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

from cnn





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(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.

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

READ: Amanda Knox retrial verdict: Six things to know

READ: What's next for Amanda Knox?

More background on Amanda Knox

from injusticeinperugia.com

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.

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

from slate.com

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.

Top Comment

I am not an expert in US, Italian or international law, nor am I privy to the full range of evidence or argument in this case, nonetheless, here is my opinion . . .   More...

-harpedonaptae

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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 a 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.

See also: The Beds in the Olympic Village Are Extremely Small

Jim Edwards is a deputy editor at Business Insider. Follow him on Twitter

Does double jeopardy apply to Amanda Knox?

from hotair.com

POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON FEBRUARY 1, 2014 BY JAZZ SHAW

  

Before everyone’s eyes begin glazing over or rising toward open revolt, let me assure you that this isn’t an article about Amanda Knox. I have little or no interest in her specific case and I have no idea if she’s guilty or innocent. (Of course, you have no need to worry if youare interested, since I’m sure Nancy Grace will be talking about it until one of them dies.) The real question for me is the difference between the Italian and American justice systems and how the two interact in the case of an ex-pat like this. The short version of the story is that an American living in Italy is arrested for a crime, goes to trial and is convicted, but on the next level of review, the conviction is overturned. She’s released, but then yet another level of review essentially reinstates the conviction.

Apparently this isn’t all that unusual in Europe, (or the rest of the world outside the United States) but it should be disquieting to Americans who are used to the mostly iron clad constitutional protection against double jeopardy we enjoy here. To a layman like myself, it seems that if you are either found not guilty at trial or subsequently acquitted after a conviction… that’s it. It’s over. You don’t get tried for the same crime again. But what is the US government to do if another country without such protections wants to put one of our citizens in the slammer under those same circumstances?

Fortunately, Dr. James Joyner has looked the case over and explains a few of the complexities.

[N]o country, much less a superpower, is going to turn over one of its citizens to another government to serve punishment that goes against its own principles of justice. Many very strong American allies, for example, routinely refuse to extradite their citizens for capital crimes because they consider the death penalty abhorrent.

It’s worth noting, though, that the United States is virtually alone in its strict interpretation of the double jeopardy doctrine (with some caveats that I’ll address later). Even though the principle was enshrined in the British Common Law centuries before the colonization of North America, the UK has long recognized exceptions, especially in murder cases. Similarly, while most European Union and Commonwealth countries have basic double jeopardy protections, there has been movement in recent years to grant exceptions in cases where the interests of justice demand it, such as proof that the accused perjured himself in trial or finding of major new evidence that makes guilt clear.

Regardless of what either of us might like to see, Joyner goes on to point out that the case is far more complicated than I first thought and standing agreements between the two countries (we have an extradition treaty with the Italians) make things less certain. But that doesn’t mean we should turn her over, either.

Given that Knox was in fact acquitted on appeal and is now residing in her home country, it would be inappropriate, in my view, for the United States to extradite her. But the new verdict doesn’t strike me as a damning indictment of the Italian court system. They do things differently there but it’s not obvious that their way is worse than ours.

Whatever the international diplomacy questions may be, Joyner brings up several aspects of such convictions which still bother me. For the case in question, no matter how we choose to define it, it certainly looks like double jeopardy. According to the treaty with Italy, in order for either of us to extradite someone, “the offense must be a crime in each country.” Murder is certainly a crime and the punishment fits the terms, but isn’t there also a case to be made that it’s not really “a crime” if the person was acquitted?

As a side reference, Joyner also talks about two other types of distortions in the American criminal judgement system which are similar in nature. One of them is the scenario where someone is tried for a crime by a state, found not guilty, but is then tried in federal court under a similar, but technically different law. Joyner describes this practice as “outrageous” and I have to agree. I was under the impression that you were protected from from being taken to trial multiple times for a single incident. It was, as I understood it, the action you were alleged to have taken which was the defining factor, not the wording or origin of the legislation in question. When we do that it still looks like getting two bites at the same apple.

The second is the practice – made famous in the OJ Simpson trial – of a defendant being found not guilty but later being taken to civil court and penalized as harshly as possible. No matter what you may feel about OJ, this has always struck me as unconstitutional, or at least a robbery of the right to a fair defense for the accused. (OJ’s defense was barred from mentioning the not guilty verdict in the civil case as I recall.) Once you’ve been found not guilty, (which is not the same as innocent, I admit, but it should hold the standing of saying that the evidence doesn’t exist to satisfactorily determine guilt) how can you be taken into civil court and sued? Shouldn’t your lawyer’s first statement be to say that any financial claim against you must be based on the conclusion that you were guilty and that had already failed to happen in a court of law?

As I said in the beginning, Knox may or may not be guilty. But I don’t think the US should serve up one of their own citizens to an Italian jail under these circumstances

Would Italy ask for Knox to be extradited?

fron cnn




(CNN) -- Would the United States extradite Amanda Knox to Italy, where an Italian court found her guilty Thursday of murdering Briton Meredith Kercher? U.S. officials may never have to decide, a legal expert said Saturday. "I think we have a hint from Italy that they may not seek her extradition," Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz told CNN. "Look, they let her go back to the United States, even though the case was then pending, knowing that it would be very difficult to get her back in Italy, so the Italian government may be satisfied with convicting her and then letting her spend the rest of her life in the United States -- not able to travel to Europe or to Italy, so it may resolve itself that way." Still, if the conviction is upheld on appeal, if there are no clear violations of due process and if no new compelling evidence is submitted, the case should be treated routinely, Dershowitz said. In other words, Knox should be treated an ordinary person, the Harvard law professor added. Amanda Knox vows to fight DNA expert: Science was ignored for Knox Ryan Ferguson defends Amanda Knox And if an extradition request is made, the United States would likely comply, according to Dershowitz. "The Italian legal system, though I don't love it, is a legitimate legal system and we have a treaty with Italy so I don't see how we would resist," he told Agence France Presse. Citing privacy and confidentiality concerns, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf declined to say whether Italy has requested that Knox be extradited. Knox and her former boyfriend, Italian Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty Thursday of the 2007 murder of Kercher. Prosecutors say Kercher was held down and stabbed after she rejected attempts by Knox, Sollecito and another man, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, to involve her in a sex game. Guede is in jail for the killing. In the conviction, which reversed an earlier appeal judgment, Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years in prison; Knox, who is a student at the University of Washington and did not attend the trial, was sentenced in absentia to 28-1/2 years. Knox lawyer Theodore Simon told CNN on Friday that his client has received "an incredible outpouring" of support, and that the evidence against his client was non-existent. "There is absolutely no evidence today, there was no evidence before and there never will be any evidence of her guilt," he said. Asked whether he believes the U.S. government would honor an extradition request from Italy, if one were issued, Simon noted that at least one appeal and other legal issues remain before that would be an issue. "It's really not a question that is an issue today or tomorrow or for a long time to come," he said. "It's really not right for consideration, and I wouldn't comment on that at this time." CNN Legal Analyst Paul Callan agreed that there is a long road ahead for Knox. "More time for her hair to grow out," he said Friday. "She is sporting a new hairdo, I don't know if you noticed that yesterday, in what I think is a public relations effort to sort of humanize Amanda Knox and keep that high public opinion poll that out there for her." That public opinion has been shaped by largely positive media coverage of the case in the United States, according to Dershowitz. One example of apparent media sympathy, if not support, is a photograph published Saturday in the New York Times showing ABC Anchor Robin Roberts holding the hand of the 26-year-old convicted murderer. "We wish you the best, going forward," Roberts told Knox at the end of a teary interview. "I don't know why public opinion is so supportive of her innocence," said Dershowitz, who described the circumstantial case against Knox as compelling, though not overwhelming. "This is not a case, as it's been projected in the media, of no evidence at all. It's a case of the kind that would have resulted probably in a conviction in most courts in America. And so yet, because she is attractive, and because she has created a media campaign all over the country, she's become very popular. And I don't think we should do justice by popularity or justice by the way a person looks. This is a case for extradition." The victim, he said, has largely been ignored by the American media, which has been supportive of Knox. "In Italy, it's exactly the opposite. In Italy, she's Al Capone, she's the worst murderer in history." Kercher's brother, Lyle, told reporters on Friday that he expected Italy would file an extradition request if the Supreme Court upholds Thursday's ruling by the lower court. "In as much as, yes, if somebody's found guilty -- and this would go for anybody -- if somebody's found guilty and convicted of a murder." He added, "I don't see why they wouldn't." Dershowitz told CNN last March that, if an extradition request is made and Knox somehow avoids being sent back, "she remains a prisoner in the United States, because Interpol will put a warrant out for her and, if she travels anywhere outside the United States, she'll be immediately arrested and turned over to Italy."