Foxy Knoxy; the movie...

And so to Foxy Knoxy, now a little of the hysteria and dust has settled. (One could normally expect ‘Amanda Knox; the Movie’ soon but of course that has already been done. It was produced on US TV whilst the appeal case was sub-judice. Contempt of court, anybody?

Pardon my mirth, but at such scenes of joy and rage one could scarce forebear to laugh.

We have the Italians getting drama-queenish over US media accusations that somehow their police are not perfect and that their judicial system is slow and incompetent.

We have the US media squawking about a ‘show trial’ (like Jackson’s Doctor, perhaps) and miscarriage of justice for convicting such a nice, all-American girl, plus a painfully slow appeals procedure that strung out the hearing for 10 months although the court only sat for 11 days, and in any event took 4 years to come to trial. This does not happen in the US, of course. There it takes 20 years, and you still get topped.

So let’s have a peep through the media fog.

What was the judgment of the Appeal Court? Well, we don’t know because nobody has told us. Was it ‘Not guilty’ ‘Not proven’ (should they have such a thing in Italy)? Was it ‘Unsafe and unsatisfactory verdict by the lower court’?

Does it matter? Well, yes, actually, because if it was the last of these it is actually saying that because both the police and the prosecution made such a balls of the whole case that she should never have been convicted. Therefore, if they have a presumption of innocence in Italy, which as far as I am aware does not exist under the Code Napoleon elsewhere in Europe, then she was innocent. (Even if she did it, which on the evidence as now reported seems most unlikely).

So what was it all about?

A large part of the defence case rested on the undoubted fact that the prosecution, aided and abetted by an enthusiastic media, drip-fed lurid details of the case so that by the time it came to trial the jury were bound to be irreversibly prejudiced against the accused. There were frequent illegal leaks that tainted the whole proceedings. The media only published the prosecution evidence.

On those grounds alone the appeal was almost certain to succeed. But the weaknesses of the prosecution case were that they were unable to show motive, there were no witnesses to show that Knox was present at the time of the murder, there was no reliable DNA evidence (it was contaminated by police bungling), the murder weapon didn’t fit all the wounds (which actually suggests that there were 2 knives), and the confession was under duress and later withdrawn.

One of the curiosities is why the West African drug dealer, who was convicted separately earlier, was not called to give evidence – an arcane aspect of Italian criminal law, perhaps.

The only certainty about the whole affair is that Knox will make a lot of money, much good may it do her.