The Trial that JUST WON'T END

I could speculate that a craft of little green men came down to take his place and carry out the burglary, but it would be pure speculation.

The whole basis of this thread is a waste of time.

Ifs and ands....

I could speculate that a craft of little green men came down to take his place and carry out the burglary, but it would be pure speculation.

The whole basis of this thread is a waste of time.

Lordyaswas wrote:

Ifs and ands....

And don't forget some big butts...

This is the trial that doesn't end
Yes it go's on and on my friends.
Some people started trying it not knowing what it was
And they'll continue trying it forever just because
This is the trial that doesn't end

"what ifs".......what if Kercher had not acted like a totally insensitive sociopathic weirdo immediately after the event, and had showed genuine concern, respect and shock/horror like the vast majority of rightminded humans would have, in similar circumstances?

Here's a few more contentious "what ifs".......what if [Amanda] had not acted like a totally insensitive sociopathic weirdo immediately after the event, and had showed genuine concern, respect and shock/horror like the vast majority of rightminded humans would have, in similar circumstances?

What if the poor victim had realised sooner that she was sharing accommodation with a weirdo sociopath, and had found somewhere else to live?

parados wrote:

Lordyaswas wrote:

Ifs and ands....

And don't forget some big butts...

How would Guede have continued to break into places and steal the computers of Mignini's enemies if he was locked up in jail?

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.

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.