The case of Amanda Knox offers international intrigue at its finest,” proclaims a brief video on the case available, where else, on YouTube (“Bizarre Things That Never Made Sense About the Amanda Knox Case”). In fact, YouTube offers so many videos on the Knox case, from two minutes to two hours, that you can watch them ad nauseum. We mean that more or less literally—there’s much to be nauseous about in this murder. The crime itself, brutal, bloody, perhaps not actually Satanic but so awful as to rate as truly beastly. You could be nauseous as well at the judicial rush to judgment. On only the evidence of how young, sometimes stoned college students behaved around a crime scene, a chief prosecutor quickly conjured a theory of the crime. He decided it was obviously the work of a depraved, sadistic Knox and boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and then jammed round pegs into square holes in his zeal to make a case.
If the prosecutor’s blind haste didn’t upset you, local and international media coverage would have. ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ runs the old saying, and that multiplies by ten or so when you add rape, beauty, and “international intrigue.” Just who was this American girl, mesmerized Italians asked themselves, as the case was thrust at them hour after hour on their television screens? She’s beautiful on the outside,…but those steely blue eyes are hiding a murderous spirit, or so says our prosecutor and he’s says it’s her that cut that other girl’s throat open…
She was hated. Had she been turned loose in Perugia’s streets, you almost wonder if a crowd would have burned her at the stake.
It seems that some players in the judicial system, and the public consuming daily news, had decided early on just who committed this brutal murder. Things like evidence, and a trial, would be merely a formality. According to accounts, Amanda’s treatment in police custody used the oldest if not the kindest of methods. If we yell at you about your guilt, hour after hour after hour while police take shifts but you have to sit and take it, we’ll finally wear you down, you’ll finally collapse and say anything. Amanda remembers that as the strangest nightmare of all.
Finally, there are the sharp, surprising turns in the Italian justice system–a conviction, an acquittal, followed by a conviction, followed by…an acquittal, from the equivalent of the Supreme Court, presumably the end of it. But if you were traveling on the prison roller-coaster, either Know or Sollecito, you’d be worn thin by the multi-year process. It was confusing, so many changes of course, back and forth.
For all of the drama that stretched on for years, it was never that subtle a case, never that much complexity from the standpoint of forensic science, or witness evidence, or anything else. But there was enough emotion and raw mass-media appeal to make up for all the substance that just didn’t exist.
Amanda Knox, who maintained that she and her former Italian boyfriend were innocent in her British roommate’s murder through multiple trials and nearly four years in jail, was vindicated Friday when Italy’s highest court threw out their convictions once and for all.
“Finished!” Knox’s lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova exulted after the decision was read out late Friday. “It couldn’t be better than this.”
The surprise decision definitively ends the 7½-year legal battle waged by Knox, 27, and co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, 31, to clear their names in the gruesome 2007 murder and sexual assault of British student Meredith Kercher.
The supreme Court of Cassation panel deliberated for 10 hours before declaring that the two did not commit the crime, a stronger exoneration than merely finding insufficient evidence to convict. Instead, had the court-of-resort upheld the pair’s convictions, Knox would have faced 28 ½ years in an Italian prison, assuming she would have been extradited, while Sollecito had faced 25 years.
“Right now I’m still absorbing what all this means and what comes to mind is my gratitude for the life that’s been given to me,” Knox said late Friday, speaking to reporters outside her mother’s Seattle home.
The case attracted strong media attention due to the brutality of the murder and the quick allegations that the young American student and her new Italian lover had joined a third man in stabbing to death 21-year-old Kercher in a sex game gone awry.
Flip-flop guilty-then innocent-then guilty verdicts cast a shadow on the Italian justice system and polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic, largely along national lines.
Associated Press, September 8, 2015
The excerpt above was from the AP, written by an English-speaking journalist. The Italian press, and populace, has generally been happy at the long prison sentences, never been thrilled at the acquittals. Many there still think she’s as guilty as sin.
Why the national divide? For many reasons, perhaps, for one the same nationalism that has Italians cheering wildly for their soccer team to beat the U.S. in the World Cup, and vice-versa. A bona fide Italian prosecutor, and Italian courts had tried and convicted this devious (in Italian perception) foreign character, and no slick lawyering or American whining should get her off.
She’s a symbol, perhaps, as a privileged American girl, in a country that’s seen tourists from wealthier nations pass through with a sense of arrogance and privilege, for generations. They may not have been aware that Amanda worked her tail off, back in the States, for countless hours to earn the funds for her college year abroad. She was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but stereotypes are powerful.
And at the end of day, Amanda was the type of American girl of her era–zestful, free-spirited, uninhibited–that doesn’t always go over well in provincial Italy. The expectations of young women are different there, a more conservative decorum is expected. So when Amanda, dressed in the casual sweats she’d been wearing, was doing casual Yoga-type stretches and the like down at the police station, to relieve the tension, Italian sensibilities were offended. What kind of girl would act like that? At a time like this?
She struck every Italian eye as at least different. And as a Senior Editor at MindOverMystery loves to remind us, the error of equating “different” with “guilty” in some way has been one of civilization’s most consistent, and often tragic, mistakes.
At the end of the day, Italians were nauseated, too, tired of the very real phenomenon of Americans-acting-badly abroad, and how someone always makes excuses for them.
On the American side of the exchange, once at least it was clear how weak the case against Amanda was, we rallied, most of us, as to an American skater competing in the Olympics. We’re all for this girl, how can we help her? Retired FBI agents, and the like, began researching and assisting in the case, generally on their own dime.
We can only wonder where international relations would stand if the Italians had not exonerated her in their final process. If they had re-convicted her, they would have then demanded extradition of the young woman who had gone back to Seattle–after all, murderers are extradited between countries.
It’s a frightening hypothetical. Italy and the U.S. might not have actually gone to war, but at one level, it would have felt like it.
At the end of the day, we saw more twists and turns in this case than in the most convoluted mystery-movie plot. If you offered this as a film script, it would seem over the top.
Really, you can’t make this stuff up.