Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (34 page)

But I was consumed by the question of how long they could, or should, keep up the back-and-forth between Seattle and Perugia.
What is my family going to do? What about work? What about life?

It was the same for my friends who were graduating that spring.
How do I tell them that I live here in prison now, and that they need to move on with their lives—without me? Can I tell them just to forget about me for 26 years?

I desperately didn’t want to be forgotten. But more than worrying about the logistics of such a life, I was terrified that we were coming to a point where we wouldn’t understand one another. They still had the right to choose what to do with their lives; they had freedom. I didn’t. I was at the mercy of my wardens. I worried that my new prison identity wouldn’t make sense to them, and my mom was evidence of that. If enough time passed, we’d be speaking two different languages—and it would have nothing and everything to do with their English and my Italian.

Chapter 31

November–December 2010

S
itting beside me in the visitors’ room at Capanne, my friend Madison reached over and brushed my cheek. I flinched.

“Baby, don’t worry. It’s just an eyelash,” she said.

My skittishness horrified me. “I guess I’m just not used to people touching me anymore.”

In one of the few happy surprises of my then-three years in prison, Madison had moved from Seattle to Perugia to be near me—arriving in November 2010, a few days after Laura handed me her bedsheets, hugged me tearfully, and left for a halfway house in Naples.

One friend couldn’t replace the other. Laura had nurtured me on the inside. Seeing Madison twice a week for an hour gave me heart—and, often, valuable information. Distraught after a bad breakup, Madison embraced the Mormon philosophy she’d grown up with: “forget yourself and go to work.” Keeping me grounded and hopeful was her work. But she also needed a paying job. A photographer who didn’t speak Italian, she turned to Rocco and Corrado. With their recommendation and her portfolio, she landed a gig taking pictures for a local newspaper. In her spare time, she and an interpreter friend talked to journalists, lawyers, and people on the street about my case. Maybe one of those interviews would give Carlo, Luciano, and me an extra fingerhold to help pull me out of this hell.

After I was convicted, my family, my lawyers, my friends, other prisoners—even, bizarrely, prison officials—tried to console me by telling me that I’d surely have my sentence reduced, if not overturned, on appeal. Rocco and Corrado assured me that in Italy about half the cases win on appeal.

The old Amanda would have appreciated the possibility.

But I’d been burned so often I was terrified. Why would the Court of Appeals make a different decision from the previous court? Or from the pretrial judge? Both had accepted the prosecution’s version. With my case, the Italian judicial system was also on trial. My story was well known, and the world was watching. It’d be difficult for the judicial authorities to back down now.

One thing had changed: me.
I
was different. In the year since my conviction I’d decided that being a victim wouldn’t help me. In prison there were a lot of women who blamed others for their bad circumstances. They lived lethargic, angry lives. I refused to be that person. I pulled myself out of the dark place into which I’d tumbled. I promised myself I’d live in a way that I could respect. I would love myself. And I would live as fully as I could in confinement.

The questions and choices I made during the first trial ate at me.
What if I’d spoken up more, clarified more when other witnesses took the stand, pleaded my innocence more forcefully? Would it have made a difference?
I’d waited for the jury and the world to realize that there was no evidence against me. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

Though I trusted my lawyers completely, this time I wanted to be involved in every decision. I owed it to myself. I couldn’t survive another guilty verdict if my team and I overlooked a single speck of favorable evidence.

Once I started thinking about what might be possible, nothing seemed out of reach. Should I write to the new judge? The U.S. secretary of state? Why not the president?

Rather than write, I read. The 407-page report from Judge Massei explained why we’d been convicted and how Raffaele, Guede, and I had murdered Meredith.

The supposed motive was as far-fetched as a soap opera plot. “Amanda and Raffaele suddenly found themselves without any commitments; they met Rudy Guede by chance and found themselves together with him at the house on the Via della Pergola where . . . Meredith was alone,” Massei wrote.

The judges and jury hypothesized that Raffaele and I were fooling around, and that Guede started raping Meredith because we turned him on. Instead of helping Meredith, we inexplicably and spontaneously joined Guede, because it was “an exciting stimulant that, although unexpected, had to be tried,” he wrote. “[T]he criminal acts were carried out on the force of pure chance. A motive, therefore, of an erotic, sexually violent nature which, arising from the choice of evil made by Rudy, found active collaboration from Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.”

The report rejected the prosecution’s claim that Meredith and I had had a contentious relationship. The judge wrote “the crime that was carried out . . . without any animosity or feelings of rancor against the victim . . .”

They allowed that there was no evidence of contact between Guede and me—no e-mails, phone calls, or eyewitnesses. They discounted the testimony of Hekuran Kokomani, the witness from the pretrial and the trial who said he threw olives at me and who “identified” me by the nonexistent gap between my teeth. And they conceded that Raffaele and I were not likely killers. Rather we were “two young people, strongly interested in each other, with intellectual and cultural curiosity, he on the eve of his graduation and she full of interests . . .”

Nonetheless, the report claimed, Raffaele and I “resolved to participate in an action aimed at forcing the will of Meredith, with whom they had, especially Amanda, a relationship of regular meetings and cordiality, to the point of causing her death . . . the choice of extreme evil was put into practice. It can be hypothesized that this choice of evil began with the consumption of drugs which had happened also that evening, as Amanda testified.”

It continued: “Therefore it may be deduced that, accustomed to the consumption of drugs and the effects of the latter, Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito participated actively in Rudy’s criminal acts aimed at overcoming Meredith’s resistance, subjugating her will and thus allowing Rudy to act out his lustful impulses . . .”

Another factor, the judge wrote, was that Raffaele and I read comic books and watched movies “in which sexuality is accompanied by violence and by situations of fear . . .”

He brought up the disputed theory that Raffaele’s kitchen knife was the murder weapon, in addition to a new theory that I’d carried the knife in my “very capacious bag.” Why would I? “It’s probable, considering Raffaele’s interest in knives, that Amanda was advised and convinced by her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, to carry a knife with her . . . during the night along streets that could have seemed not very safe to pass through at night by a girl.”

The lining of my bag wasn’t cut. The police found no blood in my bag. How can I prove what I didn’t do?

The prosecution had based their case on misinterpreted and tainted forensic evidence and had relied heavily on speculation. But Judge Massei’s faith was blind. Patrizia Stefanoni would not “offer false interpretations and readings,” he wrote.

T
he appeal wouldn’t be a redo of the first trial. Italy, like the United States, has three levels of justice—the lower court, the Court of Appeals, and the highest court, the Corte Suprema di Cassazione, their version of our Supreme Court. The difference is that, in Italy, someone like me is required to go through all three levels, all the way to the Cassazione, whose verdict is final.

Cases often take turns and twists that would surprise and unsettle most Americans. Even if you’re acquitted at level one, the prosecution can ask the Court of Appeals to overturn the verdict. If the appeals court finds you guilty, it can raise your sentence. Or it can decide that a second look is unnecessary and send you on to the Cassazione for the final stamp on the lower court’s decision—in Raffaele’s and my cases, to serve out our twenty-five- and twenty-six-year sentences.

At each level, the verdict is official, and the sentence goes into immediate effect unless the next court overturns it.

In Italy’s lower and intermediate levels, judges and jurors decide the verdict. And instead of focusing on legal errors, as we do in the United States, the Italian appellate court will reopen the case, look at new evidence, and hear additional testimony—if they think it’s deserved.

In our appeal request, we asked the court to appoint independent experts to review the DNA on the knife and the bra clasp, and to analyze a sperm stain on the pillow found underneath Meredith’s body that the prosecution had maintained was irrelevant. In their appeal request, the prosecution complained about what they thought was a lenient sentence and demanded life in prison for Raffaele and me.

I read and reread the Massei report, looking for discrepancies and flawed reasoning. I’m not a lawyer, but I had an insider’s perspective on the case, three years in prison, and eleven months in court. In one of Guede’s depositions, he claimed I’d come home the night of the murder, rung the doorbell, and that Meredith had let me in. Obviously he didn’t know it was our household habit to knock, not buzz. It was a little catch, but it was something my former Via della Pergola housemates, Laura and Filomena, could confirm.

Before arriving in Italy, Madison sent me lists breaking down the case by category and pressing me to consider it from different perspectives. Besides being a remarkable friend, Madison has, as part of her makeup, a stubborn, idealistic personality that insists on protesting wrongs and standing up for people she thinks need her help. I was lucky that she stood up for me.

For example, she wrote, “Witnesses: the prosecution knowingly used unreliable witnesses.

“Interrogation: the police were under enormous pressure to solve the murder quickly.

“There’s a pattern of the police/prosecution ignoring indications of your innocence. This must be pointed out. You were called guilty a month before forensic results, you were still considered guilty even though what you said in your interrogation wasn’t true, obviously false witnesses were used against you. The jury needs to know that you are being railroaded. How can you emphasize that? You can’t just say ‘I’m a scapegoat.’ You must present a series of convincing points.”

I knew that the most critical point was to be able to say why I’d named Patrick during my interrogation.

The prosecution and civil parties argued that I was a manipulative, lying criminal mastermind. My word meant nothing. The court would always presume I was a liar. If, in their mind, I was a liar, it was an easy leap to murderer.

I had been done in by my own words. I’d told the judges and jury things like “I didn’t mean to do harm” and “You don’t know what it’s like to be manipulated, to think that you were wrong, to have so much doubt and pressure on you that you try to come up with answers other than those in your memory.”

Thankfully Madison had researched the science on false confessions. She found Saul Kassin, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. A specialist in wrongful convictions, he took the mystery out of what had happened to me.

Before my interrogation, I believed, like many people, that if someone were falsely accused, they wouldn’t, couldn’t, be swayed from the truth while under interrogation. I never would have believed that I could be pressured into confessing to something I hadn’t done. For three years I berated myself for not having been stronger. I’m an honest person. During that interrogation, I had nothing to hide, and a stake in the truth—I desperately wanted the police to solve Meredith’s murder. But now I know that innocent people often confess. The records kept of people convicted of a crime and later exonerated by DNA evidence show that the DNA of 25 percent of them didn’t match the DNA left at the scene. The DNA testing showed that one in four innocent people ended up confessing as I did. And experts believe that even more innocent people confess, both in cases with and without DNA evidence.

According to Kassin, there are different types of false confessions. The most common is “compliant,” which usually happens when the suspect is threatened with punishment or isolation. The encounter becomes so stressful, so unbearable, that suspects who know they’re innocent eventually give in just to make the uncomfortably harsh questioning stop. “You’ll get thirty years in prison if you don’t tell us,” says one interrogator. “I want to help you, but I can’t unless you help us,” says another.

This was exactly the good cop/bad cop routine the police had used on me.

Besides being compliant, I also showed signs of having made an “internalized” false confession. Sitting in that airless interrogation room in the
questura
, surrounded by people shouting at me during forty-three hours of questioning over five days, I got to the point, in the middle of the night, where I was no longer sure what the truth was. I started believing the story the police were telling me. They took me into a state where I was so fatigued and stressed that I started to wonder if I
had
witnessed Meredith’s murder and just didn’t remember it. I began questioning my own memory.

Kassin says that once suspects begin to distrust their own memory, they have almost no cognitive choice but to consider, possibly accept, and even mentally elaborate upon the interrogator’s narrative of what happened. That’s how beliefs are changed and false memories are formed.

That’s what had happened to me.

I was so confused that my mind made up images to correspond with the scenario the police had concocted and thrust on me. For a brief time, I was brainwashed.

Three years after my “confession,” I’d blocked out some of my interrogation. But the brain has ways of bringing up suppressed memories. My brain chooses flashbacks—sharp, painful flashes of memory that flicker, interrupting my conscious thoughts. My adrenaline responds as if it’s happening in that moment. I remember the shouting, the figures of looming police officers, their hands touching me, the feeling of panic and of being surrounded, the incoherent images my mind made up to try to explain what could have happened to Meredith and to legitimize why the police were pressuring me.

This new knowledge didn’t stop my nightmares or flashbacks, but I was so relieved to learn that what I’d been through wasn’t unique to me. It had been catalogued! It had a name! As soon as I understood that what happened during my interrogation wasn’t my fault, I started forgiving myself.