There is no doubt that the police system and court system at all levels in italy are rife with incompetence and corruption. Organised crime has had a grip of those systems either through direct intervention or financial intervention for maybe 200 years. You cannot remove crime from a country run by crime lords, and those in position of office by virtue of their criminal connection or political will, have no need to learn or perform their job function. We see the same in most 2nd world countries around the world, and in most 3rd world countries.

The difference is that for for the last century, Italy has been trying to pull itself from 2nd world democracy to first world democracy, and is getting close to be considered a credible democratic nation. Then every now and then they drop their guard and either elect a criminal into high office, or expose how corrupt their judiciary are, or how little they care for honesty and the truth. Hense this fiasco.

All said though, the fact that a US citisen can buy their won joice of verdict within their own country, or in any other country with few exceptions anywhere else in the world, is pretty corrupt also. The difference here is that on home soil you need considerably more resources that the Knox family had at their disposal. If this had happenned on US soil, she'd have gone down for 40+ or gone to the chair. It is only nationalism that allows your average US citisen to believe she's innocent. At least that's the general impression the US press are giving about US feeling on the streets to the UK media.

At the end of the day, most of what you read, see and hear is not presented without an underlying agenda, and the same goes for what is reported here in the UK, and the Knox family are not ever going to tell the truth, and neither are any of the other parties involved, so there could never be any justice. There are a lot of italians who got a whole lot richer over this, and not all of them are probably known to the world. Maybe the italian justice system of vendetta is the only way justice can work in such a country. Maybe enough money in the right hands would get the victim's family justice; but then they'd have to lower their morals to those of the perpetrators to achieve justice, and that goes against the general UK ethic of fair play.

I agree with most of what you say, Ian, except that I doubt she would have been convicted in the US. Call it the "CSI Effect", but most jurors in the US now are inordinately predisposed to both DNA evidence and a "narrative" in declaring someone guilty.  Knox's case had even less going for it than the Casey Anthony case, and we saw what happened there. With no DNA and no narrative (they never came up with anything resembling a coherent motive for Kercher's murder, most Americans would have rolled their eyes at the "Orgy Thrill Murder For No Reason" crap), I have a feeling this would have never even come to trial here.

Also, while rich people can benefit more from good counsel than poor people, plenty of millionaires get locked up for life here in the US to prove that money alone aint' gonna save you if the evidence is overwhelming (Phil Spector, John Du Pont, Bernie Madoff)

Mike B.

FormCritic wrote:(And...an aside....I could not figure out why anyone found Casey Anthony to be an attractive or sympathetic figure in any way.)

I do not find her attractive or sympathetic, because when I see her I'm only looking at her boobs.

Martin

Once again, gamers vs. The Man:
http://www.kptv.com/story/15584146/loca ... bros-shirt

mbassoc2003 wrote: the 'innocence' of Knox is dubious at best, and most likely a fabrication and bias of the US propaganda machine than any real basis in fact.

Please quote a fact.  Quote one fact that indicates Knox's guilt.

mbassoc2003 wrote:If a paedophile can pay off witnesses and buy expertise, or a murderer can walk free because he can afford to pay for a greater quantity of doubt that the state is willing to pay for in evidence, then money buys the verdist in the US. You just need to be willing and able to expend more moeny than the state proscecuting you.

I hate to have to be the one to break it to you, but these claims have virtually no basis in reality. You seem to be judging the entire US legal system on a handful of cases that have become spectacles (Anthony, O.J., Michael Jackson, etc.).. Yeah, occasionally we have a criminal case where the media ends up substantially affecting the outcome (though hardly in a direct proportion to money spent), either due to celebritry involvement or the sensational nature of the crime, or both.

There are statistics that indicate a tendency to convict African American suspects more often than "White" ones, but when it comes to violent crime, especially at the level of murder, class isn't much of a factor.

FormCritic wrote:Please quote a fact.  Quote one fact that indicates Knox's guilt.

Do you mean 'guilt' as in she physically stabbed the victim? Or do you mean 'guilt' as in she was an accessory? I don't think she physically stabbed the victim, but that does not make her innocent. In fact, US law comes down far heavier on people who happened to be there than most countries, which ironically would have made it far more likely a US court would have sent her away for a long stretch.

As MetamorphosisSigma points out, money buys you far less in the outcome of a case in the US than it does in more backwards societies, so the likelihood of evidence potentially being contaminated would have been remote, and you'd have been able to put her on a lie detector, and video all her interviews, and all this stuff would have been available to help determine the likely chain of events.

mbassoc2003 wrote:Do you mean 'guilt' as in she physically stabbed the victim? Or do you mean 'guilt' as in she was an accessory? I don't think she physically stabbed the victim, but that does not make her innocent. In fact, US law comes down far heavier on people who happened to be there than most countries, which ironically would have made it far more likely a US court would have sent her away for a long stretch.

As MetamorphosisSigma points out, money buys you far less in the outcome of a case in the US than it does in more backwards societies, so the likelihood of evidence potentially being contaminated would have been remote, and you'd have been able to put her on a lie detector, and video all her interviews, and all this stuff would have been available to help determine the likely chain of events.

Zero facts.  

benjoshua wrote:2) I think many Americans who have read about this case and kept up with it believe Amanda Knox is innocent, and not mainly because she is American in another country.  The evidence does not appear to convict her.

There are substantial differences in how this was portrayed in the American press, vs. the rest of the world. From the US, I read that Knox and Sollecito called the police, & were waiting for them when a second police agency showed up with Kercher's cell phones. In news stories from outside the US, I read that the police with the cell phones showed up, & then 20 minutes later, Knox and Sollecito called the first police agency. Two completely different sequences of events, leading to different conclusions in the court of public opinion.

Then we have the supposed motive. In the US, the stories always mention the theory about a sex game gone awry. The prevalence of this bit suggests that Italian prosecutors were obsessed with pure speculation of the wildest & implausible sort. This is mentioned with much less frequency in the foreign press, where it is presented as one of many hypotheticals.

So sure, if you only hear one side of a hotly contested issue, those on the other side appear to be monsters. If you live in the NW US, ground zero for pro-Knox sentiment, the issue must seem clear as day.