Crimes Against Humanity

Today Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s convictions for the 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy were annulled, bringing this divisive case to a final close. The verdicts came as shock to both pro-innocence and pro-guilt sides, with lawyers for the defendants openly expressing their fears the conviction would be upheld, and even Knox’s supporters saying they feared a guilty verdict was the only outcome.

The reactions on both sides of the Atlantic will be markedly different; while many Americans may feel the right decision has been reached, in Italy and the UK the reaction so far has mainly been one of stunned disbelief.

Much of the U.S. media has propagated the idea that this has always been a simple case of wrongful conviction: Knox was railroaded by a corrupt prosecutor; she was beaten and bullied into a false confession; and there was no evidence anyway. Or was there?

“In 50 years of practicing law, I have never seen a more one-sided presentation by the media in the United States of the case,” says Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. “Everybody is saying there’s no evidence against her and she’s totally innocent. It’s just not true.”

"We always seemed to really click together, personality-wise," Aamina Morrison says of Diamond Williams, whom she first met in a Philadelphia LGBT youth group 12 years ago. “Like the issues of oppression we shared or things that came up in her own transition. She didn't realize those little things she did for me right there helped me see the possibility for who I am today."

Williams was brutally murdered last month, her body dismembered and thrown in a field. A 43-year-old Philadelphia man named Charles Sargent, who has previously been charged with rape and aggravated assault, confessed to the crime and led the police to Williams's remains. He will be tried for murder.

Morrison is now co-director of the peer-led Trans-Health Information Project, which, along with other LGBTQ and social justice groups in Philadelphia, is demanding justice for Williams. They believe Williams was targeted because she was transgender and working in the sex trade. Bringing Sargent to trial isn’t enough, they say; they want changes to how police and the media respond to violence against members of the transgender community.

Morrison has her own reason to believe that if Philadelphia police treated transgender victims of violence better, the friend she remembers from her youth group would still be alive. She says that when she saw Sargent’s photograph in the press after his confession, “it immediately took me back to an incident I had with him."

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  Viewed from the outside, the murder castle was simply a big ungainly building, one of the architectural monstrosities common in the nineties.