I haven’t really followed the case either but from what I hear, the initial collection of evidence and questioning was so slip-shod and irregular, even with an absolutely by the book prosecutor you would not be able to, by american standards, establish guilt.
I am interested to hear what is made of the new trial, though.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. They don’t have any evidence on Amanda Knox. The case wouldn’t even have been tried here.
All they had was a household knife with fingerprints on it, discrepancies in her story, and they thought she was a witch.
People are charged and convicted based on purely circumstantial evidence in the US all the time.
I didn’t follow all the twists and turns of the case, but from the constant bombardment of media coverage I remember there was a lot of circumstantial evidence.
She was the victim’s roommate and their relationship was reportedly acrimonious.
She lied to the police about her whereabouts on the night of the murder.
She falsely implicated someone else who wasn’t involved.
Her DNA and footprints were in the victim’s room.
The only person who could corroborate the alibi she finally settled on, after providing several others that were shot down, was another suspect.
A third suspect who was later convicted said she was involved.
That list may not be complete or entirely accurate but it’s the just of the coverage that I remember. People in the US have been convicted on much less circumstantial evidence.
She could easily be innocent and the conviction a complete miscarriage of justice since circumstantial evidence is just that - but that can and does just as easily happen in the US.
Most of your list is not true. There was a local drug dealer, Rudy Guede, who’d recently been arrested for breaking and entering while carrying an 11 inch knife. From wikipedia, on the forensic evidence:
In fact, the only part of your list that is true is the false implication of Lumumba. That accusation did occur after a lengthy interrogation without a lawyer present and without any videotaping of the proceedings. You should probably read the Wikipedia article on the entire case. Knox made some mistakes in her dealings with the police, but there was never any shred of evidence to indicate anything other than Rudy Guede acting alone.
So she wasn’t her roommate? She didn’t give conflicting stories about the events and her whereabouts during the night of the murder? There was someone other than her boyfriend who could corroborate that she was with him at his apartment?
That Wikipedia article is way TLDR, and no more credible than hearsay anyway. All this circumstantial evidence was coupled with a media frenzy about her ‘lifestyle’ choices - e.g. smoking hash and shagging a boyfriend and I remember something about her having a vibrator - gasp!
My interest in posting wasn’t to argue for her guilt or innocence but to point out that convictions based on flimsy circumstantial evidence and a jury’s judgments about someones character happen all the time in the US.
My question is, is there a point, besides saving face, for the retrial, assuming that Knox is never gonna set foot in Italy (or, likely, outside the US of A) ever again?
So that makes it all right?
“The US isn’t any better. It happens all the time” is a shitty, shitty argument.
I thought that quoting the posts to which I was replying would be enough to make clear that I was replying to those posts.
“Those whacky Italian courts.”, “you would not be able to, by american standards, establish guilt”, " The case wouldn’t even have been tried here."
Clear now?
Her boyfriend who still lives in Italy certainly has something at stake.
Italian courts don’t require a defendant to be present at trial so the point is the same as it would be if she were present.
It seems doubtful that she would ever be extradited but she technically could be. She wouldn’t be able to visit any country that honors Interpol arrest warrants. The warrant would also probably affect her ability to get various security clearances and jobs even inside the US.
I don’t want to get into the weeds on this, but there’s circumstantial evidence and there’s circumstantial evidence. There was nothing on Amanda Knox that proved that she was even there the night of the murder.
Plus they got the guy who did it! It’s like a reverse OJ case.
I haven’t really been following the Amanda Knox case, but you can’t get away from it. BBC was just pointing out that an extradition request from Italy could be difficult for the US because of the latter’s probable pursuit of extradition for Edward Snowden. Could be awkward for them to pursue the one while denying the other.
The same analyst, who is a lawyer, gave his opinion that if you looked at “the preponderance of evidence,” it should scream out “criminal” at some level to a judge. But guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Definitely not.
US law is pretty clear too though, isn’t it? We don’t honor extradition requests when there is double jeopardy involved.
Another thing, which to me demonstrates probable innocence, is what the Italian prosecutors think happened. If she killed Kercher because she was practicing satanism, then she’d still be a satanist when she came back home and would likely have killed someone else. If it was a dispute over cleaning, then that indicates a REALLY short temper, which would have resulted in her having problems with the law over here, like George Zimmerman has been having.
The fact that she’s kept her nose clean here isn’t proof of anything, but it sure puts into perspective the prosecutors’ claims that she’s either a satanist or inclined to kill people over minor household disputes.
You moved the goal posts. Was she her roommate? Yes. Was there acrimony between them? No. Did she give conflicting reports about the events and her whereabouts? No. She had the same story from the start, until the cops decided the break-in was staged and started focusing on her. Under interrogation, without a lawyer or proper translator, her story kept getting attacked and led in the direction of pointing out conspirators; that is when her story changed and the cops brought up Lumumba and she claimed he had done it.
I agree convictions about flimsy circumstantial BS happen all the time here too. The idea that she and her boyfriend managed to remove every shred of physical evidence linking the two of them from the scene but managed to not clean up all of the DNA that Guede left is absurd.
If you can’t be bothered to read a well-cited article, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t then post claims from memory.
True. But, I thought it was fairly clear that there was no double jeopardy involved as she had been convicted at her original trial.
Just to add to this: I heard the interview again, and the analyst was Alan Dershowitz. He said despite his personal reservations regarding the verdict, he expects Amanda Knox will be extradited. Besides the Snowden thing, he said the US requests extradition from other countries more than any other nation and that if we can’t extradite someone convicted of murder, it would be difficult to expect other countries to honor US requests.
I know there’s going to be intense pressure in the US not to extradite her.
Another well cited TLDR site about the case
I said right up front that I was posting from my own possibly flawed memory of media reports. As it turns out my memory was pretty good, but I wasn’t trying to support or condemn any of the three verdicts that have been reached so far in this saga so it really doesn’t matter.
Several posts in a row trumpeted about how something like this just wouldn’t fly in the US, but it does every day. Those cases just don’t make international news and include spicy details about a young woman’s sex life.
We have to extradite Knox. Shielding a convicted murderer would make a farce out of the entire process. The US demands that other countries send their citizens to our prisons. We have to do the same. We have no right to second guess another country’s legal process. Knox’s case was reviewed under appeal and she was found guilty again.
Ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito is in Italy now. He’ll be headed back to prison too.
Knox was convicted guilty of the murder of one person by the legal system in a small country.
Warren Anderson, was responsible for the killing of many thousands of Indians, yet the USA refused to extradite him to India despite it being a far more important nation to American interests.
True. And the satanic thing is just ridiculous. Besides, that prosecutor is seriously nuts and thinks everyone is a satanist.
I think she’s innocent. Someone who participates in something like that would have a LOT more skeletons in their closet than just having a vibrator and smoking weed. The whole case was handled horribly, but we have cases just as bad here so I think a lot of the U.S. media sources attitude about it was annoying.
I think it’s more a case that high profile cases, where the defense has good representation, where you wouldn’t see that here. I’m sure that people get railroaded here all the time with public counsel.