Casey Anthony Trial: Jury Selection Continues

May 16, 2011 — -- A week into jury selection in the trial of Casey Anthony, the woman charged with the murder of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee, eight jurors are still needed.

Judge Belvin Perry had hoped to open the guilt phase of the trial by Tuesday. Instead, jury selection enters a seventh day today.

The snail-like pace of juror selection forced the trial into a marathon 10-hour session on Saturday.

"Next week, we're going on the Perry plan," Judge Perry told the court on Saturday, hinting he would step up the pace. Perry wants 12 jurors and eight alternate jurors selected. Then he'll begin swearing the jurors in.

Some potential jurors have been caught posting to Facebook the rules of jury selection, others have admitted to having posted opinions about Casey Anthony in the past. Other snags in the process have included a potential witness being included in the juror pool.

On Friday, day 5 in the case, six jurors were dismissed from the pool of prospective panelists, and the defense used its first peremptory strike against juror #1011 -- a man who had lied about a D.U.I. in 2006.

The time commitment to the trial -- two months sequestered in a hotel -- has also made finding jurors difficult.

Potential jurors undergo two rounds of questioning and are asked their stance on the death penalty. If they don't believe in the death penalty, they are automatically excluded since Anthony could face the death penalty.

Jury selection was moved from Anthony's hometown of Orlando, Fla., to Clearwater, Fla., in an attempt to avoid a media circus. Judge Perry has hinted that the trial could be bigger than the O.J. Simpson trial.

The selected jurors will be transported to Orlando for the length of the trial. The trial is expected to last two months.

Casey Anthony's parents, George and Cindy Anthony, are suing a former family attorney, Brad Conway, after he was spotted making several television appearances where he hinted at possible defense strategies.

The intense interest in the saga started nearly three years ago when Caylee Anthony was first reported missing.

Caylee disappeared in the summer of 2008. The child had been missing for a month before Anthony told anyone and when she did, it was her mother who called 911.

"I can't find my granddaughter. There's something wrong. I found my daughter's car today and it smelled like there's been a dead body in the damn car," said Cindy Anthony in the July 2008 call to police.

During the search for Caylee, Anthony lied to investigators about her job. She said that she worked at Universal Studios, even taking investigators to the theme park. Anthony had no steady job. She occasionally worked at a nightclub selling shots to partiers.

Anthony also told investigators that she had been conducting her own investigation into her daughter's disappearance and claimed that she'd left her daughter with a babysitter who later vanished.

Instead of searching for her daughter, photos showed Anthony partying during the first month of her daughter's disappearance.

Caylee's body was found just blocks from the Anthony home. The body was too decomposed for medical examiners to determine a cause of death. Anthony was charged with murder in October 2008.