Italian prosecutors have indicted Amanda Knox’s parents on libel charges. The “crime” is that they claimed that Italian police abused their daughter. They said this back in 2007 (ie, over three years ago!) and the claim was made in a British (ie, not Italian) newspaper.
Jesus, does corruption get any more obvious than this? :mad: You could gouge out Ray Charles’ eyes, and he could still see that they’re just trying to intimidate the parents into keeping quiet and stop making a fuss about the deplorable railroading that was the Amanda Knox trial.
My father prefers “greasy guinea” or “wop”. And he takes great offense at being called Italian (descent). He’ll tell you that his parents came from SICILY, not Italy.
I might buy that. There’s a lot of noise here about a similarly attractive French woman sentenced to 60 years in Mexico. I’m pretty sure she isn’t the only French citizen who has been sentenced in a foreign country, but I don’t hear much about any other.
(That said, either or both could really have a good case. In the French case too, it’s said she’s been railrolled. But surely the sentence of others we don’t hear about might be equally disputable)
There’s no convincing evidence that Knox was railroaded. We’ve done this before a million times on the board. It’s not like Italy is a third world country with a sham of a legal system, and indeed there’s a current appeal going on examining the forensic evidence that partly convicted Knox.
What a crock of shit. She (and the other two) are nasty pieces of work and are in the right place for vicious, murdering scumbags - prison. Hopefully they’ll be there for another couple of decades.
C’mon. The parents make a stupid allegation, once, that the police improperly questioned their daughter, and they get put on trial themselves? You put a parent in jail because they believed something their daughter told them?
I don’t care if it’s technically legal for them to indict the parents, it’s a dick move. Frankly the prosecutor should be ashamed of himself, and our government should get off its ass and put pressure on the Italians to quit with this crap.
Specifics of this case aside, governments prosecuting private individuals for libel in response to criticism is a common tactic employed by autocratic regimes - Singapore in particular has been guilty of this on a regular basis. It’s sad that the Italians have begun using these methods, but it’s not all surprising under the rule of Duke Silvio Berlusconi-Borgia.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They accused the Italians, in a newspaper with a large international audience, of failing to provide a translator, not providing their daughter with food or water, and claimed their daughter had been virtually beaten into a confession by a police officer hitting her with a pair of handcuffs. The whole charade was a method of using the media circus surrounding the trial to throw doubt on the reliability and impartiality of the Italian legal system. Is it really any wonder that the Italian legal system itself would come down hard on them?
The effects of this calculated act are still felt today. Witness this very thread, and others like it, where idiot after idiot have managed to convince themselves that the only reason that Knox was convicted was due to some corrupt railroading at the hands of an outrageous Italian legal system.
Further, why should the US government get involved? They’ve either committed a crime or they have not. Is the US the only country allowed to have an independent legal system?
This particular case doesn’t, but I’d argue he perpetuates the aura of political/judicial interference. The way he behaves makes such things appear plausible, if not likely.