Knox Revisited: When Theory Trumps Evidence

   GUILTY      INNOCENT    INNOCENT

What part of evidence-based jurisprudence do the judges of the Court of Cassation not understand? That is the question left hanging after the Italian high court’s decision to reverse the appeals court’s voiding the murder convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and ordering a new trial in the 2007 death of Meredith Kercher in a rented home she and Amanda shared as exchange students in Perugia, Italy.

In a protracted trial that alternately riveted, tantalized and titillated much of the world and all of the tabloid media, the beautiful American college girl and her handsome new Italian boyfriend were found guilty of brutally murdering her equally beautiful English flat mate in what has been described by prosecutor Giuliano Mignini both as a Satanic ritual killing and a violent sex orgy gone bad.

We have studied and analyzed this case extensively and the only problem with the prosecution theory is that we found not one shred of physical or behavioral evidence to support it. The real killer, a drifter from the Ivory Coast named Rudy Guede, was convicted in a separate trial and is serving time. The high court’s decision is unfair to the innocent Amanda and Raffaele, and it is certainly unfair to Meredith’s survivors, who are entitled to whatever peace and truth-based closure is possible after five years after such a horrific loss.

How, for example, could Amanda and Raffaele return to the crime scene  as the prosecution suggested, and wipe away every bit of their own invisible DNA while leaving voluminous amounts of Guede’s? Unless these young people have developed techniques unknown to the most sophisticated criminalists at the FBI and Scotland Yard, it is impossible.

How can a detective search Raffaele’s kitchen and purely through “investigator’s instinct” select one knife from a drawer as the murder weapon, especially since it doesn’t even match the wounds on Meredith’s body?

The one tent pole investigators thought they had was Amanda’s “confession,” when, after many hours of intense interrogation by a team of detectives and her repeated denials of involvement at the police station, she was asked to “imagine” what had happened at the house had she been there. By the time she gave this account, she was so exhausted, intimidated and emotionally frail that she no longer knew what was real and what was a dream. The very next day she recanted the whole thing. We could pick it apart item by item, but suffice it to say, under these circumstances, any experienced detective could get any person of interest to implicate Martian invaders in the murder.

Behaviorally, the assertion that the two young lovers could have decided to pull off a sexual murder like this is nonsensical and flies in the face of everything we know about indicators in past behavior and the criminal evolution of violent offenders. Behavioral background does matter, and no one – no one – suddenly becomes a violent predator.

So why did the police, prosecution and media focus on Amanda and Raffaele and their supposed ritual murder orgy? Frankly, it makes a better story, and it adheres to the preexisting worldview of prosecutor Mignini, who played the press like a Stradivarius and wanted to reopen the notorious “Monster of Florence” case because of his unfounded theory of a satanic element. And let’s be honest, a beautiful American temptress and her good-looking Italian boyfriend assaulting, torturing and killing a beautiful English girl in a satanic sexual freak-out is a much better story than a drug-involved loser with a record of burglary breaking into a house, finding one of the residents home, opportunistically raping and murdering her and fleeing the country. The papers called Amanda Angel Face, Bambi and Luciferina. She became Italian magazines’ most popular cover girl. What the public wanted to believe took on a life of its own and Amanda’s sexual witchcraft became the received wisdom of the case. The problem is, it wasn’t true and no amount of cooking the evidentiary books can make it true.

This would be appalling enough on its own, but we see it over and over again in instances where a prevailing attitude gets out ahead of evidence and good investigative work. You wouldn’t think the well-educated All-American girl Amanda Knox would have much in common with three dirt-poor, marginal teens from rural Arkansas. But in the 1993 “West Memphis Three” case, they were also convicted of satanic ritual murder with no evidence other than a coerced false confession and a prevailing view that devil-worshippers were everywhere. And these are only the cases we hear about.

The high court’s decision can only undermine confidence in a judicial system that sorely needs to win it back. We can only hope that American authorities will refuse any request to extradite Amanda back to Italy under the double jeopardy principle. That would at least affirm our own standards of law, justice and a decent respect for both evidence and truth.

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