Free Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story by Jose Peter; Baez Golenbock

to find someone in the jail to get to you and flash “timer55” so you won’t tell the cops what’s really going on. That’s a very powerful conspiracy theory.
    But I didn’t say any of that because I wanted her to trust me. I wanted to be her helper and I wanted to find a way to get her to tell me the truth and to stop living in this intricate fantasy world of hers.
    I was really struggling to respond to her, so I finally said, “This is going to be really difficult to prove.”
    “I know,” Casey said quietly. “I know.”
    I said, “You’re going to have to think long and hard to help me find things to help prove some of the things you’re saying, because they caught you in other lies, and if I come forward with this, it’s going to be very difficult to prove just based on your word.”
    “I understand,” Casey said, “but I don’t know what to do.”
    I thought to myself, Either she’s a really bad liar or this poor girl desperately needs some professional help.
    I very much wanted to bring in a psychiatrist to talk to her. The problem was, I couldn’t. Every time I went to see Casey at the jail, the press would report, “Jose Baez went to visit Casey Anthony today for an hour and fifteen minutes.” Any visitor would become part of the public record and the subject of discussion in the media. I tried to picture the reaction if I were to bring in a psychiatrist to see Casey. The press would have had a field day. This was a clear example of how the public records law can hurt a case. I still wonder if my calling in a mental-health expert early on the case might have affected the outcome of the case.
    At the bond hearing, Strickland had ordered two psychiatrists to see Casey in order to decide whether she was competent to stand trial. I was going to object, because that shouldn’t have been something for the state to determine. Rather, if anyone was going to make that move, it should have been mine to make. I didn’t object because I thought this might be a good time to get professionals to see her who might shed light on what her psychological problems might be.
    If I had initiated it, then the media would be commenting that I was intending an insanity defense, which to a layman means, I’m not guilty because I’m crazy. Which was something I didn’t want because, more than anything, that would have hurt Casey. Plus she was sharp enough that she might have said to me, “I’m not crazy. You’re fired,” which was something else I didn’t want.
    A couple days after Strickland handed down his ruling for a $500,000 bond, I filed an appeal with the Fifth District Court of Florida to have it overturned. To the best of my knowledge, this had been the very first time in the state of Florida that a defendant had received a $500,000 bond for a third-degree felony and two misdemeanors.
    Clearly it was excessive. The appellate court denied our motion without a written opinion. We asked the appellate court to issue an opinion so we could take it to a higher court, but it refused. There’s a saying that “bad cases make bad law,” and I wondered whether this was an example of that.
    I was in a real quandary. I was unable to communicate with Casey because the clicking of the intercom led me to believe that the police were listening to our conversations, so I needed to find a way to get her out. That’s par for the course in any case. Your clients want to get out of jail. They don’t want to sit there. Only I had the distinct feeling that unlike the rest of my clients, Casey enjoyed being in jail. When I came to see her, she was always upbeat, never depressed. She would come in feeling chipper, as though she was at a picnic rather than in jail. This, as much as anything else, really struck me as being odd. Only later would it turn out to make perfect sense.

     
    I NEEDED TO SPEND TIME alone with my client, but after the judge hit us with a $500,000 punishment, I was at a loss for what to do. And then