As I’ve said before, I don’t trust the Florence court to acquit Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. They were directed by Italy’s so-called supreme court to find the defendants guilty and it would take too much courage and independence for the presiding judge and the lay judges to defy these marching orders.
Besides, judge Nencini seems to have an exaggerated opinion of the justice system he is part of: as a prosecutor, Nencini opened a case for defamation against Berlusconi when the then PM called Italy’s judges and prosecutors “cancer”. Let’s face it, dottore, old Silvio got it right, although for the wrong reasons.
Whatever the court rules, I would rather hear from people who are familiar with the case and have experience either in crime-solving, or in forensics, or in scientific research, or in some other relevant field. A new book about the case went on sale today, a Kindle Single entitled The Forgotten Killer: Rudy Guede and the Murder of Meredith Kercher. It was written by a group of authors: John Douglas, a famous American criminal profiler; Mark Olshaker, Douglas’ and other crime experts’ long-standing co-author; Douglas Preston, a well-known crime author; Steve Moore, a retired FBI agent; Michael Heavey, a retired judge, Jim Lovering, a retired businessman; and Thomas Lee Wright, a filmmaker focusing on social justice issues.
An impressive cast! But it’s hardly the first book exposing the prosecution’s delusions and the weakness of its case. Douglas and Olshaker researched it in Law and Disorder. In an unintended prequel to the case, Preston and his Italian colleague, the old school crime reporter Mario Spezi, exposed the deranged logic of prosecutor Giuliano Mignini in their 2006 classic The Monster of Florence. In 2007, Mignini went after Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Preston and Spezi wrote about this witchhunt, unfortunately still ongoing, in Der Engel mit den Eisaugen, published in Germany in 2013.
Early in 2011, Mark Waterbury, a materials scientist and engineer, published The Monster of Perugia, debunking the pseudo science behind the “evidence” against Knox and Sollecito. In August 2013, Ron Hendry, a forensic engineer and expert at accident reconstruction, put out Single Attacker Theory Of The Murder Of Meredith Kercher.
I should also mention books authored by journalists – Candace Dempsey’s groundbreaking Murder in Italy, the first book on the case, and Nina Burleigh’s The Fatal Gift of Beauty. In addition, there are Bruce Fischer’s Injustice in Perugia and Finding Justice in Perugia, the former called “an encyclopedia of a police frame-up” by a reviewer.