Amanda Knox

Why did the Italian press coverage seem so one-sided?
Italy is only 49th in press freedom in the world, and I came to understand what that meant. The judiciary doesn’t have a public face, so, for example, reporters just get information from favored lawyers, or the other way around: lawyers give favored reporters information. They just print this stuff as fact. There’s no official comment about what’s going on, so no one ever corrects things that lawyers say, that advance their narrative, their point of view.

Did you think Knox was guilty?
When I went over there, I basically thought she was guilty as charged. … After about a month of reviewing documents—the actual case record was available—and beginning to interview various lawyers and the prosecutor himself, I realized that almost everything I had been reading wasn’t true, or it wasn’t actually in the case record.

How did that happen?
It was really a case built on the sense that the police and the prosecutors had that there was just something wrong with this young woman. And they couldn’t put their finger on it. Part of it was the mistranslation, the clash of cultures and the way that young women are expected to behave here and there. She was a soccer player from age 8, and she’s into yoga, and she’s from Seattle, and she has no physical boundaries, in a way. She’s not formal—she’s totally informal—in this country where the bella figura is the be-all and the end-all, the thing that people judge you by. So she’d do things like break into a downward dog whenever she needed to stretch, and she was doing this in the police station. And in Italy, young girls don’t play soccer, that’s for sure, and they don’t exercise in public.

When I went over there, I basically thought she was guilty as charged.

I first heard about the case in 2008 from sensationalistic news accounts. I assumed from the news accounts that Knox and Sollecito were guilty. I slowly reversed my opinion by reading a variety of accounts about the crime.

The translation of Judge Hellmann's report into English has been completed:

http://hellmannreport.wordpress.com

Witchcraft manuals such as Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 made it clear that “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable”. It advised prosecutors that women who did not cry during trial were certain to be witches. Half a millennium on that sounds oddly familiar. When the American student Amanda Knox faced prosecution for the murder of her British housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, the prosecution’s language was redolent of a witch-trial. At an appeal hearing, lawyer Carlo Pacelli described Knox’s “double-faced soul”. One side was “angelic, good, compassionate and in some ways even saintly” but the other side was “demonic, satanic, diabolic”.

SHE was further described as an “enchanting witch”. Her failure to cry or demonstrate expected emotions was used in evidence against her, much in line with Malleus Maleficarum.

Anyone who followed the case could see that this language wasn’t a Rumpole-ish flourish. It was intended as character evidence.

British women may feel relieved that such naked misogyny would not be tolerated here. Amanda Knox was an American woman in an Italian court so why worry? Step in the European Arrest Warrant. If a court in Perugia wishes to try a woman for a crime, it merely needs to send a couple of British police officers to her door who can put her on a plane immediately.

She could meet that charmer Carlo Pacelli across a courtroom where she might not know the language. Suspects transported under the EAW can be kept on remand for months. Britain cannot help them. The European Arrest Warrant does not go through embassies. It arrives hot from the jurisdiction of Italy,

Bulgaria, Romania or any EU member state. There is nowhere in Europe where you can be tried as a witch but there are places where you might be tried like a witch.

To an extent that also includes Britain. My own experience of jury service taught me how jurors, both male and female, tune in to a woman’s demeanour and emotions when she is giving evidence far more acutely than when a man is doing so.

For any slightly unusual female such as Amanda Knox the courtroom is a dangerous place. The ghost of the witch trial remains.

Amanda Knox prosecutors under investigation
(By Nick Squires, The Telegraph, 01 May 2012)

Two prosecutors in Perugia, where Miss Kercher was murdered, face accusations of wasting 182,000 euros (£150,000) of public money by commissioning a controversial 3D video which purported to show how the murder unfolded.

The contentious video, which defence lawyers said was based on circumstantial evidence, showed Miss Kercher being held down and stabbed to death by Miss Knox and her two co-accused.

The Leeds University student and her alleged murderers were represented in the 20 minute film by animated 'avatars'. It was played on a big screen to the judge and jury in the original trial in 2009.

The National Audit Office is now investigating the prosecutors, Giuliano Mignini and his deputy, Manuela Comodi, on whether the video was a necessary part of their case.

If found culpable they could have to pay the money back to the prosecutors' office.

Mail Online editor forgot to flush
(Will Sturgeon, The Media Blog, May 9, 2012)

Martin Clarke the editor of the Mail Online today told the Leveson Inquiry that a combination of "Human error and over-zealousness" was responsible for an infamous article which wrongly stated that Amanda Knox had failed in her appeal against a murder conviction.

Clarke said: "There were three mistakes... the first one other people made as well which was they misunderstood a verdict being given in Italian."

He's right, there were a number of outlets which made the same mistake and jumped the gun. But the Mail's mistake was arguably made more memorable because it wasn't just the verdict they got wrong. The Mail Online ran an account of how Knox looked "stunned" when the verdict was read out and went on to claim: "As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears...Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that 'justice has been done' although they said on a 'human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail'... Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away."

None of which happened of course, though Clarke explained this as a failure of process, telling the Leveson Inquiry: "The second error was we had prepared what in newspaper parlance is called a 'set and hold' ...where you'd have copy ready to roll. That should never have gone out until it had been checked against what actually happened."

The third leg of this unfortunate shambles was a failure to hide the evidence. Clarke said: "The third error was once we had killed the story we should have done something technical called flushing the cache which would have cleared the story from the internet."

Don't you hate it when people don't flush properly.

Martin Clarke the editor of the Mail Online today told the Leveson Inquiry that a combination of "Human error and over-zealousness" was responsible for an infamous article which wrongly stated that Amanda Knox had failed in her appeal against a murder conviction.

Antonio Curatolo (the heroin-addled homeless witness) has died in prison.

Likely murdered by the Italians in order to silence him. But I guess that is what you get for helping Italians send innocent people to prison.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

oralloy wrote:

However, I am also not very willing to let you or others derail the thread by making it about me instead of about Amanda and Raffaele.

Who are you to tell anybody here such? You are a normal A2K-member as far as I know. And certainly not the creator of this thread.

Who I am is someone who will refuse to cooperate with any attempts to make the thread about me.

If you want to discuss me on some other day, fine. Today I'll not be engaging in any more discussions about me.

oralloy wrote:

And chalk up my post about harming Italian children to: I'm very angry (with much justification), and angry people sometimes lash out.

You should asked voluntarily for some professional help.

Your sense of ethics and justice seems to be ... well, low, to say it mildly.