If Amanda Knox was innocent, she has been rightly released and gone home and we should hope that she can get on with her life. If she was guilty then she has got away with it, or got off lightly, with a 4 year sentence but the only people who really know the truth about what happened that night are sadly Meredith Kercher, Knox, Sollecito & the convicted murderer Rudy Guede.There are certainly many questions to be answered but it seems to me that, guilty or innocent, Knox brought a lot of her nightmare down upon her own head.
It was odd behaviour for a young girl whose flatmate had been brutally murdered to be performing the splits and doing cartwheels while waiting to be questioned by the police. It was appalling how she incriminated her employer, who was only saved by the number of customers in his bar that evening that gave him a watertight alibi. A slanderous crime that she was convicted and served 3 years for. A crime that seems to have been overlooked in the rush to declare her innocence.
Her own changing alibi which first had her there in the kitchen, covering her ears from the screams of the tortured Kercher and then changing her mind and remembering that she was at her boyfriends that night watching a film. An alibi that Sollecito didn't support until later, he originally stated that he was home alone fixing his computer that evening.
From from being found innocent, Knox was released because the case against her killing Kercher was unproven, which is fair and should be the cornerstone of all criminal trials the world over, but guilt not proven is not the same as being found innocent of the charges.
What was proven, was the fact that she tried to frame an innocent person, for a very serious crime, which shouldn't be forgotten when she does the talk show roundabout and earns millions for her book rights.
When a person is not proved guilty of murder, as Knox wasn't, freedom must be the only just outcome but the smiling Knox receiving a hero's welcome back home in America does not sit right with me.
3 comments:
I share your suspicion about what actually happened that night, as well as your uneasiness at the welcome she received (I turned the channel when they were showing that)... however, under any decent legal system 'not proven guilty' is just that, and should rightfully ensure that Knox is walking the streets just as freely as you or I. The late great Lord Bingham was candid in admitting that when faced with the choice of convicting the innocent or freeing the guilty, he'd take the latter every time. That's the way it's weighted, and that's the way it should be. Countries that don't give the accused this kind of 'benefit of the doubt' include North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc. Which says a lot.
I think the 'not proven guilty' is a very grey area. It isn't innocent but it isn't guilty so it smacks of we think you did it but we can't prove it and that feels the person 'got away with it'.
What i do find offensive is the description that she was found innocent of all charges and served 4 years for nothing. She never, she served 3 years for slander for framing her boss.
That said, i do agree with you and Lord Bingham though that it is preferable to free the guilty than jail the innocent. Innocent until proven guilty is how it should be.
You do realize that the cops went in to that interrogation with the intent go get Amanda to say Patrick Lumumba did it, don't you? She didn't just casually throw out his name, as if he were Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct with all the cops spellbound by her Alpha personality, believing every word she said. The cops obviously saw little humanity in the American college girls in Italy. It is evident in the way they described a tomboyish, hippie girl from Seattle who didn't ware makeup as if she were a porn starlet from Girls Gone Wild. Their reads on Amanda Knox are as worthless as the reads of some square who thought Boy George was straight. They had a rape and murder of a young girl and they focus the investigation on her female roommate? Seriously, they had tunnel vision, beat a "confession" out of a frightened young girl, and then when it turned out a burglar did it and their "theories" were totally retarded they staged a public disinformation campaign to save face for being SO WRONG about the crime in their initial speculations.
They had been following Amanda around all day when they saw Lumumba approach her after class as the mediary in an attempt by a local newspaper to get an interview about the murder.(Lumumba was probably promised a kickback had he succeeded.) The cops had found an African hair on Meredith's body and when they saw Lumumba, who was also black, approach Amanda, BINGO they thought they had solved the crime. The all night interrogation was intended to get who they saw as a weak willed accomplice to spill the beans. They were going after Lumumba hard core and were going to bring him in regardless what Amanda said.
The kind of interrogation that followed is only done on people police think are guilty. They used the Reid Technique on her and screamed at her for hours that she was lying when she told them the truth that she had spent the night at Rafaelles place. (Like she had every night since she met him the week before, Rafaelle's father was rich and paid for a nice two story apartment that Rafaelle lived in alone. Why would a 24 year old male in that situation would want to hang out in a cheap rooming house with Amanda's roommates when he could take his girlfriend back to his luxurious condo and have her all to himself? Why would he want to share his new girlfriend with some street thug he didn't even know?) Being sleep deprived, cold, scared, after hours of the cops telling her Patrick did it, they had proof and also knew she was there and must have "forgotten" it, the cops asked her to imagine how the murder might have occurred. That is why you don't go in to interrogations without a lawyer, the cops will trick you into saying something to use against you, and Amanda's agreement to "imagine what might have happened" was twisted against her by a kangaroo court and yellow press as if it were an actual confession. This whole case is an attempt by a bunch of crooked cops to justify the ludicrous arrest of a harmless young girl for the rape and murder of another young girl by an African street thug.
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