I don't think media bias is specific to a country or ethnicity. I think it is a attributable to human nature. Hard to not read the headline or listen to the news on cases that have lots of publicity. Then to unring the bell and pretend you didn't see it or hear it is a tall order for anyone. Obviously it is achievable, but still and all it is hard to impartial. But overall I wouold guess most juries do a good job. I am speaking in generalities and have no idea if anyone acted improperly in this case. But to think that someone may have reached a decision based on media reports is not an outrageous notion in any venue. It happens. Did it happen here? No idea.
The police, forenic analysts, prosecutors and jury in the investigation into the murder of Meredith Kercher have all been accused, by those that want Amanda to be innocent, as having been corrupt or incompetent. The family of Meredith Kercher does not agree. It might be a good time now to look at the list of circumstances that has been assembled regarding this case ... and then we should decide whether the jury made a decision based on reading the newspaper:
•the DNA of Raffaele Sollecito on Meredith’s bra-clasp in her locked bedroom;
•the almost-entire naked footprint of Raffaele on a bathmat that in *no way* fits that of the other male in this case – Rudy Guede;
•the fact that Raffaele’s own father blew their alibi that they were together in Raffaele’s flat at the time of the killing with indisputable telephone records;
•the DNA of Meredith Kercher on the knife in Raffaele’s flat which Raffaele himself sought to explain as having been from accidentally “pricking” Meredith’s hand in his written diary despite the fact Meredith had never been to his flat (confirmed by Amanda Knox);
•the correlation of where Meredith’s phones were found to the location of Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guedes’s flats;
•the computer records which show that no-one was at Raffaele’s computer during the time of the murder despite him claiming he was using that computer;
•Amanda’s DNA mixed with Meredith Kercher’s in five different places just feet from Meredith’s body;
•the utterly inexplicable computer records the morning after the murder starting at 5.32 am and including multiple file creations and interactions thereafter all during a time that Raffaele and Amanda insist they were asleep until 10.30am;
•the separate witnesses who testified on oath that Amanda and Raffaele were at the square 40 metres from the girls’ cottage on the evening of the murder and the fact that Amanda was seen at a convenience store at 7.45am the next morning, again while she said she was in bed;
•the accusation of a completely innocent man by Amanda Knox;
•the fact that when Amanda Knox rang Meredith’s mobile telephones, ostensibly to check on the “missing” Meredith, she did so for just three seconds - registering the call but making no effort to allow the phone to be answered in the real world
•the knife-fetish of Raffaele Sollecito and his formal disciplinary punishment for watching animal
at his university – so far from the wholesome image portrayed;
•the fact that claimed multi-year kick-boxer Raffaele apparently couldn’t break down a flimsy door to Meredith’s room when he and Amanda were at the flat the morning after the murder but the first people in the flat with the police who weren’t martial artists could;
•the extensive hard drug use of Sollecito as told on by Amanda Knox;
•the fact that Amanda knew details of the body and the wounds despite not being in line of sight of the body when it was discovered;
•the lies of Knox on the witness stand in July 2009 about how their drug intake that night (“one joint”
is totally contradicted by Sollecito’s own contemporaneous diary;
•the fact that after a late evening’s questioning, Knox wrote a 2,900 word email home which painstakingly details what she said happened that evening and the morning after that looks *highly* like someone committing to memory, at 3.30 in the morning, an extensive alibi;
•the fact that both Amanda and Raffaele both said they would give up smoking dope for life in their prison diaries despite having apparently nothing to regret;
•the fact that when Rudy Guede was arrested, Raffaele Sollecito didn’t celebrate the “true” perpetrator being arrested (which surely would have seen him released) but worried in his diary that a man whom he said he didn’t know would “make up strange things” about him despite him just being one person in a city of over 160,000 people;
•the fact that both an occupant of the cottage and the police instantly recognised the cottage had not been burgled but had been the subject of a staged break-in where glass was *on top* of apparently disturbed clothes;
•that Knox and Sollecito both suggested each other might have committed the crime and Sollecito TO THIS DATE does not agree Knox stayed in his flat all the night in question;
•the bizarre behaviour of both of them for days after the crime;
•the fact that cellphone records show Knox did not stay in Sollecito’s flat but had left the flat at a time which is completely coincidental with Guede’s corroborated presence near the girl’s flat earlier in the evening;
•the fact that Amanda Knox’s table lamp was found in the locked room of Meredith Kercher in a position that suggested it had been used to examine for fine details of the murder scene in a clean up;
•the unbelievable series of changing stories made up by the defendants after their versions became challenged; Knox’s inexplicable reaction to being shown the knife drawer at the girl’s cottage where she ended up physically shaking and hitting her head.
