RandyN said:
Italians must be inherently dishonest...and or else massively stupid. The facts seem irrefutable. Dumb cows.
You had me Randy, right up until the last two sentences. Then you rode the train right off the rails. There is nothing inherently stupid or dishonest about Italians. Are some individuals and the system stupid or dishonest? Absolutely, but the people as a whole are not.
They are trapped in a failed system without the mechanism to correct it. Too much power is entrusted to the judges, The system lacks the finality and the integrity to get it right. This much is true, but I will never paint the Italian people with a broad brush. They do need wholesale changes and should adopt more the English/US type of system. They need to end the automatic appeals,and the professional jurists and go to a jury system entirely made up lay people. Would this be perfect? Hardly, but it would be better.
Moi aussi.
I've posted many times here that early 2000's Canadian study of wrongful convictions, a study which precedes the horrible Kercher murder, and if that was the only thing you ever read about the Canadian legal system, you'd want to avoid Canada like the plague.
It also answers the many questions that well meaning skeptics might ask, like, "You're implying that the whole system is corrupt, or that everyone is part of the conspiracy!"
These things very seldom work like a Don Brown mystery. It is usually one person up the chain trusting that the person below them on the chain has done their work right, and they sign off on it. Institutional loyalty and group think are powerful subtexts.... yes, even in Canada.
It's the very reason we have the safeguards of innocent until proven guilty and the right to a lawyer, and the right to have confessions videotaped.
Debra Milke in Arizona had her "confession" written down longhand by a cop, three days after she was supposed to have confessed it, and has ALWAYS denied she ever made it. Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito, Patrick Lumumba and Rudy Guede were all denied lawyers and videotaping at interrogation, and for some reason that bothers guilters not one whit.
If either of Sollecito OR Knox had had lawyers, as required by Italian law (unless we accept Machiavelli's legal definition of a "weak suspect" not requiring one) then none of us would know each other; the Kerchers would have had their answer in 2010 and would have been able to pick up the pieces of living and NO ONE would have ever heard of Amanda Knox.
The Italians may have a more damaged system than, say, Canada, but we could all start posting on the "Canada's justice system sucks!" website and find plenty to talk about.