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'My Decision Still Haunts Me,' Juror Who Acquitted Casey Anthony Speaks Out
The juror says he regrets his decision and is still haunted by the Casey Anthony murder trial.
One of the jurors who acquitted Casey Anthony for the murder of her toddler is speaking out a decade later to say he regrets his decision.
Anthony was acquitted in the 2011 murder trial of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. The toddler's skeletal remains were found near her family home in Orlando, Florida six months after she'd vanished. Anthony waited a month to report Caylee missing and questions about how the little girl died still linger. Anthony’s trial became a national obsession, with nearly 40 million Americans tuning into at least part of the trial.
Now, one of the jurors who helped acquit her in 2011 is speaking out.
“My decision haunts me to this day," the unidentified man told People. "I think now if I were to do it over again, I'd push harder to convict her of one of the lesser charges like aggravated manslaughter. At least that. Or child abuse. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and I didn't stand up for what I believed in at the time."
He’s the same juror who told People ten years ago, following the controversial verdict, that “the prosecutors did not give us enough evidence to convict.”
“They gave us a lot of stuff that makes us think that she probably did something wrong, but not beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said at the time.
Now, he tells the outlet that not one day passes when he doesn’t think about the case and trial.
"It was such a strange summer,” he reflected on Thursday. “I knew that there was public interest in the case, but it wasn't until after I was sequestered that I realized that the whole world was watching."
He said that he kept in touch with some of the jurors following the trial but their kinship soon broke apart.
"It was painful for everyone," the juror said "I remember feeling sick every time I saw one of [the jurors'] names on my phone. So I muted the chat and stopped engaging. It was just too hard."
He called the experience “traumatic” and noted, “I wish I had done a lot of things differently. But it's a part of who I am. This case will stick with me for the rest of my life.”
He said he thinks of Caylee often.
"Every time I see her face or hear her name, I get a pit in my stomach," he told People. "It all comes flooding back. I think about those pictures of the baby's remains that they showed us in court. I remember Casey. I even remember the smell of the courtroom."
