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Should Casey Anthony testify at her murder trial?

 The drama of the summer continues in Courtroom 23 in Orlando as court watchers wonder whether Casey Anthony, the Florida mom accused of killing her toddler, will take the stand in her own defense.

Legal analysts say she has little choice but to testify after her defense lawyer said in his opening statement that Anthony's daughter, Caylee, drowned in the family pool and her father helped cover it up. The lawyer, Jose Baez, told the jury that Anthony had been molested by her father as a child and that conditioned her to keep quiet about what happened to her daughter.

"She has to take the stand now," says George Parnham, a lawyer who defended Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children during a psychotic breakdown. "She has to explain this to the jury. They need to hear from her. You need to humanize your client."

Anthony's father, George, took the stand during the prosecution's case and denied the allegations. That means Anthony must testify about the alleged abuse and the alleged drowning, other defense lawyers say.

But her taking the stand has a serious pitfall, they say: The prosecution has shown, and the defense admits, that Anthony is a liar. "It's a big risk," says Miami criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor Daniel Lurvey.

Prosecutors, Lurvey and other lawyers say, will methodically pick apart all her stories about what happened to her daughter, including that the child was taken on a trip and that her daughter was kidnapped by a nanny named Zanny.

Lurvey says Baez has boxed himself into a corner.

"He's created a situation that if she does not testify, it's almost as bad as if she does and does badly, Lurvey says.

Baez did not return a call to his office. Anthony is charged with first-degree murder and faces the death penalty if convicted. She has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors say she suffocated her 2-year-old daughter with duct tape on her nose and mouth, kept her body in the trunk of her car and later dumped it in woods near her home.

Donald Jones, a law professor at the University of Miami, says the prosecution has a circumstantial case that has not tied Anthony directly to murdering her child. He says the defense should have stuck with poking holes in the prosecution's case, but Baez is giving the prosecutor a chance to discredit her on the stand.

"But because the defense chose the strategy it did, it is dotting the i's and crossing the t's prosecution failed to do," Jones says.

Baez, who was admitted to the Florida bar in 2005, has never tried a death penalty case.

Karin Moore, director of defense and death penalty clinics at Florida A&M University, says his inexperience shows in his questioning of witnesses, which she says is not as focused as it should be.

"Questioning a witness has to be like a surgical strike," she says. "You don't cut your teeth on a death penalty case. … I hope this woman does not receive the death penalty because of it."

Judge Belvin Perry adjourned for the day Monday after he said both sides were wasting the jury's time with legal matters that should have been taken up before court began.

Contributing: Melanie Michael, WTSP-TV; The Associated Press

Font: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-06-20-should-casey-anthony-testify_n.htm