Posts Tagged ‘Sollecito and Knox’

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The EU works. A bit. And slowly

January 25, 2019

As the Guardian reports below, the EU has finally taken down Italy’s pants and spanked both its cheeks for its grotesque, puerile, unprofessional and corrupt handling of the Meredith Kercher murder case. This is edifying and reminds us that the EU does perform a vital role in setting standards for its more backward members. If only, however, the EU would do more to enforce those standards in a uniform fashion.

Within Italy, the Sollecito-Knox case has led to zero change that I am aware of. Giuliano Mignini, the original narcissistic Italian magistrate-nut-job, continues to work as a public prosecutor in Perugia. No policeman, as far as I know, has been sanctioned for the many, many laws the police broke. And Italy still has no equivalent of the UK’s Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE, 1984), which makes collusion between courts and police very difficult by imposing a review layer between them — what in the UK is called the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Italy has every single one of the judicial and police problems that led to the passage of the PACE in the UK 35 years ago. But because Italy is presently masquerading as a country called Shitaly, it won’t get on and do the same thing.

 

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Amanda Knox.
 Amanda Knox. Photograph: NBC NewsWire/Reuters

Amanda Knox: European court orders Italy to pay damages

The European court of human rights has ordered Italy to pay Amanda Knox €18,400 for police failures to provide her access to a lawyer and a translator during questioning over the 2007 killing of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Perugia.

The ruling opens the way for Knox’s lawyers to challenge her last remaining conviction, for malicious accusation, in the Italian courts.

The court, in Strasbourg, declared that Italy must pay Knox €10,400 in damages plus €8,000 to cover costs and expenses.

As well as concluding authorities had twice violated her right to a fair trial, the ECHR also found they had failed to investigate her complaints she had been subjected to degrading treatment, including being slapped on the head and deprived of sleep. The court did not, however, uphold her complaint of ill-treatment.

The 31-year-old American’s convictions for murder and sexual assault were previously overturned. She was also found guilty by an Italian court of making a malicious accusation, by allegedly suggesting someone else was guilty of the murder.

The killing of Kercher, a Leeds University European Studies student on a one-year exchange course in Umbria, generated global headlines for several years as charges of sexual assault and murder were fought through the courts – exposing Italy’s justice system to international criticism.

Knox, a language student and Kercher’s flatmate, and Knox’s Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were initially charged with sexually assaulting and killing her. Kercher was stabbed in the neck.

The following year Knox was also charged with malicious accusation for suggesting another person should be a suspect. Italian detectives alleged she was trying to hide her responsibility for the attack by blaming someone else. Knox wants to have that conviction quashed.

Judges at the ECHR said the Italian government had failed to show that Knox’s restricted access to a lawyer had not “irreparably undermined the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”.

Meredith Kercher.
 Meredith Kercher. Photograph: PA

“Ms Knox had been particularly vulnerable, being a foreign young woman, 20 at the time, not having been in Italy for very long and not being fluent in Italian,” the court noted.

The ECHR’s decision was “not a big surprise for me because the supreme court already said there were many mistakes,” said Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova. “That is one of the reasons that invited us to tell Amanda to go to Strasbourg. For me this is a certification of a mistake, probably the biggest legal mistake in the last years in Italy, also because the attention that this case has had.”

Dalla Vedova said of the malicious accusation conviction: “It is impossible to compensate Amanda for four years in prison for a mistake. There will be no amount. We are not looking for compensation of damages. We are doing this on principal.”

In 2009, Knox was convicted in an Italian court of falsifying a break-in at their Perugia flat, sexual assault, murder and defamation. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison. Sollecito was also found guilty of the attack and sentenced to 25 years.

Both appealed. In 2011, the Perugia court of appeal acquitted the pair of the more serious charges, but upheld Knox’s conviction for malicious accusation.

After nearly four years in custody, Knox was released and returned to the US. She appealed again to challenge the malicious accusation conviction. It was quashed but in 2014 she was re-convicted of both malicious accusation and murder.

The murder conviction was again annulled by the court of cassation, the country’s highest court, the following year but the malicious accusation conviction was not removed. Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede is serving a 16-year sentence for his role in the killing.

Lawyers for Knox, who lives in Seattle, then appealed to the ECHR to overturn the last remaining conviction. They argued she was denied the right to legal assistance when first interviewed by police in 2007, was not given access to a professional or independent interpreter and that she did not receive a fair hearing.

Knox has always denied any involvement in the murder.

 

More:

I wrote a ton of stuff about this case while it was going on. It ought to all be under the ‘Italy to avoid’ tab

 

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World’s sickest joke ends

March 28, 2015

Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox have been acquitted of the murder of Meredith Kercher, a crime there was never any serious evidence they were involved in. The process took more than eight years (quite quick for Italy); they were convicted, acquitted, convicted, acquitted, and spent four years in prison.

Meanwhile Rudy Guede, who did kill Meredith Kercher, and in the most brutal, painful manner after first sexually assaulting her, is already enjoying day release from prison.

There will be no enquiry into the handling of the case by prosecuting magistrate Giuliano Mignini, whose bizarre theories and lack of professionalism had convinced two journalists to write a book about his ‘investigative’ techniques long before the Kercher case. Nor will there be an enquiry into the conduct of elements of the Perugia police that operated with total unprofessionalism and outside the law during the investigation.

Some people on the Knox side are so relieved the torment is over that they are saying their faith in Italian justice is restored. This is a terrible thing to say. The only useful purpose the case has served is to advertise to the world just how hopeless the Italian justice system is and perhaps give a tiny push towards it one day being reformed.

I have cited European Union reports on the Italian justice system in previous blogs under the ‘Italy to Avoid’ category. One other pointer I noticed recently is that the World Bank, as of 2015, ranks Italy 147th in the world for enforcement of contracts.

 

More:

Amanda Knox’s account of her trial and incarceration is well worth a read. It isn’t perfect, but it is a serious book, much more serious than many others that have been written about her and Sollecito. (By a curious coincidence, the Capanne prison where she and Sollecito were held is the same one where the carpenter on our house in Italy died; a hippy, arrested for marijuana possession, there is a good prima facie case that he was beaten to death. Needless to say, his friends who tried to pursue legal recourse will not be getting any.)

 

Later:

The first media outlet to have put the boot into the Italian legal system that I have seen is The Economist. Bless.

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Ferguson versus Perugia

November 27, 2014

Ferguson 2

 

 

 

 

 

Ferguson 3

Ferguson 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Ferguson, Missouri smoulders (literally and figuratively) following the decision not to indict a police officer who shot an unarmed black man dead, it is interesting to read Joshua Rozenberg’s opinion piece about the systemic failings of the arcane grand jury system that is still used in around 20 American states. It was a grand jury that decided not to indict the police officer.

What leaps out at me are the similarities between the functioning of grand juries (which only decide if there is a case to answer) and the functioning of Italy’s actual court system, as seen in the Sollecito-Knox satanic ritual murder trial in Perugia, about which I have blogged a great deal (see the ‘Italy to avoid’ tab).

The basics of a grand jury are that the prosecutor decides which witnesses to call and which witnesses to grant immunity from potential prosecution. There is no screening of jurors for potential bias and no objections can be raised about the choice of jurors. Proceedings, framed by the prosecutor who asks the questions (there is a theoretical right for jurors to ask questions at the end of testimony), are held entirely in secret and the grand jury decision is final. A longer outline of grand jury rules is here. Mostly it is the good ole boys of the south who still use grand juries, but a good number of supposedly more liberal states in the north-east do too; see here.

Well, if you look at the Sollecito-Knox satanic ritual murder trial in Perugia, several things that shocked me were: no capacity to screen jurors for bias, prosecution framed by the prosecuting magistrate (Giuliano Mignini) without any independent oversight, and jury deliberations framed and overseen in camera by the presiding judge rather than taking place independently. I am not saying this is a perfect analogue, but the excessive power granted to prosecutors and the lack of transparency do appear to be commonalities.

Of course in America the problem afflicts the indictment system in some states. In Italy it afflicts the entire national judicial process.

 

Later:

Here is another recent grand jury, in New York, failing to indict police officers over the death of a black man who was put in a choke-hold, and kept in one despite saying ‘I can’t breathe’. It was all captured on video. Coverage from the FT (sub needed). And here is coverage from The Guardian of protests in many US cities against the decision not to indict; again, the video of the police action is embedded.

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No, no, no

July 1, 2014

The Guardian, which has reported Sollecito-Knox pretty well, falls asleep on the job. Sorry to those who don’t give a damn about Italy, but this complaint to the readers’ editor explains:

…

I ask you to take a  look at the 1 July Guardian story (no byline) about the appeal of Raffaele Sollecito. It asserts (par 4) that Knox and Sollecito have previously always had a ‘rigidly joint defence’. This is 180 degrees from the truth. Part of the reason for the original conviction was that they did not have a rigidly joint defence. If Sollecito’s pending appeal implies the possibility of Knox’s guilt as part of his defence, it will in fact be consistent with the line his lawyers have pursued in the past.

If you link to my blog entries on this subject and scroll down to September 19 2012, you will find a germane entry which references, among other things, much more accurate reporting by your own paper.
I am not sure if you have just picked up an agency report here, but a court case carrying a life sentence deserves better treatment.

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Ping pong

January 31, 2014

In Florence, they have re-convicted Sollecito and Knox.

My views on this case have not changed so I won’t add to what is already filed under the Italy to Avoid tab.

The Guardian has a video interview with Knox prior to the verdict that is embedded into its news coverage.

I would also recommend Knox’s book about her experiences which I think is very good and has sold very well. It isn’t available in the UK because of spineless publishers (they would say the UK’s litigant-friendly libel law), but you should be able to order from Amazon in the US or somesuch.

 

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Weekend reading & viewing: on the theme of money (and other stuff)

May 11, 2013

Gold

George Monbiot has a go at tackling the ‘what motivates the very rich?’ issue. His thoughts are not a million miles from mine. What I have noticed about the billionaires I spent time with for research is that their reading matter consists largely of copies of Forbes, that they are engaged in ‘a game’ against their peer group in which they have little perspective on the challenges facing a wider society, and that therefore their activities need to be framed by rules made by politicians.

How four tourists were charged Euro64 for four ice creams in Rome and how the bar says it is fair.

Meanwhile Sir Michael Jagger and Keith Richards, well-known anti-Establishment radicals, wax lyrical on the price function, the price of tickets for their US gigs, and why US$65 million is a fair return on a short tour. It’s very like the defence put up by the Roman ice cream sellers, except with more ‘you know, man’ and ‘some cat said’ thrown in.

I was once hitchhiking through Ireland and saw the most arresting biblical words I have come across written on a wall in huge letters. It didn’t seem like much at the time because Ireland was still pisspoor back then. But the words have gained resonance since: ‘What shall it profit a man that he should gain the world and thereby lose his soul?’ Let me know the answer when you have a moment Roman, or Mario, or Sir Mick.

If this isn’t enough about the trouble that money can cause, I am informed there will be in interview with Stanley Ho’s daughter Pansy in tomorrow’s UK Sunday Times. Here’s the background from this blog if you don’t know it.

Otherwise:

Here is a review of Amanda Knox’s biography. Here is another one by the co-writer of Sollecito’s book. And here is a typically snooty, but also useful, review by the Grey Matriarch of Manhattan.

I would recommend reading this book even though I have not done so yet. However you will have to buy an import if you are in the UK or get an electronic download (as I will). This is because British libel law and publisher spinelessness mean that Knox’s book has not been published in Britain.

Finally, here is a link to The Economist blogging on the subject of China Dreams. I post this for no better reason than that I wrote a book called The China Dream in 2002 and I think this was the first use of the term in this recent period. However I seem to recall finding one or more older books in the British library that referenced China dreams. Mind too befuddled to remember clearly and no time to check. (Later: for some reason The Economist then publishes a letter saying what the blog already pointed out in the print edition.)

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UKIP if you want to / Weekend reading & viewing

May 5, 2013

So UKIP (full name ‘UKIP if you want to, we are going to set this cross on fire’)  has won 100+ council seats.

To me it is a symptom of a less inclusive, more unequal society fomenting a brew of angry old and ignorant people (and old and ignorant people) that the Conservative Party can no longer accommodate because they have become too angry and prejudiced even for the Tories.

In America they call this sociological phenomenon the Tea Party and I am surprised the press is not going for more of an ‘ooh, we’ve now got one too’ angle. Indeed UK leader Nigel Farage (unfortunate foreign-sounding name, no?) says UKIP is indeed the Tea Party wrapped in a different flag.

The bigger issue at stake here is whether UKIP is more of a problem for the Tories or for Labour. Hopeful Tories say that since they got a quarter of this week’s local election vote, and so did UKIP, together the right has half the vote if it can just, like Humpty, be put back together again. This sounds superficially tremendous, but the US experience suggests it is not, because when the far right of the right-wing becomes so nutty that your mother-in-law starts to seem reasonable, it really benefits the left. If the Labour Party can generate a few sensible policies (a la Obama), and get rid of Ed Balls and other remaining Blair-Brown detritus, it may be set fair for the 2015 general election. A single term of opposition for what Blair and Brown did to their country would be an extraordinarily low price to have to pay…

 

Weekend reading & viewing:

Why it is very dangerous to give police any new powers (in cartoon format).

This repeated, just in case anybody has not seen it. Give Obama a tv show, now.

Amanda Knox’s interview with ABC‘s Diane Sawyer to coincide with the release of her book. Part 1 (only about 8 mins)

This is very funny and goes out to all my friends planning to ghettoise their children in expensive British boarding schools.

Here’s more in the same vein.

Boycotting Google. I own shares in Google, but they are tax evading bastards and they promised not to be evil, so they are also hypocrites. Here is how you can substitute their services. I am trying out the duckduckgo search engine, so far without problems.

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Weekend reading: Italy and Spain and more

April 28, 2013

Italy gets a government that surely cannot last, led by a ‘left-wing’ politician whose uncle is the chief of staff to Silvio Berlusconi. Front up  a younger guy and put more women in the cabinet so the Germans think we’ve grown up, seems to be the plan. FT (sub needed) has a sensible leader about how political reform may be the only way to unlock the door to economic reform.

Meanwhile, in The Guardian Simon Hattenstone writes about his long correspondence with Amanda Knox, who faces a retrial for failing to be guilty of murder when everybody in Perugia knows she’s a witch.

In Spain, Almodovar has a new movie out about his country’s economic crisis. It sounds dark, funny and uplifting — whereas Italy has become shallow, unfunny and boring.

I quite like Krugman’s habit of leavening his blog with some decent music. And he has this very funny take-down of the Reinhart-Rogoff controversy over the relationship between debt and GDP from Colbert (you may need a VPN set to the US to view this). The theme of picking your data points to fit the hypothesis you already decided on is entirely consistent with what How Asia Works describes happening in World Bank reports about east Asian development in the 80s and 90s. Harvard, eh? Martin Wolf (sub needed) has a nice reminder of British industrial revolution history when debt was twice GDP. The best thing in How Asia Works on the non-linear relationship between debt and GDP growth is the financial history of South Korea, set out in Part 3. South Korea was more indebted than any Latin American state in the 1970s and 1980s but, unlike them, didn’t go bust because of what the debt was spent on.

If you are in London, this is superb. And very much on the theme of development.

Need more mirth?

Have a look at the curious tale of the Management Today review of How Asia Works…

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When Britain was like Italy

April 21, 2013

A day in London allows for a few minutes talking about How Asia Works on CNBC here, and a longer discussion on the UK’s Monocle Radio ‘Globalist’ programme, (beginning at the 16 minute mark).

In between I decide to spend a couple of hours wandering the corridors of the Royal Courts of Justice, as the large building that contains the High Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal on The Strand is confusingly called. The place is of interest to anyone who wants to understand the need to constantly reform institutions. In particular, Italians should visit this building. It was constructed in the late 19th century to stop the British justice system being what Italy’s is today.

Law Royal Courts panorama

Before anyone enters, the essential book to read is Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, probably his greatest, which centres on a legal case that has multiplied and gone on for so long that no one can really remember exactly what the case is about, or quite why it started. People just attend hearings because the case(s) has(ve) taken on life(ves) of its(their) own. All that is clearly remembered is that the whole, huge, expensive, draining, painful affair concerns the Jarndyce family, which is enshrined in the case name, Jarndyce v Jarndyce. The different sides of the Jarndyce family just do what the lawyers tell them, and the case does not end until it has consumed all the family’s money, and caused the death of a sympathetic character, because the system makes it possible for cases never to end.

Things were so bad in the British legal system by the 1860s — students of development should note that this had not stopped the British economy growing and becoming the world’s most powerful — that there was eventually a cross-party consensus that radical reform was necessary. A royal commission (essentially an independent review) was set up to consolidate a morass of different legal institutions under one roof, streamline procedures and simplify judicial processes so that the system worked. The Royal Courts of Justice, which opened with their 18 (now 88) courts in 1882, shunted Britain on from the world of Bleak House. Opening the court, Queen Victoria’s speech stated the aim was to ‘conduce to the more speedy and efficient administration of justice’.

Almost always, you can just wander in to a court here and sit down and listen to what is going on. I spent half an hour observing the goings on in each of two randomly selected courtrooms. In Italy, I haven’t seen courtrooms beyond the provincial level (except on television). But some very loose points of comparison can be offered. Here in London there is no chatting during court proceedings, no playing around with mobile phones, no lawyers saying hello to their friends and colleagues in court while ignoring their clients, no male lawyers dedicating their working day to trying to flirt with any woman in sight. And everything is taped. When I once asked to tape record proceedings in an Italian court the judge grudgingly acceded, but with a look that suggested I was proposing a coup d’etat.

Unlike Italian courts, the Royal Courts give a sense of being places where stuff gets done. This is not to say that there isn’t plenty wrong with the justice system in the UK. However, compared with Italy, this is the modern world. The Royal Courts are a living museum of institutional development that is well worth a visit. For the kids, there is a room displaying all the silly outfits that judges and lawyers have worn over the years — and thankfully wear less of these days. The grown-up exhibit is the institutional progress captured in quite a beautiful building with its varied, interesting and business-like courtrooms.

Could Italy have the same thing in the foreseeable future? One way to consider this is to remember that the leaders who made the British reforms of the 1870s possible were Gladstone and Disraeli, working in concert. Would you consider that any of the putative ‘reformers’ of contemporary Italian politics — Monti,Berlusconi, Bersani, or Grillo — is in their league?

More

Imagine this in Italy: Edwin Wilkins Field, one of the key reformers and the Secretary to the royal commission of 1865 on the Royal Courts of Justice, declined remuneration!

Evolution continues: didn’t have time to go see it, but the latest addition to the Royal Courts is the Rolls Building, opened in 2011.

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The Disneyland within Disneyland

March 26, 2013

Ital election Mickey face

Italian laywer toga

Upset, perhaps, that Italian politics is grabbing all the attention in the wake of recent elections, Italy’s judges are making a bold move to have the spotlight of international incredulity shine once more on their egomaniacal antics.

The national appeals court, the Court of Cassation, has sent the Meredith Kercher murder case back for a third trial, this time in Florence.

The headline reason (we won’t get the detailed ‘reasoning’ for up to 90 days) is that elements of the second trial were not conducted according to proper procedure.

To which the only response is: perhaps, but this is Italy, the Land of Unprofessionalism, where nothing is done entirely according to the rules.

On the other hand, the evidence that Sollecito and Knox were not responsible for the murder, that Rudy Guede was, and that police and magistrates broke countless laws in the course of the investigation and trial, is incontrovertible.

Nothing can now change the fact that the investigation of Meredith Kercher’s murder was staggeringly unprofessional, and that the handling of the physical evidence was disastrous.

These facts should have pointed Italy’s judiciary and its politicians to the need for urgent, radical reforms to the judicial and police systems (as recommended by the EU Commission, see below). Instead they are creating additional unnecessary pain for a large group of people, most obviously the victim’s family. And as ever in Italy, it is all done behind a gossamer veil of ‘propriety’.

More:

Guardian on the Court of Cassation decision.

In a report by the EU Commission last year, the human rights commissioner condemned the length of proceedings and the inefficiency of the Italian legal system, noting: ‘The complexity and magnitude of the problem is such that Italy needs nothing short of a holistic rethinking of its judicial and procedural system, as well as a shift in judicial culture, with a concerted effort from the Ministry of Justice and the High Council of the Judiciary, as well as judges, prosecutors and lawyers.’ Moreover, he said the problems are as much the fault of a self-serving judiciary as of politicians who fail to make judicial reforms: ‘While legislative action is necessary, it is not sufficient and should be complemented with organisational and management aspects for courts and judges, in line with the relevant guidelines of the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice. Existing examples, such as the experience of the First Instance Court of Turin, prove that good results can thus be obtained even within the current framework and without additional financial or human resources.’

In just over a month, Amanda Knox’s book about her experiences in Perugia will be out. One assumes that Giuliano Mignini will fire her off one of his suits for criminal defamation, as he did when Sollecito’s book was published.

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