Amanda Knox, the young American woman tried and convicted in Perugia, Italy for the 2007 slaying of her roommate Meredith Kercher, has been released following an appeal. The appeal saw her murder conviction overturned due to shoddy police work and questions about DNA evidence used to convict her.
Knox, who was a 20-year-old exchange student when arrested, was very much in the public eye during the original trial. Every detail of her private life was scrutinized in the press, and her behavior and online antics, which were fairly typical for an American college girl, served to paint a damning picture of the young woman. She was portrayed as vicious, frequently intoxicated and a shameless slut; essentially how the rest of the world sees American women.
Despite the circumstantial evidence pointing to Knox, such as the garbled “confession” and her allegedly odd behavior during the investigation, I was always skeptical of the story the prosecution told – that of a satanic blood ritual sparked by jealous rage – and preferred the simpler explanation that implicated Rudy Guede as a lone assailant. Amanda Knox certainly could have been involved, as Kercher was her roommate and her alibi was shaky, but it just doesn’t seem as though such a brutal murder involving multiple stab wounds and spraying blood could have occurred without an abundance of physical evidence, and the evidence police relied on to make their case was found to be entirely insufficient.
If Knox is innocent, then justice has been served, but lest we forget, innocent men are released from our prisons every single year without anywhere near the fanfare that has accompanied the Knox case. There are, without a doubt, thousands of innocent men languishing in America’s prisons and jails. This fact has far more moral significance than the reversal of Knox’s conviction, but is shamefully underreported by the press, which attaches far greater weight to the salacious details of a young American woman’s sex life.
