Amanda Knox Sentenced to 26 Years by Italian Court

Amanda Knox, an American student whose British roommate Meredith Kercher died in violent circumstances, in Perugia, Italy, has been convicted for murder, in a case legal analysts say was deeply flawed, had little to no evidence of involvement, let alone guilt. There are serious concerns about the fairness of the trial process, and people in both Italy and the United States have come to her defense, assailing the legitimacy of the prosecution, even as Italian popular culture rages against “the devil with an angel’s face”.

The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, has been accused of formulating a theory of blind-faith certainty and holding the view that the accused is accused due to already demonstrable guilt. He also stands accused of harassing and threatening an American journalist who raised questions about the investigative process. The journalist, Douglas Preston, was detained, interrogated and falsely accused of both “Satanist” activity and being an accomplice to murder. He was threatened with jailtime and told he should leave the country and stop reporting on the case.

The prosecutor’s obsessive, abusive behavior has been so extreme that after he accused Preston of involvement in a Satanic cult, he threatened to charge him with perjury if he did not admit to the alleged crimes. When Preston refused, he was in fact charged with perjury and forced to leave the country. The case of Douglas Preston gives clear evidence of the manner in which Giuliano Mignini handles the process of investigation and prosecution; it is perhaps the clearest evidence that the case was manipulated and the accused intimidated into giving “conflicting statements”.

Mignini is actually under indictment for abuse of office and has been widely criticized for ignoring facts and aggressively prosecuting Knox not only in court but in the media, while failing to provide any evidence of her actual involvement in the murder. He is alleged to have a personal obsession with the theme of Satanist cults and is blamed by Knox’s defenders for fabricating a theory of her involvement due to his arbitrary predetermination that the murder had been part of a Satanist ritual, despite zero concrete evidence of such an explanation.

Mignini has also filed a criminal indictment against a small Washington state newspaper, the West Seattle Herald, with a circulation of 12,000. He filed the criminal indictment on grounds of “defamation”, and demands that the newspaper’s website be shut down by the US government, for a story it published on an inside page, which questioned the prosecutor’s presence at a fundraiser and his mental stability. The newspaper’s supporters say the indictment is yet another sign of Mignini’s abusive prosecutorial practices.

The DNA evidence allegedly linking Knox to the crime was scant, but remained to the very end the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case against Miss Knox. According to the Times of London:

In the tests the DNA was amplified and analysed using electrophoresis, a graph consisting of a series of peaks creating a DNA “fingerprint”. The prosecution said that DNA taken from the knife blade produced a series of peaks that matched Ms Kercher’s DNA, while DNA from the handle produced peaks that matched Knox’s.

However, the defence replied that those peaks needed to be above a certain threshold to be reliable — a minimum of 150 relative fluorescence units (RFUs), as it is described. Most of the peaks on the knife DNA were below 50 RFUs — and that meant they were untrustworthy.

The defense was not permitted to present any argument against the DNA evidence the prosecution says was found on a knife. And what’s more, that knife, the defense alleged was never matched by any scientific process to the killing.  The jury was told by prosecutors that Knox admitted to police that she was present at the scene of the killing, when she did not reportedly make such an admission and her defense says police sought openly to coerce a false confession.

Knox herself reportedly alleged she was repeatedly struck on the head by police as they accused her of murder and demanded that she stop “covering” for someone else.  The prosecution also allegedly altered the official motive for which it claimed Knox committed the murder as many as five times, with no reprimand and no correction from the court.

The Times has reported:

To the claim that there was a lack of an obvious motive, Mr Mignini replied that Knox had acted out of “hatred and revenge” after falling out with Ms Kercher over drugs, missing cash, hygiene issues, and the “strange men” Knox brought home.

He said that what started as an act of petty payback escalated into a bloody scene which could only be covered up by silencing Ms Kercher for good. But even Miss Comodi was forced to observe in her closing remarks: “We live in an era of violence without motive.”

The flagrant disregard for the need to have a valid explanation for what would drive Knox to kill her roommate must also be viewed in light of the defense’s claims that in fact the two young women were friends and got along well, with friendly text messages exchanged right up to the day before the killing. The latter fact was ignored by the prosecution in service of Mr. Mignini’s various theories, ranging from “Satanism” to “hatred” to “revenge”.

The man already convicted in the killing, Rudy Guede, reportedly “a drifter with a drug problem” had initially been the only suspect. Guede had said he had been having sex with the victim, went to the bathroom, then emerged to find an unidentified “strange man” standing over her with a knife. As the case against him mounted, he changed his story and said the strange man was Knox’s boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, alleging that Sollecito and Knox had murdered Kercher for reasons unknown to himself.

A New York Times blog reported in June that:

“In every murder, the killer always leaves something behind and always takes something with him,” said Anne Bremner, a former prosecutor and prominent attorney, a member of International Academy of Trial Lawyers, who is assisting the Knox family, pro-bono – though she has no role in the actual defense. “All the forensic evidence points to Rudy Guede.”

Guede’s own conviction would appear to be an argument against Guede’s allegation that Sollecito and Knox were involved in the crime. Guede was convicted in October 2008, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The judge in that case found that there was “sufficient evidence” to bring Knox and Sollecito to trial for the murder as well, though the only evidence implicating them was the testimony of Guede, himself convicted of the killing.

Perhaps worse than any of these other factors was the total failure to limit jurors’ access to the media firestorm raging around the accused. Italian media had been persistently declaring Knox’s guilt, calling her a “monster”, an “assassin”, a “sadist” and “the devil”. While the 20-year-old was held for two years before trial, no effort was made to guarantee that the jurors selected had not been swayed by media claims.

An American student studying in Bologna at the time reported her experience of how the media had created an atmosphere of suspicion around American students, especially other female students from Washington state, like herself. Writing for the New York Times op-ed pages, Sophie Egan, whose father writes for the Times, wrote in December 2007:

Every day brings a new headline or television report about Amanda Knox. “Man-hunter, insatiable in bed,” was the first line in an article in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper. “She lives only for pleasure,” La Repubblica reported.

The hearings were held only twice per week, and none of the 8 jurors —6 lay people and 2 judges— were sequestered or prevented from exposure to the overwhelmingly pro-prosecution media. There was flagrant and persistent pressure from the media on jurors to convict Knox, with the same tabloid-style of pre-verdict prejudice being used to warn jurors how they would be treated if they failed to convict.

A friend of Knox named Madison Paxton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday night that every single day she attended the trial proceedings, one or more jurors slept through defense testimony, as did the prosecutor at times. She also said this never occurred during prosecution testimony. She said the presiding judge even answered his cell-phone and carried on talking at least once while the defense was presenting its case.

The case for appeal is complex and rests on several very firm claims of prosecutorial misconduct:

1. The defense was denied the opportunity to present its own DNA experts;
2. A neurologist acting as witness for the defense testified that Knox could have been subjected to such intense stress, between the horror of the killing and police intimidation that she falsely remembered details that initially implicated her former boss;
3. Allegations of police intimidation and misconduct were not investigated;
4. DNA evidence appears shoddy, and is the sole source of evidence linking Knox in any way to the crime;
5. Mignini, the chief prosecutor, stands accused of criminal abuse of office;
6. Mignini threatened and began to carry out a rigged prosecution against a journalist whose coverage he disliked;
7. Press were allowed to influence jurors and judges in the case;
8. There is evidence police knowingly presented false evidence, fabricating unsubstantiated theories of the crime;
9. There are questions about the legitimacy of imprisoning Knox for two years before even bringing her to trial;
10. Jurors may have slept through defense testimony, flagrantly ignoring facts of the case that conflicted with prosecution claims;
11. The prosecutor openly announced his determination that the trial should be treated as a guilty unless proven innocent process: investigation of possible collusion between the prosecutor’s office and the presiding judges were never properly investigated.

The prosecution disputes the majority of these points, but each point could be raised on appeal, and in a transparent appeal process, the failure of the jury to address any of these points as substantial cause for reasonable doubt should be cause for either acquittal or a fresh trial. Contamination of the potential jury pool also means it would be extremely difficult to find anyone in Italy who does not have a preconceived notion of the facts of the case.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, from Knox’s home state of Washington, expressed disappointment with the verdict. She is quoted as saying, “I am saddened by the verdict and I have serious questions about the Italian justice system and whether anti-Americanism tainted this trial”, adding that “The prosecution did not present enough evidence for an impartial jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Miss Knox was guilty.”

Cantwell has said she is conveying her concerns to US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, which could mean high-level diplomatic pressure on Italian authorities to re-open the case and conduct new investigations in connection with the coming appeals process. The UK’s Telegraph newspaper also reports that:

John Kelly, a former prosecutor who secured a civil verdict against OJ Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife, added his voice to the barrage of criticism. “It’s probably the most egregious international railroading of two innocent young people I’ve ever seen,” he said, calling the case “a public lynching based on rank speculation”.

Whether Knox was involved in the crime may very simply never be known, if allegations that the prosecution manipulated or fabricated evidence are substantiated. What appears to be most likely is that the scant alleged DNA evidence might be disproven or might be left under question as at present. So far, the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct are just that, allegations, and Mr. Mignini should no more be prejudged than should have Miss Knox, but questions remain about whether the Italian justice system will adequately investigate the alleged misconduct or correct mistakes made in the course of the Knox prosecution.