Casey Anthony Appeals Lying Convictions
Casey Anthony’s attorneys will return to court on Tuesday at the Fifth District Court of Appeals in Daytona Beach, Fla. to appeal her four convictions for allegedly lying to detectives, Reuters reported.
Although Anthony was formally acquitted of murdering her two-year-old daughter, Caylee Marie, in 2011, she was found guilty on four charges of providing false information to law enforcement officers, and she was sentenced to a maximum of four years in prison.
The four convictions resulted from four separate false statements that Anthony made to officials during their investigation of Caylee’s disappearance in 2008.
Anthony was convicted of lying when she told lead detective Yuri Melich that she had left her young daughter with a nanny named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez on June 9, 2008, who it was later discovered did not exist. Officials did succeed in finding a woman with that name, but she had never come into contact with Anthony before and did not match the physical description Anthony had supplied to the forensic artist.
Anthony was also convicted of deliberately misleading investigators when she told them that she was an employee of Universal Studios, and that she had spoken to her Universal co-workers about Caylee’s disappearance. According to court testimony, Anthony insisted to Melich and Leonard Turtora, Assistant Manager of Loss Prevention at Universal Studios, that she worked at the company as an events planner.
Although Melich later claimed to have known that Anthony was lying, he brought her to Universal Studios anyway, and he asked her to show him the building where she worked. When Anthony was stopped at the company’s security gate, she claimed not to have her ID card or employee number, but maintained that she was an employee, and told the security guard that the name of her supervisor was “Thomas Manley.”
When the guard could not find Manley’s name in the phone book, Turtora personally let Anthony through, allowing her to direct him to what she claimed was the events building, which Turtora said he knew was not true. Finally, Anthony confessed that the Universal Studios job was a lie.
“Melich began to look around and asked if we were in the events building,” Turtora said. “Ms. Anthony looked at me, put her hands in her back pocket and stated, ‘I don’t work here.’”
The fourth lie Anthony was convicted of was her claim that she had received a mysterious phone call from Caylee on July 15. Even after Anthony admitted to lying about being an employee of Universal Studios, she continued to insist to detectives that she had received a call from Caylee on a private number, but that when she had asked Caylee to put an adult on the phone, someone hung up the connection. Although Anthony acknowledged that the phone call was “extremely odd,” she said that Caylee had sounded “perfectly fine” and even seemed excited to talk to her.
According to Reuters, Anthony’s attorneys stated in their appellate brief that they intend to argue that the four lies should have been considered as one individual offense on the grounds that Anthony’s claims were made during an ongoing interrogation by detectives.
A lawyer for Anthony told Reuters that she would not appear at the Tuesday hearing.
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