AMANDA KNOX FOXY KNOXY

Amanda Knox is the victim of her own sense of fun and good looks. She also has a very expressive face. The public will interpret the most innocent of youthful tom foolery as something more sinister. It is what the media live and breath. They don't just light the blue touch paper, they feed the fire - because it sells newspapers. Below is a series of photographs of a girl at different stages of accusation and trial. Unless you have been through this, you will never understand the range of emotions. Any one of these pictures can be interpreted 100 ways. A trial should focus on the facts of a case. There should be some positive evidence to link whoever killed Meredith Kercher, to the crime. In the absence of that, why put someone on trial? The character of this girl alone is sufficient to dispel the notion that she is a killer. You can't hang someone for having a fighting spirit.

Amanda Knox was pictured today strolling through a Seattle park looking reflective and deep in thought just days after the Italian Supreme Court announced she will be retried for the murder of Meredith Kercher. This is the first time Knox has emerged since the controversial decision was announced on Tuesday, something which she said 'shocked and saddened her'.

With her hair in a cute plait and dressed casually in a denim jacket, pink top and navy pants, the 25-year-old casually walked along with her hands in her pockets looking pensive. The pictures were released on the same day her grandmother and closest confidante, whom she wrote to often from prison, said that her granddaughter had been 'persecuted' in Italy and would never return there to face justice.

Knox, and former boyfriend Raffaelle Sollecito, 29, spent four years in prison for the 2007 murder of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher, who was found with her throat slit in the cottage they shared in Perugia. The pair were freed on appeal in 2011, but Italy's highest court this week dramatically quashed their acquittal, ordering a retrial.

Knox does not need to return for the new trial, but if found guilty, Italy could demand her extradition. Mrs Huff, the first member of her immediate family to speak out about the family's true feelings, said that Italian prosecutors' pursuit of her granddaughter amounted to 'harassment'.

Meredith Kercher, 21, was found semi naked and with her throat cut in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in November 2007. She told the Italian newspaper La Stampa: 'It's a persecution. She has already been tried twice. Why reopen it.

The Amanda Knox story has escalated into one of the biggest controversies to hound Americans this generation. From her arrest to her freedom, there has been much hullaballoo about the life of this simple American girl.

Amanda Knox was an American college student majoring in Linguistics. She was implicated in the murder of her housemate, Meredith Kercher, a 21 years old from England. The murder happened in the cottage that they shared in Perugia, Italy, with two other women.

According to police reports, Ms. Kercher was found semi-naked with her throat slit. She was also found in a duvet. Further statements by the prosecution indicated that Ms. Kercher was killed while she and the suspects were playing a game of rough sex. The suspects were primarily Ms. Knox and her former boyfriend Rafaelle Sollecito. It is/was alleged that something went horribly wrong during the suggested sex romp because the two suspects were high on drugs. There is though no evidence of that in support of the hypothesis - which to our mind in rather crucial. Is there any evidence of addiction? Or is there not?

Aside from her former boyfriend Sollecito, it is also said that a certain Rudy Hermann Guede was also involved in the murder. Mr. Guede was supposedly the drug dealer who helped Ms. Knox carry out the murder.

The deliberation for the Knox case took months. Throughout the trial, Ms. Knox has maintained her innocence. Nonetheless, she has been perceived by a majority of the public as guilty.

The media frenzy did not help her where photographs were published that tended to paint her as evil (see what we mean below). The case became an international media attraction. The main reasons for this being the lurid details of the murder. On the other hand Ms. Knox has many supporters who maintained that she was just a victim of injustice in a country far away from home. It is easy to see why the Italian police concentrated on those living in the house, but that was held to be the problem, for they bungled the preservation of evidence, that could have led their inquiries away from the accused.

After very contrasting portrayals, Ms. Knox was found guilty and sentenced to 26 years of imprisonment. Her former boyfriend and co-defendant was sentenced to 25 years. There is nothing unusual in the sentences, if the convictions had been safe.

After deliberation, the defendants legal team filed for an appeal. This time, it took almost 11 hours for the jury to deliberate. The jury for the appeal was made up of eight Italians; two of whom are judges. But in the end, the appellate court overturned the convictions of Ms. Knox and her co-defendants. And on Oct. 3, 2011, Ms. Knox and the other defendants were freed.

This decision generated much controversy and another media frenzy all over the world. Ever since the trial started, Ms. Knox has become notorious in all parts of the globe. And the acquittal made her even hotter news in the public eye.

Ms. Knox now maintains a low profile. She is currently living in the USA, trying to start a new life with her boyfriend and family.

It has been reported that Amanda Knox has signed a deal with a media corporation for the release of her side of the story. During her four years behind bars, the woman dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” kept a journal that’s now worth millions.

As Amanda Knox’s jubilant family hung out the Welcome Home signs and global media began scrambling for her exclusive story, details emerged of a secret prison diary kept by the US student during her four-year ordeal in an Italian jail. The 24-year-old language student, dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” during her 2009 murder conviction – now overturned – for the sex-slaying of UK exchange student Meredith Kercher, stands to gain millions from the sale of the diary. It’s likely to be turned into a tell-all book and, possibly, a TV series or movie.

In it, Amanda repeatedly professes her innocence of the brutal murder of 21-year-old Meredith, with whom she shared a house. “I am innocent so I will be free. Free. Free. Free. Freedom. I will have freedom,” she writes. And, in another entry, “Waiting, unfairly, innocent and knowing that outside I’m seen as a sinister monster. Life passes me by. Here is no place for love.”Amanda adds a poignant poem – “Do you know me? Open your eyes and see that when it is said I am an angel, or I am a devil, or I am a lost girl, recognise that what is really lost is: the truth!”

Until last week, when she was spectacularly freed, Amanda faced another 22 years of a 26-year jail sentence. Not surprisingly, she relieved the boredom of prison life by documenting her innermost thoughts in her diary. In notes written recently she declares, “I am not the Monster of Perugia” – a reference to a horrific Italian killer dubbed the Monster of Florence.

In her journal, obtained by Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, she calls herself Foxy Knoxy and reveals that no less than 35 men wrote to her in the first two weeks after her arrest, many of them besotted by her appearance. “Write to me because I want to finally know ‘the girl with the face of an angel’,” pleaded one man in a letter. Another proposed marriage. “I will respond to all, but only when I am out of here,” Amanda writes. Among the papers is a letter to her American boyfriend, with whom she remained in contact during her time in Italy. “Dear DJ, I really feel the need to hold you in my arms right now,” she writes. “I have this knot inside and I feel as if someone really cold and strong is pressing my head. I beg you I cannot stay alone right now."

The American college student who spent four years in an Italian jail — until last October, when she was cleared of murdering her roommate — sold her book to HarperCollins publishers for what is said to be nearly $4 million.

"It is a story that everyone else seems to have told except for the person at the center of it all," Jonathan Burnham, the publisher of HarperCollins, said in an e-mail to The New York Times.
"This book will tell the full story from her point of view for the very first time, and it will be told in her own words," his message also said.

Knox, 24, kept prison diaries, the newspaper reports. Her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who was also cleared in the killing of Meredith Kercherercher, is said to be preparing to sell his own memoir.



GUILTY: Anyone seeing these pictures would think Amanda was guilty.



INNOCENT: Anyone seeing these pictures would think Amanda was innocent.



INNOCENT: Anyone seeing these pictures would think Amanda was concerned as to events.



FOXY: Anyone seeing these pictures might think Amanda was enjoying the trial



INJUSTICE: Anyone seeing these photos might agree that Amanda was unprepared for what happened

She was only a teenager when tried and convicted. She has learned the hard way that life is not fair, but she has rallied and pulled through. Let us hope the trial to come does not dampen her spirit. Stay strong Amanda.

The prosecutors want to find other guilty parties at any cost and they will never give up. That is the view of Amanda and our entire family.

'Because of this Amanda will not return to Italy for the new trial. She will never go back. No one in our family will.'

Mrs Huff, who was with Knox at her mother's house when she was told of the retrial, told how her granddaughter wept. 'She was hurt, sad, in pain, Mrs Huff remembered, 'She had thought that the nightmare was finally over.

'She cried, she repeated that she was innocent. 'She said she was scared and that it was impossible to live a normal life like this.' It's difficult to move on when you are 'constantly harassed' she added.

Knox's book, due out on April 30, will explain her innocence, her grandmother said.

Sollecito, who has already released a book about his experience, has registered a company which will re-examine and solve cold cases, according to Italian media.

The dubiously accused almost always disappoint, once their full stories are told. It is the crime that magnetizes our attention. Remove the stain of guilt, or at least of strong complicity, and what’s left? One more casualty, and casualties don’t command interest. They spread unease. And so it is with Amanda Knox — the Seattle college student accused of inducing Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend of one week, to join her in high jinks that led to the murder of her housemate Meredith Kercher when all three were studying in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. The two were convicted, along with Rudy Guede, a Perugino born on the Ivory Coast, whose footprint and DNA matched the grisly trail in the room where Kercher’s half-naked body was found under a comforter, her throat slit.

“Waiting to Be Heard,” Knox’s detailed account of her experiences, from her arrival in Italy through her trial, imprisonment and eventual release in 2011, after a court overturned her and Sollecito’s convictions, seeks, unsurprisingly, to affirm her innocence. It’s easy enough to do, given the rickety case presented by prosecutors, who failed to produce solid physical evidence (as experts in Rome found after careful review of DNA samples) or a plausible motive, instead positing a mise-en-scène involving drug-drenched “sex games.” Far-fetched though the theory was, Knox lent it credibility, thanks in part to her remarkably photogenic presence, highlighted by ill-chosen courtroom attire and her habit of flashing radiant smiles at family and friends in the courtroom. This followed her behavior in the Perugia police station soon after the crime, when she performed yoga exercises and perched, nuzzling, on Sollecito’s lap, seemingly untouched by grief. It formed, in aggregate, “demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment,” to quote Henry James on Daisy Miller, the not-so-innocent abroad who has been cited as Knox’s literary forerunner.

The urge to compare the two is irresistible. Like Knox, James’s American heroine left observers wondering whether her angelic exterior masked “a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young woman,” even if she was “very unsophisticated,” as James explains, “only a pretty American flirt.”

It is this innocence that Knox (assisted by Linda Kulman, a ghostwriter who has collaborated previously with the boxer George Foreman and Socks, the Clintons’ “first cat”) staunchly insists on, though she abjures any pretense of virginal purity and openly acknowledges that her junior year abroad, paid for by jobs she’d held in Seattle, included a “campaign to have casual sex” and catch up with her more practiced friends. Meredith Kercher, never her enemy in life, has in death become her doppelgänger, Knox writes; they were “both young girls who studied seriously and wanted to do well, who wanted to make friends and who’d had a few casual sexual relationships.” There is no mistaking the implication in this last clause. Knox was “no Mother Teresa,” as Sollecito puts it in his memoir, “Honor Bound,” published in 2012 — but neither was Kercher, who at the time she was killed was steamily involved with a rock guitarist who lived in the apartment downstairs.

Sisterly feeling, Knox asserts, impelled her to “help the police track down the person who murdered my friend” rather than find a lawyer or contact the American Embassy in Rome, even as her two Italian housemates, both with law degrees, sought legal counsel. Meanwhile the British Consulate swiftly sent Kercher’s posse of British girlfriends to Bergamo, more than 200 miles north, to finish their studies. Knox, left to fend for herself and speaking only limited Italian, was confused, she says, by continual browbeating. As a result, she falsely incriminated the owner of the bar where she had been waiting tables and also placed herself near the crime scene, the main reasons many remain convinced of her guilt.

Even now, with four years in prison behind her, Knox seems unaware of the distinction between un-self-conscious innocence and calculated naïveté. Her candid summaries of flings and one-night stands exude triumphalism. This isn’t surprising. For today’s young women, or many of them anyway, the ideal of sexual freedom seems to derive more from Helen Gurley Brown than from Susan Brownmiller, as some elders, even youngish ones, have unhappily remarked. Writing in The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead worried that Knox’s notion of sexual empowerment excludes the prerogative “to say no as well as yes.” But there were not always questions of any kind for Knox, the aggressor in more than one instance. A drunken evening at an “over-the-top dance club” leads to her stumbling out of the bathroom to find a boy she liked waiting for her. “I grabbed onto him and kissed him on the mouth.” Half a page later, “We went to my room and had sex.” Her conquest of the inexperienced Sollecito was just as hasty. She approached him at a classical music concert and later that night went to his apartment. “We made faces until we collided into a kiss. Then we had sex. It felt totally natural.”

It is a mistake to assume her brazenness is uniquely American. It reflects the attitudes of a global youth culture of “transparency” — or exhibitionism — fostered by social media. Both Knox and Sollecito would pay the price for their explicit Myspace pages: Knox’s blog, titled “Foxy Knoxy,” and Sollecito’s, which included a photo of him wielding a meat cleaver. Kercher, more sophisticated than the others, had made a cameo appearance in a British music video.

ALL this is to say the familiar theme of Old World-New World culture clash — “inappropriate” young American set loose in the staid medieval Umbrian hill town — misses the actual context in which the case unfolded and attained its worldwide traction. Knox was tried for murder not in James’s Italy but in the tabloid carnevale of Silvio Berlusconi’s “videocracy,” with its buxom cavorting veline, its strippers dressed as nuns, all part of the nation’s political theater, much of it broadcast on TV. At one point Knox “was voted Italian television’s ‘Woman of the Year,’ edging out Carla Bruni and Sarah Palin,” Nina Burleigh notes in her book “The Fatal Gift of Beauty,” the most thorough account of the case. Better than anyone else, Burleigh captures the parallels between Italy and America. In Berlusconi’s prolonged moment, “the lowbrow cultural phenomenon of state television,” she writes, “is only the clarified essence of American pop culture.”

Cross-cultural currents of another kind converge in Perugia. Knox describes it as “a college town much like Ann Arbor or Berkeley or Chapel Hill.” Burleigh likens it, more accurately, to an “Italian Amsterdam” or, quoting a local official, an “Ibiza for university students.” A giant population of 40,000, roughly a quarter of the city’s total, is connected with two universities: the Università per Stranieri (the college for foreigners learning Italian, where Knox was enrolled) and the state university (where Kercher had a scholarship and Sollecito was inching toward a degree in computer science). Groups gather nightly on the steps of the Piazza IV Novembre, with its 13th-century pink stone fountain at one end of the austerely beautiful Corso Vannucci, and pursue “a nonstop bacchanalia,” Barbie Latza Nadeau, whose reports on the trial were the most exhaustive published in America, observes in her book, “Angel Face.” It is a scene thick with drugs, alcohol and sex. “The American girls are more aggressive, eager to nab an Italian lover,” Nadeau writes. “Down an alley, a young man has lifted the skirt of his conquest and is having clumsy sex with her under a streetlamp while her drink spills out of the plastic cup in her hand.” The picturesque hilltop cottage where Knox and Kercher lived was next door to an open drug market. Thus Perugia in 2007, but also, if somewhat more mutedly, in 1976, when I spent a summer there along with thousands of other young people, ostensibly students but more often transients, from Cameroon and Sierra Leone, Belgrade and Tehran, many selling drugs or looking to buy them, the men usually on the hunt for acquiescent American ragazze and usually finding them.

In March, Italy’s highest court overturned the acquittals in the Kercher case and ordered a new trial. If Knox is found guilty, she may face extradition. For now she is free, enriched by a colossal book advance (reportedly $4 million), and she recently completed a well-orchestrated round of TV appearances. She’s still in college, “studying creative writing.” This last fact is yet another source of disappointment. Knox thanks her ghostwriter for having “turned my rambling into writing,” but one wishes she had pursued the natural course of those “rambling” sentences. There are instances of genuine writing in “Waiting to Be Heard.” Knox’s descriptions of her cellmates, including one who collected food wrappers and inkless pens, “which she stored in her clothing locker, like a squirrel hiding nuts,” and “tried to take care of me, in the same way a pet cat that drops a freshly dead rat at your feet thinks it’s giving you a gift,” convey authentic feeling — more feeling than her tidy assessments of the life lessons she has learned and her protests that “the people who loved me considered my kookiness endearing.” Knox has suffered grievously. Few of us can imagine spending four years in prison. But the injustice very likely done to her pales beside the brutal truth of Kercher’s death, and no plea for sympathy will ever bridge the difference.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/books/review/trial-and-error.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2301243/Amanda-Knox-retrial-First-picture-Foxy-Knoxy-out.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.