Right, that highlighted sentence is the crux of it. There is anti-Americanism aplenty, but it only - on a subconscious level, perhaps - added a bit of fuel to the fire.When my husband and I did our "grand tour" (six weeks around Western Europe), the European edition of Time was full of letters re anti-Americanism there. That was in 1979. (As it happened, we were treated very well, but we were traveling during the off-season when crowds were few.)
I'm not naive about the way Americans are perceived (nor am I blind to the ways we contribute to that perception).
Maybe there was a subconscious influence and maybe anti-Americanism predisposed Italian jurors to believe the worst about Amanda Knox. But I don't believe Western Europeans would deliberately convict a woman they believe to be innocent, just because she is American. That was my only point.
They did not intentionally frame an innocent. I think Mignini felt he was doing the right thing, and his intentions were noble at the onset.