Anthony family atty clarifies comments
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Attorney: Parents "have not come to any conclusion about whether their daughter is guilty"
- Casey Anthony's mother says she conducted Internet search for the word chloroform
- Cindy Anthony tell jurors she was trying to figure out why her dog was tired
- Testimony comes as the trial nears the conclusion of its fourth week
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(CNN) -- An attorney for Casey Anthony's parents says the couple has not come to any conclusion about whether their daughter is guilty of murder, comments that came as the capital murder trial neared the conclusion of its fourth week.
Attorney Mark Lippman made the statement the same day that Anthony's mother, Cindy Anthony, testified that she, not her daughter, conducted Internet searches for key words including chloroform and alcohol on the Anthony family computer in March 2008.
Prosecutors allege Casey Anthony used chloroform to render her daughter unconscious, then used duct tape to cover her nose and mouth, suffocating her. Caylee's remains, prosecutors allege, were then put into Casey Anthony's car trunk and eventually disposed of. The girl's skeletal remains were found in a wooded field on December 11, 2008, nearly six months after her family last reported having seen the child.
Defense attorneys say Caylee was not murdered, but that she accidentally drowned in the family pool on June 16, 2008, the day she was last reported to have been seen. They argue that Anthony and her father, George Anthony, panicked and covered up the death. George Anthony rejected that scenario in his testimony.
Casey Anthony, 25, is charged with seven counts in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, in 2008, including first-degree murder. If convicted, she could face the death penalty.
Caylee was not reported missing to police until July 15, 2008, when Cindy Anthony tracked down her daughter and demanded answers regarding Caylee's whereabouts.
After telling CNN's Gary Tuchman that Casey Anthony's parents do not believe she is innocent, Lippman issued a statement Thursday clarifying his remarks.
Lippman said George Anthony never molested his daughter or helped cover up his granddaughter's death, as Casey Anthony's attorneys have alleged. But he said his clients have not come to any conclusion about whether their daughter is guilty of murder.
"They simply want to know the truth," Lippman told reporters. "They have no idea what happened. ... They just want both the state (prosecutors) and the defense to do their jobs."
Lippman's initial statement to Tuchman was discussed that night on "AC 360," a conversation that the lawyer mentioned Thursday.
"But this is important, and they wanted me to stress this," Tuchman said on the show Wednesday. "They love her, they support her and they do not want her to get the death penalty and they will do all they can to avoid her getting the death penalty in this case."
Tuchman said Thursday the statement "doesn't mean (the Anthonys) feel she's guilty of the charges against her." Saying someone is not innocent is not quite the same, he noted, as saying they are legally guilty.
Tuchman acknowledged Thursday that Lippman was "not happy" after the story aired. He said that in a follow-up conversation, he asked Lippman what he thought was taken out of context, and Lippman said he could not point to anything Tuchman said that was out of context, but said there was "too much hype" in the discussion. "That happens sometimes," Tuchman said.
He said Lippman also said that not everything he told Tuchman was mentioned on the show. That is true, Tuchman said, but added, "I certainly included every single thing that was important and relevant to this discussion."
In the courtroom Thursday, Cindy Anthony told jurors that she conducted the searches because she was trying to figure out what was making one of her Yorkie dogs "extremely tired all the time." Both the dogs ate bamboo plants in the backyard, she testified, so she started searching for chlorophyll to see if the plants were causing the dog's exhaustion.
A bacteria associated with chlorophyll production comes from different plants, she said, and some species of algae and seaweed produce natural chloroform, so the search led her from chlorophyll to chloroform.
She also was searching for other chemicals, including alcohol, she told defense attorney Jose Baez, because of a recent scare regarding hand sanitizers around small children. And she searched on some injuries, she said, because a friend of hers had recently been in a car accident and suffered head and chest injuries. She was, she said, "looking up specific terminology that someone had asked me to look up."
In a testy cross-examination, prosecutor Linda Drane Burdick noted that Cindy Anthony's work schedule showed she was working the days the searches were conducted, March 17 and 21, 2008. The witness said it was possible she could have been home, saying she went home early a couple of days that week.
"Were you or weren't you?" Burdick asked.
"The only thing that triggers that day for me is those computer entries," Cindy Anthony told the Orlando courtroom. "It was not a traumatic day for me like the last three years, so I can't tell you what time I went home."
Earlier in the trial, experts testified that someone conducted the keyword searches on a desktop computer in the home Casey Anthony shared with her parents.
The searches were found in a portion of the computer's hard drive that indicated they had been deleted, Detective Sandra Osborne of the Orange County Sheriff's Office testified Wednesday in Anthony's capital murder trial.
However, she told jurors, deleted material remains on a computer's hard drive and can be retrieved until it is overwritten by new data. It had not been overwritten on the Anthonys' computer, she said, and "a complete Internet history" was obtained.
The searches using the keyword chloroform were conducted in March, three months before Caylee disappeared, according to testimony.
It appears the computer user first searched for "chloraform" on Google and received results for "chloroform," said John Bradley, owner of the software development company that created the software used to retrieve the data. One of the search results was from Wikipedia.org, which was accessed, he testified.
Searches were also conducted on "how to make chloroform," "neck breaking" and "making weapons out of household products," Bradley testified.
Cindy Anthony testified Thursday she did not search for how to make chloroform or household weapons. She said she also did not search for neck breaking, but remembered a pop-up ad featuring a skateboarder doing a "neck-breaking stunt."
She testified that she told authorities about her search for chlorophyll earlier.
Orange County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Kevin Stenger, a forensic computer examiner, followed Cindy Anthony to the stand, where he was questioned about the report on the searches he compiled. Asked by Burdick whether a search for "how to make chloroform" would have showed up in such a fashion if someone had typed the word "chlorophyll," Stenger said it would not.
CNN's Lateef Mungin and In Session's Mayra Cuevas and Michael Christian contributed to this report.
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