So much media coverage attended the trial and conviction of Amanda Knox six years ago that commentators fairly described it as the most sensational since the trial and acquittal of O.J. Simpson.
Here is an excerpt from “American Student Amanda Knox Guilty of Murder in Italy,” December 9, 2009, in which I registered my take.
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The local media had a starring role in this show trial, parroting the prosecutors’ alternating theories of the crime as unimpeachable facts. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that Amanda’s jurors, who were never sequestered, convicted her after only 14 hours of deliberation…
Notwithstanding this verdict, however, it smacks of an unseemly mix of arrogance and hypocrisy for everyone from pundits to politicians in the United States to be hurling self-righteous indignation at the Italian justice system.
After all, one would be hard-pressed to find a judicial system that is guilty of more egregious miscarriages of justice than America’s: There are of course the more notorious cases like O.J. and the Duke Lacrosse players. But I’m thinking here of its shameful legacy of convicting, and in some cases executing, Blacks for crimes they did not commit.
Therefore, instead of criticizing the jurors and condemning the Italian justice system, Amanda’s supporters would be well-advised to just pray that Italy’s appellate courts do in this case what they’ve done in many others, namely, overturned guilty verdicts that offended all notions of justice.
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Unfortunately for Amanda, the rollercoaster appellate process – which saw one tribunal overturn her conviction, only to have another reinstate it – soon surpassed the egregiousness of this initial verdict.
Except that this made the Italian Supreme Court’s intervention inevitable. And, as the excerpt above indicates, the ruling it handed down on Friday came as no surprise.
A tearful Amanda Knox said she is glad to have her life back after an eight-year legal drama that gripped the United States, Britain and Italy.
Knox made a brief statement after Italy’s Supreme Court overturned her murder conviction late Friday.
She was prosecuted after the semi-naked body of British student Meredith Kercher, 21, her throat slashed, was found in November 2007 in the apartment the two women shared.
(CNN, March 28, 2015)
Unfortunately for Amanda, again, this Supreme Court decision got relatively scant media coverage. In fact, most networks gave it mere seconds during their wall-to-wall coverage of rank speculation and pop psychoanalysis masquerading as breaking news on the crash of that Germanwings plane in the Alps four days earlier.
Indeed Knox can be forgiven the all too familiar lament about having news of her unjust conviction blared across front pages, but news of her just acquittal buried in back pages.
Anyway, case closed!
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Knox guilty…