Amanda Knox will again go before an Italian court

[DanTex]

121. Yes good talking to you.

Some final thoughts.

First, I don't have any certainty at all that she's guilty, just my relatively uninformed opinion. I could very easily be totally wrong. However, as I posted upthread, I've read accounts of the case by informed and impartial observers, and the closest I could find to a consensus is that the case is pretty strong. For example, Alan Dershowitz (who I don't like, but he sure knows his criminal law) has stated that with the same evidence, in the US she would almost certainly have been found guilty. Some American journalists posted in Italy have made similar statements. These are the closest I could find to some middle ground between the mainstream US press, and the mainstream UK/Italy press.

As far as the court case and extradition. First, if the case is as weak as you are saying, I think there's a good chance that the Italian Supreme Court will find her innocent. That will avoid all this.

But if not, the only prediction I would make is that any extradition or non-extradition will not be based on justice, but on politics. I don't believe that there are any grounds to deny extradition based on the judicial proceedings. If this weren't a high-profile case, there would be no question about extradition. If Italy doesn't ask for extradition, it will be because they don't want to have an international incident. If they do and the US denies it, it will be for political reasons. Either way, it will be a PR victory, not a legal one.


One last thing. What this case reminds of, more than anything else, is (oddly) the Lance Armstrong case. There again, the entire US media and public were sure that he was being unfairly attacked, that it was a rogue prosecutor, that the system was a kangaroo court, that it was anti-Americanism and jealousy from Europeans, that there was "no evidence", etc. I remember this because I tried to discuss this, both on and off DU, before the latest report came out.

On the other hand, within the cycling community, it is not an exaggeration to say that 95% of what came out of the USADA report had been common knowledge for many years. I'm not even "in the community", and even I knew about it. Nothing in the report surprised me, I could almost have written it. I remember telling people, well before the report, not only is Armstrong a doper, he is a leader of it, he forced other people to dope or leave the team, he had the best doping doctor on contract, and his whole success is due to having the best organized doping program.

And then, when it came out, there was this spectacle of the whole media acting shocked, even though if even one American journalist had had the guts to go against the mainstream (and expose him/herself to the wrath of the Armstrong PR/legal machine) and do a little digging, they would have known all this.

With the Knox case, again, there are all the same charges, the same discrepancy between US and foreign media, the same eerie certainty in the US this is all about nothing, the same PR offensive, when certain credible voices like Dershowitz and others tell a very different story. It rings a bell for me.