Europe: Painting Amanda Knox as a sex-crazed killer

She looks like “an all-American Miss Perfect,” but she’s really “a coldhearted killer,” said Pete Samson in Britain’s The Sun. After a trial that lasted for months, Amanda Knox, 22, an American college student studying in Italy, was convicted in Italy last week of murdering her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. Prosecutors told the six-member jury that Knox “is fascinated by dangerous sex and harbors dark fantasies of rape,” and that she hated Kercher for criticizing her lifestyle. Knox apparently carried condoms with her all the time, the state noted, and even owned a vibrator. In the prosecution’s telling, after a “drug-fueled” orgy, Knox, her Italian boyfriend, and a third person, African immigrant Rudy Guede, forced Kercher to have sex with them. Then Guede and the boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, held Kercher down “while the American slit her throat.”

It was a “bizarre sex game” gone wrong, said Ryan Parry in Britain’s Daily Mirror. Knox—known to her friends back home as “Foxy Knoxy”—is an “evil temptress” who resented the chaste ways of her “pretty roommate.” Her behavior after the murder was callous in the extreme. Police officers said she was chatting with her boyfriend and even turning cartwheels in the hall of the police station. During her interrogation, she tried to divert suspicion from herself by fingering an innocent man, the owner of the bar where she waitressed. Ultimately, she and Sollecito were condemned by the DNA evidence found on a knife in Sollecito’s apartment.

Actually, the evidence was far from conclusive, said John Hooper in Britain’s The Observer. In fact, it seems that the only thing prosecutors “proved” was that Knox was promiscuous. They presented little hard evidence. The DNA in question wasn’t obtained until weeks after the crime, so could easily have been contaminated, and the knife didn’t fit the wounds on Kercher’s body. There was nothing to indicate that Knox had been in the room where the body was found—“not a single fingerprint belonging to either Knox or her boyfriend,” while Guede’s prints were everywhere. Guede was convicted of the murder in an earlier trial. Yet the jury was under intense pressure to convict Knox and Sollecito as well. “Italy is a country in which the preservation of face is of enormous importance,” and the reputations of many prominent Italians—from the detectives who botched the evidence collection to the prosecutors who concocted the motive—were at stake. Some Italian lawyers expect the verdicts to be overturned on appeal.

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This case “casts suspicion” on the entire Italian justice system, said Lucia Annunziata in Italy’s La Stampa. Indeed, “the Knox trial is just the latest to raise doubts.” Several other prominent murder trials in recent years were marked by similar flaws. In each of them, “the investigation was confused, as evidence was collected, then changed, and new evidence suddenly introduced in the middle of the trial.” And prosecutors who lacked hard evidence relied instead on psychology. “The culprit is not one who is proved to have done wrong, but one who arguably would do so.” In the Knox case, there may also be political repercussions. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she will review whether “anti-Americanism may have tainted the trial.” A thorough investigation could well “expose the weakness of our judicial system to the world.”