In November 2007, a British college student named Meredith Kercher was brutally murdered in her rented apartment in Perugia, Italy. Her roommate, a pretty Seattle native, Amanda Knox, admitted under interrogation that she had committed the crime, but later retracted her confession, claiming police abuse. Nevertheless, Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were tried and convicted of Kercher's rape and murder last week in an Italian court.
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The Knox trial was fraught with controversy, and the media coverage in the Italian and British press was obsessive. Papers painted Knox as an ice queen, a libertine, and a demon. Speculating wildly, prosecutor Giuliano Mignini accused Knox of "harboring hatred against Meredith" until "the time came for taking revenge," and drunkenly attempting to drag Kercher into "heavy sexual games." Moreover, Knox's family argued the DNA test upon which the case rested was compromised. U.S. cable shows declared the verdict a sham, shredding the evidence and the court's conduct. And now, the Knox case is turning into an international trial on the reliability of Italy's justice system.
The truth is, Italians have long since recognized the unreliability and compromised nature of their courts. At the moment, the Italian public's trust in the justice system is at an all-time low. According to a November poll by Euromedia research group, only 16 percent of Italians fully trust it; just two years ago, the figure was 28 percent. And Italian civil rights groups are intense in their criticism of what they view as kangaroo courts.
For one, they say that coerced confessions and the use of dubious forensic evidence, as might have happened in the Knox case, are way too common. "Inquiries are conducted without any reliable methods," says Roberto Malini, president of EveryOne, a nongovernmental organization that defends ethnic minorities in jail. "Tests take place solely in the laboratories of the state police. There's no independent lab, and independent observers do not have access to the police's work."
He also claims that prosecutors routinely present evidence as proof. "Recently we've followed the case of Romulus Mailat, a young man accused of raping and murdering a woman in Rome," Malini says. "The prosecutors [said] the defendant had blood under his fingernails, assuming it was the victim's. Oddly enough, they didn't think of taking a DNA test. The defendant's lawyer had to ask for it. When finally the test was taken, the prosecutors claimed it was unreliable because the blood had been reportedly altered by water, and they refused to show the results." Mailat was convicted.
Legal experts also share concerns about Italy's bar for admissibility. Il Giornale, a conservative newspaper, for instance, recently published an interview with Marco Morin, a Venice-based firearms expert who declared he no longer wanted to work in Italian courts. "In the United States, federal judges must study a 637-page manual in order to be able to evaluate [forensic] evidence," he told the newspaper. "Here, they accept everything without questioning, as long as it comes from the institutional laboratory."
Further, some Italians believe the media is complicit in "creating a general sense of social alarm," says Malini, pressuring authorities to arrest, indict, and sometimes even convict suspects without solid evidence. Newspapers routinely blame blood crimes on suspects belonging to "dangerous minorities" -- that is, immigrants from Romania or Italian Roma -- not just perverting the course of justice, but stoking racism to boot.
"Here in Italy trials take place in TV, rather than in court," Judge Francesco Cananzi, a representative of the national council of magistrates, publicly stated this year. And as the Knox case demonstrated, the court of public opinion is often defamatory. For instance, the Italian press routinely demonizes defendants by revealing embarrassing details about their personal lives, even if unrelated to the trial -- such as the pornography kept on their home computers. Knox's alleged sexual promiscuity, even her preferred underwear, made headlines across the globe.
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