In the case of the trial of Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, how trustworthy is the recent reinstatement of their conviction for murder? For Italy’s La Stampa, columnist Alessandro Perissinotto writes that Italian prosecutors, goaded by a public weaned on TV crime dramas, are loathe to admit when a lack of evidence requires dismissal. To add insult to injury, he also says that as may be the case for Raffaele Sollecito, Americans are unfairly advantaged, and in similar circumstances, Americans go free when Italians are convicted.
For La Stampa, Alessandro Perissinotto starts out this way:
There was a time when one could be acquitted due to a lack of evidence. It was a stain one carried for the rest of your life – worse than a conviction.
To be convicted was the prelude to redemption – punishment after a crime. A lack of evidence was a suspicion you could never shake off. If some considered a lack of evidence a defeat for the justice system, for others it represented the highest moment in which justice itself accepted its limits, admitted it is unable to go beyond reasonable doubt. This was justice free of the delusion of omnipotence. Today, although Article 530 of the Code of Criminal Procedure still refers to insufficient evidence, it seems no one is willing to acknowledge a boundary that cannot be crossed. This is demonstrated by the trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.
Convicted, then acquitted, and then convicted again. And at every stage of appeal, the evidence becomes ever more slender, clinging to a small trace of Amanda’s DNA on a kitchen knife that she may have used to slit her friend’s throat or chop an onion. Nevertheless, those three letters, DNA, seem to form the magic word that always unlocks the treasure chest of truth. We worship scientific data as if it alone is capable of explaining everything. We forget that the data has to be interpreted. We even go so far as to consider motives secondary. Throughout the stages of this trial, the murder in Perugia has been depicted as the result of an erotic party gone wrong – as sexual violence, or in Prosecutor Alessandro Crini’s closing remarks, the culmination of a fight over house chores.
Under these conditions, it is hard to believe that justice really knew where it was headed. No matter, though – only a fragment of DNA is required to save the dignity of the prosecution. In March 2009, the house where the murder occurred on Via dell Pergola was visited by thieves who stole the mattress on which Meredith was murdered, which was possible because the Perugia prosecutor forbid the windows from being barred so as not to alter the crime scene!
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