Life this weekend must seem pretty grim for Amanda Knox, the American student sentenced to 26 years in jail by at Italian court for the murder of a young British woman, Meredith Kercher.
In America, there have been howls of indignant rage at the guilty verdict, the implication being that Knox was convicted on insubstantial evidence in a Mickey Mouse trial. I shall return to the respective merits of American and Italian justice a little later.
The first thing to be said about the trial outcome is that if you were not present in court, your view of guilt and innocence is uninformed and ultimately worthless.
Court cases that grind on for months, indeed even those that are done and dusted in a fortnight, involve a huge volume of evidence. However diligently reporters cover the proceedings, their editors have appetite for little more than a few snatches of what goes on. Documents of all kinds and varying importance are available to judges and juries and not necessarily to the press.
As people looking on from outside, we simply have insufficient knowledge of the material before the court to entitle us to pontificate on the correct verdict.
But we are human and therefore do so in any case. Sometimes, we can apply general principles that do not depend strictly on the fine detail of the case. We may, for example, be against capital punishment, or vindictive prison sentences or denial of bail, and such thoughts would be unaffected by the actual evidence.
That is not to say that the courts do not make mistakes. I have attended trials where, I believe, miscarriages have occurred, in terms of the conviction of innocent or possibly innocent people, the acquittal of the guilty and the nature of sentences imposed.
Only three living people know the truth of their own guilt or innocence in the case of Meredith Kercher: Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, convicted with her, plus Rudy Guede, who opted for a fast track trial (Knox and Sollecito say he was the lone killer). All are in prison.
If Amanda Knox is innocent, I pray that the error is identified and rectified. If she is guilty, the sentence, though severe, could hardly be described as unjust. The same applies to Sollecito, jailed for 25 years. However bleak their lives are just now, the one certainty is that Ms Kercher has been robbed of any life at all by whatever happened in that house in Perugia.
The caution mentioned in my headline is the sort I urge people to exercise when considering the way this trial has ended. The consolation, for Amanda Knox, is that she was tried and convicted in the relatively civilised environment of a European justice system.
Such are the infantile sentencing policies adopted by American courts that supposing she had stood trial in her native country, and assuming further that the case was not in a state with capital punishment as a likely or available option, she would have faced a prison sentence measured in multiples of life expectancy.
* Image by Robertodevido. See his photographs at Flickr
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