"Casey Anthony's defense team had a very good morning Friday by calling a well-versed bug expert who expressed doubt – based on insect evidence – that a body was ever stashed in the woman's car.
Friday afternoon was a different story: Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton savaged forensic entomologist Dr. Tim Huntington with a brutal cross-examination. Ashton challenged everything from Huntington's experience to the validity of his opinions to his failure to include one of those opinions in a report prepared for this case."
REPORTER ANTHONY COLAROSSI; THE ORLANDO SENTINEL;
A backgrounder on this high profile Florida case cane be found on Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Caylee_Anthony
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"Casey Anthony's defense team had a very good morning Friday by calling a well-versed bug expert who expressed doubt – based on insect evidence – that a body was ever stashed in the woman's car," the Orlando Sentinel story by reporter Anthony Colarossi published earlier today begins, under the heading, "Casey Anthony trial: Jeff Ashton hammers defense's bug expert: Expert for defense admits Casey's car smelled."
"Friday afternoon was a different story: Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton savaged forensic entomologist Dr. Tim Huntington with a brutal cross-examination. Ashton challenged everything from Huntington's experience to the validity of his opinions to his failure to include one of those opinions in a report prepared for this case," the story continued.
"For example, Ashton got Huntington, a key defense expert, to admit that when he examined Casey Anthony's Pontiac Sunfire in July, roughly two years after Caylee's death, the car still smelled.
The assistant biology professor from Concordia University in Nebraska attributed the odor, possibly, to the garbage that had been in the car. But later, he acknowledged there were no apparent food sources in the waste.
Several other witnesses, including Casey Anthony's parents, have said the Pontiac smelled like a dead body had been inside. Casey Anthony, 25, is accused of first-degree murder in the death of her 2-year-old Caylee Marie.
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The prosecution says the child's body was placed in the car's trunk before she was ultimately dumped in some woods near the Anthony home. Her remains were not discovered until December 2008, several months after Caylee was first reported missing.
Huntington told Ashton Friday that insect evidence from Caylee's recovery scene indicated that the body had been moved to the woods after probably decomposing two or three days, a timeline more or less consistent with the state's theory.
He also confirmed that the body had likely been left at that wooded location months earlier, another statement supportive of the state's theory.
Huntington said he largely agreed with an explanation on insect findings included in a report by Dr. Neal Haskell, the prosecution's insect expert.
When Ashton asked about Huntington's own decomposition study involving pigs placed in the trunk of a car, he noted that the pigs were not wrapped in blankets and bags the way Caylee's remains were thought to have been placed in her mother's car.
"Why didn't you wrap your pigs in a blanket?" Ashton asked, eliciting laughs around the courtroom.
Earlier, though, Huntington seemed to score points for the defense when questioned by attorney Jose Baez.
"If we assume a body is in a car trunk, you would expect to find hundreds if not thousands of these blow flies," Huntington said. "They're in there. They die there. They're stuck there."
Instead, just one leg of one apparent blow fly was found in connection with the trunk.
Huntington also said the presence of other insects -- another, more common type of fly species -- in a trash bag once placed inside the car was not surprising, nor indicative of human decomposition.
"Their presence is completely expected given that it's a bag of garbage," he said. At another point, Huntington said, "It's a bag of trash with trash feeding insects. There's nothing remarkable about that."
At one point, outside the presence of the jury, Huntington told the attorneys, "For me, there's no reason to assume those maggots came from a dead body."
The prosecution has put forth the argument that fatty acids indicative of human decomposition and found on paper towels are what drew those flies.
Later Ashton got Huntington to acknowledge that chloroform can be used to kill insects. Chloroform was found in high concentrations in air samples pulled from the trunk of the Pontiac. Still, Huntington insisted chloroform would not have kept these flies away unless it was at levels displacing oxygen.
Toward the end of the day, Huntington told Baez, "The evidence doesn't make sense any way you look at it to say there was a body in the trunk."
When shown a photo of a stain from the car, Huntington said it did not resemble the stain of human decomposition.
But he later acknowledged to Ashton that: he did not examine the actual stain; he is not a forensic anthropologist; this was the first time he had been asked to identify a decomposition stain through a photo; and he did not include this opinion in his report.
Ashton asked why that opinion was not in his report and only surfaced at trial, even though he had previously discussed it with Baez.
"I didn't think it was going to be brought up with me," he said.
The trial resumes with more testimony expected at 9 a.m. today."
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The story can be found at:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/caylee-anthony/os-casey-anthony-trial-day-21-20110617,0,6280926.story
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
