The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher (Kindle Single) Read Free Page B

its Web site, Throne and Altar promotes the infamous anti-Semitic forgery known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and explains how the Jewish plan for world domination gave rise to most of the evils of the modern age, including Darwinism, Marxism, and Zionism. This same organization calls for the restoration of the historic Papal States (i.e., much of central Italy) to the Catholic Church. Most tellingly, writings on the site decry the Anglo-American tradition of Halloween, claiming it is an “offensive launched by the Devil” to trap unwary people and “propagandize for magic and witchcraft.” While we don’t know Mignini’s precise connection to this group, his name appears on the Web site. The site thanks “the important minister of Perugia Giuliano Mignini” for his involvement in one of the organization’s signature events, which took place in Trieste, Italy, in 2009.
    After the eight-month investigation, Amanda and Raffaele were put on trial and convicted a year later. Their appeal took two more years. (Trials in Italy are notoriously slow.) The court of appeals, in a full jury trial, found them innocent of murder in 2011 and severely criticized the evidence against them as being nonexistent, scientifically flawed, and erroneous. They were released after spending 1,427 days in prison, and Amanda flew home to America. But Italy has no double-jeopardy clause in its constitution, and prosecutors are allowed to appeal acquittals. Mignini appealed the verdict to the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. On March 26,2013, the Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a new trial. That new trial took place in late 2013.
    On January 30, 2014, the new trial verdict will come in, and, once again, Amanda and Raffaele may be found innocent. As in the appeals trial, the court may find the evidence used to convict them—both scientific and eyewitness—to be faulty or nonexistent. But this is not the end. The legal appeals and wrangling over the case may continue, perhaps for many years to come.
    Niccolò Capponi, a distinguished Florentine historian who is deeply knowledgeable about the inner workings of the judiciary, explained that this decision is “a case of
dare un colpo al cerchio ed uno alla botte
” (in English: “Give a blow to the ring and one to the barrel…”)—in other words, it is an attempt to satisfy everyone. The judiciary could say they had done all they could on behalf of justice to placate Italian public opinion against Amanda. The corruption and unfairness of the original trial was swept under the rug. The torrent of bad publicity about the case coming out of America was halted. In other words, the case, almost from the beginning, was more about covering up mistakes and protecting the careers of powerful people than in finding the truth about who killed Meredith Kercher.
    During the early weeks when Amanda was in prison, police and prosecutors fiercely leaked their version of events to the Italian press. Italian juries are not sequestered, and Italian public opinion plays a large role in Italian jury verdicts. But some opinion in America also turned against Amanda, primarily because most news organizations in the U.S. did not have the budget or manpower to send legitimateinvestigative reporters to Italy to cover the story. Many print and electronic accounts were simply verbatim regurgitations of the prosecution’s version of events without qualification. The language barrier became a nearly insurmountable hurdle to thorough and accurate reporting, as few reputable bilingual investigative journalists were assigned to cover the story. Often, those who wrote about the case appeared to be biased. The Rome bureau chief for
Newsweek
, Barbie Nadeau, sarcastically dismissed Amanda’s defenders as a “cult” in an e-mail to me—even as she was covering the case as a supposedly objective journalist. Later, she wrote a book subtitled “The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox,” which