When the verdict was read, Amanda slithers like Jello pudding down in her chair. My initial reaction is that she falsely believed her conviction had been upheld. Of course, she was acquitted, other than her frame-up of her ex-employer, bar owner Patrick Lumumba. The Daily Mail missed the boat too, and had to pull some bad reporting from their web page. This is not new, confusion with the Italian court proceedings has been obsequiously omnipresent during the past four years.
As I try to make sense of something like more than 6,000 news reports on Amanda Knox's new-found freedom, I walk away with one clip of gold that hasn't been spun to death as cotton-candy, pandered from the columns of international news services, anxious to scoop Foxy Knoxy in her final moment of glory. This clip, in its pristine condition, has to be the unfiltered self-defense of Amanda arguing for her own innocence yesterday.
You need to experience it in its entirety. You must hear it in Italian also. Heed my warning, this English translation, which is out of context, doesn't measure up to Amanda's stirring Ciceronian pleas for vindication, with the rapture and conviction singularly found in a person falsely accused, and maligned in the press, as some kind of witch such as was found in the Puritan debacle in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692.
"I did not kill, I did not rape, I did not steal. I was not there. I want to go back home. I want to go back to my life. I don't want to be punished. I don't want my life and my future to be taken away for something I didn't do."
At least 50 violations in the gathering of evidence have been cited by Amanda's defense and these court-appointed independent experts, especially demonstrating that DNA could have (and probably was) contaminated by the Perugian police, who investigated Meredith Kercher's murder the day after Halloween in 2007. One item that stands out for mishandling is the tattered bra clasp of Meredith's.
Not to go back through the maze of missing links, or evidence that makes little sense, but rather to bring a sort of synthetic closure to a case that is essentially unsolved and so will remain through-out eternity. I've studied the case many times before, and I'm convinced that petty drug-dealer and small time criminal, the Ivorian Rudy Guede, acted alone. Yet definitive proof is ineffable!
Meredith's blood, traced from the knife found at Raffaele Sollecito's apartment is one loose end that's most troubling. My best theory is that Amanda and Meredith had used the incriminating utensil at this haunted mansion, sitting on a hill where they were short-lived roommates. In other words, on one occasion, Meredith had cut herself accidentally when maybe she was chopping carrots or onions. Nothing more to it.
When Amanda came upon the crime scene that morning, she knew she hadn't done it, but remembered the accident from an earlier occasion, and took the knife out of the spook house, knowing full and well it would point the finger at her. Why she and Raffaele didn't completely dispose of this knife is anybody's guess. It also underscores their innocence in terms of the low priority status they attached to this ill-fated utensil.
I will jump off that meteor of a tangent before I vanish into a galaxy of catastrophic contradiction and cruel befuddlement, where fulfillment is the alluring and unreachable Grapes of Tantalus! The crime scene had been compromised. Efforts at reconstruction or a simulation are the fluff of fairy tales. Let's simply celebrate Amanda's freedom and put these ghosts back into a musty trunk and bury it (once and for all) in grandma's attic.
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