Amanda Knox

So I get to do a bunch of thumb down.

Quite an interesting piece in the New York Times today.

Ms Knox is being kept away from the news media why? Unanswered questions?
I think there's a lot of image-building going on. And I think Ms Knox knows more than she's said up to now.

For the dead woman’s family, the appeals verdict brought no comfort. “It feels very much as though we are back to Square 1,” Lyle Kercher, her brother, said at a news conference in Perugia on Tuesday. He said he could not understand how a ruling that “was so certain two years ago has been so emphatically overturned now. It obviously raises further questions.”

One of those questions is about Rudy Guede, who in 2008 received a 30-year sentence for sexual assault and aiding and abetting murder in Ms. Kercher’s death, though the sentence was reduced to 16 years on appeal. Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito were never named in the ruling, which said only that he had aided unknown “others” in the crime.

“The courts agree that he wasn’t acting alone,” Mr. Kercher said. “If the two people released really were not guilty, we are left wondering what really happened.”

The police arrested Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito on Nov. 6, 2007, five days after Ms. Kercher’s naked and bloody body was found in the apartment she shared with Ms. Knox. In December 2009, Ms. Knox was sentenced to 26 years and Mr. Sollecito to 25 for the crime, which prosecutors said was a case of rough sex that got violent.

The lower court’s reasoning ran to nearly 500 pages, but it presented only a circumstantial account of the events leading to Ms. Kercher’s murder, and did not ascribe a motive to her attackers. During the appeal, court-appointed experts determined that some DNA evidence on which prosecutors had based the original case was unreliable.

With so many unknowns, the case “wasn’t a victory” for the Italian justice system, the jurist Carlo Federico Grosso wrote in a commentary in the Turin daily La Stampa on Tuesday. Instead, he added: “Faced with the lack of sufficient evidence, the judges inexorably but correctly had to reach their conclusion. But this is an acquittal that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.”

Back in Perugia, residents said the trial had tainted their town. Monia Montagnini, who teaches Chinese here, said that the image that had emerged of Perugia as a den of iniquity “just isn’t true. In fact, it’s quite dull here.”

This is too bad, I was interested in talking.

Ms Knox is being kept away from the news media why?

And I think Ms Knox knows more than she's said up to now.

I still think she's guilty. She got off because the Italian police screwed up. I don't like her at all.

I agree with the Kercher family that more than one person was involved in their daughter's murder.

McTag wrote:

factors that helped Knox case

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15157384

Wow. Talk about a dishonest article. Who wrote that tripe?

Oh. Never mind. Just went back to see after I asked the question. It was written by one of the guilter book authors who's about to be sued for libel.

Hope he has his assets in liquid form so they can be efficiently transferred into Amanda and Raffale's bank accounts.

1. Reasonable doubt
Amanda Knox's lawyers managed to instil reasonable doubt in the jurors' minds over the quality of testing of the bra clasp belonging to Meredith Kercher - which it was claimed had Raffaele Sollecito's DNA on it - and the knife that prosecutors argued was the murder weapon. The prosecution maintained Knox's DNA was on the handle of the kitchen knife, with Ms Kercher's DNA on the blade. The defence claimed that the amount of Meredith Kercher's DNA on the blade was too small to test. An independent review disputed the prosecution's claims.

2. Crime scene errors
A few police crime scene errors, such as contaminated samples, lost evidence and disputed procedures, were successfully portrayed as generalised incompetence. An independent review raised doubt over the attribution of some of the DNA traces, which were collected from the crime scene 46 days after the murder.

3. Lack of proof
There was no convincing proof that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were actually in the room when Meredith Kercher died. Even the presence of Amanda Knox's blood and footprints in the house were successfully explained away. Her defence claimed that Knox's blood could have been there because she was a resident at the farm house on Pergola Road. The evidence of Rudy Guede against Knox was also confusing. Guede, who is serving a prison sentence for sexual assault and murder, said that he heard her voice at the scene but didn't see her face.

4. Motive
There was no credible motive for the murder. The prosecution stuck doggedly to the sex-game-gone-wrong explanation even though their own medical examiner said there was no evidence of rape in the days following the murder. An alternative motive, involving robbery, gained traction as the case rolled on, based on the unexplained disappearance of Meredith Kercher's 200 euro rent money.

5. Unreliable witness

One of the key witnesses at the original trial, a homeless man called Antonio Curatolo, publicly admitted to being a heroin addict, undermining his observations that he saw Knox acting suspiciously by the scene of the crime on the night of the murder in November 2007.

6. Character
Knox claimed that some of the evidence put forward against her - stories about her strange behaviour after she was arrested and the prosecution's focus on her sexuality - was no more than an attempt to demonise her to cover up for a weak case.

7. PR campaign
Knox's family hired a Seattle public relations specialist, David Marriot, who for months repeatedly plugged the line: "Amanda will get out, it's a done deal." This created a self-propagating media frenzy, which - in the end - helped convince a largely sceptical Italian media.

8. Supporters' presence
The massive presence of friends and family in Perugia in support fuelled the "Amanda is innocent" campaign. Italians have claimed that because Knox is American, the case has been handled differently, so as not to offend the US.

9. Appeals process
The Italian appeals process offers more guarantees to defendants than any other legal system in the world, whereby only the weakest evidence is treated, not the whole case. Knox's team only had to attack the DNA evidence against her to undermine the whole edifice of the original trial. Italy has one of lowest prison populations in the world because of its lenient appeals process.

10. Favourable political climate
Silvio Berlusconi's government vowed to tame his country's fiercely independent system of magistrates - one that had been bolstered to fight the mafia. The more the government shows the magistracy to be incompetent the better for Mr Berlusconi. The ministry of justice is poised to investigate what went wrong.

I still think she's guilty. She got off because the Italian police screwed up. I don't like her at all.

I agree with you on that, JWand

and would go so far as to say I still don't know if Knox and Sollecito were involved or were somehow stoned innocents elsewhere (I haven't read the early stories lately) - but it is reasonable that they were acquitted.

Mignini the prosecutor seem to be dangerously unhinged.
He should never have been allowed within 100 miles of this case.

I still think she's guilty too - and I guess that means her boyfriend probably also had something to do with it.

They both told too many lies and changed their initial stories too totally to seem at all innocent or credible.

And I just don't buy her (their) explanation for why they HAD to lie.

One minute they put themselves at the scene and the next they're somewhere else doing something that the evidence just doesn't support.

There is a writer, american if I remember, yet another expat type, that writes police procedurals set around there, no link from me just now. I cited a couple of her books on the what are you reading now thread, but I forget the author's name right now.