Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

When jurors hear closing arguments Sunday in the Casey Anthony murder trial, they will be reminded that the attorneys’ presentations are not evidence — and not the facts the panel must rely upon to render its verdict.

Yet trial attorneys maintain that closings are essential to their craft. They represent the final time lawyers get to speak directly to jurors to convey the merits of their case. As the name suggests, closing arguments emphasize what legal advocates should do best: argue.

“Perhaps the most important purpose of the closing argument is to provide jurors sympathetic to your side with points that will enable them to persuade other, undecided or doubting jurors,” states a 2003 Florida Bar Journal column titled “Avoiding Pitfalls in Closing Arguments.”

“It is an opportunity to explain how the promises you made in the opening have been fulfilled, and conversely, how the other side’s promises have been neglected,” authors Tucker Ronzetti and Janet L. Humphreys noted in the article.

With Casey Anthony’s defense attorney José Baez making so many bold promises in his opening statement, many legal experts and followers of this case say Baez will have a difficult time today reconciling what he claimed from the start with what his team proved in recent weeks.

More Top Picks Fire Pits Ga

The biggest unfulfilled promises in most experts’ minds include the claims that Casey Anthony suffered sexual abuse by her father, George; that her daughter, Caylee, died in an accidental drowning; and that her father knew about the drowning and helped dispose of the body.

“There’s been absolutely no evidence to support it,” said Miami-based criminal-defense attorney and former prosecutor Daniel Lurvey. “I cannot get my head around what [Baez] was thinking. His closing argument has got to be what it should have been from the beginning: They [the state] did not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Unnecessary burden

The problem with the Baez opening is that he created a competing theory for how Caylee died — and an unnecessary burden for the defense. In fact, he insisted it was an accident. Now jurors are “comparing theories,” Lurvey said, instead of just evaluating the prosecution’s hypothesis.

This tactic might have helped the defense had it made a compelling case about Caylee’s death, but every legal expert familiar with this trial, contacted for this story and others, has agreed the defense did not deliver a credible alternative theory.

Lurvey and others suggest that during closing arguments, Baez must abandon the claims he made at the start.

“In light of the missteps,” Lurvey said, “looking back, yes, he has to ignore it.”

Casey Anthony, 25, is charged with first-degree murder in her 2-year-old daughter Caylee Marie’s death in 2008. If convicted as charged, she faces a possible death sentence. So the stakes could not be higher for the lawyers making these closing arguments.

For the prosecution, the experts expect to see veteran Assistant State Attorney Linda Drane Burdick give a another clinical presentation that focuses less on Caylee and more on her mother, the accused. It will be designed to help the jurors piece together the vast circumstantial evidence in the case.

They say the prosecution may play the dramatic 911 calls from July 15, 2008, when Cindy Anthony discovered her granddaughter had been missing for a month and thought she had been abducted.

“You always want to send the jury into deliberations with some image in their mind,” said Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University. “I think it’s going to be a lengthy review of why all this circumstantial evidence points to Casey and only to Casey. And why it couldn’t be all of these other theories that have spun out.”

Some experts agree the defense will claim the state did not meet its burden of proof, while driving home the point that the prosecution doesn’t even know exactly how Caylee died.

Jarvis said he expects Baez to suggest this is a story of a “terribly dysfunctional family, an accident and a cover-up … not a murder.”

“The defense doesn’t have to do anything. The defense always has the presumption of innocence,” Jarvis said. “The problem for the [Casey Anthony] defense is José Baez overpromised in his opening statement. The jury is sitting there saying, ‘Is that really all that you have? Why did you tell us all these things?’ “

Bill Sheaffer, WFTV-Channel 9 legal analyst and one of the experts with perhaps the most knowledge about this case, says Baez gave a “bombastic opening” and now he has “to own it.”

“I don’t think you can ignore what you promised,” said Sheaffer, who explained he would never have given an opening with so many difficult-to-prove claims.

But given this situation, Sheaffer said Baez could artfully explain, “We did the best we could to bring you that evidence. I know we fell short.”

This would allow Baez to suggest that court rulings regarding testimony and evidence did not go his way — without criticizing the judge — and let him move on to an argument attacking the prosecution’s case.

That argument would have Baez saying, “Let me talk to you about what the state hasn’t proven and hasn’t shown,” Sheaffer said.

Sheaffer has been among the most critical of Baez’s handling of this case, but he also thinks Baez can acknowledge his opening statement, minimize the defense’s “big credibility problem” and still deliver a coherent closing.

“I have seen flashes in him … he has the basic materials to be a good trial lawyer,” Sheaffer said.

Few ‘theatrics’ by state

Lurvey said the prosecution “has so much ammunition” but must be careful not to overplay its case and “shift the burden to the defense.” He expects the prosecution to remind jurors of what the defense promised and failed to deliver, but not go over the line.

Sheaffer envisions “little to no theatrics by the state,” just an attempt “to connect all the dots in a logical manner.”

Though most agree the state’s case was well-presented, Jarvis says the prosecution still has work to do today.

“They have always had a very circumstantial case. For a juror who is used to television and is used to the defendant breaking on the stand, or the smoking gun, or the absolute, ironclad proof, that doesn’t exist in this case,” Jarvis said “Caylee Anthony died. How she died, when she died, who killed her — it just isn’t there.”

More Top Picks Best Amazon Fire Tvs

But he added that prosecutors win circumstantial cases every day in this country.

“The state is going to have to really … show why it could only be Casey Anthony,” Jarvis said. “Why no one else could have been the murderer. And to show this had to be a murder and not an accident.”

[email protected] or 407-420-5447. [email protected] or 407-420-5735.