Farcical Knox trial verdict is finally righted

On Monday, justice finally reigned in Italy in the highly publicized and drawn out trial and appeal of Amanda Knox. Knox, an American college student studying abroad in Perugia had been convicted, along with her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, of the brutal murder of her housemate Meredith Kercher in 2007.

For the past four years, Knox and Sollecito languished in prison first as they awaited trial and then as they waited for their convictions to be overturned on appeal.

Throughout this time, Italian prosecutors made a mockery of the justice system. They did not follow proper procedures for analyzing DNA evidence; they held and interrogated Knox without a lawyer (and, according to Knox, physically struck her); and they released intimate details of the case to the media (and, quite directly, to the jury, which was not sequestered).

Then there are the accounts of what occurred in the courthouse. According to the New York Times, one prosecutor tried to poison the jury by telling them what Knox may have said to the victim prior to killing her. They called Knox names from she-devil to femme fatale, purely based on speculation, in order to get the jury to buy into the preposterous scheme they had hatched up.

Obviously, the case is not that cut and dry. There are reasons why it has dragged on for so long and why the first verdict was a conviction. However, there is a key distinction to make between a suspicious person as a potential suspect and as a definite murderer. Italy, like the United States, requires that jurors examine the case and establish a certainty of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

There are three main reasons why Knox was a potential suspect. First, after originally denying that she had been in the house she shared with Kercher that night, Knox eventually admitted that she had been in the house and heard the victim scream. She also identified her former employer, Patrick Lumumba, as the killer.

However, Knox later recanted this, claiming that she had been held all night without a lawyer, threatened by an officer, handcuffed around her head, and interrogated in a language she barely understood at the time.

The second reason is that Knox had no alibi. She claimed that she had been at Sollecito's apartment smoking marijuana and watching movies all night. However, Sollecito could not remember if she had been there that night. Furthermore, both had their telephones off for the whole night and there was no record of computer activity to watch the movies, as they claimed.

Third, there was a staged break-in in the room where the murder took place, an action that implies, but does not prove, that it was an inside job. Police found that glass from the broken window was on top of the contents of the room, and, therefore, broken after the murder had occurred.

All of these coinciding incidents could imply guilt, but they are not enough to convict someone of murder, especially considering the defense's arguments. There was absolutely no motive for Knox and Sollecito to kill Kercher, a reality which led prosecutors to concoct the far-fetched sex orgy gone wrong scenario.

There was no DNA evidence linking Knox to the crime scene, at least none that would withstand the kind of scrutiny applied in any American court (prosecutors originally claimed that there was, but this was later discredited by court-appointed forensics experts). Also, there were no credible witnesses linking them to the scene and the supposed murder weapon did not match most of the wounds.

Furthermore, the only suspect whose murder conviction has not been overturned, Rudy Guede, a drifter whose DNA was found at the scene and who fled to Germany, did not immediately implicate Knox and Sollecito as accomplices. Rather, he implicated them more than a month later when they were already identified as suspects and when he was looking to cut a deal.

Considering all of the facts, it is not difficult to understand why Knox was a person of interest in the investigation. What is unreasonable is the extent to which Italian authorities pursued her as a suspect, without a substantial amount of evidence.

There have been claims that anti-Americanism was at the heart of the court's persecution prosecution of Knox. Additionally, there are claims that Knox did not act with enough remorse when she was brought in for questioning, apparently doing splits and cartwheels during her extensive interrogation. Basically, the argument was that she seemed a bit odd and did not react the correct way. Regardless, these claims, are, at most, enough to raise a cop's suspicions (and lead him or her to try and find legitimate evidence against the suspect), but can never be a substitute for evidence.

 Police and court officials conceived this image of Knox and saturated the media with it to persuade the jury, which, shockingly, was not sequestered. The result is a joke of a trial, based at least as much on media impression as on the very slim evidence produced at trial, which ended with a completely unwarranted guilty verdict and caused two innocent people to spend years imprisoned.

While the Italian justice system is, from this case at least, seemingly incompetent, it is not to say that there are no similar problems here in America; it seems that reports of reversals of convictions proved erroneous by DNA are an almost daily occurrence. However, the problems that arose in the Knox case, most of which stem from misconduct or, at best, extremely lax standards on the parts of the police and the prosecutors, seem more systemic than incidental and do not reflect a functional legal system. Luckily, the right verdict was eventually reached.

There is a saying that it is better to let ten guilty men walk free than to wrongfully convict one. We may never really know whether Knox and Sollecito participated in the murder of Meredith Kercher, but if they did, and walked free because of lack of evidence, Kercher's family can still take some solace in knowing that the right man is in jail.  

What is more important is that there was not nearly enough evidence to convict Knox or Sollecito, and murder trials cannot be based on hunches or suppositions. That is how witch trials were conducted, and not how trials in a modern first-world country should be.