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Mignini's "Keystone Kops" Arrest British Doctor and Wife for Wild Poppies on Property

Giuliano Mignini

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Another tale of the Italian troll posing as a prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini.  This time he arrested a British doctor and his wife for wild poppies growing on their farm near Perugia, Italy.  Apparently, the poppies grew wild and on their own after the doctor had cleared the land during a restoration of the property.  Perugia's "Keystone Kops" arrested the doctor and his wife, both 58, in a dawn raid last Tuesday, sending an overwhelming force of patrol cars to apprehend the two, who spent the next three days in prison.  Apparently, the police believed the doctor to be growing illegal poppies for heroin production.

Clive Gillis, 58, was released yesterday after three days in prison when a judge threw out the case against him and his wife Nina. Mrs Gillis was freed from the hospital ward of a women's jail.

The GP from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, was the victim of jealousy from his neighbours, according to Niclaflavia Restivo, the judge who ruled the case lacked "any serious evidence".

So once again we see how easily it is for innocent people in Perugia, Italy to have their lives upset and their freedom abruptly ended for dubious reasons.  Since the Amanda Knox travesty, however, Perugian judges seem to be on the lookout for such nonsense, well aware that the world is watching.

It is amazing to me just how ready the Perugian police are to arrest first and ask questions later.  Couldn't they have performed an initial investigation first?  Interviewed the doctor, ran a background check?  Discussed a possible arrest with a judge in advance?  But no, the spirit of Mussolini is alive and well and living in Perugia.

Read it all here.

Giuliano Mignini, Agent of Injustice

Visualizing Justice in the Case of Amanda Knox

As we await the verdict in the Amanda Knox appeals trial, it is clear why and how two innocent students were imprisoned for four years for a crime that they did not commit.  It is because the chief prosecutor of Perugia, Italy, is not an agent of justice, but of injustice; not an honest warrior for truth, but for falsehood.  The man has such a massive ego that he believes his intuition is 100% accurate.  Whatever impressions first enter his mind are immutable truth, not subject to change based on evidence, no matter how compelling.  Evidence and proof are merely bureaucratic inconveniences, needed only to confirm his clairvoyance.  That which tends to refute his visions is to be devoutly ignored.

This is what happened in the Narducci case, where 21 defendants were prosecuted by Mignini in a different province,  Florence (the city of Perugia is in Umbria province).  There Mignini held no sway over the forensic teams and other law enforcement personnel, and lost every one of the 21 trials.  Justice triumphed, over the heavily damaged lives and fortunes of 21 innocents.  Mignini, however, did not learn from this, i.e. that his intuition and judgment were not so accurate as he believed.  He entered the trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito with the same irrational belief in his own infallibility.

Early on, within the first three days after the murder of Meredith Kercher, Mignini had formed an unshakable opinion that Knox and her boyfriend Sollecito were parties to the crime.  There was no evidence to support this belief, so the Perugian offices of justice went to work to either find or invent some.  The forensic team worked for Mignini and was not an independent authority committed to finding the truth, wherever it might lie, but to finding whatever Mignini wanted them to find.  To do otherwise could be detrimental to one's career, and reflecting on Mignini's recent past, to one's liberty as well.

When one is clairvoyant, like Mignini, proof is only a statutory annoyance, nothing more.  Even today, after all of his key evidence has been refuted or thrown out, Mignini is as convinced as ever of the absolute certitude of his unproven accusations.  No doubt, when the Italians finally get around to removing this massive ego from their system of justice, he can make a fine living as a fortune teller or soothsayer.

Whatever you might say about Giuliano Mignini, in spite of his exalted opinion of himself, he is not an agent of truth and justice, but an agent of falsity and injustice.  His delusional, ruthless abuse of his office have furthered both injustice and human suffering, a net loss to humanity and to civilization.  When this case is finally over, when Knox and Sollecito have finally been released to salvage their damaged lives, a form of justice, however tortured, will have been achieved.  But that's not enough.  Giuliano Mignini must be held to account for his crimes, for the many damaged lives and the suffering that he has caused.  He must be removed from office so that he can no longer victimize the innocent.  Further, the Italian system of justice must be reformed to prevent such injustice in the future.

I personally hope that Mignini will inhabit the prison cell soon to be vacated by Raffaele Sollecito.  Now that would be justice -- and a step in the right direction for Italy.

Related Video:  Ex-FBI agent Steve Moore speaks out on the trial from Perugia, Italy.

Amanda Knox Appeals Trial Ends Today: Verdict Next Week

New suspect in Meredith Kercher murder case? Or
is it another victim of Amanda Knox?  DNA on kitchen knife
indicates rye bread was slain in a Satanic ritual.  Either that
or in a sex game gone awry.   Will Mignini prosecute?

Amanda Knox's appeals trial in Perugia, Italy ends  today.  Yesterday, the defense put on an excellent summary of the case and why the prosecution's case is utterly flawed and unsupported by evidence.  Today the two accused, Knox and her friend Raffaele Sollecito, will make personal appeals to the jury.  A verdict is expected early next week, perhaps on Monday.

I have read about the case rather extensively, and I have no doubt that the two accused are completely innocent of the crime.  They were not present when the crime went down, had no motive for killing the pretty young victim, Meredith Kercher, and there are no witnesses and no evidence to support their conviction.  They should never have been indicted, never should have been tried, and most certainly never convicted.  However, the prosecution lied repeatedly throughout the first trial, destroyed evidence and obstructed justice.  Luminol indicated that footprints in the bathroom might contain blood, but specific tests for blood showed there was no blood.  Nevertheless, the prosecution (and many media outlets) proclaimed that the footprints were "bloody footprints."

However, the two major pieces of "evidence" on which the prosecution built its case were these:
(1) DNA found on a kitchen knife that they alleged was the murder weapon, and  
(2) DNA found on a bra clasp that was ripped from the bra of the victim during the crime.

First, let's review the knife and its DNA evidence.
A kitchen knife was chosen at random from a kitchen drawer in Raffaele's apartment, 15 miles away from the crime scene, and proclaimed to be the murder weapon.  It wasn't.

In the first place, it is absurd to think that Knox and Sollecito carried a kitchen knife to the crime scene, 15 miles away, used it to murder the victim, then washed it off and carried it back to be placed in a kitchen drawer.  Ridiculous.  As Mark Waterbury points out in The Monster of Perugia, there were plenty of kitchen knives in the cottage where the murder occurred, why would one need to be transported to and from the crime?

More importantly, the knife didn't fit the wounds on Kercher's body, it didn't match the bloody print of the actual murder knife left on her sheets, but the prosecution was bent on framing Knox and Sollecito (why is another story -- see today's ABC report for details) and presented it as key evidence.  A forensics lab, under the control of the prosecution, tested the knife for DNA and found (1) Amanda's DNA on the handle, providing shocking and irrefutable evidence that she once used the kitchen knife to prepare dinner, and (2) a very tiny amount of what might be DNA on the blade of the knife.  The prosecution alleged that it was Kercher's DNA.

That small amount of DNA was below the threshold of accurate testing by the lab's equipment, and might have been from contamination from other samples tested in the same lab.  The amount of DNA the tester, one  Dr. Stefanoni, retrieved from the blade was extremely small, 1/3 of a picogram.  A picogram is one one-trillionth of a gram.  Stefanoni used 1/3 of the sample to test for blood, and no blood was found.  Let me repeat: The DNA on the blade was not from blood. She then used all of the remaining sample to test for DNA, even though the sample was far too small to provide an accurate reading, overriding the testing equipment's TOO LOW indicator in order to do so.  Since all of this DNA was used up, there was no possibility for a second test to confirm the results.  However, it is highly doubtful that this substance was the victim's DNA; other experts who reviewed Stefanoni's results say it was apparently starch from rye bread.  (Perhaps Mignini will now issue a warrant for the arrest of a loaf of bread!)

Clearly, the kitchen knife and related DNA evidence prove absolutely nothing, except that the prosecution was reckless, amateurish and highly biased in their effort to manufacture the evidence needed to fit their preconceived theory of the crime.  The appeals court was right to throw it out.

Second, let's review the evidence of the bra clasp.
When Rudy Guede was raping the victim, he ripped off her clothes.  Her bra was found on the floor and tested for DNA evidence, but the bra clasp was left on the floor for 47 days among the dust and debris before it was picked up and tested.

The prosecution stated that Raffaele Sollecito's DNA was found on the bra clasp, indicating that he must have ripped off the bra and was part of the crime.  However, the DNA of at least three other people was also found on the bra clasp, but these samples were not profiled and the identities of the owners not explored.  When one is attempting to prove a preconceived theory, one does not bother with evidence that might lead elsewhere.

However, it is not at all clear that the prosecution's DNA test proves anything.  About 30% of household dust is dead skin cells.  Dead skin cells contain DNA.  Contamination of the bra clasp, either from 47 days of dust or from the forensic team's dirty gloves (as recorded on video), is almost a certainty.

Further, none of Raffaele's DNA was found on the bra itself.  This is rather incredible if Raffaele ripped off the bra.  Perhaps he ripped it off only by touching the tiny bra clasp in back, either using tweezers or his first finger and thumb.  Who knows what these satanic cultists will do during an orgy?

Some DNA strands were found to match some of the markers for Sollecito, but again, the DNA collected was not good enough to prove this beyond any shadow of a doubt.  One of the outside experts called in from Rome reviewed the DNA testing of the bra clasp, and found DNA markers that matched her own!  Perhaps she was the true murderer -- perhaps you were (can you prove you weren't in Perugia on November 1, 2007?).  It does prove, however, that the bra clasp evidence is worthless.  The appeals court was right to throw it out.

If Knox and Sollecito are exonerated, as they certainly should be, let us be clear:  they will not have been "let off on a technicality."  They will have been exonerated for a crime for which they had no guilt whatsoever.

The Massive Incompetence of the Perugian Police in the Amanda Knox Murder Trial

Perugian Police In Action

The massive incompetence of the Perugian police is breathtaking.  However, to be fair, their destruction of major evidence in the case may not have been  incompetence.  It may have been deliberate obstruction of justice, in order to frame the suspects under the command of chief prosecutor Giulano Mignini, no stranger to illegal and unethical methods of prosecution.  Let's review, shall we?

1.  Failure to affix the Victim's Time of Death.
Meredith Kercher's body was not examined by the coroner for more than 48 hours, making it impossible to fix the time of death in the usual manner -- by analyzing the drop in temperature, the onset of rigor mortis, etc.  The TOD is critically important to a murder case, because individuals can be eliminated from suspicion if they can establish their whereabouts at the time of death.  Fortunately, Meredith had a pizza dinner with several friends on the night of her death, and it is established that she last ate at 6 pm.  Food traveling through the digestive tract can be used as a secondary method of determining the TOD.  Mignini's control (formally or informally) of the entire Perugian legal structure resulted in a highly biased "motivation report," also known as the Massei Report after the judge who issued it.  The Massei Report disingenuously pushed the possible time of death to 11:30 pm, even though Kercher's stomach contents indicate her death occurred between 9:00 and 9:30 pm.  Both Knox and Sollecito were seen at the latter's apartment, 15 miles away, at the time of death.  They should have been eliminated as suspects early on, absent a conscious effort to frame them.

2.  Destruction of Computer Evidence.  The prosecution claimed Knox and Kercher disliked each other and had issues about rent money, cleanliness and other things.  However, this could have been proved or disproved by photos, email, letters and other documentation in the computers of the victims and the suspects. However, the Perugian police destroyed three out of four hard drives, ostensibly by accident:  those of Knox and Kercher, and one of Sollecito; the remaining drive on Sollecito's laptop was compromised by the use of the police for surfing the internet.  The defense proposed that the fried hard drives of the first three computers be sent to outside experts to see if the lost data could be recovered, but the prosecution refused.  It is reasonable to suspect that the police willfully destroyed evidence that refuted their case.

Update:  Another blogger in Perugia states that a fourth computer was also seized by the police, a laptop belonging to housemate Filomena Romanelli.  Her laptop was returned to her with the hard disk fried as well.  Gee, what an incredible string of bad luck!  Oh well, one out of five ain't bad.

3.  Failure to Tape the Interrogation of Amanda Knox.  A team of 12 interrogated Amanda Knox for many hours, during which she says they deprived her of food, water and sleep, screamed threats and insults in her face, cuffed her on the back of the head and subjected her to psychological torture.  It was from the use of this method that they coerced her into signing a false confession implicating her boss, Patrick Lumumba, who was targeted as a suspect. However, the police did not record the interrogation, either with video or audio, as required by Italian law, so Knox's claims cannot be verified.  It is entirely possible that the police did indeed tape the interrogations, but then  either destroyed the tapes or withheld them from the defense in order to obstruct justice. (As noted by author Mark Waterbury, the Perugian police recorded everything -- phone calls, text messages, email.  Not recording these interrogations would be out of character.)

4.  Failure to analyze a bank's security camera across the street from the crime scene.  The bank's camera would have recorded all comings and goings at the murder house, but the police did not access the camera until after the recordings were overwritten.  Although DNA, fingerprints and footprints clearly establish Rudy Guede's presence in the murder room, they do not refute the prosecution's claim that Guede was the invited guest of Knox and Sollecito, rather than a burglar who entered through a broken window on the second story.  (The Massei Report implausibly argues that the broken window was "staged" and not the actual point of entry by Guede.  Their argument is absurd and not supported by any evidence.)

5. The "loss" of twenty-nine wiretapped and recorded phone calls between Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, and between Raffaele and his father, and unable to be reviewed  by the defense (see here). One can only imagine the conversations that devastated Mignini's fanciful and imaginary theory of the crime.  It is reasonable to assume that these calls were "lost" because they exonerated the accused.  Either the police make the Keystone Kops look like CSI Miami, or they willfully obstructed justice by destroying exonerating evidence.  I report, you decide.

****

The government and legal system of Italy is very corrupt.  As disclosed by Wikileaks, our State Department is aware of this corruption.  Therefore, the willingness of judges and police officials to purposely frame innocents may seem unbelievable, but in Italy it appears to be both possible and probable.

Sources:  The Monster of Perugia:  the Framing of Amanda Knox, by Mark Waterbury, PhD. (See here for relevant excerpts.)
                Doug Bremner, M.D.  (See here)

More Shocking Information About Giuliano Mignini, Prosecutor of Amanda Knox

I am reading "The Monster of Perugia: the Framing of Amanda Knox" by Mark Waterbury. Waterbury discusses Mignini's past and it is quite revealing. Before Mignini framed Amanda Knox, he prosecuted 21 defendants for being part of a "Satanic cult" that "murdered" a doctor, Francesco Narducci. Actually, Narducci drowned in a lake, either an accident or suicide, but Mignini was convinced, based on absolutely nothing but his imagination (and that of a soothsayer that he consulted), that Narducci was part of a Satanic cult responsible for the serial killings of the "Monster of Florence" case, and that he had been killed by the sect because he had become a security risk.

All 21 of the defendants were acquitted over an eight year period, after having their lives almost ruined and after incurring huge legal expenses, all because of Mignini's fantasy that was unsupported by any evidence or facts. I think this indicates that Prosecutor Mignini has a difficult time differentiating fantasy from reality.  It also makes it clear that his accusation that Amanda Knox took part in the murder of Meredith Kercher (as part of a "sex game gone wrong") is typical of Mignini's dark imaginings.  There was never any evidence to support this fantasy.   It did not happen.

Why the Italians have allowed Mignini to continue as a prosecutor is incredible. He should be removed from office so he cannot wreck any more innocent lives.

And while we are at it, perhaps our ambassador in Italy can discuss reparations from the Italian government, to reimburse the Knox family for the huge legal expenses that have eaten away at the family fortune for the past four years.  

Ann Coulter's Continuing Error on Amanda Knox and My Rebuttal

Note to Readers:  Prominent conservatives are not immune from criticism at this blog, especially when they have taken positions or made statements that are lazily based on myth or rumor instead of fact, or when they are patently self-serving.  I have previously leveled serious criticism at Mark Levin for this, for example (on his biased and erroneous concepts of the American Civil War).  Ann Coulter seems determined to destroy any credibility she has left with sloppy thinking and zero research into the facts surrounding the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox, and this is not her first excursion into the subject.  She deserves a broadside and she gets it below.

*****

Over at World Net Daily Ann Coulter has once again insisted that Amanda Knox was guilty of murder, in spite of an almost complete absence of evidence or motive tying Knox to the crime.  Amanda Knox, if you don't know, is an American student who was studying in Italy and wrongly convicted of murdering her housemate, Meredith Kercher.  (The real perpetrator, a thug named Rudy Guede, was convicted of the crime after his bloody footprints, fingerprints, DNA and semen were found all over the crime scene.  He lied and said he was only a spectator, that Amanda Knox and another housemate, Raffaele Sollecito, committed the crime, even though there was no DNA or fingerprints or bloody footprints from either of them anywhere near the crime scene, despite Mignini's misrepresentations to the contrary).  Guede's lies were not unrewarded:  his 30 year prison term for murder was reduced to only 16 years.  Knox and Sollecito were later sentenced to 26 and 25 years, respectively -- based only on the imagination of Prosecutor Mignini.  Note the irony:  the actual murderer got ten years less than two innocent people.  Italian justice would appear to be little more than a bad joke.

Knox had nothing to do with the crime, and the extensive scenario described by a ruthlessly dishonest prosecutor was nothing more than a fantasy.  The prosecution's "evidence" has been thoroughly debunked by former FBI agent Steven Moore and Forensic Engineer Ron Hendry, Mark Waterubury, PhD, among others.  Indeed, there has been a growing crowd of voices who have reviewed the evidence and have concluded that Amanda Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito are innocent.  Nevertheless, Coulter continues to repeat disproven prosecution arguments as if they were fact, showing that her grasp of the case is entirely superficial.  For instance, she argues:

1.  That Amanda Knox falsely implicated her boss, Patrick Lumumba, in the crime, "to throw suspicion off of herself."  However, that's not true.  The prosecutors had found a negro hair at the murder site and suspected Lumumba, who is black.  They wanted Knox to implicate Lumumba so they could arrest him.  In a rigorous and exhausting all-night interrogation of Knox, where she was denied sleep, water and food and often slapped on the back of the head "to help her remember," the prosecution obtained a false and coerced "confession":  Knox was asked to "imagine" a scenario where Lumumba took part in the murder, and she gave the imaginary scenario as requested, to stop the tortuous ordeal of an abusive interrogation and finally be allowed to drink water and sleep.  (Note:  I recently saw a documentary unrelated to this case that proved false confessions are easy to obtain through aggressive techniques such as these.  That's why they are illegal in most western nations.)  Lumumba was arrested, but had an air tight alibi and was soon released.  The negro hair, however, belonged to the real killer, a black man named Rudy Guede who was later convicted.  No problem for the prosecution:  they dropped Lumumba and inserted Guede into their fantasized scenario of group sex turned murder.  [See more about false confessions here.]

2.  That the break-in had been "staged" by Knox and Sollecito to hide their own guilt.  The evidence:  broken glass from the entry window was scattered about the room on top of clothes on the floor, which were allegedly thrown around to make the room appear ransacked by a burglar.  If the clothes were thrown around after the break-in, they would have been on top of the glass, not the other way around.  Therefore, the prosecution concluded that Knox et al must have broken the window AFTER they had strewn clothes around to simulate a break-in.  The "staged break-in," however, was nothing but unproven speculation.

The truth:  the entry room was very small and the resident who lived there had very limited closet space, so she stored a lot of her clothes on the floor.  Some of her clothes were dirty and in messy piles, and so when Rudy Guede broke the window with a rock, the glass naturally landed on top of these existing piles.  The clothing was not put there by Knox or Sollecito.  Further, the rock that broke the window damaged the wooden window shutter, hit the floor, hit a paper bag on the floor, and rolled to a stop further in the room, where it was later found.  Coulter bases her argument simply on the false scenario painted by the prosecution, who had prejudged the case from the beginning and was looking for "evidence" to support its preconceived notions.

3.  That investigators determined there were multiple assailants in the murder.  Actually, this isn't true at all.  The prosecution, bent on getting convictions at any cost, simply lied about it.  There is no physical evidence to support this claim.  The only fingerprints, footprints and DNA in the murder room (besides those of the victim) were those of Rudy Guede.  Even the unflushed feces in the toilet were those of Guede (based on DNA testing).  There is no credible physical evidence or motive that ties Knox or Sollecito to the crime...none at all.

Coulter's latest column indicates that Knox must be guilty because some liberals are supporting her, and it's not a question of guilt or innocence, but of conservatism vs liberalism.  If convicting two innocent people of a crime they didn't commit and ruining their lives helps conservatism, it isn't obvious to me.

However, the question of Knox and Sollecito's guilt or innocence isn't about partisan politics.  It is about two young people wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit, by a seemingly unbalanced prosecutor who has now been convicted himself to a 16 month prison term for prosecutorial irregularities in another case.

I am very much disappointed in Ann Coulter.  Her latest publicity-seeking gambit displays a slippery grasp of the facts, and is based on popular rumors and falsehoods, all of which have been disproved.  If this is an example of Coulter's intellectual honesty and rigor, then why should anyone believe any of her arguments on any subject?  I say this as someone who has read most of her books (including her most recent, Demonic) and who has defended her on many an occasion, as my posts in this blog will show.

Right now, in Italy, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are apparently winning their appeals trial (all of the prosecution's so-called DNA evidence had been thrown out) and it is expected that they will be exonerated and released by the end of this month.  After almost four years of wrongful imprisonment, these two young college students may be able to resume their lives.

If any readers want to know just how thoroughly the prosecution's case has been debunked, visit this site:
www.injusticeinperugia.com.

Related post:  "At Long Last, Ms. Coulter, Have You No Sense of Decency?"

Amanda Knox Moves Closer to Freedom: Prosecution's DNA Evidence Discredited

Shortly after the Amanda Knox conviction for murder in Italy, I changed my opinion in light of emerging evidence.  I had at first accepted the prosecution's tale of murder and intrigue, but soon thereafter concluded that Knox was innocent and that her conviction a disgrace to justice.

Today in Italy, Knox's appeal moved her another step closer to freedom.  ABC reports:

The family of Amanda Knox said that testimony today by DNA experts at the appeal of her Italian murder conviction was "huge" and put the American exchange student "another day closer to freedom."

The Knox family was buoyed by the testimony of court appointed experts who said the prosecution's collection, handling and interpreting of DNA on two crucial pieces of evidence used to convict Knox of killing her roommate was blatantly flawed.

The two DNA experts disputed claims made by the prosecution during the original murder trial:

Conti and Vecchiotti testified today that they found no DNA or blood on the blade of a knife found in Sollecito's kitchen that prosecutors claimed was the murder weapon. Prosecutors had claimed during the trial that the knife had DNA from both Knox and Kercher on it.

Read more about it here.

See Injustice In Pergugia for other articles dealing with these new developments.

Conviction of Amanda Knox Is Falling Apart In Appeals Trial

Amanda Knox in Italy

Amanda Knox, an American student studying in Italy, was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of fellow student Meredith Kercher in 2009.  At first the conviction seemed obviously right and proper; however, various parties, including form FBI and other crime experts, subsequently reviewed the evidence and concluded that Knox is innocent.

Amanda Knox's appeals trial began in May, and the prosecution's case against Knox is being demolished bit by bit.  Key witnesses in the first trial are convincingly refuted or shown to be untrustworthy; scenarios described in the trial are shown to be completely untrue, e.g. that Knox was seen buying bleach the day after the murder (she didn't), that her boyfriend's kitchen knife had the victim's DNA (it didn't) even after having been washed in bleach (it wasn't).  A woman witness who had testified that she had heard a scream the night of the murder now admits she has mental problems; other witnesses have been utterly refuted (one of which is a drug addict and homeless man who has testified at numerous trials for the prosecution).

The most "convincing" evidence has been found to be complete fabrications by the Italian prosecutor.  The prosecutor seems mentally unbalanced and dangerous:  he has filed over a dozen lawsuits against journalists and even Knox's parents for criticizing him and the outcome of the trial.  One blogger had his blog removed by its host after the prosecutor threatened litigation.

The online news site Seattlest describes the original trial:

For Amanda Knox, the 23-year-old Seattleite accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, during a study abroad program in Perugia, Italy, the tide may be turning. Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of the crime in 2009, and are currently appealing their case. Confusion reigned during the investigation and conviction of the pair. The standards of modern law enforcement investigation fell by the wayside, replaced by a tumult of amateurism, half-baked musings, and a media feeding-frenzy. Much of the chaos and confusion seemed to emanate from the chief prosecutor: Giuliano Mignini, a man whose flair for bombast and drama seemed tailor-made for the brutal, bawdy world of modern tabloid journalism.

Seattlest reports that even the frenzied Italian tabloids, so eager to see Knox convicted in the first place, are backing away from both the prosecutor and the conviction, and that this may signal a coming end to the unfair and unjust ordeal of Amanda Knox.  Let's hope so.

See also Injustice In Perugia for more information on the crime, the trial, the conviction, the evidence and the latest developments.

Lawrence Auster Wrong on Amanda Knox?

My friend Larry Auster and I do not agree on every point.  He has concluded that Amanda Knox was most probably guilty, and her innocence is only a lie being pushed by the liberal media in America.  I, on the other hand, believe she is innocent of the crime for which she was convicted of murder.

Read Auster's opinion here.

The case was recently made more ambiguous by a stupid "Lifetime" movie on the crime that was fiction, told with the premise that Knox was guilty.  I had a ton of hits yesterday from people who had viewed the silly flick and were looking for information on Knox.

Almost all of the lies, distortions, myths and falsehoods about Amanda Knox and the crime for which she was framed are covered at Injustice In Perugia.

Prosecutors who frame innocents simply to augment their reputations or to express their biases are nothing new.  It happens, more often than most Americans want to believe.