As Amanda Knox Heads Home, the Debate Is Just Getting Started-NYTimes

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October 4, 2011


As Amanda Knox Heads Home, the Debate Is Just Getting Started


By RACHEL DONADIO and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO


ROME — At least one thing was clear Tuesday as Amanda Knox headed home to the United States after an Italian court threw out the convictions of her and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, in the 2007 murder of her housemate in Perugia. The case had lost none of its power to polarize.

Many Americans applauded the vindication of two young people they believed had been wrongly accused, particularly Ms. Knox, widely seen as an innocent who was smeared in the Italian news media as a sex-crazed femme fatale.

But to many Italians, the case was a humiliation, an American media circus that came to a sleepy Umbria hill town and depicted Italy as a banana republic with amateur police and compromised magistrates — a depiction, it bears noting, not terribly different from that drawn by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in his many tangles with Italian justice.

“In the end, it was the trial of a different culture, a clash of cultures more than a legal case,” Vittorio Zucconi wrote in the center-left daily La Repubblica. “The same girl whom prosecutors depicted as a she-devil starved for sex and orgies, grew, in inverse proportion in American public opinion as a chaste diva who fell into a hornets’ nest of inept, evil men.”

The case, the most watched trial in Italy after the trials of Mr. Berlusconi, tapped into an intense debate this fall over Italy’s justice system at a time when the Berlusconi government is pushing a law that would make it illegal for papers to publish material leaked from preliminary legal investigations. In recent years, those leaks have become a cornerstone of the Italian press, and, in Mr. Berlusconi’s view, a de facto political opposition through the courts.

That point was hammered home by a front-page headline in Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by Mr. Berlusconi’s family: “Amanda and Raffaele Acquitted: It’s the Magistrates Who Should Be Convicted.”

Inside, the commentator Vittorio Macioce wrote: “The only certainty is that at the end of this story without pity is that Meredith died at age 22 and did not get justice, and Amanda and Raffaele were put in prison for four years without a definitive sentence.”

“It’s the law,” he wrote, “but maybe in Italian justice there’s a black hole where uncertainty reigns.” As a consequence, he continued, Mr. Berlusconi is right to want to reform the Italian justice system so that people won’t be held in jail without evidence. “Something beyond Berlusconi and his story should be done, and quickly. It’s no longer a political question. It’s humanity,” he added.

The case also tapped into Italy’s longstanding inferiority complex about how it is viewed from abroad. Papers and television programs were filled with Italians questioning how Americans perceived them and their justice system. Corriere della Sera carried an interview with the legal analyst and writer Scott Turow, saying there had not been enough evidence to convict.

Some callers to a morning radio show on Il Sole 24 Ore Radio were defensive. One asked how Americans could judge the Italian justice system so harshly when the United States has the death penalty, something abhorrent to the majority of Italian Catholics.

For the family of the murder victim, Meredith Kercher, the appeals verdict brought cold comfort. “It feels very much as though we are back to square one,” Lyle Kercher, her brother, said at a news conference in Perugia on Tuesday. He said he could not understand how a ruling that “was so certain two years ago has been so emphatically overturned now. It obviously raises further questions.”

One of those questions is about Rudy Guede, the third culprit, who in 2008 received a 30-year sentence for sexual assault and aiding and abetting murder, though it was reduced to 16 years on appeal. Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito were never named in the ruling, which said only that he had aided unknown “others” in the crime.

“The courts agree that he wasn’t acting alone,” Mr. Kercher said. “If the two people released really were not guilty we are left wondering what really happened.”

Police arrested Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito on Nov. 6, 2007, five days after Ms. Kercher’s naked and bloody body was found in the same apartment she shared with Ms. Knox. In December, 2009, Ms. Knox was sentenced to 26 years and Mr. Sollecito to 25 for the crime, which prosecutors said was a case of rough sex that got violent.

The lower court’s reasoning ran to nearly 500 pages, but it presented only a circumstantial account of the events leading to Ms. Kercher’s murder, and did not ascribe a motive to her attackers. During the appeal, court-appointed experts determined that DNA evidence on which prosecutors had based the original case was unreliable.

With so many unknowns, the case “wasn’t a victory” for the Italian justice system, the jurist Carlo Federico Grosso wrote in a commentary in the Turin daily La Stampa on Tuesday. Instead, he added, “Faced with the lack of sufficient evidence, the judges inexorably but correctly had to reach their conclusion. But this is an acquittal that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.”

Back in Perugia, residents said the trial had tainted their town. Monia Montagnini, who teaches Chinese here, said that the image that had emerged of Perugia as a den of iniquity “just isn’t true. In fact, it’s quite dull here.”


Rachel Donadio reported from Rome, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Perugia, Italy.