Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [57]
The priority for the Sollecitos is getting Raffaele off suicide watch. Since the verdict, he has been increasingly withdrawn. He is in the sex offenders’ ward at Capanne, and like most of the inmates there, he is on heavy antidepressants. He has given up his studies, and his family says he has also given up hope. He has stopped writing letters to his daily newspaper, and he barely responds when his family comes to visit him. He knows enough about the Italian justice system to understand that his chances of getting off on the first round of appeal are slim. The thought of spending four or five years until the second level of appeal is too much for him to bear. His family is petitioning to have him moved closer to them in Puglia, but the prisons in the south are much rougher.
In Italy, the appeal process is complex and involves two levels. A full acquittal is rarely won on the first round, even though a full 50 percent of all cases are won on the second and final stage of the appeal. On the first round, the appeals judge can choose to overturn the conviction entirely or to uphold the decision and simply increase or reduce the sentence. In Rudy Guede’s appeal, which was heard around the same time that closing arguments were being made in Amanda and Raffaele’s trial, the judge chose to uphold the initial ruling; he agreed that Rudy murdered Meredith Kercher along with Amanda and Raffaele. But Rudy did win a reduction in his sentence from thirty to sixteen years for what the judge called “extenuating factors,” not least of which was his cooperation in placing Amanda and Raffaele at the crime scene.
Amanda and Raffaele can only begin their appeal process after Judge Massei’s reasoning, or motivazione, is released from the Corte d’Assise. The deadline is strict—Massei must file his report within ninety days of the verdict—and few Italian judges rush the deadline, determined to ensure that the person they have convicted serves the most time possible in the event his or her verdict is overturned. Judge Massei’s statement is expected in early March. After it is delivered, defense lawyers have forty-five days to officially file their appeal. There is very little they can do without first studying the intricacies of the judge’s reasoning. Even the slightest misstep by Judge Massei could give the defense a loophole to crawl through. The first-level appeals judge is from a higher Italian court than Judge Massei. This higher judge will review all the evidence and testimony from the first trial with a more highly qualified jury. In the initial case, the jury members only had to have a junior high school diploma. In the first appeal, they must be high school diploma or equivalent.
If Amanda and Raffaele lose in the first appeal round, their cases are automatically pushed to Italy’s highest cassazione court, where they have a better chance at a reversal. This level more closely corresponds to a U.S. appeals court; it does not retry the facts of the case, but focuses only on points of law, closely examining any procedural errors made during the investigation and trial. Did the evidence in the Knox case pass all legal requirements? The knife, surely not. Nor did the sneaker footprint that initially landed Raf in jail. The highest court must also examine the definition of each accusation. In Italy, first-degree murder requires motivation, yet Amanda, Raffaele, and Rudy were convicted without solid proof of a motive, by the prosecution’s own admission. The law also requires that an autopsy must conclusively point to sexual assault for a conviction on that charge, yet that was never medically proven in Meredith’s case.
It can take several