Amanda Knox

orourkeda wrote: »

Thats what the press do.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito last night won their appeal against their conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher. But if many doubted the first verdict, just as many will doubt this one. It's one of the many failings of Italian justice that it never delivers conclusive, door-slamming certainty. What usually happens is that the door is left wide open to take the case to the next level, first to appeal and then to the cassazione, the supreme court. The score in the public imagination, at the moment, is simply one-all.


It's always been that way. There's barely one iconic crime from the post-war years that has persuaded the country that, yes, justice has been done: the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Ustica crash, the Bologna railway station bombing, the Piazza Fontana atrocity, the Monster of Florence murders, the murder of Luigi Calabresi, the "caso Cogne" … none has ever been satisfactorily, convincingly resolved. Instead the country seems to split into innocentisti and colpevolisti (those who believe in the innocence or guilt of the accused) and the heated debates continue for decades.


Part of the reason that the Knox trial has captivated media attention isn't just the "Foxy Knoxy" thing, the fact that Knox was attractive and allegedly sexually adventurous. It isn't just because of the cosmopolitanism of the crime, the fact that here was a foreign victim and, it was thought, a foreign assassin. Its appeal, if that's not too gruesome a word, lies in the fact that there was sufficient doubt about both the prosecution and defence cases. Italy is divided down the middle, meaning that the case is, in a way, perfectly set up for a media circus, for debate and deconstruction. Already the Kercher case has spawned, at the last count, 11 books and a film.


Dietrologia – literally "behindery" or conspiracy-theorising – is a national pastime precisely because the courts don't offer convincing verdicts. It allows every journalist, magistrate and barfly to try their hand. The result is that everyone with an active imagination has a go at explaining the truth behind the mystery, and inevitably the truth only gets further buried beneath so many excited explanations. The media plays an active role in keeping the circus going: in no other country are cronache nere – "black chronicles" – so much the mainstay of the evening news. There's always a case on the go. Between 2005 and 2010, the seven national channels aired, in the evening news alone, 941 stories about the Meredith Kercher murder in Perugia, 759 about the Garlasco murder, 538 about the murder of little Tommaso Onofri and 508 about the murder in Cogne. Often studio shows in the afternoons talk about the ins and outs of these cases for hours, interspersing expert witnesses with short location reports. And because such cases often have one trial then another, they're like stories that never end, so that the speculation and the spectacle can continue untramelled. As one journalist recently wrote in La Repubblica, these cases are popular because they "generate anxiety but, at the same time, they reassure. They brush up against us, but touch others. It's like leaning over the edge of a precipice to step back at the last moment. You feel giddiness. Anxiety. But also relief. It's a subtle pleasure".


It's a truism that fact and fiction often overlap, but in Italy it really is the case. Two of the best crime novelists – Giancarlo De Cataldo and Gianrico Carofiglio – have both worked as judges and draw on real life; and the godfather of Italian crime writing, Loriano Macchiavelli, has often revisited real crimes like Ustica and the Bologna bombing. Occasionally writers even get caught up in the weird wheels of Italian justice: the great writer Massimo Carlotto was accused of murder back in the 1970s and the American novelist, Douglas Preston, has been vociferous in his defence of Knox because the prosecutor in the case had previously turned his ire on Preston when he was writing about the Monster of Florence case. In Italy, true and fictional crime stories blur into one another and, as Luigi Pirandello warned almost a century ago, in this land of illusionism you could go mad searching for the missing truth.


There are also, however, more mundane reasons that Italian justice never seems to resolve anything. It's partly a question of meritocracy: in a land in which appointments are invariably made through nepotism rather than competence, it's perhaps inevitable that any investigation has holes in it and that decent lawyers are able to find them. A fair trial is often impossible because there's no jury (at least not in the sense that we understand the term) and there's no sense of sub judice: the juiciest bits have always been leaked to the press long before trial. The judiciary, no one really doubts it, is in desperate need of reform. The trouble is that the one man most desperate to reform it, the prime minister, is coincidentally the man most desperate to avoid it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/04/amanda-knox-case-italy-justice