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Amanda Knox

New York Times writer compares Amanda Knox ordeal with the Salem witch trials

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

October 4, 2011 | 3 min read

The freeing of Amanda Knox was big news in the US. All the main TV channels featured it as the main story of the night, with pictures of a weeping Amanda walking free from court, and the major dailies flashed it up on their websites as "breaking news" .

The New York Times posted a striking article headlined "Lessons from the Amanda Knox case" by Timothy Egan which compared the treatment of Amanda with the Salem witch trials of 1692. 
He wrote that the tragic junior “year” abroad was over, at long last, for Amanda Knox.

"For that, we have to thank an Italian legal system that essentially gives every convicted criminal a do-over — more formally, an appeal before fresh eyes. Bravo for Italy."

Egan said that the jurors came to the same conclusion that any fair-minded person would have done. He declared,"There was no way, based on forensic evidence that was a joke by international standards and a nonexistent motive that played to medieval superstitions, to find Knox and her boyfriend Sollecito guilty of the 2007 killing of Meredith Kercher, her British roommate in Perugia." He said a " global media cabal had initially turned Amanda into a villainous cartoon". He said however that the jury verdict "should not diminish the memory of the victim." He pointed out one of the prosecutors in the case implied last week that if Knox was being tried in the United States, "she might well be on her way to an execution."


Said Egan, "The case of Troy Davis, killed by the state of Georgia last month despite the fact that most of the witnesses in his case later recanted their testimony, should linger as the Knox saga is reviewed." Egan revealed that his own daughter, a Seattle girl who never knew Knox, was studying in Italy at the same time as Knox. "Suddenly, Seattle, and a college student abroad, took on a very menacing new meaning. I could see my daughter in the Knox role, not yet 21, trying to do the right thing — staying around to help the police, as did Knox, instead of fleeing. "And then, a domino of events, a long night of interrogation by police without a lawyer, at a time when Knox could barely understand the language, conflicting statements, and the torture of being fitted into a narrative at odds with the truth."

Egan said Knox had no criminal record. No motive for killing the girl who shared a house with her. No one had ever been able to place her at the crime scene. Yet in court prosecutors and lawyers called Knox a “she-devil,” a seducer, a “witch,” someone who manipulated Sollecito into an orgy with Kercher and Guede.

Their evidence? Well, she was sexually active, they said and had a sex toy, said Egan. "I half-expected prosecutors to throw Knox in a tank of water to see if she sank or floated, a la the Salem witch trials." If all the attention to the Knox episode made people to take a second look at other questionable cases,said Egan, "then perhaps the tide from Perugia will lift other boats."

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