by Patrick H. Moore
Amanda Knox. You just got hit about as hard as anyone can get hit…short of…death. The Sword of Damocles, that had been hanging over your head for years, has dropped. Yesterday, in a Florentine courtroom, a cruel Fate clipped the slender thread belaying the sword above your head and you have been thrust into a frightening world in which you face a 28-year prison sentence. This has got to be the hardest knock of all. You have vowed that you are not going back to Italy. Now you face a new chapter in, as you put it, the “train wreck” that your life would become if you were found guilty a second time.
Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian writes:
“It would feel like a train wreck,” Amanda Knox told the Guardian, shortly before being found guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher for the second time. “I’m definitely not going back to Italy willingly. They’ll have to catch me and pull me back kicking and screaming into a prison that I don’t deserve to be in. I will fight for my innocence.”
Knox said the whole experience had irreparably damaged her. “I am a marked person, and no one who’s unmarked is going to understand that. It’s very intimidating. I don’t even know what my place is anymore. What’s my role in society? Who am I, after everybody has branded me?”
Amanda Knox has only a few choices now. She can let the convoluted legal scenario play out and hope that extradition never comes to pass. This would mean she would be counting on our Government to protect her one way or another. And there are those who believe that our Government would protect her. This would mean no extradition prior to the final appeal and no extradition after the final appeal should the Final Court in this labyrinthine spectacle rule against her. It is her fate to be part of this No Exit protocol, in which there exists – in the last act as the curtain comes down – the real possibility of a lengthy prison sentence.
The legal analysts naturally disagree on whether the U.S. would send Knox back to Italy if Rome requests extradition.
“She was once put in jeopardy and later acquitted,” said Sean Casey, a former prosecutor who is now a partner at Kobre & Kim in New York. “Under the treaty (between the two nations), extradition should not be granted.”
In other words, under the theory of double jeopardy, the new conviction is in violation of our law which dictates that a person cannot be tried twice on the same charge.
Not so fast, cautions George Zimmerman’s former attorney and current CNN analyst Mark O’Mara, who believes the United States has to respect our extradition treaty with Italy:
“We have to follow the letter of the law,” said O’Mara on Thursday.
But suppose Amanda Knox doesn’t want to let the “wheels of the political world” play out with her as the guinea pig irreparably dizzied by the madness of all that has transpired. Her haunting remark: “Who am I, after everybody has branded me?” leaves only a few possible choices. She can fall victim and be destroyed or she can bear the mark of Cain with courage – she can become that outlaw whose courage must never falter as she is fated the wander the wastes of this world always a fugitive and never at ease.
It’s a hell of a position for a young woman to be in but whether she knows it or not, she’s been preparing for it. Her freshly-cropped hair has something of the jailhouse about it, but it is also is a first step on the way to Knox changing her identity into that of a boy or rather a young man.
If she chooses to be a fugitive from justice she will have to be perennially shrewd and strong – in disguise, various subterfuges, alternate identities, why not be a boy some of the time? (She’s always looked slightly boyish when viewed from certain angles; why not make the most of it?)
But she may have already pondered these possibilities.
She will need a superlative crew of foils and companions. She will need simulacrum A. Knoxes fanning out across the globe, false leads to keep Interpol off their game.
The most important thing she must realize is that whatever plans she may make – she will have to endlessly change direction and turn on a dime to stay ahead of the pincers that will be yapping at her mercurial heels.
It’s a hell of a tough proposition but the alternative is to risk going back to an Italian prison for all of what should be the best years of her life.
* * * * *
In a Perfect World
Actually, there’s another alternative — in a perfect world. Let’s say Knox needs to serve 28 years. Here’s what needs to transpire. She will need volunteers to serve her time for her.
I know many people who believe in Knox and not just because they find her attractive (that’s bit of a given), but rather see in her a kind of portal to Fascination Street, a muse fit for this new uncertain millennium in which every man or woman of good heart may find themselves convicted of some crime real or imagined. Amanda Knox is an accident, many would say, of the random vagaries of fate that brought her and Meredith Kercher and the others together in Perugia, a heroine blasted by circumstance, a young woman approaching the prime of her life “branded” as a pariah, a Cain, a Jezebel, a convict, a jackal, it’s too much to bear…
So is it really too much to ask 28 of Amanda’s admirers to sacrifice a year of their lives and go serve that year in an Italian prison working off her sentence for her? Hell, I’d do a year for Amanda without blinking. I’m sure many others would do the same. All it would take is a little serious arm-twisting on the part our government to expedite matters with our Italian friends. So it’s time to step up — heart, body and soul…
And the message would be plain as the Liberty Bell. I’m serving this time for Amanda Knox because I believe she has been railroaded and because this is the right thing to do. And meanwhile Knox would know that although she is alone yet she is not alone… And, there will be time for writing…