The Craziness Continues

Meredith Kercher & Amanda Knox

When a murder suspect keeps changing his story, our natural and reasonable tendency is to figure he’s guilty. So what should we figure when a murder prosecution keeps changing its story?

Less than three weeks ago, we wrote that the latest prosecution theory in the retrial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito was that the motive for the murder of Amanda’s flat mate Meredith Kercher was arguments  between the young women over (the actual killer) Rudy Guede’s repeated failure to flush the toilet after taking a dump.

This superseded the prosecution theory that Amanda killed Meredith over resentment that Meredith criticized her for her own supposedly slovenly housekeeping, which superseded the theory that Meredith was killed during a sex game in which she refused to participate, which superseded the theory that Meredith was killed as part of a satanic ritual murder.

But wait! There’s more!

Now comes the report that Francesco Maresca, an attorney for the Kercher family, has put forth the premise that drugs and alcohol fueled a murderous rage on the part of Amanda, Raffaele and Rudy, said drugs and drink having “deprived their minds of inhibitory impulses.”

As if acknowledging that this scenario was unsupportable, Maresca declared that the “motive” was irrelevant since it had been proved the three were in the room together when Meredith was killed.

Except it hasn’t been proved. It has, in fact, been contradicted. Guede’s DNA is all over the crime scene. Amanda and Raffaele’s are nowhere to be found. This is typical of the illogic and outright fabrications that have characterized this entire sordid process.

Compounding the unbearable tragedy of Meredith’s death is the fact that her family has been misled by the police, prosecution and media to believe that Amanda and Raffaele participated in her murder. All of the evidence – every single bit of it – proves that Rudy Guede was her sole killer, and that her murder and sexual assault were secondary to his breaking and entering the house for burglary.

The grieving Kercher family is entitled to the truth, and various elements have made a concerted effort to isolate them from it.

In an American court, the victim’s family is not directly represented in a criminal trial. That is the role of the prosecution. While we definitely believe the victim and/or her survivors have a stake in the proceedings, the perception that they are prosecuting the case themselves is inherently prejudicial against the defendant.

In a further attempt to prejudice the judges and jury, Maresca condemned Amanda for not showing up for the trial. He rapped her for becoming famous, hiring a PR person and making millions of dollars. That all sounds really terrible.

How about the fact that Amanda did not want to be famous, that she would have remained in total oblivion if the Perugia police had not trumped up this ridiculous case against her and coerced her into signing a false confession?

How about the fact that they used all of their resources to convince a hungry media that she was a killer and that public opinion had already condemned her long before the jury panel had a chance?

How about the fact that they leaked her diary to the press and mistranslated it to make it appear she had implicated Raffaele?

How about the fact that they published photos of her and Meredith’s bathroom purporting to be covered with blood, when in fact the red stains were actually the results of fuming for latent fingerprints with cyanoacrylate and a staining reagent?

How about the fact that Amanda’s sizable book advance went almost completely to reimburse her parents for mortgaging their houses and impoverishing themselves to support her during her four years of captivity, to pay enormous legal bills, to pay for her agent and cowriter and her expenses in reestablishing her life in Seattle and returning to her university studies?

And how about the fact that she would risk long years of imprisonment for a crime she demonstrably did not commit, were she to return to the country that falsely charged and imprisoned her in the first place. Would you let your daughter go back under similar circumstances?

This is all typical of the ongoing efforts to vilify Amanda and Raffaele and to deprive the Kercher family of the truth they need and are entitled to. We thought this truth finally was on the verge of being widely accepted when an appeals court ruled that the two were innocent in a masterfully reasoned and written opinion by Judge Claudio Hellmann. But then the Court of Cassation in Rome – the Italian Supreme Court – in what appears to be an act of shameful and craven judicial face-saving, ruled that Amanda and Raffaele must stand trial again – double jeopardy by American legal standards – and that the prosecution could dredge up all of their old nonsense (our words, not the court’s) again.

The prosecution has gone to massive lengths to push its case against Amanda and Raffaele with everything but evidence and they have been forced to change the narrative each time they hit a point where the actual evidence contradicts them. So this latest iteration would be both ludicrous and pathetic if the freedom of two innocent people and the memory of a beloved third were not at stake.

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