Amanda and Raffaele acquitted

I am watching it live on the Web at ABCnews.go.com (but the same was on ABC News). One of their correspondents called it “a total repudiation” of the prosecution and the original verdict.

The moment the verdict was announced, Amanda bent forward over the table crying, and then she was immediately taken from the courtroom.

But the charge against Amanda for slandering Patrick Lumumba was upheld, along with a three year sentence for that offense (already served). So in this way perhaps the authorities are keeping face.

* * *

All day long I’ve had a hopeful feeling about this, a sense that this monstrous injustice was about to end. Of course I didn’t know what would happen. It’s a great relief.

I repeat that the police and prosecutors, who committed so many outrages,—even now the prosecutors were insanely demanding that in addition to having their sentences increased to life, Amanda and Raffaele should serve several months in solitary confinement, after having already served four years in prison—should be held accountable for what they have done. Maybe that will happen. Clearly something was rotten in the city of Perugia. Does the Italian elite have any notion of how the image of Italy has been tarnished by this case? The overturning of the verdict may have been in part an expression of that realization. ABC said that Italian public opinion, which previously had been strongly anti-Amanda, had changed and that there was a widespread feeling that an injustice had been done to the defendants.

Two young people spent four years in prison, for a crime for which there was no evidence, only lurid operatic scenarios invented by the prosecutors, a crime for which the real killer, whose guilt was unquestionable, had already been convicted. But Rudy Guede is virtually invisible in the coverage and discussion. Why? Consider my tripartite theory of liberal society. In the “script” of liberal society, only whites (whether the “good” whites or the “evil” whites) are moral agents. Nonwhites are not moral agents, but sacred objects. Nonwhites exist only to be the recipients and touchstones of the goodness of the good whites, and of the evil of the evil whites. Therefore crimes committed by nonwhites are of no interest to liberal society, because nonwhites are not moral agents.

* * *

Here’s a typical example of the media coverage or rather non-coverage of Rudy Guede. CBS News in its 1,000 word article on the acquittal of Raffaele and Amanda has one brief, bland mention of Guede:

Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison, Sollecito to 25. Also convicted in separate proceedings was Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivorian man. They all denied wrongdoing.

Well, maybe Guede is as innocent as Knox and Sollecito, hmm? In fact, no one on planet earth, other than Guede himself, asserts that Guede is innocent. But you don’t know that from CBS.

On a different point, I’m annoyed by the chauvinism of the U.S. press which always reports it as the “Amanda Knox” case, adding Sollecito as an afterthought. The two of them were charged together, tried together, sentenced together, acquitted together, and released together. They should be reported together. But for the U.S. press, nothing and no one outside America matters.

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Sophia A. writes:

Thank God. I’m usually completely opposed to people exploiting things like this for money, but I hope that Amanda sells her story for top dollar. Her family has had to pay for a lot of legal fees.

As I said to you previously I do not believe the Italians really acquitted her, they acquitted Sollecito, and if they acquitted him, they had to acquit her.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 03, 2011 03:52 PM | Send