Casey Anthony’s lawyer has claimed the Florida woman suffered a “blackout,” and that’s why her memory is fuzzy about the death of her daughter, Caylee.
Anthony couldn’t remember events surrounding her 2-year-old’s death because she experienced a type of trauma-related memory loss, alleges one of her trial lawyers, Cheney Mason. In a recent interview with LawNewz, he was asked why—six years after she was acquitted in her daughter’s death—people still don’t know what happened to her daughter.
Mason told the legal news website: “I believe that Casey’s mind, in some dimension, I guess the common word would say ’snapped.' She didn’t go crazy by any means—but blackout—completely a blackout—of what went on and what happened.”
A jury acquitted Anthony of first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child, and aggravated child abuse in the high-profile murder case in 2011. But she was convicted of lying to police.
“Casey, as we established with an expert witness at the end of the trial, grieved and comprehended differently than anyone else what happened. She went into what I call ‘Casey World.’ She shut it out,” Mason said.
“She didn’t know what she was doing or what she was saying,” he claimed. “She knows she did not do this.”
Meanwhile, Anthony was “close to, bonded to, and loved that child. The child who was perfectly healthy, perfectly clean dressed, well nourished, no instance of any prior injury, no abuse whatsoever. That’s the truth,” Mason said.
She didn’t fully come to know her child died until she was on trial.
“She just snapped . . . when that testimony came out, I was sitting next to her, and I don’t remember whether I had my arm on her shoulder or was just holding her hand there while that testimony was going on, but she started shaking, and shivering, and she cried . . . all the time I’ve known her, and all the times I’ve seen her, I had never seen this. It was clear to me — my personal opinion — that it was the first time she consciously was actually aware that her daughter had died,” Mason said.
Anthony, who rarely gives interviews, told The Associated Press in March 2017 that details about her daughter’s death are not clear.
“I understand the reasons people feel about me. I understand why people have the opinions that they do,” she said. “I’m still not even certain as I stand here today about what happened.”
“She is still the central part of my life, the central part of my being,” Anthony said of her daughter, “and always will be.”
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