I for one have lost my faith in the justice system in Italy. Especially Perugia. So I will not gloat or celebrate until AK and RS walk out of prison free. Corruption in the justice system is how they were convicted, so I don't put anything past these judges, lawyers, police, and forensic (experts).
Funnily enough, I haven't - in fact, today's events have served to strengthen my faith in the Italian criminal justice system.
Let's face it: every single country in the world has (to a greater or lesser degree) entrenched problems in its justice system, and every single country in the world also produces miscarriages of justice. The important thing is that there be sufficient safeguards and checks & balances to maximise the chances of injustices being spotted and corrected.
Arguably, then, the anglo-saxon system has an intrinsic disadvantage compared with the Italian system, when it comes to bad verdicts. If the murder had occurred in (say) the UK, and Knox and Sollecito had been found guilty in a criminal trial, they would immediately have been convicted and sentenced. And the only option open to them at that point would be an appeal in which they would have to convince a largely reactionary group of appeal court judges that there was sufficient reason to either overturn the verdict or order a retrial. And, in practice, that's a very hard thing to convince appeal court judges to do: just ask the Birmingham 6, the Guildford 4, Barry George, the Bridgewater 4, etc etc.
By contrast, Knox and Sollecito essentially get a "do-over" in their trial process. It gives their lawyers a chance to figure out where they might have gone wrong in the first trial, and which of the prosecution points they need to counter more successfully. Most crucially of all, of course, is that the entire burden of proof is still with the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And even after the appeal trial, the Supreme Court automatically checks on the correct application of the law: many miscarriages have occurred due to exactly this reason, and it's notoriously difficult to be granted an appeal in the UK or US based on misapplication of the law (as opposed to new or challenged findings of fact).
So, while I think that Massei's court was terribly wrong in the way it assessed and ruled on the first trial, courts can and do get it wrong with significant regularity. It's a fact of life. But the appeal trial gives the defendants (and the court) the chance to make sure that everything is done as well as possible. It seems to me that the current appeal trial of Knox and Sollecito in Judge Hellmann's court is currently doing exactly that.
It's just a shame that the process will take four years to play out. But people convicted after a single bad trial can take decades to have the injustice addressed. In that context, things perhaps don't seem quite so bad in Italy after all.
