Amanda Knox: Vixen or Victim?

A young girl returned to a massive homecoming in Seattle last week, that girl was Amanda Knox.

Knox has become a media obsession and the decision to overturn her conviction for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher has divided opinion in the most cavernous way.

To some she is the victim of a grievous miscarriage of justice while to others she is a cunning and libidinous creature whose feminine wiles have outwitted an asinine Italian police force.

But what is the truth?

From the outset Perugian local prosecutor Giuliano Mignini asserted this was a crime of passion and that it had the hallmarks of a female perpetrator.

The way the victim’s body was left protected by a duvet was suspicious: “only a woman would have covered her up after killing her” he is reported to have said.

What then ensued was a modern day witch-hunt.

Despite accurate physical evidence to prove it, Mignini formed the hypothesis that Kercher’s murder was the result of a sordid sex game gone awry.

This is a man whose phone tapping exploits would put the News Of the World to shame; he chose a theory and doggedly stuck to it for four years while the case fell around his ears.

Many of the police tactics shared this willfulness: Knox’s defamatory indictment of local bar owner Patrick Lumumba came after a mammoth 53hrs of questioning over a four day period and wasn’t even recorded.

Such blasé disregard for the rules was characteristic of the whole operation: the seriously inept gathering of forensic evidence was the real reason the case fell apart.

Even the prosecution of Rudy Guede was not enough to stem the flow of suspicion toward Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.

Guede’s were the only reliable forensic traces found in the fateful room and he only named the couple after they had been accused, at first insisting that it was another man who had killed Kercher.

Whether the lack of physical evidence is down to ineptitude or to Knox’s innocence we will never know, even judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann who delivered the not guilty verdict made a crucial distinction between “judicial truth” and the “truth of reality”.

What is certain is that the highly sexualised portrayal of “Foxy Knoxy” by Italian prosecutors and the media almost put a ‘judicially’ innocent if slightly oddball and uninhibited girl in jail for a very long time.