With “flawed and flimsy” evidence and “no motive,” the murder trial of Amanda Knox seems more about a prosecutor’s ambitions than any likelihood the American student actually killed her housemate, Timothy Egan writes in the New York Times. “Any fair-minded jury would have thrown” the case “out months ago,” Egan says, citing an expert who called it “the railroad job from hell.”
“No reliable witness or credible evidence has ever placed” Knox and her then-boyfriend “at the crime scene,” Egan notes, but they’ve been “painted across Europe as thrill-seekers who killed a woman in a drug-fueled orgy.” Meanwhile, prosecutor Giuliano Mignini is facing a judge’s accusations that he intimidated and wiretapped “perceived enemies.” The case may well be continuing because his reputation hangs in the balance—no small thing in Italy.
(More Amanda Knox stories.)