Casey Anthony Attends Court Hearing

This is a rush transcript from "On the Record ," January 8, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST: Casey Anthony, shackled and in a blue prison jumpsuit in her first public appearance since being indicted for her daughter, Caylee's, murder.

Casey Anthony got summoned by a judge to a court hearing in Orlando:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ms. Anthony, as best you can, raise your right hand for me, if you would (INAUDIBLE) swearing in.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you solemnly swear or affirm that (INAUDIBLE) in this matter will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

CASEY ANTHONY, CAYLEE'S MOTHER: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) ask you a few questions. First of all, tell me your name.

ANTHONY: Casey Marie Anthony.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. We are here today on several motions filed by the state and by your attorney. We have joined (ph) the motions (INAUDIBLE) had to do with autopsy pictures. That motion was done in your absence, and you're aware of that, right?

ANTHONY: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. As I understand it, Mr. Baez spoke to you sometime today or before today about waiving your appearance here — about your ability to waive your appearance here for that motion, right?

ANTHONY: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And did you, in fact, give him authority to waive your appearance at that motion?

ANTHONY: Yes, I did.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. All right. Thank you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VAN SUSTEREN: What happened in the courtroom today? Holly Bristow, reporter for WOFL, joins us again. She was there live. Holly, first, why was she in the courtroom? There have been other court appearances and she has not been summoned by the judge.

• Video: Watch Greta's interview

HOLLY BRISTOW, WOFL: Well, the judge himself said today that he's been pretty lax and just, you know, taking it — her attorney's word, saying if she didn't want to appear, then she didn't have to appear. But today, the state attorney's office came forward and said, You know what? We'd like to hear it officially. So they stopped court proceedings for about an hour, called the jail, had her hauled in there, brought upstairs. And what you see is basically about all she said in there.

VAN SUSTEREN: Was she there for the full hearing? And we'll get to the full hearing in a second, but — or did she just go in there and wave and leave?

BRISTOW: She was in there the full time. She got to hear all the details and all the arguments about whether or not there should be restrictions put upon the discovery that's going to be released to the defense. That would be the X-rays and the photos taken of her daughter's remains that were found in that wooded area near her home.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right. So that's really been the dispute, is that the defense has wanted unrestricted the photos and the X-rays from the autopsy so they can turn it over to their experts. The state didn't want to do it. Did the judge rule today whether the defense gets it?

BRISTOW: The defense will get it. And there was sort of a compromise, of sorts. Basically, what the judge said is that, You will get them, there will be a way to do this, but you need to do this on a secure server, where people will have to log in with access codes in order to access any of the information that's contained on the three disks that have hundreds of photos of Caylee's remains.

VAN SUSTEREN: All right. As a companion issue or a companion hearing today is a civil case is that when Caylee was first questioned, she said that she dropped her daughter off with a Zenaida Gonzalez, and Zenaida Gonzalez has now sued her civilly, and her lawyers want to depose Casey in jail. Is that going to happen?

BRISTOW: Well, yes and no. They are going to get to depose Casey in jail, but not the way they want to. Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez's attorneys actually wanted to go into the courtroom — or into the jail and bring Zenaida with them. They wanted to sit down with Casey Anthony and have a videotaped deposition in the jailhouse with Casey.

And the judge said, You know what? I'm not going to allow that to happen. That could infringe on her 5th Amendment rights. So instead, as sort of a compromise, the judge said, What we're going to do is I'm going to allow you to write out a list of questions. We'll send those to the jail, and Casey Anthony and her attorney will have 30 days to return those to you. So they won't be doing this orally, but they will be doing this written.

I do want to say that I did talk to Casey Anthony's attorney late this afternoon, and he said, You know what? They can ask whatever they want on that paper. All I'm going to allow her to do is basically fill out her name and her date of birth, and other than that, she's going to plead the 5th on everything anyway.

VAN SUSTEREN: Holly, thank you.

Casey's defense team wants those records and maps that — wants records and maps from the group Equusearch. Equusearch helped look for little Caylee when she disappeared. Tim Miller, the founder of Equusearch, joins us live. Good evening, Tim.

TIM MILLER, TEXAS EQUUSEARCH: Hi, Greta. How are you?

VAN SUSTEREN: Very well. So Tim, has the defense or the prosecution reached out to you said, I want this from you, or, I want something?

MILLER: No, absolutely not. I heard yesterday that there was a motion to get our records, and then I heard today that the judge was in favor of Baez. And we were never notified by the court, never notified by anybody. And you know, we're going to live up to what the judge says, but you know, I've got some — I got a few problems there.

Number one, I've talked to my counsel late this afternoon. He's in one state, I'm in another. And they've got to realize we've got a very small office, two volunteers in there. We've got over 20,000 pieces of paper. That's going to be extremely time-consuming and costly.

And my other concern, of course, is all the volunteers that came out there and gave everything from their heart, whether anybody's thinking about — because, Greta, what we do is we give that information to the police when they ask for it because it has all their personal information on it. I just don't know if anybody thought about whether these 4,000-plus people, all their personal information needs to be given to somebody that we don't know what's going to happen to.

So I've got some questions. I'm working with counsel on that. And again, we'll obey any order the judge gives us, but again, I'm disappointed I wasn't notified, but you know, we'll see where this is going to head from here.

VAN SUSTEREN: In terms of the search that Equusearch did, do you know if Equusearch searched the area where, ultimately, the remains of Caylee were found?

MILLER: We most definitely did search that area, Greta. And the first time we were there — of course, you know, we got there the very beginning of September, and that was right after Tropical Storm Fay came in, and the water was so high and — and I got a lot of criticism when I suspended the search because I said, You know what? I'm afraid that little body's under the water. If it is, she's just totally skeletonized. And I don't want a horse to step on her or a ground searcher to step on her or a four-wheeler drive over her and take a chance on pushing that little body down in the mud and jeopardize any chance of her ever being located, so I suspended the search.

November, we went back and we searched that area again. And at the area — because I physically went to the area the day that Caylee's body was found. And that area again in November, when we searched it, that exact area where Caylee was at was under water still.

And again, I made the decision we are not going to do any searches in water because this is a tiny little skeleton and we're not going to jeopardize it. And the land owner adjacent to where Caylee's body was found stated his own self that approximately a week-and-a-half before Caylee's body was found is when the water level went down to the point that you may have been able to see something back there.

So I think we made the right choices. We was there, and you know, we — we don't have a thing in the world to be ashamed of. I know that.

VAN SUSTEREN: And Tim, thank you for joining us.

MILLER: Thank you, Greta.

VAN SUSTEREN: The legal panel — criminal defense attorneys Jeff Brown, Mark Geragos and Jeanine Pirro — they join us. Of course, Jeanine is a former DA and host of the show "Judge Jeanine Pirro."

Jeanine, turning over those photographs and autopsy pictures — or the autopsy pictures and X-rays, with some restrictions — right idea?

JEANINE PIRRO, FORMER WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY, DA: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the defense is entitled to have them, and the only issue is whether or not the defense, either through the attorneys or a clerk or a secretary, might profit by selling these photos or autopsy pictures to the tabloids. And that's what the prosecution was concerned about.

One of the interesting things, though, is that the judge said that, I am going to decide a little later exactly how we're going to do this. Is it going to be on a secure Web site with a password so that no one other than the intended expert witnesses have access to it — but at the end of the day, the defense is clearly entitled to this stuff.

VAN SUSTEREN: Mark, nice to see you. Haven't seen you in a while. There is some complaint...

MARK GERAGOS, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Hi, Greta.

VAN SUSTEREN: ... by the prosecution — hello, Mark. There's some complaint by the prosecution fearing that the defense would leak it and sell it. But I guess — and Jeff Brown brought it out last night that it's sort of equal opportunity, that there is leaking often on both sides of this, isn't there.

GERAGOS: Well, my experience is, is that the — it's not necessarily the DA or the prosecutor, but the police are the ones who leak. And if I'm on the defense, I want some kind of a secure way that I can show that it did not come from my side or the defense side or anybody else. So if you can devise some way that it's password-protected, or if you can imprint — what we've done in some cases is actually imprint on the autopsy report and imprint on the pictures themselves who gets what, so that if it does get leaked, there's a way to actually trace who leaked it, which side did.

VAN SUSTEREN: Jeff, what's the defense — can you sort of discern at this point what defense they're raising on behalf of Casey?

JEFF BROWN, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: What defense they're what?

VAN SUSTEREN: They're raising. What sort of defense.

BROWN: Well, we really don't know what their defense is. I think their defense is clearly going to be, though, that it was somebody else that committed this crime. They have plenty of time to be able to switch that, so I think they're holding their cards to their vest. They're waiting to see what the evidence is. They want to look at all the evidence, and then they'll announce what their defense is.

But you know, this whole discussion about the discovery being limited to the defense is built on the premise that the defense somehow, their experts are going to leak information and the prosecutors won't. And I just don't agree with that premise to begin with.

And secondly, if they're going to put restrictions on the defense, why aren't they putting restrictions on the prosecutor? It should be a level playing field. Both should have the same access to it.

VAN SUSTEREN: And I think that's essentially what Mark and I were just discussing about the fact that, you know — I mean, we basically want to track down who's leaked it, if it has been leaked.

Mark, why is the defense — what's the defense going to do with these pictures anyway?

GERAGOS: Well, the first thing they're going to do is give the autopsy pictures to the pathologist, who's going to take a look at them. They're going to want to study them. They're going to want to measure. They'll also probably give it to a forensic anthropologist, who's going to do work of their own. And they're going to see if they can try to date the time of death, which is probably one of the toughest things that anybody's ever going to have to do in this kind of a situation. And that makes a big difference.

And then the Equusearch records play a big part in that because they're going to want to see if whether or not somebody had searched that area, when they searched it, whether it truly was under water at the area where the body or the — not the body but the skeleton was found later on.

PIRRO: And Greta, the interesting part of it is that now, with Tim Miller and Equusearch, we're going to see volunteers possibly exposed to discussions of where they were, what they did, what their motivations are, where they live. I mean, this is going to open a whole can of worms for the volunteer efforts that we see on a regular basis for missing victims.

VAN SUSTEREN: And as problematic as that is, is that the defendant has a 6th Amendment right to an effective assistance.

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