"As she recalled in an interview last week with Il Messaggero, conducted through her lawyer Luciano Ghirga: “During the first trial, I was so afraid to go in the witness box. There was such a hostile atmosphere every time I spoke and cried as I tried to explain that I had nothing to do with what happened that night. I could tell people were laughing and shrugging their shoulders.”
No fingerprints were found linking either Knox or Sollecito to the crime. Police retrieved a knife, allegedly the murder weapon, from Sollecito’s apartment. There was no blood on the knife but forensic examiners retrieved a minute quantity of low-grade genetic evidence — Knox’s DNA on the handle and Kercher’s DNA on the blade. Forty-six days after the body’s discovery, traces of Sollecito’s DNA were found on the murdered girl’s bra clasp.
This was the totality of forensic evidence against the defendants in a case that lacked any rational motive or credible witnesses. Yet murder is rarely rational."
COLUMNIST ROSIE DIMANNO: TORONTO STAR;
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------BACKGROUND: Ms. Knox, 23, from Seattle, and her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian, were convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively, for the murder of Meredith Kercher, 21, a British exchange student at the University of Perugia who shared a home with Ms. Knox. Both have denied wrongdoing and their appeal trial started last November. An Ivorian man, Rudy Guede, was also convicted of the crime and sentenced to 16 years. After Ms. Kercher’s half-naked body was found in her bedroom, her throat slit, on the morning on Nov. 2, 2007, prosecutors said she had been killed in a sexual escapade that spiraled out of control. (New York Times);
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"PERUGIA, ITALY—There’s a beauty: Amanda Knox, known gleefully in the Italian tabloids by her teenage nickname, “Foxy Knoxy," the Toronto Star story by columnist Rosie DiManno published on September 11, 2011 begins under the heading, "DiManno: DNA bungling undermines Amanda Knox case.
"There’s a beast: The Monster of Florence, an unknown murderer who slaughtered and mutilated eight couples whilst they were making love in cars parked around the Tuscan hills in the ’80s, removing the women’s genitals," the story continues.
"And there’s a bungling, malicious prosecutor: Giuliano Mignini, the common denominator in two sensational and scandalous trials. Mignini notoriously got the wrong man in the Monster of Florence case — a meek retired pharmacist acquitted in 2008 in the five double homicides with which he’d been charged. Mignini had accused Francesco Calamandrei of being the “mastermind” of an alleged satanic cult behind the Tuscan killings, a cabal he claimed extended to some of Florence’s most powerful noble families. For his sins — which included wiretapping a respected crime reporter (throwing him in jail for weeks) — Mignini was convicted last year of abuse of office and received a 16-month suspended sentence. He’s appealing it. Now it feels like déjà vu all over again. This time Mignini had visions of sex orgies turned lethal dancing in his head, the proffered scenario of how British student Meredith Kercher came to be brutally slain in Perugia in late 2007, more than 40 stab wounds inflicted on her body, her neck nearly sawed through. Amanda Knox, Kercher’s purportedly “naïve’’ roommate from Seattle, was convicted in 2009 and drew a 26-year sentence. Knox’s former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, was sentenced to 25 years in the joint trial. Last week, however, an appeals court all but knocked the underpinnings out from Mignini’s case against the pair. Most observers believe the lead prosecutor will suffer another ignominious loss — conviction overturned—when the hearing concludes later this month. Specifically, Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellman rejected a prosecution request for more testing of the minuscule and widely discredited DNA evidence that was crucial to securing guilty verdicts. Instead, Hellman accepted the scathing contents of an independent 145-page forensic review, ordered earlier, that blasted police for their botched collection of evidence at the scene and ripped apart the original testing of genetic samples lifted from a knife and the victim’s brassiere clasp. Knox’s family was practically turning cartwheels over the development — just as Knox herself was reported to have turned cartwheels at the police station when first brought in for questioning over her roommate’s murder. It was this weird behaviour that instantly got her pegged as a prime suspect by Mignini. And, oh yeah, there was a signed confession too, squeezed out during some 56 hours straight of interrogation in which Knox admitted that she had been in the flat when Kercher was killed, had heard the victim’s screams but stuck her fingers in her ears, and knew the identity of the murderer. Knox further named this individual — Patrick Lumumba, owner of the bar where she worked — except he turned out to have an airtight alibi. This confession was later deemed to have been obtained illegally — Knox had never been allowed to speak with a lawyer during the interrogation — and thus could not be used against her at trial, though the jury was permitted to hear it anyway under the odd Italian legal system. It has been a riveting saga, transfixing an international audience: as Mignini sketched the picture, a predatory American university student gone wild in a medieval town, offing her gentle 21-year-old roomie in a frenzy of sex and drugs when Kercher allegedly wouldn’t join an orgy with Knox and Sollecito. Knox’s family kept the case in the public eye (even as they lambasted the media for sensationalizing the story), excoriated the Italian justice system and endlessly depicted the convicted murderess as an innocent abroad, an unworldly ingénue who didn’t understand the confession she’d signed while 37 police officers purportedly cheered and applauded the admission. There was never a convincing motive for the murder, and when Lumumba was ruled out as a killer Mignini slotted in another suspect, Rudy Guede, a drifter from the Ivory Coast. Guede was an acquaintance of some boys who lived downstairs in the Knox cottage and the perpetrator in a series of burglaries. His bloody handprint was found in Kercher’s ransacked room, his DNA in her vagina and his feces in the unflushed toilet bowl. Guede was ultimately arrested in Germany, tried and sentenced to 30 years for the murder. That term was later reduced to 16 years. At her trial, Knox insisted she’d spent the night of the murder with engineering student Sollecito in his apartment, watching the movie Amélie and smoking a joint. She returned home at 10.30 a.m. to find the front entrance open, blood in the sink, a window shattered — the prosecution claimed this was done afterwards to simulate a break-in — and Kercher’s room locked. Knox’s friends knocked down the door — police at first refused to do so — and found the semi-naked Kercher in a pool of blood. A pathologist testified the young woman, sexually assaulted, had died an agonizing death, estimating she’d suffered at the hands of her killer for two hours. But the victim, as is often the case in murder trials, practically disappeared from the narrative as attention fixated on Knox. As she recalled in an interview last week with Il Messaggero, conducted through her lawyer Luciano Ghirga: “During the first trial, I was so afraid to go in the witness box. There was such a hostile atmosphere every time I spoke and cried as I tried to explain that I had nothing to do with what happened that night. I could tell people were laughing and shrugging their shoulders.” No fingerprints were found linking either Knox or Sollecito to the crime. Police retrieved a knife, allegedly the murder weapon, from Sollecito’s apartment. There was no blood on the knife but forensic examiners retrieved a minute quantity of low-grade genetic evidence — Knox’s DNA on the handle and Kercher’s DNA on the blade. Forty-six days after the body’s discovery, traces of Sollecito’s DNA were found on the murdered girl’s bra clasp. This was the totality of forensic evidence against the defendants in a case that lacked any rational motive or credible witnesses. Yet murder is rarely rational. Forensic experts for the appeal hearing, which began in June, dismantled that evidence. The scientific review listed 50 breaches of international forensic protocols. The alleged murder weapon was found not to reliably contain any DNA material from the victim and the item had been contaminated during handling. Sollecito’s supposed DNA on the bra clasp turned out to be vegetable matter; in any event, it can’t be tested again anyway because the clasp had rusted in police storage. Police were slammed for incompetence and shoddy work. Video showed officers walking through the crime scene unsupervised, one picking up evidence with dirty gloves. Had the trial judge not refused a defence request for independent DNA analysis, there likely would have been no convictions at all. Which doesn’t make Knox innocent. She did, after all, alter her story repeatedly and changed her alibi at least nine times. But guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and this prosecution, stripped of the disputed DNA, was shot through with doubt, though the judge said the prosecution case was “without holes or inconsistencies.” Apart from the DNA bombshell, the appeal hearing has had its own evidentiary outrages. The defence summoned a rogue’s gallery of witnesses to point the blame elsewhere. They included a convicted rapist and child-killer and a mafia snitch. Four out of five convicts gave testimony based on alleged conversations with Guede in the sex crimes wing at Viterbo prison. One claimed he’d been told Guede left a disco that night with a drunken friend who’d raped Kercher and then killed her to avoid “rotting in prison.” A mob turncoat accused his brother of killing Kercher during a break-in to steal a painting. There wouldn’t have actually been much there to support a verdict reversal, had the DNA review palpably not sunk the case. Indeed, Ghirga, the defence lawyer, has warned that the court’s rejection of the prosecution request for another round of DNA tests does not guarantee a positive appeal outcome. The judge can overturn the conviction, reduce the prison sentence — or even impose a harsher sentence. But Knox’s family has given interviews in recent days expressing hope they can bring their girl home by the end of the month. And she is cautiously optimistic. “It’s great to know that at last they don’t hate me any more, that they are not looking at me as if I am guilty, although not all of them believe me, some still want to hurt me and I don’t understand why,’’ Knox told Il Messaggero. “I always believed the truth would emerge. I always believed I would be able to get out of that prison where my life has frozen. “Meredith was my friend. I liked her. I could never hurt her.’’ In this lovely hilltop town, inside the many bars where students have descended anew for the university term, the chatter is all about Amanda: a shocking miscarriage of justice or an American girl in Italy getting away with murder. If the conviction is reversed, Knox can launch a compensation claim under Italian law for 500,000 euros ($680,000 Canadian). Her tantalizing tale has already spawned at least 10 books and a made-for-TV movie, with a big-screen version under discussion. Bloggers and astrologists continue to debate the case, just as they do the Monster of Florence killings, which remain unsolved. Mignini said of the beast who wasn’t the Monster and the beauty who may not be a killer: Caso chiuso. Case closed. He may be needing a good lawyer."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The story can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1052267
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog; hlevy15@gmail.com;
