An American in the Italian Wheels of Justice
The trial took nearly a year. But now that an Italian jury has determined that Amanda Knox, a 22-year-old American student, is guilty of murdering her British housemate in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, the legal wrangling has in some ways just begun.
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And yet, Mr. Dershowitz called the verdict “totally predictable,” saying that the trial was just a “confirmation of the investigation.”
He added: “This is not the end of the line.”
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One leading scholar on international law said that in the context of Italy’s complicated judicial system, and its stark differences with the legal process in the United States, this case could have important international ramifications.
“I think this is a scandal of the first order,” said George P. Fletcher, Columbia University’s Cardozo professor of jurisprudence. “I don’t think this is an expression of anti-Americanism.”
Rather, Professor Fletcher said, this verdict came about because the Italian judicial system has not “adapted correctly” the American judicial system. “We are the only country in the world that has a real jury system,” Mr. Dershowitz said.
In Italian criminal cases, the jury includes two professional judges, one of whom is the presiding judge in the case. “Many of the European countries have this mixture,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “In general, the lay jurors don’t have as much lay influence as the professional judges.”
Also, the jury is not sequestered until deliberations, opening them to the inflated media coverage of a trial. And in the case of Ms. Knox, there seemed to be leeway about how much inflammatory prejudicial evidence was allowed.
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“In the United States, character evidence does not come to play in the trial unless the defendant puts it in play,” Mr. Fletcher said. “The prosecution can’t come into court and say my guy is a bad guy. In this case, even if there a sexual motive, so what if, say, she had a dozen boyfriends? That is not relevant here.”
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As Rachel Donadio writes in The Times:
Unlike in the American system, where appeals center on issues of law, not fact, in the Italian system, defendants can ask to retry the entire case from scratch in the first round of appeals.
This is known as a de novo review.
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Moreover, in Italy a jury does not need to be unanimous but only needs a majority to convict on murder. The entire jury deliberates on the verdict, while the judge decides the sentence and awards the damages. How the jury in this case voted has not yet been released, nor has a longer explanation of the verdict. That could take up to 90 days.
More here:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/an-american-in-the-italian-wheels-of-justice/?hpThe reason I highlighted the section about the jury is because the presiding judge is part of that system. Judge Mignini is someone I had read about a long time before this trial.
Here were my observations:
I became familiar with Judge Mignini long before Knox was in his courtroom. I read 'The Monster of Florence' by Douglas Preston about a serial killer who attacked young couples. The book not only delves into who the killer could be, it also naturally includes the handling of the crimes by the Italian police and justice system.
Preston and his co-author Spezi became suspects themselves in a Kafkaesque twist. They had cast aspersions on the guilt of a couple of people that were accused of the crimes. The people accused were treated no better than Knox as they were declared guilty by the police and then the evidence was made to fit the crime. The people in charge really went after Preston and Spezi in order to destroy their character and thus their conclusions.
Preston has commented on the Knox trial and has been a spectator. He is not an unbiased person. However, reading about the actions of Mignini and others in the serial killer case, the parallels between the techniques used against the suspects years apart are striking.
The serial killer case and the Knox case are both very high profile cases. They both were guaranteed to receive tons of press, and the authorities were under the gun to find a killer. In both cases, they declared who the killer was and then got backed into a corner when things fell apart. In the Knox case, I believe they are loathe to publicly once again be seen as inept and have used everything under the sun to cast her in a negative light. The evidence is so suspect that they have chosen to bolster it by making her a monster.
Mignini is a piece of work. Google Douglas Preston and you will find a myriad of articles about his earlier run in with Mignini and the Italian justice system. You will also find his take on the Knox trial.
I am not going to defend the cases in our own justice system that beggar belief. They can be as twisted and convoluted as anything here. However when I heard the name Mignini, I thought that Knox was toast. I was right.
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