Roseville Columnist Reflects on Freedom for Amanda Knox

Amanda Knox has been in my thoughts. 

I hope she's soaking up freedom and having sweet dreams in her Seattle bedroom, left intact by her parents after she went to Italy for a one-year study-stay, but ended up in prison for four years.

You've all heard her story through extensive coverage: Knox, 20 years old, wants to learn Italian in the charming Umbrian city of Perugia. Finds a roommate from England. Roommate is brutally killed. Knox and her boyfriend are convicted.

On appeal, when DNA evidence was found unreliable, she and her boyfriend were freed recently. What Italian police originally claimed to be Amanda's DNA on the murder knife proved to be a speck of rye bread. How incompent was that testing?!

I've been following this case for four years, both on TV and in print, and I knew from the start she was innocent, despite horrendous sexual and demonic accusations, and a prosecutor (known to be a grandstander who seems to enjoy brutalzing American defendents in court) who wanted to crucify this young girl.

Here's why I knew she wasn't involved in the murder. I was a 20-year-old girl when I first went to Europe, traveling for three months with two college friends. I was wide-eyed, too, and that trip changed my life forever.

At that age, at that stage in life, I know that Amanda was thrilled to be immersed in the wonders of Italy, too upbeat and positive about that opportunity to even think of killing. Totally improbable.

Yes, she said some things she shouldn't have while being grilled by the police. But if I had been arrested far from home, interrogated for endless hours, I might have been frightened enough to say anything to make the police stop their badgering.

From there, it went from bad to really bad, because the Italian press likes nothing better than a lurid scandal, and for reporters there Amanda was fresh meat which they gnawed mercilessly.

It's heart-wrenching to look at photos of fresh-faced Amanda at 20, excited to be leaving for Italy, and four years later, to see her haggard and shaking in the courtroom. She clearly suffered immensely for something she didn't do.

What has always bothered me about the earlier trials was that another suspect, Rudy Guede, an all-around no good, whose DNA was all over the murder scene and on the victim (not rye bread for sure), was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Amanda's ex-boyfriend was given 24 years, and she was given 26. Why two more years for her, when the evidence was so shaky that she was at the crime scene?

In her appeal to the court, begging that she be set free, Amanda said something that is likely true: She was horrified by her roommate's death, and realized that if she had been there, she would likely have been killed, too.

Coverage in the U.S. press of recent court events were so focused on Knox that I kept wondering what was happening for her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Only at the last moment of trial was he shown to be her co-defendent again, as he, too, pleaded for freedom. Which he was granted, along with Amanda; able to return to his southern Italy hometown of Bari.

Until this case, I have always considered Perugia to be the sweetest of Italian cities. I was there as a 20-year-old, and I have returned several times leading food tours. Our mecca is the Perugina chocolate factory, where they make, among many candy varieties, Baci. That translates as Kiss -- wonderfully delicious.

From now on, after what befell Amanda Knox there, I may kiss-off Perugia forever. I'll buy my Baci elsewhere.  

Knox, homeward bound after being freed, was quoted as saying she would like to return to Italy someday. She is more forgiving than I.