We now know. US$4m is to be paid for Amanda Knox’s story of torture at the hands of Italy’s ‘professional’ classes. It is a lot of money. But then the publishers have calculated that the appetite for a tale of medieval habits sustained in a modern society is considerable. I reckon they will get their money back. Italy is something truly special.
More:
Here is Douglas Preston, who already wrote a book about Giuliano Mignini.
Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor in the Sollecito-Knox case, has had his conviction for abuse of office — relating to persecution of journalists and illegal investigations (details here under the 20 April 2010 entry) — quashed after the Florence appeal court ruled his case should have been heard in Turin.
In theory Mignini can be tried again. But it looks like his case can has been kicked way down the road.
Despite Mario Monti’s promises of ‘Change-Italy’, at ground level things look very much like business as usual.
The Italian press has barely touched on Mignini’s successful appeal. There is a short report here in Italian, and an even shorter one here in English.
The trial of police officers involved in a wrongful 1980 conviction of 3 men for murder in Wales has collapsed on a technicality. The case has interesting parallels with the Sollecito and Knox case in Perugia. The three convicted men left no forensic/DNA evidence at the crime scene, despite a murder by 50 stab wounds. The man later convicted of the murder left plenty of forensic evidence, but police were obsessed with the other three suspects. As in Perugia, their theory was more important than the investigation.
It all looks rather Italian, as does the failure to complete a trial of the police officers alleged to have perverted the course of justice. However we must note that there have already been two enquiries into this case, and there will now be a third. That isn’t the same as Perugia, where the expectation is that there will be no enquiry, nothing will change, and police and magistrates will not even get a telling off.
Time for Giuliano Mignini to investigate. The yield on Italian debt has hit seven percent. Which is the same as the number of deadly sins committed by the Italian prime minister. Every week, which in turn has seven days. And today is only just more than seven days after Halloween, the diabolical festival when Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox, give or take a day, hatched their Satanic ritual murder plot. In Perugia. Whose name has seven letters.
It is soooooooo obvious that everything in the whole world is a conspiracy. How can anyone be expected to take action when confronted by forces beyond our control?
Frankly, they can’t. Which is why Italy’s professional class is doing nothing as the country goes down the tubes.
Let Rome burn!
The images will at least form a good backdrop for a Dolce and Gabbana advertising campaign. Sicilian peasant chic — combining glamour, stoicism and passion — is surely the perfect day-wear for the modern cataclysmic financial crisis. Not to mention a great metaphor for a society living on bullshit.
Prime Minister Nero putting in a bunga-bunga order last night.
Worth a read:
Nouriel Roubini reposts what he said about Italy at Davos in 2006. Roubini’s analysis led to a bizarre racial outburst from finance minister Giulio Tremonti, the former professor of ethics who was recently busted renting a Rome apartment for cash.
In the finest traditions of the Italian judiciary, the presiding judge in the Sollecito-Knox appeal — Claudio Pratillo Hellmann — has been giving interviews to the press.
You can guess what he said: this has been a terrible mess, creating appalling trauma for innocent people, in particular the Kercher family. We really have got to get an independent prosecution service set up — like the CPS in the UK — and start following our rules about criminal investigations. Plus, we need a full public enquiry into the whole thing, not least the conduct of the police, why no tapes of the Knox interviews were ever produced, allegations of physical attacks on journalists, and so on. And don’t even get me started on Mignini…
But of course I am joking. What Hellman really said (let me stress I have not had time to read the original text in Italian but John Hooper is a serious correspondent) is that it is quite possible Sollecito and Knox were party to the murder, that Mignini is at the top of his game, and that the issues are really very complicated.
Many open-minded Italians will forgive Hellman because his brave decision to do the only sensible thing and have the forensic ‘evidence’ looked at by more serious people decided the outcome of the case. He is likely just covering his fanny, as they say in America. But in covering his fanny he is ensuring that everything will stay the same. Which means that people less interesting, less white, less attractive and less well funded than Sollecito and Knox will continue to get stitched up unnecessarily.
Knox is gone. Not only that, she flew — which is pretty compelling evidence she is a witch. Let those four years inside be a lesson to other young people thinking of taking a student holiday in Italy and smoking a bit of dope. Just as well Knox and Sollecito didn’t grow their own and end up dead in Perugia’s Capanne prison, like the hippie who built our kitchen.
I forgot to remind readers yesterday who have not done so already to watch this short interview with the chief investigator in the Sollecito-Knox case. Arthur Miller must be eating his heart out. His play was only based on a true story.
Other:
Writer Douglas Preston on Mignini and the case, and Mignini’s form with respect to the earlier Tuscan serial killer case. What Preston says is no doubt true, but the Mignini focus tends to draw attention away from what are really systemic problems in Italy. Mignini is a symptom. The incompetence of the magistrates compounds the incompetence of the police and unlike the UK — with the Crown Prosecution Service — there is nothing in the middle of them to act as a circuit breaker.
Before Mr Giobbi undertakes his next ‘exquisitely psychological’ investigation, he would do well to read this.
John Hooper does a Q&A in the Guardian that gives answers I would agree with to a number of obvious and important questions.
So Sollecito and Knox are out.
My immediate reaction is that this is consistent with the behaviour of a survivor institutional-retard state. It is another moment, to use the phrase which Lampedusa never quite used, when ‘everything must change so that everything can remain the same’.
Sollecito and Knox are free so that we can get back to business as usual. It’s a sort of mini Mani Pulite for the legal system.
Anecdotally, what stands out for me more than anything is ignorance. I have asked four separate Italian lawyers, two internationally renowned and two from my local town, what they think about the Sollecito-Knox case and each has said they are sure that in some sense they are guilty. But when you ask why, you realise they are ignorant of even basic facts in the case. A small dose of northern European puritan professionalism would go a long way in Italy. This is a society where no one is capable of saying ‘I don’t know’.
Worth paying attention to:
One of the great UK long-form journalists was in Perugia tonight:
10.31pm: Peter Popham of the Independent tweets:
The video in court is very Italian, lots of extras on camera. Sollecito, who as a local always seemed to accept that a life in jail might be his fate is more together. Knox, who stood up a the start of the appeal and took the fight to the jury, is spent at this point.
John Hooper toys with the Perugia is different angle.
I am not so sure.
Monday’s coverage:
The second part of this article highlights the position that Italian ‘justice’ has left the Kerchers in. Their suffering goes on because of the grotesque unprofessionalism of the investigation and trial. The Kercher family will hold a press conference this morning that will be blogged here by the Guardian. Their anguish remains focused on the idea that the use of two knives and the number of wounds in the murder must have required more than Guede. I can’t speak to this or to the behaviour of sex attackers who use knives. What everyone can speak to is the fact that there was no motive and no evidence to put Sollecito and Knox in the bedroom where Meredith Kercher died and a huge amount of forensic evidence — hair, hand prints, finger prints, semen, other DNA — to put Guede there. I wonder if at the presser the Kerchers will mention the fact that Guede can expecct to be out of jail in only seven or eight years after his sentence was reduced on appeal (largely, I would say, to ‘fit’ with the wrongful convictions of Sollecito and Knox). If you run a legal system like a bunch of adoloscents, there will be a price to pay. Laid-back Italy doesn’t seem so cool today.
The Perugia shock blog reminds us that Knox’s 3-year, Euro22,000 criminal defamation conviction for saying the black bar owner she knew had committed the crime is UPHELD. This is very important because it is tantamount to saying the police did not intimidate and hit her during the illegal all-night interrogation for which no tape recordings have ever been produced. I have blogged before that the obvious explanation for her accusation against the bar owner, Patrick Lumumba, is that the first clearly identifiable forensic evidence the police found at the crime scene was the hair of a black male (Guede). They knew they were looking for a black man before they got the DNA match to Guede’s police record. And, in the middle of the night, subjecting Amanda Knox to the kind of pressure and sleep deprivation that produces false confessions everywhere, they got their black man (a mild-mannered barman according to people I know who know him).
(Note that the Perugia Shock blog, written by an Italian non-native English speaker, sometimes slips into the kind of emotional language that is not helpful to understanding the case. However in general it provides excellent, fine-grained coverage that you will not find in a newspaper. The author is being sued for guess what — criminal defamation — by Mignini.)
Want to read the rest of the stuff I have written about the Sollecito-Knox case? Just click on the ‘Sollecito and Knox’ tag (subject Categories and Tags are all listed in the right hand border).
The Observer runs a long article to coincide with the start of summing up in the appeal case of Sollecito and Knox in Perugia.
The expectation of an acquittal is now such that journalists are moving on to the ‘What it all means’ phase. And this story is probably a taste of what is to come.
An unnamed source is quoted:
‘According to one local journalist with decades of crime reporting experience, the descent of American and British reporters on Perugia in the days after the killing “put pressure on local investigators to go too fast”.’
Only in Italy could a journalist — a person whose work is public by nature — insist on being quoted as an unnamed source. It is the measure of the society, and the shallowness of its professionals. Of course it is also shocking (and I think unusual) that The Observer would allow a journalist to be quoted as an unnamed source.
The import of the remark, of course, is straightforward. This is an early example of the aberration argument. It infers that this miscarriage of justice was unusual, explicable by its uniqueness, and partly the fault of foreign journalists.
Were the jailings of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four or the Maguire Seven in the UK aberrations that resulted from journalistic pressure on police? Or did these cases — and many more that were not terrorist-related — reflect systemic failings in the police and criminal justice systems?
The passage and application of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in the UK in 1984 is the answer to the question.
In Italy, there will be no gains from a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Instead, we are getting ready for face saving. The narrative of the professional class’s self-defence is under construction. It tells of a society incapable of self-improvement.
At the same time, inflaming those famous Italian tempers further, people around Berlusconi are suggesting that acquittal for Sollecito and Knox will prove that the police-judicial system is rotten to the core and therefore that cases against the premier are fabricated assaults. It is the little jump in logic that does not work. The system is a mess, but this is not reflected in the existence of cases against Berlusconi, it is reflected in the fact that justice is never done.
In northern Europe or the US Berlusconi would have been dealt with by the judicial system years ago. Here he gets to survive, with the only quid pro quo being that he must participate in the judicial circus. The latest gratuitous leaks and leaks from cases that have not been completed are surely a small price to pay for never actually having to pay for anything. Better still, the judiciary is a source of endless votes for Berlusconi, much of whose political support derives from popular frustration with Italy’s Third World legal system.
Chris Jefferies. Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA
Here is a salutary outcome from the Bristol murder case highlighted in my Perugia versus Bristol post of January 2011. Eight tabloid British newspapers have been swiftly and efficiently hit with substantial defamation damages after they attempted to convict Chris Jefferies on the basis he looks a bit odd. (And he wears an anorak. And he’s a teacher.) It is going to be very interesting to see how many Italian newspapers are hit with substantial damages for their reporting of the Sollecito-Knox satanic ritual murder trial after it turns out Sollecito and Knox aren’t satanists after all. Will Italians also realise that it is not necessary to have a criminal libel law in order to sort this kind of thing out, just a functioning judiciary?
The damages award as reported by Roy Greenslade in the Guardian on 29 July:
…
Eight national newspapers have made public apologies today to Christopher Jefferies for the libellous allegations made against him following the murder of Joanna Yeates,
The titles – The Sun, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Daily Star, The Scotsman and Daily Express – have also agreed to pay him substantial libel damages, thought to total six figures.
The solicitor for Mr Jefferies, Louis Charalambous, told Mr Justice Tugendhat in the high court hearing that the newspapers had acknowledged the falsity of the allegations, which were published in more than 40 articles.
Ms Yeates, a Bristol architect, was killed in December last year. After her body was discovered, Mr Jefferies, who was her landlord, was arrested by police.
In subsequent days, into early January, the newspapers ran a series of articles about Mr Jefferies that were inaccurate and defamatory.
Charalambous, of Simons Muirhead and Burton, said after today’s hearing:
“Christopher Jefferies is the latest victim of the regular witch hunts and character assassination conducted by the worst elements of the British tabloid media.
Many of the stories published in these newspapers are designed to ‘monster’ the individual, in flagrant disregard for his reputation, privacy and rights to a fair trial.
These newspapers have now apologised to him and paid substantial damages.”
Bambos Tsiattalou, the solicitor who advised Mr Jefferies after he was taken into police custody, said that the media were given a fair warning to be careful about what they published.
He said: “We warned the media by letter, immediately following Mr Jefferies’ arrest, in the strongest possible terms to desist from publishing stories which were damaging or defamatory.
“We were dismayed that our warnings went unheeded and are pleased that the newspapers in settling Mr Jefferies’ claims have acknowledged the extent of the damage to his reputation.”
The papers’ publishers – News International, Trinity Mirror, Daily Mail & General Trust, Express Newspapers and Johnston Press – will now have to fork out substantial sums in damages and legal fees.
But Charalambous pointed out that once the rules over conditional fee (no win, no fee) agreements change next year, “the victims of tabloid witch hunts will no longer have the same access to justice.”
via Eight newspapers pay libel damages to Christopher Jefferies | Media | guardian.co.uk.
And there’s more:
Plus the two best-known UK tabloids have been found guilty of contempt of court (a charge that is filed against them too rarely). This is what italian papers should go down for, having leaked the Perugia investigation before it was complete, in brazen contravention of Italian law. Problem is that Italy doesn’t apply the law, most obviously because it is the police and the magistrates who do the leaking. Or did I misunderstand something?
Here is the Guardian again:
The Daily Mirror was fined £50,000 and the Sun £18,000 after the high court ruled that the papers posed a “substantial risk” to the course of justice in their reporting on the arrest of Christopher Jefferies, Yeates’s landlord, who was later released without charge and was entirely innocent of any involvement.
The Daily Mirror fine is the biggest against a British newspaper for contempt since 2004, when the Daily Star was fined £60,000 for revealing the identities of two Premiership footballers at the centre of high-profile gang rape allegations.
In a separate legal action eight national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror and Sun, collectively paid six-figure libel damages to Jefferies following allegations made about him in January, when the police hunt for Yeates’s killer was at its height.
In a written judgment on the contempt of court action handed down at the high court, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Owen described the Daily Mirror articles as “extreme” and “substantial risks to the course of justice”. The judges said the Sun’s coverage of Jefferies created a “very serious risk” that any future court defence would be damaged.
Lord Judge said: “The articles in the one issue of the Sun were written and laid out in such a way that they would have conveyed to the reader of the front page and the two inside pages over which the stories were spread that he was a stalker, with an obsession with death, who let himself into the flats of other occupants of the building where Miss Yeates lived, and that he had an unhealthy interest in blond young women.”
The court gave the Daily Mirror publisher Mirror Group Newspapers extended time in which to launch a petition for permission to appeal to the supreme court.
Vincent Tabak, a 33-year-old engineer, pleaded guilty to manslaughter but has denied murdering Yeates, who was found dead on a roadside verge in Failand, Somerset, on Christmas Day 2010. Tabak, who lived next door to Yeates, is due to go on trial accused of murder at Bristol crown court in October.
Tabloid media coverage at the time of Jefferies’s arrest was intense, with speculation about the suspect rife in newspapers and the internet. Dominic Grieve, the attorney general who brought the court action against the two papers, issued a rare warning to the press at the timeabout their reporting.
Two of the three articles found in contempt of court were published the day after Grieve’s warning, on New Year’s Day. The attorney general welcomed Friday’s judgment, saying: “[The Daily Mirror and Sun] breached the Contempt of Court Act and the court has found that there was a risk of serious prejudice to any future trial.”
Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, echoed the attorney general’s warnings in March when he said that media focus on suspects in recent criminal cases had been “startling” and “far removed” from what it was just a few years ago.
Contempt of court proceedings are infrequently issued against newspapers. It is more unusual still for the attorney general to take action in defence of an individual who has not been charged.
Eight national newspapers separately issued a public apology to Jefferies over libellous claims made about him in the aftermath of his December arrest. The Sun, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Daily Star, the Scotsman and Daily Express agreed to pay the retired public-school teacher damages.
Lawyers acting for Jefferies said he had been the victim of “regular witch hunts” in more than 40 articles in the tabloid papers. Bambos Tsiattalou, the solicitor who advised Jefferies after he was taken into police custody, said that the newspapers had ignored warnings to be careful about what they published.
We start our report in the Third World’s richest nation, Italy.
I haven’t blogged about the Sollecito-Knox Satanic ritual murder case in my local provincial capital Salem* for some time because the case has been unravelling as predicted. The star witness turned out to be a junkie-dealer who already testified for the police in two other murder trials (so much for drug addicts spending all day in bed). And the forensic procedures and DNA ‘evidence’ have been shredded by a long report from Rome’s Sapienza University.
We are now in the end game. The prosecutor Giuliano Mignini is firing off criminal defamation suits against people who point out he is unfit for office even in Italy at a rate unprecedented even for him. After the Rome academics introduced their report in court in Perugia this week, Mignini and his pals despatched two squad cars of police to Sapienza University in the capital in what appears to be a bizarre act of attempted intimidation. (The university sent them packing.) There is no real doubt that Sollecito and Knox are going to go free. The main point of interest for Italy-watchers is to ascertain that ABSOLUTELY NOBODY is held responsible for burning witches**. That includes the prosecutors; the half-witted magistrates; the gormless, overcharging lawyers; the thoroughly incompetent and corrupt police; the lazy and self-serving journalists who leaked the official side of the investigation at every turn in contravention of the law, and every other medievally-minded member of this shameful lynch-mob***.
When nobody is held responsible, it is important that you do not think of Sollecito and Knox. A couple of years inside will for them have been an interesting life experience. Think instead of the family of Meredith Kercher, the murdered girl. They are the real victims of this pantomime performed by adults with uniforms and titles.
*Known in dialect as Perugia
** Should read: ‘sending innocent kids to prison for life’.
*** Should read: ‘professional mafia’.
A link to another part of the Third World that I cover is provided by poor old Google. The same US internet firm which last year decided to stand up to China by refusing orders to censor its service recently got a demand via Mr Mignini to shut down an Italian blog he does not like. The China decision has cost Google much of its market share in the Middle Kingdom as the Chinese government does almost everything it can to slow down and disrupt Google’s service (pushing many users to move to the Chinese Google rip-off provider, Baidu). In Italy, Google has already been intimidated under the country’s media laws in a case that saw some of its executives sentenced to prison (they won’t actually go, because that only happens to kids and poor people). So what did Google do when Mignini came knocking? The firm immediately pulled the site Mignini does not like (without contacting the blogger), even though there is no prima facie evidence it contains anything libelous under Italian law. The firm that took on the Dragon is caving in Italy. However, the blog in question has been moved to WordPress (which I use!), and which so far seems to have the necessary cojones for our Italian adventure.
The global battle against men who live with their mums, men with comb-over hair-cuts and men and women who call themselves ‘doctor’ but don’t actually have a doctorate, goes on.
We close today on the subject of the recent, horrific high-speed rail crash in China’s Zhejiang province and the official efforts to (literally) bury the truth of what happened (with corpses still inside). Rather than more news reports that you have probably already seen, here is a translation of Han Han, China’s most famous blogger. I wonder, is there anything in these lines that rings a bell for Italians with regard to the conduct of their own ‘professional’ classes:
“The Derailed Country”
You ask, why are they acting like a bunch of lunatics?
They think they’re the picture of restraint.
You ask, why can’t they tell black from white, fact from fiction?
They think they’re straight shooters, telling it like it is.
You ask, why are they running interference for murders?
They think they’ve thrown their friends under the bus. And they’re ashamed.
You ask, why all the cover-ups?
They think they’re letting it all hang out.
You ask, why are they so irretrievably corrupt?
They think they’re hardworking and plain-living.
You ask, why are they so infuriatingly arrogant?
They think they’re the picture of humility.
You feel like you’re the victim. So do they.
They think: “During the Qing Dynasty, no one had television. Now everyone has a television. Progress!”
They think: “We’re building you all this stuff, what do you care what happens in the process? Why should you care who it’s really for, so long as you get to use it? The train from Shanghai to Beijing used to take a whole day. Now you’re there in five hours (as long as there’s no lightning). Why aren’t you grateful? What’s with all the questions?
“Every now and then, there’s an accident. The top leaders all show how worried they are. We make someone available to answer journalists’ questions. First we say we’ll give the victims 170,000 kuai apiece. Then we say we’ll give them 500,000. We fire a buddy of ours. We’ve done all that, and you still want to nitpick? How could you all be so close-minded? You’re not thinking of the big picture! Why do you want us to apologize when we haven’t done anything wrong? It’s the price of development.
“Taking care of the bodies quickly is just the way we do things. The earlier we start signing things, the more we’ll have to pay out in the end. The later we sign, the smaller the damages. Our pals in the other departments—the ones who knock down all the houses—taught us that one. Burying the train car was a bonehead move, true, but the folks upstairs told us to do it. That’s how they think: if there’s something that could give you trouble, just bury it. Anyway, the real mistake was trying to dig such a huge hole in broad daylight. And not talking it over with the Propaganda Department beforehand. And not getting a handle on all the photographers at the site. We were busy, ok? If there’s anything we’ve learned from all this, it’s that when you need to bury something, make sure you think about how big it is, and make sure you keep the whole thing quiet. We underestimated all that.”
They think that, on the whole, it was a textbook rescue operation—well planned, promptly executed, and well managed. It’s a shame public opinion’s gotten a little out of hand, but they think, “That part’s not our responsibility. We don’t do public opinion.”
They’re thinking: “Look at the big picture: We had the Olympics, we canceled the agricultural tax, and you guys still won’t cut us a break. You’re always glomming on to these piddling little details. No can-do spirit. We could be more authoritarian than North Korea. We could make this place poorer than the Sudan. We could be more evil than the Khmer Rouge. Our army’s bigger than any of theirs, but we don’t do any of that. And not only are you not thankful, but you want us to apologize! As if we’ve done something wrong?”
Society has people of means, and those without. There’s people with power, and those that have none. And they all think they’re the victim. In a country where everyone’s the victim, where the classes have started to decouple from one another, where it’s every man for himself, in this huge country whose constituent parts slide forward on inertia alone—in this country, if there’s no further reform, even tiny decouplings make the derailings hard to put right.
The country’s not moving forward because a lot of them judge themselves as if Stalin and Mao were still alive. So they’ll always feel like the victim. They’ll always feel like they’re the enlightened ones, the impartial ones, the merciful ones, the humble ones, the put-upon ones. They think the technological drumbeat of historical progress is a dream of their own making.
The more you criticize him, the more he longs for autocracy. The more you gaomao him (piss him off), the more he misses Mao.
A friend in the state apparatus told me, “You’re all too greedy. Forty years ago, writers like you would’ve been shot. So you tell me, have things gotten better, or have they gotten worse?”
I said, “No, you’re all too greedy. Ninety years ago, that kind of thinking would have gotten you laughed out of the room. So you tell me: after all that, have things gotten better, or have they gotten worse?”
Worthwhile links:
No longer on Google’s Blogger, but now at WordPress (great courtroom detail):
Long reports can also be funny when they deal with Italian police conduct:
http://knoxdnareport.wordpress.com/
The highlights of this report (at least those that have thus far been translated into English) are here:
http://knoxdnareport.wordpress.com/contents/conclusions-2/
Note the discovery at Sapienza of starch (err…food) on the knife between the blade and the handle. Prosecution claimed the knife had been thoroughly cleaned by the killers, but their great forensics still uncovered (internationally-unacceptably small trace of) Kercher blood on the blade. Presence of starch residue now shows satanic ritutal murder gang cunningly cleaned off blood but not food from the knife… just like they cleaned all their fingerprints, bloodprints, DNA, etc from the room where Kercher died while leaving Rudy Guede’s evidence all over the place. I say: Burn ‘em already…
Finally, here is that YouTube video of the chief investigator on the Sollecito-Knox case again, talking about his ‘exquisitely psychological’ investigation. There have been another 2,000 hits since I first posted it. It deserves 2 million. You will not find anything funnier on a comedy programme, so settle for Italian reality and send it to your friends.
