Jeff Ashton tells Dr. Phil: I wish I hadn’t smirked HAL

“Wow was the only thought in my mind,” Jeff Ashton said when he heard the jury’s acquittal of Casey Anthony.

The former prosecutor was a guest on “Dr. Phil” today.

Why did he smirk at a crucial moment in the trial? “I wish I hadn’t,” Asthon said. He cited attorney Jose Baez’s argument that the duct tape connected George Anthony to the crime.

“That argument had never made sense to me,” Ashton said. “Jose’s voice went up a couple of octaves. The combination of the argument and the squeaky voice got me. I apologized to him, and I meant it. That was not appropriate.”

Ashton said his biggest complaint about Baez was that the defense attorney wasn’t honest with the Anthonys or the court. In July, Casey Anthony was acquitted of murder in the 2008 death of Caylee Anthony.

Ashton said the duct tape on Caylee’s remains convinced him that the toddler was murdered. Ashton’s theory is that Casey decided that Caylee was keeping her from the life she wanted and that the mother used chloroform and duct tape to kill the child. “There’s no reason to put duct tape over a child’s nose and mouth unless you want to kill them,” Ashton said.



Ashton said he never believed Caylee had drowned. “Nobody takes a child that is drowned in a pool, then dumps them in a swamp with duct tape over their mouth,” he said.

Ashton said the jury was bland and not made up of passionate, decisive people. “All of those people had already put the pieces together,” Ashton told McGraw.

Why wasn’t there a conviction? Prominent attorney Mark Geragos cited the sequestration of the jury and “the pretty white girl exception,” which kept the jury from giving death to Anthony.

Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder case, described a trial as a popularity contest. “When jurors go into a case and they decide they like the defendant for whatever reason might be, there’s not going to be a way for a prosecutor to convince there’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said.

Ashton said prosecutors misjudged the jurors and thought they could look beyond performance.

Jane Velez-Mitchell of HLN weighed in on the media’s role in the case. “Don’t blame the media. The case was lost from the get-go, because they didn’t find the body for six months,” she said.

Velez-Mitchell added that the public learned “a tremendous amount” about the legal system through the high-profile case.

Ashton said the media did what they were supposed to do: Report information. But the heavy reporting limited the jury pool, he added.

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