I fully agree. The American government is definitely shittier than many others, including the Italian one. How many reasons do you need?
Are you sure you want to hang your hat on that? I mean, it has been suggested that trial by jury for an act which is a crime according to the duly enacted laws of a particular state is less of an affront to freedom than detention and torture without trial.
Okay, it probably hasn’t been suggested, but I am suggesting it now.
Maybe if Knox’s parents have evidence of wrongdoing, they should go to Italy and present it in the courts?
I disagree with Italy’s more liberal uses of the anti-libel law, but I understand it. Don’t go around accusing the police of doing something you have no evidence for. If they had evidence of misconduct, they should have filed a suit
They’re still free to go to Italy to defend their daughter, they simply have to also defend the accusations they levied against the Italian police in this case, which, if true, shouldn’t be a big deal. That’s not wrong, and it’s not against some intrinsic but vague notion of freedom of speech supposedly present in all good democracies.
Frankly, I would like it if people who can’t support their wild-ass claims to be given some punishment if the initial claim doesn’t pan out. We would be more free without the likes of Glen Beck in this country if we could lock him up for shitting on things he merely doesn’t like, but are lies he makes up. The truth is harmed when obscured in a cloud of lies, and often the lies have more power than truth
What I find dismaying is that not many people on this topic is talking about whether the charges are accurate. Most people seems to only care about demonizing Italy, the US, or defending them.
Are the accusations true? Can they be supported? Those should be the only questions we ought to concern ourselves
Yes, but the OP made it pretty clear that he either doesn’t care if the Knoxes’ claims are true or believes a priori that they are, so we’re all essentially arguing from that point.
Exactly. There are plenty of archaic laws that are still around, but nobody ever actually uses them. My own state of Michigan still has a law that makes it illegal to curse in the presence of women or children. A few years ago, some asshole prosecutor tried to charge a guy with it, but the charges were thrown out by the judge. (This was the “cussing canoeist” case that some of you might remember.)
The difference between criticizing the government and making specific accusations is, quite frankly, a meaningless distinction.
Since none of us are experts in Italian criminal law, none of us are qualified to distinguish this law from the similar but “archaic” laws in the US.
Yeah, this is the rub. There’s been a few posters in this thread stating that they’d never be prosecuted in the UK or in the US. Well, to put it bluntly, who gives a fuck if they would or wouldn’t? We’re not discussing the UK or US, which has slightly different ideas of what libel and slander is (and let’s not forget, we’re talking about two countries where, if convicted of defamation on the “preponderance of evidence” you can be hounded out of house and home, bankrupted, and so on. At least the Italians will apply the same standard of evidence to the case as in a criminal trial). If you only ever want to be subject to British or American law, kindly stay at home and shut the fuck up.
Further, I can fully appreciate that a “reasonable” legal system would want to make it illegal to accuse the police, in a paper with one of the largest readerships in the world, of beating and starving suspects into confession in order to impeach the credibility of the legal system. Many here are missing half an argument. It isn’t enough to state that this would never happen in the UK. You need to argue that being prosecuted for libel after accusing a police officer of beating your daughter is a bad thing. And nobody has done this with any sort of effectiveness.
Feel free to come up with that evidence of Americans being hated in Italy, and the prosecution being politically motivated, any time you like.
Demanding evidence that a prosecution of someone for the act of saying mean things about government officials is “politically motivated” is as inane as demanding evidence that someone rescued from the middle of the desert chugged a pitcher of water because of “thirst”. :rolleyes:
Maybe he can also explain how Knox’s two non-American co-defendants also got caught up in this nefarious web of rampant anti-Americanism… :rolleyes:
You misunderstand. I’m asking him to provide some evidence to support his claim that the prosecution is related to Americans being politically unpopular in Italy. See his earlier posts in this thread.
Her’s is a wealthy family, who, finding no other avenue, began a campaign to so impugn the Italian judicial system hoping they could get an angry American mob to pressure the US government into politicizing this case enough that the Italian’s would eventually just give up to make it go away. Even if they only get her transferred back to the US, where, with their money and connection they can very likely make this go away. And it’s kind of working. Pretty blond American girl unjustly convicted by foreign power, the horror, the horror.
Because so many American’s just see the surface stuff, swallow the Koolaid and join ranks. When a quick perusal of the evidence presented clearly shows they were perfectly justified in convicting this poor little rich girl. Who was literally, and on tape, doing handstands in the police station while being questioned about this murder.
You may not believe she was guilty, but she was definitely not railroaded.
Oh for Christ’s sake…
It’s not “saying mean things” - it’s “saying false mean things”.
She’s already had one chance in court to identify her alleged attacker, and was unable to do so, despite having all the principals involved present in the courtroom. She’ll have another chance in three months’ time when she goes on trial herself for calunnia charges (her parents are being prosecuted on less serious diffamazione charges).
Precisely. The fact that the Italian government’s response was to attack the accuser rather than to investigate the allegation is a rather clear indication that its motive was to silence criticism, not to protect its employees against unsupported accusations.
See the message immediately below yours.
That is fair, but I still consider the comparison to a hacker to be bullshit.
Is there some evidence that the allegation was not investigated before the accuser was “attacked?”
I think that the prosecutor calls into question the whole trial with crap like this. And I didn’t follow the trial. It makes it look like a kangaroo court system. Could they charge me for making these kinds of remarks half-way around the world? Apparently so.
Oh, I’ve seen his earlier posts:
“…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.”
To a typical Knox supporter, the original murder trial was an example of anti-Americanism. Hence, the defamation trial of her parents is a further extension of this fervent anti-Americanism.
Which is really fucking stupid when you remember that her co-defendants were not Americans, who received identical sentences to hers for the sexual assault and murder (Guede received an automatic one-third reduction of his sentence for wisely opting for a fast-track trial). Knox and Sollecito received an extra year on their sentences for tampering with a crime scene, theft, and carrying a knife to the scene of the crime. Knox got an additional year tacked on for knowingly accusing an innocent man (her former boss) of the crime. She stands to have still more time added on to her sentence when she goes on trial for calunnia in May.
Considering the comments were made in 2007, it’s a bit of a stretch to characterize these charges as a “first response”.