Whether it is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Weather Underground, Central Park rapists, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jim Jones and the People's Temple, welfare recipients, Palestinian terrorists, murderers, abortionists, strippers or common criminals — liberals always take the side of the enemies of civilization against civilization.
In the view of The New York Times, every criminal trial is a shocking miscarriage of justice — except the ones that actually are shocking miscarriages of justice.
Thus, in last week's Times, Timothy Egan wrote about a shocking miscarriage of justice being carried out against a "high-spirited" American girl accused of murder by a crazed prosecutor in Perugia, Italy.
Egan's column bears as much relationship to the facts of the case as — well, I guess as anything printed in the Times. And yet every American news network has embraced Egan's version and is flacking for the accused.
Amanda Knox, her erstwhile boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and another man, Rudy Guede, stand accused of murdering Knox's roommate, Meredith Kercher, on Nov. 1, 2007, at the house Knox and Kercher shared with two other girls in Perugia.
Egan triumphantly cites an "outside expert hired by CBS News" who calls Knox's prosecution, "the railroad job from hell." Egan does not mention that the "outside investigator" is Paul Ciolino of the "Innocence Project," whose investigations always seem to conclude that the accused is being railroaded.
Ciolino's theory of the crime — adopted unquestioningly by Egan — is that the third man, Guede, who has already confessed to the crime, acted alone.
Despite Ciolino's careful analysis of the evidence, his theory is contradicted by Guede himself, as well as the coroner and a leading forensic geneticist, both of whom have testified that Kercher's massive injuries could only have been inflicted by multiple assailants.
It is also contradicted by the court's 106-page report, released in January, explaining the judge's reasons for refusing to release Knox and Sollecito on bail.
Even the "48 Hours" executive producer doesn't endorse Ciolino's preposterous "single knifeman" theory, admitting: "Do we know every piece of data? No. Is there some troubling DNA? Yes."
Hey, does anyone know if CBS hired more than one "outside investigator" to look at the Knox case? Because if Egan considers one CBS "outside investigator" the Rosetta Stone of this case, it would be odd if he didn't mention the conclusions of another CBS outside investigator.
Why yes there was!
The second investigator, Paolo Sfriso, didn't pronounce judgment, but he did cite some of the evidence. The evidence includes:
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a large kitchen knife, believed by forensic investigators to have caused at least one of Kercher's three wounds, found at Sollecito's house. Despite having been thoroughly washed, the knife had Knox's DNA on the handle and the murder victim's DNA on the blade.
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a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matches Sollecito's. The floor had been cleaned so that the footprint was invisible to the naked eye, but was revealed with Luminol (just like on "CSI").
— Knox's bloody footprints, mixed with Kercher's blood, were found in another roommate's room, where a window had been broken to make it look like there had been a break-in — a theory discounted immediately by investigators. Knox's footprints, too, had been scrubbed but were discovered with Luminol.
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Kercher's bloody bra strap at the crime scene that had abundant amounts of Sollecito's DNA on it.
Egan explains away the devastating DNA evidence by denying it exists. Delusionally, he writes:
"(I)f Knox and Sollecito had killed Kercher, and were in that blood-splattered room, why is there no physical trace from them on the body? A print? A swap of DNA somewhere? After all, Kercher had died after a brutal strangulation, evidence of considerable struggle, with knife pokes in the neck."
Read the trial transcript, Matlock.
Egan does acknowledge the bloody bra strap covered with Sollecito's DNA, but dismissively writes: "(T)hey discovered Kercher's clasp nearly six weeks after the murder — a highly suspect and tainted piece of evidence from a contaminated crime scene."
Even the defense isn't complaining about the amount of time that passed before the bra strap was tested. The bra strap was found during the initial search of the crime scene — which was promptly sealed off — and then was collected for testing during the second search of the sealed crime scene some weeks later.
True, the defense has tried to minimize all the evidence by throwing out the old "contamination" chestnut, but without proof of systematic contamination of the evidence, this is just a boilerplate defense, much like "but he hit me first." (Next the defense will be vowing to look for the "real killer.")
Egan also dismissed the knife at Sollecito's house with Knox's DNA on the handle and Kercher's DNA on the blade, claiming the knife contained only "a tiny amount of DNA that might match that of the victim." (I know I'm constantly finding small amounts of other people's DNA on the blades of my kitchen knives.)
When the defense tried the "small amount of DNA" argument at trial, forensic biologist Patrizia Stefanoni replied, "If the blood evidence is a positive match, it is not always important how much there is — and the material on the blade matches the victim."
Even the accused murderess has a better theory to explain the DNA on the knife. Knox wrote in her prison diary: "I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith's house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife."
These are only a few examples of the wildly deceptive account of the Amanda Knox trial printed in the Times. The reason this is important is that this is how the Times portrays all criminal prosecutions: Ruthless prosecutor railroads innocent bystanders for mysterious reasons. (Unless the victim is a late-term abortionist or the accused is a Duke lacrosse player.)
The only difference in the Knox case, compared to run-of-the-mill criminal cases, is that the copious foreign reporting on the case makes it child's play to see how egregiously the Times is lying this time.
I don't know if Knox murdered her roommate, but I am sure that America's news coverage of this case is a crime.
