....and they laughed at CoCo the clown.
You are taking the wrong starting point. You are starting with Amanda Knox being innocent and that is preventing you undertaking any rational analysis.
You see a guilty verdict as questionable (wrong) but a not guilty verdict as 100% proof she is innocent.
I could give you a list of guilty people found not guilty. The cases you list mean nothing.
The fact is innocent people sometimes are found guilty and guilty people are sometimes found not guilty.
If Amanda Knox is found not guilty don’t make the mistake of assuming that means she is innocent. The beyond reasonable doubt burden of proof required in most criminal jurisdictions is high. The prosecution have a higher bar to jump over than the defence. Logic dictates there is far more chance of a guilty Amanda being freed than an innocent Amanda found guilty.
I understand what you're getting at here, and on one level I definitely agree: there ought to be more guilty people getting off than there are innocent people imprisoned otherwise the system doesn't work the way they always say it does, and quite frankly would be rather barbaric in my opinion.
I also see in some cases where the person was acquitted and there's
damn good reason to think they still did it. As has been noted the OJ case is one notorious one, and apparently the recent Casey Anthony case is another. I don't have any interest in court cases generally, two months or so of the ubiquitous OJ trial coverage circa '95 sent me fleeing in horror from the whole subject, and I came to the conclusion I'd rather watch a documentary on the mating habits of cockroaches than lawyers and other 'court-watchers' propounding daily on these cases.
However, as some thought it related in some way to this case, I came across some information about it, and from what I gather the poor child died and it took a month for her to say anything, instead saying something about a nanny that either didn't exist or they found and denied it, and went out partying. The 'explanation' for this was an unsubstantiated and apparently never even brought up in court (?) accusation she'd been abused as a child and taught to hide things. Let's just say '
I get it' in regards to why people might still think her guilty.
Another one might be Rubin Carter, the (in)famous story of The Hurricane, immortalized in a beautiful song by Bob Dylan. I vaguely recall this from his last trial as a kid, I came across the song as a teenager and thought it wonderful--then I actually found something out about the evidence against him. Let's just say
I get that one too. There was some poetic license taken in that wonderful song methinks.
This one however is different, and it might well explain why the ones still promoting guilt don't ever want to talk about evidence anymore--because it all pretty much reveals just how disturbing this prosecution was on so many levels. Nor do any of the circumstances actually suggest guilt to a rational mind when
put into context. Some might be suspicious at first glance, but
just look into them and you might just find out the full story is actually either irrelevant, or makes you wonder about the ones who find it 'suspicious.'
My underlying point is this: this case is unlike those others, and in the long run there's just not going to be much mystery about what happened, or much of anyone who thinks them guilty. That there still is now is an artifact from the time when the only information available to most came from the police and prosecution. The case presented through the press was damning--and virtually entirely untrue. However a number of people congregated and talked about it for a year before the trial, which also lasted a year and found them guilty on the basis of disingenuous 'evidence' and they had almost 240 people online to 'celebrate' the conviction. There's only a fraction of them left now, and they sit around and do little more than dream up ways to twist things so that it's still possible to think them guilty and that they will be found guilty by the second trial.
The reality is, on the basis of the evidence it's damned deadly difficult to even put them at the scene of the crime (that's what the time of death argument is about) and once you get them there (or skip that step!) there's nothing in the murder room whatsoever to suggest they were involved, and most of the rest of the physical evidence amounts to the fact that Amanda lived there, or something done by Rudy Guede thought ambiguous enough to pretend was Raffaele or Amanda.
From a rational standpoint there shouldn't actually
be people who are adamant about their guilt, maybe some still suspicious, but not much of anyone absolutely sure. However there ought to be--and is--a number of people pretty damn sure they're innocent, as that's what is actually suggested by the timeline, evidence, science, and known human behavior. No one has ever come up with a coherent and believable theory of the crime which actually employs evidence in the endeavor, and people have stopped trying, just as the ones who think them guilty stopped talking about the evidence long ago. It just serves to make them look silly for the most part, thus I don't blame them overmuch.
However a number of factors, such as what I mentioned above about the initial untrue information (most of which isn't even disputed by them anymore and ironically they were in part responsible for dispelling) combined with the length of time spent congregating, the closed nature of their environment, (by and large anyone arguing innocence is either banned or strictly controlled at the--all associated BTW--guilt sites) and the fact that sometimes people can be the most adamant about that what they actually have doubts about, serves to create the illusion that there's a significant number of people who still think them absolutely guilty and actually know something about the case. That just isn't true, and I strongly suspect it will become even less true the more exposure the case receives.
All the rest of those cases left one with a mystery about whodunit or how it happened if it wasn't them, this one already has the perpetrator the evidence suggests responsible behind bars, and Amanda and Raffaele are--and always were--leftovers from their mistaken first arrest where they made a huge display of themselves before they'd even received the forensics report. It
just so happens they weren't too willing to admit their 'theory' of a sordid sex ritual involving three people that the prosecutor just made up out of whole cloth was wrong, so they pretended they were still right and threw the two college kids in with the burglar they caught doing things following standard investigatory procedures.
Though it's not that big of a deal.
