Following on from what I was saying yesterday, I had a read round some of this. I'm even more baffled by the attitudes of those pushing the "guilt" line.
What is their connection to the case? Who are they to write to people's employers and try to get them silenced for expressing an opinion that differs from their own? Why are they championing this hate campaign, when the Italian criminal justice system seems to have the situation under control anyway (from their point of view)?
Do they go after everyone involved in the Innocence Project, or MOJO, to insist that nothing should ever be published suggesting someone convicted of a crime might actually have been innocent? And dammit, the people these organisations champion have actually been through the full legal process and been confirmed as convicted!
Amanda Knox is not the only accused or convicted person who has been the centre of a campaign suggesting there has been a miscarriage of justice. It's actually quite common. I never heard of anyone being threatened like this in any other case.
It's really quite bizarre.
Rolfe.
It has moved some to wonder, indeed.
One possibility is that we're just dealing with a couple of people who are unhinged, and a cadre of followers who haven't quite realised it yet. For example after a
long time where the guilters ran with a meme that anyone who was pro-innocence was almost certainly a fat, pathetic, ageing virgin who fantasised about having sex with Amanda Knox, it turned out that prominent guilter Peter Quennell who runs the somewhat creepy "True Justice For Meredith Kercher" site also had at least one equally creepy shrine to another teenage girl with identical layout. Bruce Fisher also documented a case of Peter Quennell harassing another young woman, and although it may not be strictly relevant Quennell fit the physical description of the pro-innocence stereotype he helped promote to a remarkable degree.
So it might be that the core of the movement is more about the psychological oddities of a handful of people who took up the case, than it is about anything intrinsic to the case. If it wasn't Knox, it would be some other attractive young woman that there is a socially-validated excuse to whip themselves into a frenzy of hate about.
Another is that millions of dollars may hang on the outcome of the case, since the Kercher family and their lawyer, Maresca, will be in a position to make a move on Raffaele Sollecito's seven-figure fortune if his conviction is upheld. While I'm not accusing anyone of being a paid
astroturfer or hiring astroturfers, it is certainly true that people have done far worse for far less.
Or a final one might just be that while it hasn't been formally identified as a scientifically identified psychological bias, it might just be the case that some humans have an extremely strong aversion to revising guilt-judgements. I could vaguely see how this might be adaptive in our evolutionary environment - once you've beaten a tribe member up or killed them for doing something wrong, revising the decision might not be be adaptive from a group survival point of view regardless of whether it turned out you had the wrong target. This might account for some of the Lockerbie diehards too.
As always when skeptics get to the question of why people believe weird things in the face of the evidence, there are lots of good hypotheses and relatively little evidence as to whether or how much any one factor is responsible.
