Monday, May 12, 2014

The Ritual Sacrifice of Amanda Knox

from psychcentral.com




The Ritual Sacrifice of Amanda KnoxWhat do domestic violence, terrorism, the apparently renewable cold war and the repeat trials of Amanda Knox have in common? In a word, the devolution of humanity.
Knox, if you managed to miss the media storm about her, is the young American exchange student convicted, acquitted, then convicted again of the 2007 brutal murder of her roommate in Italy. She is currently living in her hometown of Seattle while awaiting yet another trial, an appeal to the Italian Supreme Court later this year.


From the very first, I’ve found this case more than perplexing. As a clinical supervisor who specializes in assessing complex mental health cases and offering feedback and direction to therapists, I’m accustomed to looking at the big picture and sorting out what may need course correction in the therapeutic approach.

In this legal case I see what psychotherapists call “countertransference” — an emotional reaction that belongs more to the practitioner than the client. In effect, due to social, cultural and religious predispositions, the prosecution concocted the following: two middle-class college kids without any criminal records or history of mental illness, who, in the first week of young romance, smoke some dope, watch a movie and then decide to hook up with a drifter they’ve never met before to have a “sex game” that then leads to extreme savagery. With that story having run its course as a fiction, another judge has decided it was arguments over rent money and household hygiene that led to murderous rage.

Knox’s original conviction — with the Italian courts reflecting the bias of a worldwide media-blitz — is now back on the books. There is no concrete forensic evidence. It is a classic police-induced false confession. The actual murderer, Rudy Guede, was tried, convicted and is now serving a 30-year sentence (reduced to 16 years for implicating Knox and her boyfriend).

How and why did this happen? Why is everyone so much more interested in this young woman than in the man who confessed, was tried and convicted, and is serving time?

Nina Burleigh, an American journalist who was present at the trials and wrote The Fatal Gift of Beauty, says she felt she was present at a session of the Spanish Inquisition.

The lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, is alleged to be obsessed with satanic rituals, Masonic occult practices, and sex cults. Before taking on the Amanda Knox trial, he was charged with prosecutorial corruption in another case. Looking at the vile and misogynistic comments about Knox that still race around the Internet, it’s obvious something regressive is going on that needs to be named. It’s as primitive as our ancestors’ instinct to drive evil from our midst.

The phenomenon of this modern-day witch trial brings together the “viral” quality of an Internet lynch mob with something as old as the ancient Greek practice of stoning or exiling selected slaves, cripples or criminals at times of disaster, in order to “purify” the community and protect it from cosmic punishment. As soon as Amanda Knox became associated with archetypes of female evil, the so-called trials become a way to purge the sins of those downloading the very heart of darkness onto the universal girl next door.

The term “scapegoat” comes from the ancient biblical practice of offering a blood sacrifice in the form of a slain goat. The reward to the community? Cleansing of its sins. In the Christ story, Jesus of Nazareth willingly became the human scapegoat, removing the burden of sin for all humanity. Same deal. He takes the hit, and we’re off the hook.

In the twenty-first century, scapegoating still happens in legal courts as well as the court of public opinion. We may not be heaping sins on the head of the goat whose death serves for our atonement. Yet, according to the teachings of psychologist Carl Jung, we still have a tendency to deny or split off the darker sides of human nature, at our own psychological risk.
It’s completely understandable that we do this. Splitting off parts of ourselves allows us to look away from the ugliness within ourselves. But here’s where the trouble comes: The “shadow” traits don’t just go away. They continue to fester under the surface, periodically erupting in condemnation of the moral shortcomings we ascribe to others. They are dubbed the evil ones who then deserve the worst of punishments.

Amanda Knox had the misfortune of being the perfect carrier for the shadow side of Perugia, an Italian city with a medieval collective unconscious. In Perugia, she was the archetypal anti-Madonna. In the Western press, she epitomized our fascination with the good girl/bad girl persona.

When Knox first appeared in the news after the murder, she was way too cool. In my estimation, this was either a remarkably pure form of sociopathic personality disorder, or a young woman showing amazing “grace under pressure” (probably dissociation posing as self-composure).

She was also not “normal.” She was weird and quirky, an ingenuous free spirit not wise to the ways of the world, apparently with a naïve trust in people’s good intentions.

She was caught on camera kissing her boyfriend right after her roommate’s body was discovered. In the days following the murder, she repeatedly visited the police station, trying to help, where others might have kept a quiet distance. When she failed to show sufficient sorrow as a grieving roommate, she was instead cast as the poster girl for American moral licentiousness.

The grounds of her evident innocence receded and the figure of evil personified emerged. In turn, the archetype of a literal “femme fatale” was amplified by mushrooming media attention.
Knox’s shortcomings might mean you wouldn’t want her for a roommate. But are they cause to demonize her? I think not. Her story shows the power of projection that can take over the collective psyche and induce individual psyches to blame, shame and shun the perceived evil of others. This is what Hitler depended upon during his rise to power.

Carl Jung warned us that if we didn’t learn to own our shadow nature, we would seek to destroy each other personally and the world would polarize into factions trying to eliminate each other at the risk of humankind’s very survival. That’s what this case has in common with domestic abuse. A husband sees in his wife the image of his own vulnerability, and raises his fists to smash that mirror.

A religious fundamentalist sees his own “impurity” in the compromised moral standards of a secular culture, and, in denial of gray, white must defeat black, even if it means terrorism. A political leader perceives a threat to his power and decides to play God by rearranging the world.

The integration of justice and mercy begins in our own hearts. We require awareness of how we, as individuals and communities, can get caught up in dirty, deadly projections of our own meanest nature onto the nearest convenient target. 

We bravely need to face all our demons. Let Amanda Knox go back to creating her own story, not living out someone else’s.







Thursday, May 1, 2014

Amanda Knox Family Disputes Court's Theft Motive for Murder

from abc


April 29, 2014
The family of Amanda Knox disputed an Italian court's report today that she killed her roommate Meredith Kercher after a "mounting quarrel" that may have culminated with Kercher accusing Knox of stealing 300 euros from her.
Knox’s family said today that the court's reasoning was flawed, that there was no reason for Amanda Knox to steal money from Kercher. The family told ABC News that at the time of Kercher’s murder, Knox had over $4,000 in her bank account that was immediately accessible to her.
In addition, she had a job and received monthly allowances from her parents.
The court said in the 337-page document, known as a "motivation" of the sentence, that the relationship between Knox and Kercher was "not idyllic," with tension over Knox's supposed sloppiness and her tendency to bring strangers to the cottage that they shared in Perugia, Italy. The two college students were spending a semester abroad when the murder occurred in 2007.
In a statement, Knox said, "The recent Motivation document does not -– and cannot –- change the forensic evidence: Experts agreed that my DNA was not found anywhere in Meredith’s room, while the DNA of the actual murderer, Rudy Guede, was found throughout that room and on Meredith’s body. This forensic evidence directly refutes the multiple-assailant theory found in the new Motivation document. This theory is not supported by any reliable forensic evidence."
Knox's ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito was convicted along with her and a third man, Rudy Guede, was convicted in a separate trial of taking part in the killing. Guede is serving a 16 year prison sentence.
"I will now focus on pursuing an appeal before the Italian Supreme Court. I remain hopeful that the Italian courts will once again recognize my innocence. I want to thank once again, from the bottom of my heart, all of those -- family, friends, and strangers -- who have supported me and believe in my innocence," Knox added in her statement.
The court stated in the motivation that it was hard to establish a reason for the brutal slaying of the British student, but cited the allegations of tension between the roommates and a statement Guede made to police that Kercher believed Knox stole 300 euros - about $450 - and two credits cards from her.
The document states that a fight over money was a "valid motive" for the murder.
"It is a matter of fact that at a certain point in the evening events accelerated; the English girl was attacked by Amanda Marie Knox, by Raffaele Sollecito, who was backing up his girlfriend, and by Rudy Hermann Guede, and constrained within her own room," the court document said.
Today's release by the Italian court was the latest twist in a legal saga that has lasted nearly eight years.
Kercher was found partially nude and with her throat slashed in a cottage she shared with Knox. Knox and Sollecito were both arrested and jailed pending trial and were convicted in the first trial after the prosecution argued that the murder was the result of a sex game gone awry.
They were both freed after four years in prison when an appeals court ruled in 2011 that much of the evidence was poorly handled, raising questions that key forensic evidence had been contaminated, and that the prosecution had failed to produce a motive for Knox to kill Kercher.
Knox returned home to Seattle and was stunned when Italy's Supreme Court ordered another appeals court to look at the case again. This time, the appeals court found Knox and Sollecito guilty of murder.
In detailing the latest decision, the court dismissed the sex game gone awry theory, but attributed the murder to bad blood between Knox and Kercher that erupted over the theft accusation.
The motivation also said there was evidence that more than one person was involved and more than one knife was used in the attack on Kercher, which meant that Guede did not kill Kercher by himself. It claimed that Guede restrained Kercher while Knox and Sollecito wielded knives.
The court sentenced Knox to 28.5 years in prison and Sollecito to 25 years. The defendants are expected to appeal this latest sentence to Italy's supreme court.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Amanda Knox: 'Moral damages' compensated to Amanda Knox, judge rules

from examiner.com

April 4, 2014

Amanda Knox



Amanda Knox fought to get compensation for "moral damages" after an Italian journalist published names of those she mentioned in her sex life during her pre-trial period in 2008 for the murder of student, Meredith Kercher. A judge in Milan ruled in favor of Knox's right to privacy on March 21. The Latino Post reports April 4 that the judge acknowledged that those accused of serious crimes don't have the same privacy as others.
Knox filed a civil lawsuit against an Italian media company, RCS Mediagroup, for excerpts they used from her personal diary.
Although the Amanda Knox civil suit was granted, but defendants appealed the ruling to the Court of Cassation. They referred it back to the Milan court, suggesting they reexamine the suit based on rules "governing privacy and journalism."
The judge found a violation in the Italian Data Protection Code was made in which personal information is "not essential to public interest," ruling in Knox's favor.
The Milan judge stated in her ruling that it wouldn't be acceptable to "... lower the bar for intrusion into the personal life of inviduals in proportion to the hype around the facts and that the relevance of the information would not be connected to the public relevance of the story, and instead ... linked to the volatile curiosity of readers and, more importantly, bent to economic interests, or interests of another nature, pursued by the media...".
It was also stated by the judge that just because journalists can access public court documents doesn't mean they can go and exploit certain details. They are required to "filter the documents to comply with the standards for the protection of fundamental rights in the privacy code."
The judge ruled that Amanda Knox suffered moral damages in this civil case and ordered defendants to compensate her for those damages.
Copyright © 2014 Heather Tooley
Heather focuses on trending news and entertainment headlines. To read more from this writer, her Twitter page is @HotTopicWriter or hit "Subscribe."

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Amanda Knox's ex finds her behavior odd, as appeals case looms

from cnn


Watch this video


Link to Video  



(CNN) -- "We are innocent." For six years, that has been the cry that has united Amanda Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend, as they have faced trials in the murder of Knox's former roommate Meredith Kercher.
But that unity may be crumbling, as she and Raffaele Sollecitoprepare to appeal their convictions before Italy's Supreme Court next year.
Knox, who is living in the United States, appears to be sticking by the maxim.
Just over two weeks ago, she posted it in a photo to her Facebook page in Italian: "Siamo innocente."
Sollecito: 'I still have to fight'
Sollecito: I am not responsible for this
Will Amanda Knox go back to Italy?
But Sollecito, who is still in Italy, no longer seems so adamant about it, as the prospect of a long prison term stares him in the face.
He was sentenced to 25, Knox to 28 years in prison.
Yes, but
Though he still says that the evidence exonerates them both, he is using more selective language.
"There is nothing against me and nothing very strong against Amanda," Sollecito recently told CNN. "And in my case, I really did nothing wrong, and I don't want to pay for someone else's peculiar behavior."
Knox's behavior on the morning Kercher was found stabbed to death in the apartment she and Knox shared seems to be a new hitch for Sollecito.
That was early November 2007, and he and Knox had only been dating for a week.
Sollecito expanded on his doubts in a new interview with Italian television this week that aired in part on NBC.
Knox had spent the night with him but went back to her place to shower, he said. When she returned, she was "very agitated."
She told him that it looked like someone had broken in and that there was blood in the bathroom, Sollecito said. But rather than call the police, she showered and returned to his place.
He finds it odd, he now says.
"Certainly I asked her questions," he said. "Why did you take a shower? Why did she spend so much time there?"
He didn't get any real answers from her, he said in the interview.
Lawyer's advice
Sollecito's apparent distancing from Knox echoes the position of his lawyer, John Kelly.
"It's imperative that the Italian courts consider Raffaele's case separate from Amanda's case," he said. "By necessity, he has to distance himself and his case from Amanda and her case."
In a note on her Facebook page, Knox acknowledges Sollecito's new stance and appears to back it up.
She said he's a scapegoat.
"The only reason he has been dragged into this is because he happens to be my alibi," she wrote.
Since Kercher's death, Knox and Sollecito have gone through a legal odyssey that led to a conviction that was overturned, followed by a second conviction.
Another man, drifter and drug dealer Rudy Guede from the Ivory Coast is currently serving 16 years for Kercher's murder. He was tried separately from Knox and Sollecito.
He admitted having sex with the young British woman but said someone else killed her while he was in the bathroom.






Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Monday, February 3, 2014

Amanda Knox's ex-boyfriend says he'll face new 'ordeal'

from cnn

By Matt Smith, CNN
updated 9:08 PM EST, Mon February 3, 2014








STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • "I still have to fight," Raffaele Sollecito tells CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360"
  • Sollecito and ex-girlfriend Amanda Knox convicted a second time in Italian courts
  • Knox's roommate, Meredith Kercher, was killed in 2007


(CNN) -- The ex-boyfriend of American exchange student Amanda Knox says he has returned to Italy to fight his new murder conviction in the death of Knox's onetime roommate, Meredith Kercher.
In a CNN interview Monday evening, Raffaele Sollecito said he and his current girlfriend were in neighboring Austria, preparing to celebrate what he had expected to be his exoneration by an Italian court. Instead, that court found Knox and Sollecito guilty for a second time last week, sentencing him to 25 years.
Knox, who returned to the United States after her 2009 conviction was overturned, said last week that she "will never go willingly" back to Italy. But Sollecito said he came back "as soon as I understood the verdict."
"I'm trying to be as positive as possible in a situation like this," he said. "It's very traumatic, the situation here now. But on the other side, I still have to fight. I have chosen to be here and to fight against this ordeal."


Guilty...once again
Italian police said Sollecito was stopped in the northern Italian town of Udine, near the border with Austria and Slovenia.
In an interview on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," Sollecito said he thought his relationship with Knox hurt him.
"Why do they convict me?" he said. "Why do put me on the corner and say that I'm guilty just because in their minds I have to be guilty because I was her boyfriend. It doesn't make any sense to me."
Kercher, 21, of Great Britain, was found stabbed to death in 2007 in the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, where both women were exchange students. Prosecutors said Kercher was killed after she rejected attempts by Knox, Sollecito and another man, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, to involve her in a sex game.
Guede is the only person in jail for the murder, and many aspects of the crime still remain unexplained.
Both Knox and Sollecito have maintained their innocence, and their 2009 convictions led to questions about the effectiveness of Italy's justice system. The trial revealed widespread doubts over the handling of the investigation and key pieces of evidence, and the convictions were overturned on appeal in 2011.
But in March 2013, Italy's Supreme Court overturned the pair's acquittals and ordered a retrial. That proceeding resulted in the convictions being reinstated on Thursday.
"I don't know what to think, because objectively, there's nothing against me and nothing very strong against Amanda," Sollecito said.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The Italian Justice System Is Insane—Amanda Knox Is Completely Innocent

from slate.com



465963007-amanda-knox-reacts-in-court-before-the-start-of-a
Amanda Knox in 2011.
Photo by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images
This post originally appeared in Business Insider.
Most people know that Amanda Knox—"Foxy Knoxy"—is the pretty American student who was arrested and found guilty of the stabbing death of her British roommate in Italy, during a "sex game" gone wrong, when the pair were on study-abroad programs several years ago.
Unfortunately, a far smaller number of people know that Knox was probably completely innocent of the crime; that another man was successfully convicted of the murder; and that NONE of the evidence—blood, DNA, or witnesses—ever really pointed to Knox.
Here's a primer on the Knox case, and the miscarriage of justice at the heart of it.
Knox was initially convicted. Confusingly, the verdict was overturned by an Italian appeals court and then, a higher Italian court overturned that acquittal and asked that the case be heard again at the trial level. Thursday, Knox was found guilty again. She may choose to appeal the verdict.
This, of course, would never happen in a U.S. court, where the Constitution forbids suspects from being repeatedly retried.
The frustration for followers of the case—and Knox herself, of course—is that most people have a vague sense that she wasMeredith Kercher's killer, and that somehow—on a technicality!—she wriggled free.
It's important to understand that when Knox went to Perugia to study, she was just 20 years old. Like a lot of kids in college, she experimented with marijuana, booze, and boys. She didn't feel the need to apologize or hide the fact.
This part of the Knox story—that she was a pretty, unapologetic party girl—seems to have worked against Knox from the start, even though it has nothing to do with the case.
Kercher's killer is actually Rudy Guede, an itinerant African immigrant.
Guede found Kercher's body in the house she shared with Knox (even though he didn't live there). His fingerprints were found at the scene. He admitted being there prior to the killing (and using the toilet). And one of his palm prints was found in a blood stain underneath Kercher's body.
He then fled town, and had to be extradited back to Italy from Germany to stand trial. He's serving 16 years.
In the excellent book on the case, "The Fatal Gift of Beauty; The Trials of Amanda Knox," author Nina Burleigh describes Guede's history with the law: He was previously arrested for housebreaking, and on one occasion stole a knife (Kercher was stabbed).
The baffling part of the book (which is sourced at a level of detail that's almost excruciating) is, why Knox was prosecuted in the first place.
The answer is that the Italian prosecutor in charge of the case was an obsessed weirdo who was convicted of corruption.
Giuliano Mignini had previously prosecuted the "Monster of Florence" serial killer case and became convinced that it was a masonic conspiracy. His case came to nothing. Mignini was later convicted of illegally tapping the phones of various police and reporters connected to the Florence case, and was given 16-month suspended sentence.
Somehow, he was allowed to be in charge of the Kercher murder, and he screwed that up too. The alleged ritualistic sex game, for instance, turned out to bemanufactured from whole cloth.
There was no evidence indicating Knox killed Kercher:
  • No DNA evidence linked Knox to the crime, even though she lived in the same house as Kercher.
  • The forensic evidence that did exist was mishandled by Italian authorities prior to trial. (Kercher's bra clasp was left on the floor of the crime scene for six weeks before blood evidence was found on it.)
  • A bloody knife print didn't match the knife police had in custody, so Mignini's team had to create a theory involving two knives, Burleigh reports.
  • One of Mignini's witnesses against Knox was Antonio Curalato, a homeless anarchist who slept on a bench near Knox's house. He testified on who was near the house that night, and he also remembered seeing a party bus on the night of the killing. Burleigh's book shows that that bus was not scheduled to run on the night of Kercher's death.
  • Curalato turned out to be a serial witness and heroin addict whom the police had persuaded to testify in two other murder cases.
It's not just that Knox was falsely accused. It's that her entire life was ruined in the process, in the most vindictive and sexist way possible. At one point, Burleigh reveals, a police official posing as a doctor informed Knox she had HIV, and asked her to name all her previous sexual partners so they could be alerted to the risk. She did so, and only found out later that it was a trick—the Italian cops just wanted to know about her sex life. (Her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, was also eventually acquitted of aiding in Kercher's murder.)
Knox was guilty of two things:
She did falsely accuse Patrick Lumumba, a bar owner, of being involved in the crime. She was convicted of that libel and sentenced to time served (three of the four years she spent behind bars).
She was also guilty of being young and naive. Burleigh's book paints a picture anyone who has ever been 20 years old and away from home for the first time will recognize: a girl enjoying herself, taking risks, being a bit of a jerk by all accounts, and not really understanding—or caring—how the perceptions of older adults might play against her.
She was convicted in part because the Lumumba accusation made her look guilty; because she failed to act sad enough; and because the Italian authorities and jury had sexist views of her behavior.
Few Americans regard the Knox case as a feminist issue, or Knox as a victim of discrimination. (She served four years in prison for having a sex life, basically). They should reconsider.
Jim Edwards is a deputy editor at Business Insider. Follow him on Twitter