Amanda and Raffaele: Free at Last

Amanda Knox and Carlo Dalla Vedova, her lawyer.

So at last the court overturned the homicide convictions of Amanda Knox and her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, allowing for their immediate release. I am very happy for them, even though, being far from an expert in judicial matters—in which I am neither well-versed nor, to be honest, particularly interested—I am not the most qualified person to write about this subject. And in fact, were it not for the half-dozen or so American friends of mine, who emailed me asking for an opinion on the Amanda Knox case, I wouldn’t be writing this post (I thought it was better to write a post rather than a half-dozen emails). Be it as it may, my very humble opinion is this: the more I have been reading about the Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito trial, the more I realize that there was no proof of their guilt. That’s why I cannot but agree with Amanda’s lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova who told the court that his client had been “crucified, impaled in the piazza” for a crime she never committed, and that she had spent more than 1,000 days in prison on the basis of “evidence that cannot stand up to other hypotheses.” Not a good story for the Italian justice system. Yet, now justice seems to have been done. Let’s not forget, however, that what was at stake in Perugia was not only the future of Amanda and Raffaele, but also the reliability of the Italian justice system. And in the latter case there have been no winners, only survivors.

UPDATE — Wednesday, October 5, 2011 
This may also be of interest: Lessons from the Amanda Knox Case (according to Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the newspaper Il Foglio, there are things foreign correspondents in Italy might want to learn from the Amanda Knox trial about the Italian justice system).