28 responses so far ↓

• 1 LL // Dec 5, 2009 at 4:22 pm

  Dear, under Italian regulations there is no obligation to sequester the jury.

• 2 Harry Rag // Dec 5, 2009 at 4:55 pm

  The evidence against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito is overwhelming:

  1. The multiple conflicting alibis and the fact they still don’t have credible alibis for the night of the murder.

  2. The contradictory and conflicting witness statements.

  3. The deliberate and repeated lies that were exposed by telephone and computer records, and by CCTV footage.

  4. Amanda Knox’s voluntary confession that she was involved in Meredith’s murder and the fact that this confession contained significant elements of truth.

  5. Judge Paolo Micheli’s claim that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito knew precise details about Meredith’s murder that they couldn’t have known if they weren’t involved.

  6. Various independent forensic experts – Dr. Patrizia Stenoni, Dr. Renato Biondo and Professor Francesca Torricelli – categorically stating that Meredith’s DNA was on the blade of the double DNA knife.

  7. The five instances of Amanda Knox’s DNA mixed with Meredith’s blood in three different locations in the cottage in Via della Pergola: the bathroom, the hallway, and Filomena’s bedroom, where the break-in was staged.

  8. An abundant amount of Raffaele Sollecito’s DNA being on Meredith’s bra clasp. Meredith’s bra had been cut with a knife and Sollecito must have touched the clasp as it cut the strap.

  Judge Paolo Micheli pointed out that Meredith’s bra had been removed some time after she had been killed.

  9. Two independent imprint experts categorically excluding the possibility that the bloody footprint on the blue bathmat could belong to Rudy Guede.

  Lorenzo Rinaldi stated:

  ““You can see clearly that this bloody footprint on the rug does not belong to Mr. Guede, but you can see that it is compatible with Sollecito.”

  The other imprint expert print expert testified that the bloody footprint on the blue bathmat matched the precise characteristics of Sollecito’s foot.

  10. The woman’s bloody shoeprint on the pillow under Meredith’s body matched Amanda Knox’s foot size, but was incompatible with Meredith’s foot size.

  11. Raffaele Sollecito’s forensic expert, Professor Vinci claim cthat he had found Knox’s DNA on Meredith’s bra.

  12. The Murder Dynamic.

  Barbie Nadeau wrote:

  “Countless forensic experts, including those who performed the autopsies on Kercher’s body, have testified that more than one person killed her based on the size and location of her injuries and the fact that she didn’t fight back—no hair or skin was found under her fingernails.”

  13. The fact that the break-in was clearly staged with witnesses testifying that there were shards of glass strewn on top of Filomena’s clothes. This proves that the window was broken after the room had been ransacked.

  There were no marks to indicate that the somebody had climbed up the wall and no blood or DNA on the broken glass.

  No-one managed to the scale the wall and climb through the window when Sollecito’s defence team attempted to show that it was possible.

  14. The tampering of the crime scene. Judge Paolo Micheli wrote in his 106-page report that Meredith’s bra was removed and her body was moved some time after she had been killed.

  15. The witness testimonies, especially the testimony given by Antonio Curatolo and Nara Capezalli.

  Antonio Curatolo testified that he saw Amanda Knox and Raffale Sollecito watching the gate of the cottage from Piazza Grimana on the night of the murder. Curatolo is regarded as an honest and reliable witness by Judge Paolo Micheli.

  Nara Capezalli claimed she heard a terrified scream and then two or more people running away.

  Another witness Antonella Monacchia corroborated Nara Capezalli’s testimony about hearing a woman’s loud scream.

  16. Suspicious Mobile Phone Activity

  Amanda Knox’s and Raffaele Sollecito’s mobile activity on the night of the murder was suspicious and highly unusual. They turned off their mobiles at approximately the same time shortly before Meredith was killed.

  Police investigator, Letterio Latella, testified that Knox’s and Sollecito’s mobile phones were inactive most of the night, and that activity on their mobile phones stopped almost simultaneously.

  Latella stated that he did not find any evidence of a similar “blackout” of Knox’s and Sollecito’s mobile phones in the month before the murder.

  Investigators have said that both Knox and Sollecito’s phones were usually on until late at night and would come back on in the late morning.

  17. Amanda Knox’s false accusation of Diya Lumumba after she had been informed that Sollectio had told police that she had asked him to lie for her and he had stopped providing her with an alibi

• 3 yournutz // Dec 5, 2009 at 5:02 pm

  justice has been served! she is guilty!!!!!!

• 4 Bryce // Dec 5, 2009 at 5:50 pm

  You need only to look at her face to she that she did it.

• 5 Bryce // Dec 5, 2009 at 5:51 pm

  You need only to look at her face to see that she did it

• 6 J.B. // Dec 5, 2009 at 6:00 pm

  Great editorial, it’s too bad it’s only brought out the witchhunting, torchwaving crowd of trash that would have cheered at the Salem Witch trials so far. Again great editorial

• 7 Margo // Dec 5, 2009 at 11:37 pm

  I feel sorry for Amanda and Raffaele, and I am sure they are innocent. The prosecution theory doesn’t make sense. What killer would take the murder weapon and bring it to his apartment? What for? And, if Amanda was a killer, why would she stay in Italy instead of flying immediately back to Seattle? Why would those 2 young people kill their friend together with the man they didn’t know?

• 8 justiceforall // Dec 5, 2009 at 11:51 pm

  This is so sad. I thought that we stood for an “innocent until proven guilty” system. OOOPS, I forgot, we are not talking about our justice system here! Words can’t express how terribly I feel for Meredith’s family. At the same time, words can’t express how terribly I feel for us as a civilization. It seems that everyone is rushed to judge guilt or innocence, without looking at the justice system that is trying the accused. This especially implicates the political and personal motivations of those involved (both U.S and Italian interests- and the personal interests of the prosecution trying this case). Without considering these grave issues, can we ever think that Meredith’s family will ever have true justice? Again, this is so sad. I pray that Meridith and her family will be able to have true closure on this issue without political motivation. I also pray that Meridith and her family have true justice, as well as all person or persons implicated and/ or responsible for their involvement in this tragedy.

• 9 jillian // Dec 6, 2009 at 1:46 am

  There is no evidence linking either Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito to the crime scene and I believe that they’re both completely innocent.

  This is a grave miscarriage of justice by the lead Prosecutor Guiliano Mignini.

• 10 Disgusted // Dec 6, 2009 at 6:53 am

  The real tragedy in all this is how one sided the press has covered this case in the US. Harry Rag gave you a good summary of the evidence against the two, but all you see on TV networks is how there is no evidence, and let’s talk to Amanda’s Aunt. One can’t help but think what other things the media have distorted and forced on us to believe all these years…

• 11 Mo Gregson // Dec 6, 2009 at 8:33 am

  WELL DONE ITALY!!!
  I am sat here with a nice glass of chianti to celebrate a victory of justice and common sense over bluster, arrogance and US “girl next door” media hype.
  The Americans are all sat hand wringing and whining that the evidence against Knox could be piece by piece explained away. However even those with a poor knowledge of statistics will know that Knox must have committed (part of)this crime.
  You cannot complain about US justice when your own courts let OJ walk…
  Go figure.

• 12 uncle joe mccarthy // Dec 6, 2009 at 10:29 am

  harry rag writes alot of facts…sad thing is, none are true

  amanda knox and raphaeli are innocent

• 13 Xeno // Dec 6, 2009 at 12:59 pm

  I am utterly shocked at the base racism and xenophobia that underpins so many comment in the US about this case. She’s one of ours – it must be a miscarriage of justice! The Italians are anti-American! She’s just a poor innocent – lets call out the army to get her back.

  Purlease… they convicted an Italian (two if you take the fact that Rudy Guede had been in the country since 5) on exactly the same evidence.

  The reporting of the case has been utterly appalling in the US on many sites. Editorials are put in place like this which mislead people about the depth of evidence against Knox and her co-accused. In fact, if you read up both sides of the story you will find Knox and her boyfriend repeatedly lied putting false accusations against an innocent man just because he was black and might fit with anyone seeing the true 3rd killer – also a black man, changing of story and behaviour like buying thongs , laughing, smiling and kissing and talking loudly about having sex with the new lingerie on within a day of her flatmate being found with “her ****ing throat cut” (Knox’s words to Kercherer’s distraught friends who were worrying if Kercherer died in pain).

  Don’t just take it as read there isn’t evidence just because someone says so – there is an absolute stack load of it and Knox and her Italian boyfriend’s utter inability to ‘remember’ where they were / the changing stories etc on the night her flatmate was killed are paper-thin as soon as you actually read some two-way coverage of the case. Try reading something like this, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22332240// , published by msnbc back in Dec 2007 before the apologists and PR campaign for Knox started preying on people’s fears about how-Americans-get-treated-abroad.

  If Amanda Knox had been tried on the very same evidence in the US she would be one of the most villified figures in the country and she may well have received the death penalty. She would certainly be doing a great deal more time than 26 years. Shame on those who are appealing to nationalism but are merely using knee-jerk xenophobia to further their own agenda to free this rightly convicted murderess.

• 14 Gwenda // Dec 6, 2009 at 1:11 pm

  She’s American therefore she must be innocent. Duh. She did it fo.lks. Time to move on.

• 15 Word from the wise // Dec 6, 2009 at 9:09 pm

  Now they’ve been found guilty expect the truth to come out, one of them will do a sentence reduction deal, probably her. The coverage in the UK has been even handed but the general consensus of opinion is all 3 are guilty of murder, but who actually did what is unclear

• 16 Xeno77777 // Dec 7, 2009 at 8:03 pm

  Moses Law is that those who lie to convict innocent persons must receive the same penalty they tried to inflict!

• 17 Mo Gregson // Dec 7, 2009 at 10:37 pm

  Knox is bright, intelligent but also looks the part for an evil psychopath. I am happy to see her behind bard for 26 years, I only wish it was for life!

• 18 LTJ // Dec 13, 2009 at 9:31 pm

  Yes, Amanda Knox was involved with this murder. If not, then why was she waiting to buy cleaning supplies at 7:45am as soon as the store opened (while also claiming she slept until after 10:00am)? And why were she and Raffaele standing next to a mop and bucket later that morning, when the police unexpectedly arrive to return the cell phones? And why had they just started washing a load of Meredith’s clothes? Did the police interrupt a little clean-up session that was careful to skip most of the places where Rudy Guede had placed his paws?

• 19 Hristina // Dec 15, 2009 at 9:29 am

  Very good! THANK’S

• 20 Sophie J // Dec 18, 2009 at 5:31 pm

  Whatever happened to objective journalism. This piece is DISGUSTINGLY one-sided. Knox was involved somehow, why else would you have no alibi and give conflicting stories to the police? Innocent people have one story and that is the truth. The fact that she is American and never committed a crime before does not make her innocent.Delusional people. Remember the victim here, RIP Meredith Kercher.

• 21 captcorajus // Dec 21, 2009 at 2:02 pm

  Harry Rag is an idiot. He posts the same DUMB, factless BS all over the internet.’

  Rudy Guede’s DNA was inside the victime. His handprints in Kersher’s blood were on her pillow in the room.

  There is no DNA, hair, fingerprints, fluids of Knox in the room, and of Sollecito is only the tainted bra clasp.

  How can the evidence against Guede be so damning and of Knox and Sollecito you can’t even put them in the room or even connect them to Guede.

  What are they, witches??

  Give me a break Harry Rag… you are a fool, can’t site one piece of hard evidence and repeatedly cut and paste inaccurate information.

• 22 Jim Smith // Dec 22, 2009 at 6:40 pm

  I am not surprised that the author feels the way he does. Psychopaths, such as Amanda are able to manipulated simple-minded people with their charisma and charm. It’s a shame and a verdict on society as a whole that physical appearance play such an important role in shaping one’s opinions If Amanda was two inches shorter and 20 pounds heaver, I seriously doubts she would be able to garner as much sympathy as she has.

• 23 billy ryan // Dec 23, 2009 at 6:12 pm

  amanda knox and raffaele were framed and convicted in a kangaroo court

• 24 Hrisya // Dec 31, 2009 at 2:29 am

  And why were she and Raffaele standing next to a mop and bucket later that morning, when the police unexpectedly arrive to return the cell phones?

• 25 Tony De Silva // Jan 4, 2010 at 1:40 am

  It wasn’t the 21st birthday party Amanda Knox’s family had planned for her — a barbecue at home in Seattle, with gifts like rock-climbing and camping gear. Instead, when Amanda’s mother, Edda Mellas, wished her daughter a happy birthday, it was 6000 miles away, in a silent, sun-seared Italian prison.

  Amanda’s Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 24, sent her flowers for the occasion; he’d called the florist from his own prison, an hour south. The bouquet, which Amanda was allowed to glance at before it was whisked away, was made up of white nasturtiums, symbolizing “victory in battle”.

  Amanda, along with Raffaele and a young African immigrant named Rudy Guede, is accused of killing her British roommate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, in an alleged “extreme sex orgy” gone wrong, in November 2007. Although Amanda has yet to be charged, she spends every day behind bars. Hearings are currently under way to determine whether she will be indicted; if she is found guilty in a trial, she’ll spend the next 30 years in prison.

  “Leaving my daughter in that place is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Just walking away and knowing she’s shaky and … oh, my God,” says Edda after the birthday visit, breaking down and weeping at an outdoor café in Perugia, the medieval Italian hill town with sweeping views of olive groves, vineyards, and fields of sunflowers. Since the ordeal began, she’s dropped from a size 14 to a 6.

  A math teacher and mother of two, Edda takes turns flying to Perugia with her current husband, Chris Mellas, and Amanda’s biological father, Curt Knox, so that a family member can always make the twice-weekly prison visits. “When I’m waiting for legal developments in Amanda’s case,” she says, “I feel my heart racing and need to take a tranquilizer”.

  Amanda has been sitting in prison for a year now, while the Italian press dissects her past and her behavior, framing her as a sex-crazed ugly American who didn’t properly mourn the death of her roommate. Did she kill her, or is Amanda but the latest in a long line of women deemed guilty in the court of public opinion for acting in ways that subvert the script? Be it the U.K.’s Kate McCann or Australia’s Lindy Chamberlain, both of whom were judged harshly in the disappearances of their daughters, a woman’s demeanor and the way she grieves is sometimes her greatest crime.

  Amanda lives in an 8-by-12 cell that looks out at a cement wall and a little patch of sky. She can leave her room two hours a day to walk alone in a tiny yard. She’s always had a roommate — currently, an illiterate gypsy, and previously, an 18-year-old who’d murdered her boyfriend and repeatedly told Amanda, “You are never getting out of here.” However, Amanda is not allowed to mingle with the prisoners outside her cell. Prison regulations even forbid other inmates from talking to her through the bars of her cell. “Amanda’s segregation from other prisoners is a precaution for her security,” the prison director, Antonio Fullone, says, through an interpreter. “She’s accused of a sexually violent murder. This is like pedophilia or killing a baby. The other prisoners don’t like it.”

  60-foot walls surround the prison compound, Casa Circondariale Capanne di Perugia. It houses 201 men, including Rudy Guede, plus 31 women in the female wing. Cell doors open and lock by remote control. Amanda’s mattress and pillow are bare slabs of industrial foam rubber. In the summer, the cell is suffocingly hot; in the winter, uncomfortably cold.

  For hours at a time, Amanda reads, studies, improves her Italian, sleeps — and tries to understand how her life changed so dramatically.

  A year ago, in October, she and her roommate Meredith were new exchange students at the University for Foreigners in Perugia. With her blue eyes and athletic build, Amanda, who had come from the University of Washington in Seattle, drew the immediate attention of Italian men; after two weeks in Perugia, she began dating Raffaele, a clean-cut Italian student with wire-rim glasses. The son of a prominent urologist, Raffaele was a studious, shy guy who occasionally smoked pot. Meredith, meanwhile, started seeing a 22-year-old Italian guitar player in a rock band, Giacomo Silenzi, who lived in the cottage apartment downstairs. Then there was Rudy, 20 — an Ivory Coast native who was raised in Italy — who occasionally visited Giacomo’s apartment and was attracted to Meredith. Amanda, Meredith, and their two other Italian roommates studied hard then hung out deep into the night with friends at local pubs or in each other’s apartments.

  On the morning of November 2, everything changed. As she remembers it, Amanda returned home from a night at Raffaele’s and found a few drops of blood in her bathroom and the door to Meredith’s bedroom locked. “She called me to say she was worried, and I told her to call the police,” says Edda. Amanda has said that she was in the process of calling the police when they happened to arrive on their own, looking for the owner of two cell phones tossed in a nearby garden — Meredith’s phones, in fact. They broke into Meredith’s bedroom and discovered her lying in a pool of blood, half-naked, her windpipe crushed in an attempted strangulation and her throat partially slashed.

  News of the murder spread fast, with the Italian media dubbing the crime scene the “House of Horrors.” Terrified parents of the 40,000 Italian and foreign students in Perugia immediately began threatening to withdraw their kids from local colleges. The town of 160,000 relies on the money these students bring in, so the pressure was on to solve the crime quickly.

  Three days after the murder, the senior police investigator on the case sought out Amanda and Raffaele to question them. When he discovered them casually eating in a pizza restaurant, he grew suspicious. Soon after, they were arrested. “That was how it started,” says Paul Ciolino, an American forensic examiner who was the primary investigative adviser for the Innocence Project, which has helped exonerate more than 215 prisoners jailed in the U.S. He has independently studied the facts of Amanda’s case in Italy, and says the senior officer told him Amanda should have been “wrapped in grief in bed, crying, not eating” at a restaurant. “I was stunned that this was why he suspected Amanda and her boyfriend were involved in the crime,” he says. “These two kids, never in trouble, classic middle-class college students — it’s ludicrous that they were implicated.”

  Local news reports buzzed about Amanda allegedly being spotted buying racy thongs in the days after the murder, suggesting callous plans for a “wild night of sex,” as one paper put it. According to Amanda, the truth was much more mundane: With her home sealed off as a crime scene, she went to a discount store to buy some basic cotton underwear. Regardless, she quickly became the prime target of the Italian press, possibly because of Italy’s increasing xenophobia and concerns about immigration, with the government blaming foreigners for a spike in crime. Indeed, the director of Amanda’s prison says, “Seventy to 80 percent of our inmates are foreigners.”

  Amanda’s Facebook and MySpace pages also provided fodder. News reports said she had an unnatural fascination with weapons, because there was a photo of her toying with a machine gun. In fact, the only image posted of Amanda with a weapon was a typical tourist shot taken on a family vacation in Europe, where she’s posed at a museum behind an antique gun, pretending to fire it. The tabloids also claimed she had a bizarre interest in rape, as demonstrated by a short story she posted on the topic — when in fact she’d written it for a class assignment, then put it online for friends to read.

  Through it all, Amanda kept a cool head, which only fueled more doubts about her. “Amanda isn’t the type to be hysterical,” says her mother, explaining that her honors-student daughter is even-keeled and calm by nature. “When Amanda was angry with us, she didn’t throw tantrums. Instead, she wrote long letters to us expressing how she felt.”

  “She is completely the opposite of almost every single article that’s been written about her,” says Madison Paxton, 21, who became friends with Amanda when the two were freshmen at the University of Washington. “She’s really good at putting things into perspective.” Amanda was of course “torn up” about Meredith’s murder, Madison says, but “didn’t make a public deal of it.” She adds, “The papers have called her a drugged-up skank, and that’s just incredibly untrue. She respects her body; she doesn’t like to party too much. This is the furthest person in my mind I can imagine being guilty of anything even close to this.”

  Says Andrew Seliber, 21, who also befriended Amanda their freshman year, “She’s a very good listener, and she goes out of her way to make people feel good. So for her to try and bring harm to anyone is unfathomable.”

  In grade school, Amanda’s soccer teammates nicknamed her “Foxy Knoxy” because she would crouch down like a fox on the playing field. European tabloids picked up on the name, calling her “Foxy Knoxy: a sex-mad American party girl.”

  After her arrest, Amanda was detained by the police and interrogated for 14 hours. Amanda, who wasn’t fluent in Italian at the time, was provided with neither a professional interpreter nor a lawyer. She later told her parents that her interrogators deprived her of sleep, smacked her in the head a number of times, and asked her to visualize what might have happened to Meredith the night she died. In a state of confusion and exhaustion, she ended up signing a confession. In it, she also implicated her boss at a local bar where she had worked. He was held for nearly two weeks, then released; Amanda later told her parents that it was the interrogators who suggested him as a possible suspect in the crime. News leaked to the press that police thought Meredith’s murder was the result of a drug-fueled sex orgy.

  After the interrogation, Amanda and Raffaele were sent to jail but not charged; in Italy, a suspect can be held for 12 months without being charged. This, despite the fact that the only DNA traces found on Meredith’s body came from Rudy, who had not been seen since the night of the murder. His bloody fingerprint was also found on her pillow.

  Two weeks later, officials picked up Rudy, who had fled to Germany, and extradited him back to Italy, where he admitted to being in Meredith’s room before she died. His explanation of what happened that night is so fantastical, even his own lawyer admits it will be “an uphill battle” to present his defense: Rudy claims he was invited home by Meredith that night to have sex, but stopped because they didn’t have a condom. He went to the bathroom, then came out to find an Italian man with a knife standing over Meredith’s bloody body; he says the man then fled.

  ================================================================================
  In his initial two statements several weeks apart, Rudy claimed he didn’t recognize Meredith’s killer; he also said he did not know who Amanda and Raffaele were. However, five months later, Rudy suddenly told investigators it was Raffaele who murdered Meredith, and that he’d seen Amanda running from the house with her boyfriend.

  Edda was on her way to Perugia to see Amanda when the news broke that her daughter had been arrested. “I was on a five-hour layover when the television news announced that my daughter had confessed to the murder,” says Edda, her eyes bloodshot from sleeplessness. “I walked around that airport in a daze. My daughter murdered someone … it wasn’t possible. My husband was on the phone to the embassy in Rome. They gave him a list of some lawyers, and he started calling them.” (Eventually the family reached out to their state representatives, who have been in contact with the State Department on their behalf.)

  Says Amanda’s 19-year-old sister, Deanna, “I stayed in bed for four days when we first heard. I had to drop out of college for a semester because I couldn’t concentrate.”

  Since then, the police investigation has been chaotic and bumbling. Take the alleged murder weapon, a cooking knife that belonged to Raffaele. Amanda’s DNA was found on the handle — not surprising, since she used it for cooking — and officials said Meredith’s DNA had been found on the blade. But new DNA evidence released shows that after 183 attempts to match the material on the knife to Meredith’s DNA, there is only a 1 percent chance that it is hers, making it unlikely that the knife is, in fact, the murder weapon.

  There is also no indication that Meredith was subjected to sexual violence, “and no evidence at all on the young woman’s body that would indicate there was a sex orgy,” says Carlo Torre, a professor of legal medicine at the University of Turin and a leading forensic expert, who examined the autopsy reports and photographs of Meredith’s body.

  Meanwhile, Perugia’s senior prosecutor on the case, Giuliano Mignini, 58, a round, balding man with unruly eyebrows, is himself under investigation for abuse of power, with a trial scheduled for November; he’s been charged in a case involving wiretapping the phones of police and journalists, among other things. Nevertheless, in Italy, even if a prosecutor is under a cloud of suspicion, it is not mandatory to remove him from a case.

  Equally bizarre, Amanda’s defense lawyers — who no longer talk to the press — were denied the “evidence” against Amanda for months. Then, according to what they told Amanda’s parents, the prosecution said they could have access to it for 50,000 Euro (around $78,500). After vociferous protests from the lawyers, the prosecution relented.

  Miraculously, Amanda did finally get a break when the Italian Supreme Court tossed out the results of her interrogation this past spring on the grounds that she had not been provided with a lawyer or interpreter. Nevertheless, legal experts in Italy say Amanda and Raffaele could very well be found guilty if indicted and tried, as saving face is a priority among Italian officials. “They’ve put so much into this case, they have to convict Amanda now or they look like fools,” says Paul Ciolino. Amanda and Raffaele can always appeal to a higher court, but the Italian judicial system moves at such a glacial pace, the process could take several more years, during which time they could remain behind bars.

  Amanda’s stunned relatives, powerless to help her, are going bankrupt from the legal costs and trips to Italy. Her grandmother and biological father have taken out loans on their homes; Edda and her second husband expect they’ll have to sell their three-bedroom house in Seattle.

  In Perugia, Edda rents an apartment in a former farmhouse just outside of town. Alone here for a month or more at a time, she is as much a prisoner in Italy as her daughter. “I read, I e-mail, I sleep — except when I visit Amanda,” she says. “How could I play tourist when my daughter is behind bars?”

  These days, Amanda doesn’t even have her journal to turn to for solace; the authorities confiscated it. In it, she describes Meredith as being studious and very smart. “To me, she was always a good friend,” she wrote late last year. “She gave me advice and also protected me when she knew I was in an uncomfortable situation.”

  In the journal, Amanda repeatedly writes of her innocence: “Do you know what it feels like to see people looking at you like you are a monster? To have someone call you a liar, even when you are telling the truth? I can’t stand being hated for something I didn’t do,” she says in an undated entry.

  Amanda has lost nearly 20 pounds in prison. As an athlete used to running, rock climbing, hiking, and biking, she finds the physical inactivity a unique form of punishment. Her hair is thinning and she has become increasingly nearsighted, but prison authorities won’t allow her family to supply her with vitamins.

  “The only way I get up every morning and function is by believing my daughter will get out of there,” says Edda; depending on what happens in the hearings, there’s a very slim chance Amanda could go free this month. “I know innocent people are found guilty. We just pray that doesn’t happen to Amanda.”

  In the meantime, Amanda, who once enjoyed camping by herself, is now terrified to be alone. Her thoughts often turn to the horror of Meredith’s death. “Meredith was home alone and killed,” she says in her journal, in another undated entry. “What if I were home that night? Could I have helped her, or would I be dead too?”

  Amanda was acquitted on the charge of theft but was found guilty on the charges of murder (24 years presumably because the crime was not premediatated-21 is minimum and 30 is the maximum in Italy), sexual assault, illegally carrying a knife and staging a break in to distract police (a year between them as well as the charge of slander against Patrick (1 year). Her total sentence was 26 years in an Italian prison.

  The prosecution has 90 days to produce an explanation of how the verdicts were arrived at. This will serve as a roadmap or blue print for the first appeal. This explanation is due on or before March 5. The prosecution has decided not to appeal but Amanda’s family has, meaning the sentence can only be affirmed or reduced, but not increased. Rudy has already had his appeal and his sentence was reduced from 30 years to 16 years. The 14 year reduction was a reduction of 8 years as provides automatically as an incitement to take the fast track (sort of an automatic plea bargain) and the other 6 years, strangely, to match the reduction for extenuating circumstances that was granted to Amanda and RS. This is strange because Amanda presumably was given a lighter sentence because she had no criminal history (not true about Rudy) and no history of violence (also not true of Rudy). Rudy has already been involved with fights in prison.

  Besides the broad appeal rights granted by the Italian law, an ulterior incentive to appeal is given by the fact that Italy has a very high “Reversal Rate” during the appeal process. Approximately half of all sentences rendered in the first trial are in fact reversed during the appeal process, a percentage that is 3 times higher than France for example. The ones that are not reversed often see a decrease in punishment.

  No surprise therefore that Italians always appeal their sentences. And some analysts have even ventured to say that Italian appeal courts like to modify the sentences of the first trial just for the purpose of justifying their own existence.

  Fascinating insights into a complicated process of checks and balances that certainly seems to work in favor of the accused, even though the process is so lengthy.

  According to a 2003 study the average verdict for a voluntary homicide carried a punishment of only 12.4 years in prison, in spite the fact that the Penal Code prescribes a minimum of 21 years for voluntary homicide (applicable “attenuating circumstances” then cause the reduction). Nevertheless, even after receiving this number of years, the law doesn’t state that you actually have to serve all those years. “The Italian constitution in fact provides that the punishment must aim to the re-education and rehabilitation of the convicted”. On average convicted defendants serve only about 35% of the years for which they were convicted. Even if convicted in appeal, both Amanda and Raffaele could actually be free few months after the final sentence by the Supreme Court!

  Only 20 some days after hearing her sentence, Amanda asked the prison hairdresser to cut her hair short because the stress of incarceration was causing her long hair to fall out in clumps.

  Believe her or not, she is still a frightened, somewhat naive young lady who chose to stay in Italy to comfort Meredith’s father and stayed in Perugia to help the police rather than seek shelter with relatives in Germany.

  Let’s flood her cell with Valentines (after Saint Valentine whose feast is on February 14. He was imprisoned, martyred and buried at the Via Flaminia north of Rome on February 14.) Please mail by February 1 and packages will NOT be allowed into the prison.

  Amanda Knox
  c/o Casa Circondariale
  Strada Pievaiola
  06100 Capanne (PG)
  Italy

  Bless you!

• 26 Rick // Jan 21, 2010 at 10:16 am

  Good article, and great comment by Tony Silva. I learned a lot from both.

• 27 poster // Mar 6, 2010 at 7:55 am

  The ones that are not reversed often see a decrease in punishment

• 28 grahame rhodes // Jul 12, 2010 at 6:58 am

  Tony De Silva
  Writing reams of copy will not change the fact that they are all guilty. Except it.

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