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Looking
more like the First Lady that a murderer, few people would argue that Amanda Knox
is not the victim of her own good looks. The court system will err on the
side of caution and deliver a guilty verdict no matter what, so leaving it
for the Supreme Court to revisit the facts in Article 6 terms. Whatever
comes next, tourism and journalism in Italy will soar as will Italy's coffers.
Many girls would kill to be the subject of so much attention. It is
perhaps ironic that Amanda would rather have stayed in the US a nobody
that suffer the attentions that she has. You can't hang someone for having a fighting spirit.
Go girl.
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID
Thank
heavens that common sense has prevailed. Amanda Knox has had her life
ruined by being imprisoned
but she is now free to get on. The Italian Supreme Court (Cassation) have
acquitted her because of "stunning flaws in the
investigation."
The
law is imprecise, there is no direct evidence to say who did what. There
is only a supposed situation involving many different people. But only one
could be guilty of killing poor Meredith. The fact is that if a
prosecution proceeds despite lack of evidence, the accused will be found
guilty. This is especially true in the UK when it comes to sexual
accusations - where statute has been rigged to gain convictions without
any evidence in support of a claim. All one needs to do is say something
happened - and a conviction will follow. It will then take years of
research and agonizing on the part of the convicted person, mainly because
on the UK the Criminal
Cases Review Commission is not bound to ensure that a fair trial tool
place. According to the High Court (Royal Courts of Justice) they can take
view. Taking a view amounts to discrimination - which is of course
unlawful, but where such view is in connection with a criminal appeal - we
say that such refusal to correct injustices is a criminal matter, where
perhaps the investigators should be prosecuted for a failure to carry put
their function.
THE
GUARDIAN - 7 SEPT 2015
Italy’s highest court acquitted Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito of the 2007 murder of the British university student Meredith Kercher, because there were “stunning flaws” in the investigation that led to their convictions, according to judges’ legal reasoning.
A panel of judges at the court of cassation in Rome found that the state’s case against the pair, who were definitively cleared of murder in March, lacked enough evidence to prove their wrongdoing beyond reasonable doubt, and cited a complete lack of “biological traces” in connection to the crime.
The 52-page legal motivazioni, published on Monday, detailed the reasons for the
acquittal of Knox, a US exchange student, and Sollecito, who each served four years in prison for Kercher’s murder before they were released and then retried.
Releasing the details involved in a court decision months after a verdict has been announced is common practice in Italy’s highest court.
“The trial had oscillations which were the result of stunning flaws, or amnesia, in the investigation and omissions in the investigative activity,” the judges wrote.
They also said that the murder investigation was ultimately hindered by the fact that investigators were under pressure to come up with answers once the
case was prominently covered in media around the world.
“The international spotlight on the case in fact resulted in the investigation undergoing a sudden acceleration, that, in the frantic search for one or more guilty parties to consign to international public opinion, certainly didn’t help the search for substantial truth,” the judges wrote.
They also criticised prosecutors and lower court judges for failing to establish a clear theory on what would have prompted Knox, who is now 28, and Sollecito, 31, to commit the murder, and that they instead had bought into a “theory of complicity” – suggesting, for instance, that Knox had been resentful of her flatmate – with few facts to back them up.
The judges denounced the prosecutors’ argument that there was not more physical evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime because they had selectively cleaned the crime scene as illogical. Such an act would have been impossible, they said.
Instead of being wary of the lack of evidence, the judges said the lower court in Perugia that initially found Knox and Sollecito guilty in 2009 had ignored experts who had “clearly demonstrated possible contamination”. The lower court had also misinterpreted evidence about the knife that prosecutors argued was the murder weapon.
They said evidence pointed to the guilt of one man – Rudy Guede, a drifter from Ivory Coast, who received a 16-year prison sentence for Kercher’s murder following a fast-track trial in 2008. At the time of his conviction, it was stated that he did not act alone. In their decision, the judges said Guede may have had accomplices but that prosecutors had not proven them to have been Knox or Sollecito.
The judges added that the only crime of which Knox was guilty was the false accusation she made to police days after her roommate was killed, in which she blamed her boss, Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, a bar owner, for the crime. Lumumba spent two weeks in jail before he was exonerated. Although the charge carried a three-year sentence, it was deemed moot because of the time Knox had already spent in prison.
On Monday Carlo Dalla Vedova, one of Knox’s lawyers, said the judges’ explanation was tantamount to a “great censure, a note of solemn censure of all the investigators”. Speaking about his client, the lawyer told AP: “She is very satisfied and happy to read this decision. At the same time, it’s a very sad story. It’s a sad story because Meredith Kercher is no longer with us, and this is a tragedy nobody can forget,” he added.
The Knox case became a media circus in Italy and was the subject of intense attention in the world press, which nicknamed the young American “Foxy Knoxy”. A native of Washington state, she was portrayed both as a harmless innocent and a sex-crazed killer.
The case began on 2 November 2007, when the body of Kercher, a 21-year-old Leeds University student from Surrey, was found in the bedroom of the flat she shared with Knox in Perugia, central Italy, where both were studying. Her throat had been cut and she had been sexually assaulted.
Kercher’s family expressed profound dismay when Knox and Sollecito were acquitted in March. At the time, the family’s lawyer, Francesco Maresca, called the decision a “defeat for the Italian justice system”.
Today, the case itself – and the fact that Knox and Sollecito were found guilty, not guilty and then guilty again before finally seeing their case thrown out – is seen by many as an indictment of the Italian court system.
The case continues to captivate people’s interest, but the court said there was no possibility that Kercher’s murder would be investigated again. It would be impossible to offer, at this late stage, any more “answers of certainty”.
LINKS
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/07/amanda-knox-acquitted-because-of-stunning-flaws-in-investigation
The
Guardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/07/amanda-knox-acquitted-because-of-stunning-flaws-in-investigation
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/31/world/amanda-knox-evidence/
http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/amanda-knox.htm
http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/cara-delevingne-film-amanda-knox-2355632#.Uu2qKj1_uSo
http://www.smh.com.au/world/amanda-knoxs-judge-stands-by-guilty-verdict-20140202-hvaup.html
Amanda-knox-and-raffaele-sollecito-again-found-guilty-of-meredith-kerchers-murder
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2301243/Amanda-Knox-retrial-First-picture-Foxy-Knoxy-out.html
Daily
Mail Amanda Knox retrial
http://amandaknox.net/
http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/gallery/amanda-knox-photograph/
http://womansday.ninemsn.com.au/lifestyle/truelifestories/8357001/amanda-knoxs-secret-prison-diary
http://www.statesman.com/news/lifestyles/newsmakers-amanda-knox-signs-book-deal
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/books/review/trial-and-error.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/books/review/trial-and-error.html
TRUE
LIFE: It can happen to anyone and until these issues are addressed no man
in Britain is safe. Corruption within the British judicial system leads to many wrongful
convictions. How this works is revealed in this book, which refers to
official documents and prison diaries in the telling. Some names have been
changed because under the present system those making false allegations
are protected by the state and rarely prosecuted, once found out - which
is another mechanism perpetuating injustice, that needs to be reviewed.
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