Trial By Osmosis: Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and the Nightmare of Italian Justice

by Andrew Gumbel - LA Review of Books

February 11th, 2014

ANYONE FOLLOWING THE BYZANTINE TRIALS of Amanda Knox, the American exchange student accused with her onetime boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito of murdering her roommate in Perugia, will have noticed that criminal justice in Italy doesn’t work the way it does in other countries. First they were guilty, then they weren’t, now they are again. In the United States, this is commonly referred to as double jeopardy and is barred under the Constitution. In Italy, it’s pretty much business as usual.

When the pair was first arrested, more than six years ago, they were left to rot in jail and for months — in Sollecito’s case in solitary confinement — before charges were brought. They didn’t qualify for bail because bail does not exist in Italy. The prosecution regularly leaked information to the media but did not formally share its investigative findings with the defendants or their lawyers until the summer of 2008, by which time the public was broadly convinced they were no ordinary college students, but rather, depraved sex addicts who had forced the victim, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, into a satanic orgy before brutally stabbing her to death.
To this day, it remains doubtful whether evidence ever existed to substantiate such a scenario.

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Andrew Gumbel, a regular contributor, spent five years as a foreign correspondent in Italy and co-wrote Raffaele Sollecito's account of the trials, Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (Simon & Schuster, 2012)

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