I’m glad someone specializes in maggots and other insects but I’m so glad it’s not me. If I did, I’d spend my days in a constant state of nausea. Needless to say, I wasn’t captivated by Dr. Timothy Huntington’s testimony Friday morning. In fact, I found the most fascinating thing happened outside of the courthouse–the arrival of Vasco Thompson in Orlando.
It seems that Jose Baez is so obsessed with demonizing George Anthony that he doesn’t care who he rolls over to do it. I guess Baez would call Thompson collateral damage. I’d call him another victim of the defense team.
Thompson has been reported as a convicted kidnapper–technically that is true. But when that is mentioned in connection with the murder of Caylee Anthony, one envisions a stranger abducting and harming a child. The actual offense, although clearly wrong and illegal, bore little in common with that imagined scenario. It involved Thompson, his girlfriend and the restraint of her freedom for a time measured in minutes–not in weeks or months or maggots.
Was there any substance to the defense contention that George Anthony telephoned this convict the day before Caylee went missing? No. Not one little bit.
Yes, George Anthony did call that number on July 14, 2008, but it was not Vasco Thompson’s phone number until February 2009. How difficult would it have been for the defense to check that out before dropping their so-called bomb shell?
Now, Baez may get his just desserts for dragging yet another person under the bus with George, Vasco Thompson has an attorney and they are threatening legal action.
I found the afternoon session of court far more lively even though the same witness was on the stand. The reason: Jeff Ashton delivered a text book cross examination of a defense expert whose opinions obviously outraged the prosecutor.
On Dr. Timothy Huntington’s direct, he described in great detail the experiment he did with a pig carcass in a car trunk over eleven days in September in Nebraska. It bothered me that he attempted to make it seem comparable to this situation–a young girl in a trunk in the heat of summer in Florida for a period of three to five days.
On cross, Jeff Ashton dissected and decimated the experiment and, along the way,got the witness to admit he’d never worked with a human body in a trunk and that Casey’s car still had a foul odor two years after Caylee was reported missing; to acknowledge that there was no actual garbage in the trash bag in the trunk and had him corroborate the timeline of the testimony of a state’s witness who said the body was moved after three to five days and remained in the location where it was found the rest of the time.
But my favorite moment of all was this exchange:
Ashton: Can we assume that none of your studies involved a child wrapped in a blanket, stuffed in two garbage bags and stuffed in a laundry bag? None of the studies involved did any of that, did they?
Huntington: I think that is a fair assumption, yes.
Ashton: Why didn’t you wrap your pig in a blanket?
And thus, the prosecution wrapped up another step in their battle for justice for Caylee.