An Italian court today re-convicted University of Washington student Amanda Knox. Probably what happens next is her legal team will appeal that verdict to a higher Italian court, but CNN’s legal analyst believes this conviction is likely to stand. This analyst also expects Italy to ask the U.S. to extradite Knox to Italy to serve another Italian sentence. Then the question becomes whether the U.S. would honor such a request, or refuse to extradite Knox (a U.S. citizen) on grounds the Italian judicial system subjected her to double jeopardy, which is impermissible under the U.S. legal system. Some American legal experts quoted by the media believe the U.S. would refuse extradition on that basis. The argument goes like this: If the Italian court that freed her is deemed to have acquitted her, and not merely vacated her conviction, then retrial constitutes double jeopardy. In America, an acquittal cannot be appealed or retried. But other legal experts disagree. Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, a nationally-recognized criminal law expert, believes Knox will be extradited if she loses her Italian appeal of this latest conviction. Certainly, Knox is worried about being returned to Italy and imprisonment against her will. But overarching all of the legal issues, and even this possibility, the burning question on her mind must be: Will she ever get to live any semblance of a normal life? And for those of us fortunate enough to be living unfamous, boring, utterly normal lives, perhaps the lesson of her experience is that we should be very grateful that we are.
Hey bunny ..
Do you lawyers even care if she was g-u-I-l-t-y?
From what I remember of the case she certainly could be. Doesn’t Italy use the Napoleonic standard?
As for how she lives the rest of her life, presumably she knows what happened. IF she is innocent, I spect she will fade into America’s great collection of the formerly famous.
Of course she’s guilty. The real question is, guilty of what? At a minimum, she’s guilty of being a convenient scapegoat for police who can’t solve a crime. Other guilt scenarios are possible, of varying degrees of culpability. If we frame this question as a multiple-choice quiz, your odds of picking the correct answer are slightly better than a monkey’s. Unless, of course, you were there and have personal knowledge of the victim’s untimely death.
Horse pucky. You confuse a fact with the chance of determining the fact.
In fact she is or is not guilty. What happens to her in the future will depend on which of these is true.
As for the process, the clear fact is that the adversarial trial process has very little to do with determining guilt vs innocence, I do not know how to make a prefect process, but the current one could obviously be made better in many ways. Here is a start. Lawyers who intentionally mislead a jury, regardless of which side of a case they are on, should be charged with and tried for a felony.