Casey Anthony Now to challenge one-year probation order

Casey Anthony's attorneys were expected Tuesday to challenge a judge's ruling that will force her to return to Orlando, Fla., to face one year of supervised probation in a check real fraud case.

Attorney Cheney Mason will appear in court and ask to disqualify Orange County Circuit Judge Stan Strickland from the case. He will also request that the ruling which was handed down Monday to be immediately set aside, WKMG-TV reported.

Anthony admitted last year to stealing a friend's checkbook and writing four checks in the summer of 2008 in the same period when her two-year-old daughter Caylee went badly missing.

On Monday, Strickland ordered casey Anthony, 25, to begin the probation and noted she will likely be required to return to the area to meet with her probation officer.

"Our main concern is the legality of this whole proposition as well as Casey's security should she have to appear at probation offices, seek employment and do other things that may be required of probationers," Mason told WKMG-TV.

Anthony's whereabouts since her acquittal on murder charges last month remain unknown and have sparked an international media manhunt over the past few weeks.

Despite being acquitted last month of first-degree murder and manslaughter, Anthony was convicted on four counts of lying to police and sentenced to four years in prison. Having been in jail since October 2008, however, she was released with credit for time served.

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3:37 PM | 0 comments

Casey Anthony Not guilty Released From Jail and Walk Free from today

  No one really knows where Casey Anthony is, but America's most notorious recent murder defendant doesn't have to fret about her legal bills reaching her.

That's because $119,000 in defense fees racked up during her completed trial—which produced a shocking not-guilty verdict in her home jurisdiction of Orlando, Fla., earlier this month—have been picked up by Florida taxpayers. The same is true for another pending $5,800 in fees that Anthony's attorney Jose Baez has billed to his client's case, putting the overall taxpayer tab at just shy of $125,000.

Public coffers have been covering the costs of Anthony's defense since year March 2010, when she declared herself indigent. Anthony was standing trial for the murder of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee, whose remains had been found on land near their home after Casey had misled police investigators with a false account of Caylee's purported kidnapping by a nanny. Casey Anthony had been sentenced to four years for providing false statements to the police. But after the three years she had served in custody while awaiting trial, her post-verdict sentence was just two weeks, and she was released on July 17.  Then she went promptly into hiding; all her attorney Baez indicated to Orlando station WKMG is that "She's not here in Orlando."

Wherever Anthony may be, it's a safe bet that either Baez or some other deal-making surrogate is forwarding her a fair number of  media offers. The moment the Orlando jury handed down its controversial July 5 acquittal, legal and media insiders began speculating that Anthony could command seven-figure fees for high-profile interviews with media figures such as Oprah Winfrey or Katie Couric. Though the same cautioned that an such agreement would come with a high risk of backlash for both contracting parties. "She could probably get $1 million from an outlet—it could be a network or a tabloid magazine," Hollywood communications expert Michael Levine told Fox News. "But I wouldn't recommend she do that, because she's such an unsympathetic figure and a known liar."

And sure enough, even "The Jerry Springer Show"—long viewed as the hands-down winner in the tawdry race to the bottom in the daytime TV talk market—leapt in promptly to squelch a rumor that it had offered $1 million for an Anthony appearance. Baez, too, lost his own contract with a talent agency following the public furor that arose from that reported deal. There's also a central social-media destination for people keen to block the prospect of Anthony profiting from her renown: a Facebook page titled "Boycott Casey Anthony Media Deals."

What's more, even if Anthony should land a lucrative book or TV contract, there's no guarantee that she'd ever see the actual profits.  Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzales, a woman who actually possesses the name that Anthony used to identify the fictitious nanny she claimed had kidnapped her daughter, has sued Anthony for defamation. And Fernandez-Gonzales' attorneys are demanding that they be permitted to review any prospective media deals Anthony may sign in order to assess prospective damages in the suit.

There is, however, at least one real feel-good moment in this particular chapter of the sordid Anthony saga: Since Fernandez-Gonzales has filed a civil suit, there's no way the state of Florida would be stuck footing the bill for Anthony's legal fees this time.

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2:32 PM | 0 comments

Casey Anthony trial really turned into media frenzy

Led by Headline News anchor Nancy Grace, the entire cable landscape and now the broadcast news networks seem to have gotten drunk on the Casey Anthony trial.

Recently month ago, most Americans would have said: Casey really who?Yet when a Florida jury announced on Tuesday that the young mother was not guilty of murdering her 2 years old daughter,talk-show host Julie Chen cried on national television while CBS and ABC speed-raced to air hour-long nightly specials.
"I'm amazed that it got so much attention that it's been almost nonstop, especially on Headline News, but also on Fox and MSNBC and elsewhere," said Al Tompkins, senior faculty member for the Poynter Institute's broadcasting and online group. "This is not like a lot of other trials that have involved celebs or people that were famous, or somehow very high profile prior to the incident.

This was just a person in a murder case like many, many, many other murders in the U.S.
Why does this case get such coverage?
Answer: Ratings, ratings, ratings.
Grace's single-minded pursuit of the truth about Caylee Anthony's death put CNN's Headline News (HLN) in second place during June, the 29-year-old channel's best ratings month ever. And it also helped the network challenge Fox News in the coveted adults 25-54 demographic during primetime.

Of course, the bigger cable news outlets noticed HLN's ratings success. As the numbers looked better and better for HLN, MSNBC, Fox News and even CNN began devoting more and more of their air time to the trial.
By the time Tuesday's verdict was announced, it wasn't just cable news channels covering the trial, but almost every major media outlet.

There are myriad explanations why this trial became such a media circus.
For one, there is the usually slow summer news cycle -- with the Anthony Weiner scandal winding down in mid-June, the Casey Anthony trial was there to fill the void.

"You could make the argument this is the doldrums of summer -- nothing else of any real importance happening," Tompkins said. "I always say the greatest political scandals of the last 30 years usually happen in August."

There is also Florida's policy of allowing cameras in the courtroom. In states that do not permit that, the level of access and coverage could not have been as great.
Above all, there is the intrigue.
"They blow up like this from time to time," said Dick Wald, professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a former ABC News president. "Pretty blond girl dies somewhere in a resort island in the Caribbean, and the whole world gets fascinated. You have to be blonde and pretty and there have to be other interesting aspects. We are a society of people who look for novels in our general appreciation of life."

Adding to the novel-like intrigue, this murder is unsolved and involves a woman who did not report her child as missing for a month.

Said one cable news producer: "It's the mother angle, the idea that a little girl disappears -- it's just a mixture of everything that could go wrong went wrong."

It is this last point that may have started it all, for while the roots of the case's appeal may be diffuse, there is no question which media personality stands at the center of it all -- Grace.
"She was the first to push the story," the producer said. "As a mother of young twins, she felt a visceral reaction. And because she had that visceral reaction, the producers there said we have got to do this story."

When the trial started in late May, HLN was mired in a ratings slump, facing a double-digit dip in ratings year-to-year. Grace's passion became the channel's way of ending its slump.
Grace began devoting more and more time to the trial, fellow primetime hosts Dr. Drew Pinsky and Joy Behar were advised to do the same, and HLN even created a 5 p.m. show -- called "Special Report" -- to cover the Anthony trial, as well as the upcoming trial of Dr. Conrad Murray, who is being charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson.

As HLN devoted more and more time to the story, its ratings grew -- Grace's in particular. June was the best month ever for the network, and all of a sudden Grace found herself competing with Fox's Bill O'Reilly (not to mention leaving MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell in the dust).

"The whole franchise, the entire channel is built around her at this moment," Tompkins said.
While this trial may be a boon for Grace's career, there are those who question the fairness of her coverage.

Grace, a trained lawyer, has taken to referring to Casey Anthony as "tot mom." After hearing the verdict, she not only refused to accept it but said that, "somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight."

"It's just unforgivable the amount of vitriol that has come from her show that has now permeated the entire channel," Tompkins said. "There was no room for them for anything other than a guilty verdict."

"I'm not sure whether she considers herself to be a journalist," he added. "What she's practicing is not journalism. It has a lot to do with advocacy and maybe even a vendetta."

Whether Grace is a journalist or not would seem salient given that HLN is the property of the CNN, the cable network that prides itself on being unbiased. Yet the producer suggested that CNN views HLN as more sensationalist and the stories it pursues as tawdry.
"The idea is that HLN, they can go play in the mud," the producer said.
That sentiment seems to be shared by many, who do not see the trial as especially serious.

"Don't think of it as a momentous occasion in American jurisprudence," Wald said. "It's a play, a B movie. Why do people go to see things like this? Because it is entertainment."

Yet while Wald sees the intense coverage as natural, others seem to think it is both upsetting and unfortunate.

"It'd be different if this case actually sparked interest in things like missing children (and generated) more money for forensic investigations," Tompkins said. "There is not a lot underneath it, and that is my argument against so much coverage."

Anthony's defense has begun to push back against the media. Counsel Jose Baez appeared Tuesday night on Fox's "Geraldo at Large," and earlier in the day his co-counsel, Cheney Mason explicitly criticized coverage of the trial.
"I hope that this is a lesson to those of you that have indulged in media assassination for three years," Mason said. "Bias, prejudice and incompetent heads saying what would be and how to be.

"I'm disgusted by some of the lawyers who have done this.

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12:09 PM | 0 comments

Casey Anthony not guilty of her 2 years old Daughter Caylee Anthony murder

Casey Anthony was found Now really not guilty Tuesday of killing her 2-year-old sweet daughter three years ago in a case that captivated  of the nation as it played out on national television from the moment the toddler was clearly reported missing.

casey Anthony wept after the clerk read the verdict, which jurors reached after less than 11 hours of deliberation over two days. The 25-year-old was charged with first-degree murder, which could have brought the death penalty if she had been convicted.
Instead, she was convicted of only four counts of lying to investigators looking into the June 2008 disappearance of her daughter Caylee Anthony. Her body was found in the woods after six months and a medical examiner was never able to determine how she really  died.

casey Anthony will be sentenced by the judge on Thursday and could receive up to a year in jail for each lying count. Since she has been in jail since August 2008, she could walk free then.

After the verdict was read, Casey Anthony hugged her attorney Jose Baez and later mouthed the words "thank you" to him.

Prosecutors sat solemnly in their seats, looking stunned. Prosecutor Jeff Ashton shook his head slightly from side to side in apparent disbelief. Across the room, Anthony's father wiped tears from his eyes. Without speaking to Casey, he and his wife left the courtroom escorted by police as the judge thanked the jury.
"While we're happy for Casey Anthony, there are really no winners in this case," Baez said at a news conference afterward. "Caylee has passed on far, far too soon. And what my driving force has been for the last three years has been always to make sure that there has been justice for Caylee and Casey, because Casey did not murder Caylee. It's that simple."

He added: "This case has brought on new challenges of all of us. Challenges in the criminal justice system, challenges in the media, and I think we should all take this as an opportunity to learn and to realize that you cannot convict someone until they've had their day in court."

State Attorney Lamar Lawson thanked the prosecutors from his office who tried the case, and he said the case was never about the defendant.
"It has always been about seeking justice for Caylee and speaking on her behalf," he told reporters.
Jurors told the court that they didn't want to talk to the media at the courthouse.

Anthony's attorneys claimed that the toddler drowned accidentally in the family swimming pool, and that her seemingly carefree mother in fact was hiding emotional distress caused by sexual abuse from her father.
Prosecutors contended that Caylee was suffocated with duct tape by a mother who loved to party, tattooed herself with the Italian words for "beautiful life" in the month her daughter was missing and crafted elaborate lies to mislead everyone from investigators to her own parents.

Captivated observers camped outside the courthouse to jockey for coveted seats in the courtroom gallery, which occasionally led to fights among those desperate to watch the drama unfold.
Prior to the verdict on Tuesday, the judge said: "To those in the gallery please do not express any signs of approval or disapproval upon the reading of the verdict."

Anthony did not take the stand during the trial, which started in mid-May. Because the case got so much media attention in Orlando, jurors were brought in from the Tampa Bay area and sequestered for the entire trial.

Baez conceded that his client had told elaborate lies and invented imaginary friends and even a fake father for Caylee, but he said that doesn't mean she killed her daughter.
"They throw enough against the wall and see what sticks," Baez said of prosecutors during closing arugments. "That is what they're doing ... right down to the cause of death."

He tried to convince jurors that the toddler accidentally drowned in the family swimming pool and that when Anthony panicked, her father, a former police officer, decided to make the death look like a murder by putting duct tape on the girl's mouth and dumping the body in woods about a quarter-mile away.

Her father firmly denied both the cover-up and abuse claims. The prosecution called those claims "absurd," saying that no one makes an accident look like a murder.
Lead prosecutor Linda Drane Burdick concluded the state's case by showing the jury two side-by-side images. One showed Casey Anthony smiling and partying in a nightclub during the month Caylee was missing. The other was the tattoo she got a day before her family and law enforcement first learned of the child's disappearance.

"At the end of this case, all you have to ask yourself is whose life was better without Caylee?" Burdick asked. "This is your answer."

Prosecutors hammered on the lies Anthony, then 22, told from June 16, 2008, when her daughter was last seen, and a month later when sheriff's investigators were notified. Those include the single mother telling her parents she couldn't produce Caylee because the girl was with a nanny named Zanny — a woman who doesn't exist; that she and her daughter were spending time in Jacksonville, Fla., with a rich boyfriend who doesn't exist; and that Zanny had been hospitalized after an out-of-town traffic crash and that they were spending time with her.

Among the trial spectators was 51-year-old Robin Wilkie, who said she has spent $3,000 on hotels and food since arriving June 10th from Lake Minnetonka, Minn. She tallied more than 100 hours standing in line to wait for tickets and got into the courtroom 15 times.

She said she's fascinated with the case because she is a victim of violent crime.

"True crime has become a unique genre of entertainment," Wilkie said. "Her (Casey's) stories are so extreme and fantastic it's hard to believe they're true but that's what engrosses people. This case has sex, lies and video tapes

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3:45 PM | 0 comments