Why Italy Held Amanda Knox

In youth I once drove across a vast expanse of central Mexico in my convertible. I paused in many villages to meander through modest churches, eat with locals, and play games with the barefoot children. Today anyone who would do the same is either a fool or suicidal.

This is not to impugn the Mexican people or their countryside. As in many places, most individuals are decent on all counts. Yet the global meme of dusky natives trammeled upon by pale colonials has been pervasive, even in the hinterlands.

Should one be in such places when a child disappears, a woman is raped, or a man murdered—and there is any way the crime can be pinned on the “white man”—it most certainly will be so. This is true not only in Third World nations but in any place that paler pelts or their philosophies are in abeyance.

Falsely accused prisoner Amanda Knox has been released in Italy, itself basically a Second World country. For those unfamiliar with the facts, this young American college student ventured abroad for an annum to work and study. In 2007, she unwisely chose to cohabitate a rental flat with three other female students. One of these other girls was Meredith Kercher, who was later sexually assaulted and murdered.

An African named Rudy Guede was arrested and eventually convicted by ample evidence at the scene. Yet authorities had already targeted Knox and her boyfriend, largely on the basis of extremely dubious circumstantial suspicion and by no means the determinative physical proof which linked Guede to the crime.

With this earlier arrest, the Italian media and judicial system went insane. The press assigned sexualized nicknames to Miss Knox. Elaborate and graphic theories were spun out of whole cloth involving orgiastic frenzies. The prosecutor at varying times made bizarre claims of Satanism and vampirism against the accused.

“Old suspicions and hatreds are always only one accusation away.”

Eventually Knox and her boyfriend were both convicted of the crime despite the chief witness against them being a heroin addict, no more than trace amounts of her DNA on the supposed murder weapon (later shown by the authorities’ own video record to have been improperly collected weeks after the killing), and a total lack of motive beyond aforesaid fabricated orgy. Indeed, by the time of her appeal, the prosecutor had abandoned several prior “motives” and claimed there was no motive at all beyond Knox being a “sex loving she-devil.”

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