acrossthelines wrote:
Most of those who believe her guilty believe that purely because of her behavior during the trial (smiling occasionally in the courtroom) and at a police station (she did cartwheels once). Since it's outside of what they imagine their own behavior would be, she must be guilty as sin. (I am using harsher language than they would, but still.)
Honestly, fuck that. I personally know someone who has been falsely accused of a crime and have seen this happen to him, and fuck. that. It has been proven through study upon study and experiment upon experiment that what people's perceptions/memories of someone else's behavior or of a given situation are change based upon what they are told after the fact. Example of this bearing out in real life: Cameron Todd Willingham was falsely executed in Texas due largely to eyewitness accounts for arson that killed his three young children. At first, eyewitnesses reported that he was extremely (and appropriately) distressed and tried to get back in the house to save his children; after being told that he was being considered a suspect in their murders, those same exact eyewitnesses either began to say that he was too distressed, that he was acting, or that he was not bothered by it at all; those are the testimonies that ended up being given in court. (There is a lot more complexity to this particular case, though let it not be mistaken that ultimately I don't believe any reasonable person would think of finding him guilty, but when I first read up on it that disgusted me, although I knew/know how extremely common that behavior is.) It's a twisted form of hindsight bias that we are guilty of every day when judging other people.
Looking at Amanda Knox's behavior from the lens of "she's guilty" makes that behavior fit perfectly in an overall scheme we think up in our heads. In reality, though, her behavior can be explained in a myriad of ways which I should not need to get into because people who are familiar with the case should already be able to come up with several off the tops of their heads.
Off my pedestal now... This way of judging people is just something that gets to me more than most things. It happens all the time and is nearly always wrong, sometimes to the point that it takes away a person's life or livelihood. That's not cool.
To add to this, even just using certain words can change how someone views a situation. I know there was one study where participants watched a video of a car crash, and then were later asked one of two questions, depending on the group they were in: how fast was the car going when they hit/collided vs. how fast was the car going when they smashed into each other. The people who heard smashed recorded the speed to be about 10 MPH faster, and remembered the crash to be even more violent than it actually was, as compared to the group that heard the "softer" word. Simply using a stronger word can completely distort a person's memory. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this sort of thing played a role in the confession that was taken from Knox.
In any case, while I didn't follow this case much at all in the beginning, I read up on it towards the end, just before Knox/Sollecito were acquitted. The whole thing just made me facepalm. Unless there was some major key evidence to this case that tied the two to the crime that the media hadn't presented, it seemed highly unlikely to me that they were involved in any way. There was no motive and no verifiable evidence. The only thing that legitimately linked them at all (from what I could see) was Knox's "confession", which I think most experts agreed wasn't very reliable considering the conditions she was under whilst making said confession. It just blows my mind that the lives of these two people were ruined because of sensationalized media, cops who were horrible at their job, and a prosecutor who seems like he's batshit crazy, as far as I can tell.
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