BBM ~ Well, it's not obvious to me. The evidence I saw was all circumstantial and George behaved as if he was hiding something.
And Casey didn't?
The jury was instructed to give circumstantial evidence the same weight as direct evidence. In bare bones cases where the mother has misled and stalled the police (insisting her daughter was alive and trying to get them to search for a fictional nanny in New York and Puerto Rico) to the point that her daughter is finally discovered skeletonized, there isn't a lot of forensic evidence.
If the jury had given the circumstantial evidence any consideration, they would have realized that Casey's story was both impossible and it made no sense. Instead, the jury decided George's behavior (on the stand, not even during the 31 days) mattered and Casey's did not.
And what else implicates George? The tape on the gas can that Casey was toting around in her trunk? The same tape that came from the shed that Tony testified that he helped Casey break into during the 31 days? The fact that he didn't immediately see the tow notice and go collect the car that according to Baez, did not have a dead body in it?
Baez went to such lengths to paint all the expert testimony about the trunk as junk science. So why would he harp on the George not immediately grabbing the tow notice or immediately calling the police about the smell after opening the trunk and finding nothing there? Why try to convince the jury that it was just trash?
What's suspicious about George not immediately going to the tow yard to retrieve a car that had nothing to do with Caylee's death? What about Baez's reasoning makes sense?
This is where it gets really interesting:
A) if you decide George not immediately getting the car is suspicious, it means you concede that Caylee's body was in Casey's trunk at one point and Casey was fully aware of that fact because she abandoned her car and was texting people with excuses about the smell in it.
Then we run into another problem. If George knew Caylee's body was in the trunk, why wouldn't he have picked it up sooner to get rid of the evidence? Or if you want to claim this is another attempt to frame Casey for what she actually did (which was drive around with her daughter's body in the trunk of her car) why would he have picked it up at all? Why wouldn't he have just tossed the tow notice all together instead of showing it to Cindy?
A juror claimed that it's suspicious that George opened the trunk in front of the tow employee. Would it have been less suspicious for him to have smelled decomposition and not looked in the trunk immediately? Baez claimed it's suspicious that he even drove it home all, but the jury should have taken into consideration that Casey was also driving around in it despite the smell and Casey did not call the police.
If George had called the police over what he thought he smelled, I get the feeling said juror would revert back to finding it suspicious that he was so willing to "throw Casey under the bus" the same way he did when he addressed George reporting the f'ing gas cans missing after he discovered his shed had been broken into and George's initial cooperation with the police.
Is it more suspicious to drive a decomp smelling car home with all the windows rolled down or to drive around in a decomp smelling car, park it by a dumpster, text your friend about it blaming it on dead animals and leave it there until it gets towed?
The foreman made a halfhearted attempt to put George behind the wheel by vaguely alluding to an extra set of keys, but there is zero evidence of that. George wasn't seen driving Casey's car, he didn't pick her up at Amscot, there is no evidence that he saw her at all during the thirty one days other than that one day when he surprised her while she was sneaking around the house and he confronted her about the gas cans.
B) If you decide that there was no body in the trunk, there is nothing suspicious about George claiming that he did not see the tow notice and there is nothing suspicious about George not calling the police after smelling the trunk. He was simply mistaken and snookered by one stinky bag of trash. (That Casey failed to remove from her trunk even though she parked next to a dumpster and then texted Amy about the smell.)
You can try to claim it's suspicious and another attempt to throw Casey under the bus that George claimed he was smelling death where there was none, but then you run into another problem. At least five other people, Casey Anthony herself and two cadaver dogs made the same mistake. So the only conclusion you can come to is that that was one stinky, stinky bag of trash and George's actions are not all that suspicious.
Maybe back at the tow yard, George thought or was praying that it was the trash too. Then Cindy got into contact with Casey and realized Casey had been lying and his granddaughter had been missing for the last 31 days. Maybe he needed that to put two and two together.
Maybe George did the right thing when he initially cooperated with the police. Maybe his intention was not throwing Casey under the bus. Maybe he was telling the truth because he wanted to find his granddaughter and know what happened to her and he sure as heck wasn't getting the truth from her mother. I thought that was the strangest part of the jury's logic and the "George was involved" logic. George cooperating with the police when there is a missing child is suspicious, but Casey not cooperating with the police is not?
Casey's story had holes in it bigger than the grand canyon starting with how Caylee's body got into the woods.
If only the people who bend over backwards to give Casey the benefit of a doubt would do the same for George. There is absolutely nothing that implicates him other than Casey changing her story yet again.