Tuesday 26 March 2013

Amanda Knox Retrial

I don't know if Amanda Knox killed Meredith Kercher that day in 2007, but i'm quite happy that the Italian courts overturned their previous acquittal of Knox and her ex-boyfriend and ordered a retrial.
Many people are under the misguided notion that she was cleared or found innocent in the 2011 trial but she wasn't, the ruling was that the case against her killing Kercher was unproven which means while there was not enough evidence to convict her, there was enough evidence that she could not be deemed innocent either. Another misconception was that she wrongly served 4 years in an Italian prison for a crime that she was not convicted of but that is also incorrect.
Her time in prison was for slandering her employer who she said was the murderer of Meredith and who was only saved by the number of customers in his bar that evening that gave him a watertight alibi. A crime that she was convicted and served 3 years for.
If the new court case find her innocent then i wish her all the best but there seems to be a weight of evidence that so far points to her escaping justice.
The change of alibi halfway through the case, from being in the other room blocking her ears to shut out the sound of the dying Kercher's screams to suddenly remembering that actually she stayed at her co-accused boyfriends house that evening working on his computer despite police saying tests on his PC show his computer had not been accessed that evening.
There is the Knox DNA evidence on the knife and the bloody footprints of Knox found near the murder scene and in Knox's bedroom which makes the earlier not proven verdict all the more surprising.
Knox always seemed an arrogant woman, a view supported by the Police testimony that she was performing cartwheels, doing the splits and giggling with her ex-boyfriend when she was brought in for interview but the largest problem now seems getting Knox to the Italian court.
America, while always keen for other countries to extradite their citizens for trial in the US, are not so quick to send their own people to foreign courts and as Knox is currently in the US preparing for a woefully tasteless book tour of her book about that night, the chance that she will be tried in absentia is strong.
Knox's lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said the 25-year-old student was upset but "willing to fight" and had not yet decided whether she would turn up for the trial in person or not.
I guess not because if the Italian prosecution gets its act together, she should be looking at the inside of an Italian prison cell for the next 30 years.

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