Amanda Knox

They say the breakin was staged, and there was no broken glass on clothes.

The crime scene photos show the breakin was not staged, and there was no broken glass on clothes.

Reasonable doubt that justice was done
(Matthew Harwood, The Guardian, 25 February 2010)

It's easy to forget three months have passed since conviction beyond a reasonable doubt took a holiday inside a courtroom in Perugia, Italy. On 5 December, Amanda Knox, a 22-year-old American student from Seattle, and Italian Raffaele Sollecito, 25, were found guilty of murdering British student Meredith Kercher. Two days ago, however, American audiences were reminded of Knox and her boyfriend's plight as her parents took to the Oprah Winfrey Show to once again declare her innocence.

While it's cynically easy to see the show as catering to American exceptionalism and exploiting a family's collective self-deception for ratings during "sweeps", anyone who has followed the trial should have had a gnawing feeling that the bars closed on the wrong people.

Here's why.

The jury in the Perugia sentenced Knox and Sollecito to prison for about a quarter of their lives, despite no motive, scant physical evidence, and no prior criminal histories. Prosecutors smeared Knox as a "luciferina," or "a devil with an angel's face". Unlike the US, juries in Italy are not sequestered. The constant media coverage calling Knox a "she-devil", illustrated by her promiscuity and drug-use, couldn't have fared well for the jury's neutrality. And it didn't help Knox and Sollecito that in Italy the prosecution is king, owing to its descent from the Inquisition and medieval law. "This nullifies the fact " written in our constitution by the way " that you're innocent until proven guilty," ecclesiastical judge Count Neri Capponi told Vanity Fair last year.

But what's instructive and terrifying about this case is how an overzealous prosecution used the traditional morality of the medieval Catholic town to punish an outsider and her boyfriend for a crime the evidence does not support. What's even more disturbing is that the prosecution did this despite already convicting a drifter and small-time drug dealer, Rudy Guede, of the crime. Investigators found his DNA all over Kercher's body and his bloody handprint on her pillow. Immediately after the murder, he fled to Germany where he was arrested. He told police he walked in on a man standing over Kercher with a knife after returning to her bedroom. The two struggled before the murderer fled. In October 2008, he was found guilty of murdering Kercher and sentenced to 30 years in jail " a sentence later cut to 16 years.

But the prosecution had already accused Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito of the crime and they weren't going to let them go. While it's possible the pair and Rudy Guede murdered Meredith Kercher, the prosecution's story still sounds absurd, like hell opened up underneath that picturesque cottage on All Saints Day.

According to lead prosecutor Giuliano Mignini's closing argument, Guede met Knox and Sollecito at Knox and Kercher's cottage, probably to settle a drug transaction. Kercher then began arguing with Knox, who hated Kercher because she thought Knox unclean and immoral. In a fit of drug-fuelled rage, the three attacked Kercher. Then, according to Mignini, the three tried to force Kercher into a sex game but she fought valiantly. Mignini even speculated what Knox might have said to Kercher: "You can imagine Amanda telling Meredith, 'You act like such a saint, now you are going to have sex with us.'" When they couldn't have their way with her, Sollecito and Guede held down Kercher while Knox cut her throat.

The evidence supporting Mignini's closing statement is shaky at best. Knox, however, only helped the prosecution along, engaging in absurd, even callous behaviour after the murder. When she returned home the morning after the murder, she found blood in the bathroom. However, she didn't immediately call police but took a shower, then left the cottage, and returned with Sollecito to investigate. When Knox was brought in for questioning by police, she did cartwheels in the station while awaiting interrogation. She pointed the finger at an innocent man, her boss, Patrick Lumumba, at the bar she worked at. She said she was there the night of the crime and heard Meredith Kercher scream before Lumumba killed her. (When Guede was arrested, he took Lumumba's original place in the conspiracy.) She and Sollecito both changed their stories of what happened and what they did that night. But Knox's intense questioning took place in a strange country in a strange language without an attorney or a professional translator present. She claimed the police slapped her.

Knox's allegations, however, aren't hard to discount as the lies of a desperate woman who saw the walls slowly closing inward. Her queer behaviour made it easier for Italians, Britons, and many Americans disgusted by Knox to rationalise that even if Knox didn't murder Kercher, a bad person was still deservedly punished.

But for people who still believe in a reasonable doubt, there's considerable unease that these two young people may be spending a good portion of their lives behind bars because the jury, the prosecution, and Italian society did not approve of the lives they led, especially Amanda Knox.

If there's anything to be learned from this case, it isn't that US standards of due process are better than Italy's. (Too many wrongfully convicted people face the prospect of death row in the United States for that belief to rationally exist.) It's this: when any legal system bites down on a person, especially one easy to dislike, it's hard for it to unclench its jaws.

The evidence supporting Mignini's closing statement is shaky at best. Knox, however, only helped the prosecution along, engaging in absurd, even callous behaviour after the murder.

When she returned home the morning after the murder, she found blood in the bathroom. However, she didn't immediately call police but took a shower, then left the cottage, and returned with Sollecito to investigate. When Knox was brought in for questioning by police, she did cartwheels in the station while awaiting interrogation.

She pointed the finger at an innocent man, her boss, Patrick Lumumba, at the bar she worked at.

She said she was there the night of the crime and heard Meredith Kercher scream before Lumumba killed her.

She and Sollecito both changed their stories of what happened and what they did that night.

Knox's allegations, however, aren't hard to discount as the lies of a desperate woman who saw the walls slowly closing inward.

Her queer behaviour made it easier for Italians, Britons, and many Americans disgusted by Knox to rationalise that even if Knox didn't murder Kercher, a bad person was still deservedly punished.

But for people who still believe in a reasonable doubt, there's considerable unease that these two young people may be spending a good portion of their lives behind bars because the jury, the prosecution, and Italian society did not approve of the lives they led, especially Amanda Knox.

America needs to start killing Italian honors students.

oralloy wrote:

America needs to start killing Italian honors students.

This type of foolishness and your overall overconfidence in your assessment continues to all but destroy your credibility. That being said; I remain extremely underwhelmed by the evidence against her and do consider the Italian System a recipe for injustice.

OCCOM BILL wrote:

oralloy wrote:

America needs to start killing Italian honors students.

This type of foolishness and your overall overconfidence in your assessment continues to all but destroy your credibility. That being said; I remain extremely underwhelmed by the evidence against her and do consider the Italian System a recipe for injustice.

There is no overconfidence. The evidence is rock solid that she is innocent, and that the Italians knew she was innocent when they convicted her.

And my suggested remedy for this atrocity is entirely appropriate.

America needs to start killing Italian honors students.

oralloy wrote:

America needs to start killing Italian honors students.

This, more than anything else you've said, highlights how much consideration you are due.

I have been too quiet. I saw that and didn't work up what to say, and then life went on.
So, well said.

This profile fits with a lot if people.

She got advice, if even from herself.

I remain not knowing what happened,

and despite your wailing, I don't think you do either.

I think arrogance in this matter by any country is not applied well.

And that interrogation is not the only place where the facts completely support Amanda and completely contradict the Italians, either.

Every bit of the evidence the Italians pretended they had against Amanda turned out to be completely fabricated.

For instance, their claim that the breakin was staged "because there was broken glass on clothes" is quite clearly refuted by the actual pictures from the crime scene, which clearly show that there was not a bit of broken glass on clothes.

Can you see broken glass on the floor ? Did it all land on the mat or is it that we can not tell from a photo ? Glass is usually transparent.

Yesterday, as we remember, Mignini showed a picture with white stains on a sweater, which he suggested could be the glass of the broken window. That phantom glass that everybody saw except the cameras.

Maria del Grosso answered Mignini. Simply by picking the next picture. Which shows what the white things were: the polka dots of the sweater.

An optical illusion had deceived Mignini. Just the last of the many illusions of this case, optical or not.

http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009/12/amanda-knox-stands-up.html

I can see what seems to be glass on the dark grey clothes.

given the extremely strong circumstantial evidence that Guede broke in through this window (he has a history of breaking in through windows while carrying a big knife, including a breakin that is an exact match for this one).

Perugia resident Christian Tramontano, who will not be testifying in person, made a statement to Perugia police Jan. 1, 2008, two months after Kercher's murder, saying that he had recognized Guede from newspaper photographs as the person who had broken into his house and threatened him with a knife four months earlier.

In the statement to police, Tramontano said he and his girlfriend were awakened by noises in their apartment early on Sept. 1 or 2, 2007. When Tramontano looked down from his loft bed, he saw a young man going through his belongings. Tramontano chased the man downstairs as he tried to escape, but the front door was locked. The thief -- who Tramontano identified as Guede -- first used a chair to keep Tramontano at a distance, and then pulled out a switchblade knife. Guede, who escaped, had stolen a 5 euro bill and three credit cards.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7946289&page=2

A defense witness testified that just two weeks before British exchange student Meredith Kercher was murdered, his law studio was broken into and a computer and cell phone were stolen. The stolen objects were later found in the possession of Rudy Guede, who has already been convicted for his role in Kercher's murder.

Paolo Brocchi, a lawyer whose office is not far from where Kercher was killed, told the court that the thief had entered his office through a window that had been broken with a large rock.

A similar scenario was found in the cottage where Kercher was killed Nov. 1, 2007.

. . . .

Palazzoli discovered they had been broken into Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007, and police later determined that the thief or thieves had entered by climbing up to the window, which is above a terrace, about 12 feet high. Police determined a rock was used with some strength to break through the double glass, and the alarm system was disabled. A computer and a printer were missing.

There was a similar broken window at the scene of Kercher's murder, in the house on via della Pergola in Perugia that Knox and Kercher shared with two Italian girls, When Knox returned to the house on Nov. 2, 2007, the morning after the murder, she noticed that the window in her housemate Filomena Romanelli's room was broken, and there was glass on the floor. Nothing of value was missing from any of the rooms, however. Police later found a large rock in the room.

. . . .

Brocchi explained in court that about two weeks after the theft, Oct. 27, he received a call from the police saying that they had found the stolen computer and a cell phone belonging to him (which he had not realized had gone missing). The objects were found on a person who was picked up by police in Milan, but they did not specify who that person was.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7939101
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7939101&page=2

Nursery school owner Maria del Prato testified in court today, with Knox's and Sollecito's parents looking on, that she had stopped by her school Saturday Oct. 27, when it was closed, and came upon Guede in her office.

"I asked him who he was," she told the court, "and he replied perfectly calmly, even though I had caught him red-handed." Del Prato said he told her he was "a kid from Perugia" who had arrived the night before and had nowhere to sleep.

Del Prato doubted his story, as her locker had been opened, and she said she believed Guede was looking for something to steal. Some small change was missing, and Del Prato noticed Guede had a laptop, but he told her it was his.

When police arrived at the school, they searched Guede's backpack and found a large knife with a 16-inch blade that had been taken from the school kitchen.

Guede was later booked at a Milan police station and accused of theft, receiving stolen goods, and in possession of a weapon. He was also fingerprinted and then released.

It was those fingerprint records that eventually nailed Guede to the scene of Meredith Kercher's murder. His bloody palm print was found on a pillow under Kercher's dead body.

The episode that Maria Del Prato recounted in court Friday followed Friday's testimony by Perugia lawyer Paolo Brocchi, who said a computer and cell phone had been stolen from his law offices in October 2007, weeks before Kercher's murder. The computer from Brocchi's office matched the one Guede had brought to Milan.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7946289