Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [30]
She was less certain about where she stood with Raf:
Something interesting that has come up is about Raffaele. Apparently he told newspapers (though who can trust them) that all I’ve done is made his life crazy and he wants nothing more to do with me. Ouch.
Raffaele also wrote a diary as he waited for the trial to begin, complaining, as befits his privileged upbringing, about having no slippers and no one to clean the toilet. He described the cold floors in his cell and the Moroccan inmates next door who beat their heads against the wall screaming for another dose of heroin. During the summer of 2008, Sollecito began writing to his hometown paper, effectively developing his own column, which always began “Cari Amici della Piazza—dear friends in the square,” a familiar political cry in Italian villages. “I continue to serve my sentence in hell before being convicted of a crime,” he informed the folks back home in Puglia. “I hope someone will remember that I’m still here and that I’m innocent.” He supplied vivid details about living in isolation and befriending a family of cockroaches.
Every scrap of information about Amanda and Raffaele—every photo, every diary entry—was front-page news, avidly consumed throughout Italy and especially in and around Perugia. Most Italian trials are decided by a panel of judges, and only in rare circumstances do they include additional jurors who, in fact, are called “civilian judges.” Their names are drawn from a computerized list with no vetting about their opinions or their exposure to the case, and they are compensated for their time according to their level of education and current salary. The investigation of the Kercher murder dragged on for nearly a year, and for all that time, those who would eventually be called to sit in judgment on Amanda and Raf were bombarded by sensational journalism about them.
The Italian system does, however, allow for a quicker “fast-track” trial if a defendant agrees to fewer witnesses and limited evidence. And that’s what Rudy Guede, arrested November 20, 2007, fourteen days after Amanda and Raffaele, requested.
6
“I Am Not the One Who Took Her Life. But I Didn’t Save Her”
RUDY GUEDE’S INVOLVEMENT in the death of Meredith Kercher, and how that relates to the prosecution of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, has been the most misreported aspect of this case. The Knoxfriendly American press usually told the story like this: Amanda, Raffaele, and Patrick Lumumba were all arrested in the early days of the investigation, and then the police found the real killer, Rudy Guede. The authorities soon released Lumumba, but in order to save face—so important in Italian culture!—they stuck with their original theory of multiple killers and refused to let the two nice white kids go free even after Rudy was convicted of the murder! This was the line taken, for example, in this exchange with CNN’s legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, in June 2009:
JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, I just think—the thing that people don’t realize about this case is that someone has been convicted of killing this woman. There is the guy—
CAMPBELL BROWN: One of the guys, he’s already in jail.
TOOBIN: He’s already in jail and he’s been convicted based on DNA evidence, and seems like pretty good evidence of killing this woman with a knife. Why is this woman on trial now?
ANCHOR JAMIE FLOYD: Well, I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why she’s on trial. Because as in our country, certainly over there, the authorities went out in front of the story. They put themselves on the line, naming this young woman and her boyfriend and they don’t want to admit a mistake. It’s that simple. They don’t want to admit they made a mistake, nor does the media.
The reality is quite different. Most importantly, Rudy was convicted as one of three killers, with the judge in his fact-track trial voicing his conviction that Rudy acted in consort with Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito