GroundReport | Author: S. Michael Scadron
On March 25, 2015, the case against Seattle native Amanda Knox and her one time Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, will be heard by the Italian Supreme Court in what may be the pair’s final attempt to set right a miscarriage of justice reminiscent of the infamous Dreyfus Affair of the nineteenth century.
To briefly recount, the sorry saga began on November 1, 2007, when Knox’s housemate, Meredith Kercher, was found murdered, her throat slashed, in the cottage she shared with Knox and two Italian women in the Umbrian hill city of Perugia. On scant evidence, Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murdering Kercher in December 2009 following a year-long trial. A third man, Rudi Guede, was convicted of the crime in a separate abbreviated trial in which evidence was not contested. The conviction of Knox and Sollecito was overturned two years later, when an appellate court found them innocent. The prosecution appealed and the Italian Supreme Court annulled the acquittal in March 2013, ordering a re-trial by a different appellate court. As a result Knox and Sollecito were once again convicted, setting the stage for yet another, possibly final, appeal to Italy’s high court. Parallels between Italy’s case against Knox and Sollecito and the Dreyfus Affair are compelling. Continue reading →