Hard Knocks

Real and TV Amanda Knox - Amanda Knox (l) and Grace Van Patten (r)

I am very happy that Jimmy Kimmel's suspension has been suspended by ABC because it means that there is no longer any need to boycott Hulu at the moment.  Hulu, apparently owned by Disney is one of my streaming indulgences, and apparently enough people made good on their impulse to cancel all Disney related subscriptions, including Hulu, in protest that they succeeded in reversing Disney owned ABC network's caving to the FCC's extortion campaign to use the excuse of a Charlie Kirk adjacent joke that Kimmel told (which was actually at Trump's expense) to force the show off the air.   ("Charlie Who?" I can hear future readers ask.   Trust me, you don't want to know.)  I barely had time to betray the cause before the boycott was over.  I can go months without even thinking of watching Hulu, but lately I'm invested in the mini-series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox which has two more episodes to go.  

Anyone who has been around since 2007 should be able to remember the real Amanda Knox-- Foxy Knoxy as she was known by the European press at the time-- a 20-year old American college student taking a year abroad in Perugia Italy who was accused, tried and convicted of killing her British roommate Meredith Kercher in some weird sex game with her brand new Italian boyfriend of just over a week, Raffaele Sollecito, on the evening of All Souls Day of that year.  Under police interrogation before her arrest, Knox had voluntarily wrongfully implicated a third party, her boss Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese immigrant who owned the bar at which Knox served drinks for extra money.  Lumumba was ultimately acquitted for lack of evidence-- he was after all at his bar when the murder happened.   Knox and Sollecito after a lengthy highly publicized trial were convicted on December 20, 2009 after spending 2 years in prison and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively.  In the meantime, police work had uncovered the participation of yet another party to the murder,  Rudy Guede, a troubled Côte D'Ivorian by birth brought to Perugia at the age of 5 by his polygamous ne'er-do-well father who ultimately left him there, and ever since in and out of trouble, raised by a succession of unofficial foster parents.  The wealthy couple that finally adopted him at age 17 were so immediately overwhelmed by his behavior that they had the adoption nullified.  According to the story presented by the prosecution, Knox and Sollecito had procured Meredith for sex with Guede-- a sometime guest of the group of male jocks who lived in the apartment below Amanda and Meredith's-- and then  killed her with Knox delivering the fatal blow which the three attempted to cover up by staging false evidence of a robbery.

As the dramatization demonstrates, Amanda Knox had been tried in the court of public opinion before her verdict was reached, painted in the press in Italy and in Kercher's Britain as an ice cold American beauty, a serial sexual adventurer who betrayed callous feelings toward her roommate's death, preoccupied as she was with brazenly engaging in nookie with her new boyfriend and partner in crime while the investigation was underway.  The narrative of the murder was provided to the public from the interrogation of Knox herself without a lawyer present (Italian law requires a lawyer only for the already accused.  Knox's accusal came out of her testimony.  Once accused, Knox was advised by her interrogators that requesting a lawyer would only be seen as admission of her guilt.). In fact, the police conducting the interrogation had already formed a theory about Knox cultivated by the prosecutor of the case Giuliano Mignini from suspicions of the lead investigators Monica Napoleoni and Marco Chiacchiera in spite of a stubborn lack of corroborating evidence.  

From the beginning, Knox had maintained that the night of Kercher's murder, she and Sollecito spent the evening at his place smoking pot and watching Amelie since her boss Lumumba had given her the night off.  However during lengthy interrogation, Knox was worn down by insistence that she give her testimony in the Italian that she was barely fluent in.  The police had decided that the text Knox had written to her boss on learning of her suddenly free night-- "See you later"-- was not some benign American pleasantry, but rather proof that Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba had planned to meet up after the bar closed, no doubt to terrorize and murder Kercher.  In a harrowing recreation of the interrogation it's evident that the police used a number of tactics familiar from miscarriages of justice on the American side of the Atlantic-- withholding permission to speak to her mother as she repeatedly requested, domination to the point of disallowing bathroom breaks, teaming up against her with several interrogators screaming at her in Italian all at once, coaching desired answers out of her, wearing her down with accusation after accusation without the opportunity to respond to each in turn, lying about the testimony that Sollecito was giving separately in a way that suggested her new boyfriend was implicating her, threatening her with serious consequences for lack of cooperation and even committing physical violence against her with slaps to her head.  Having learned from witnesses of an African man who may have been involved, the police had suggested that Lumumba was the man and planted the false accusation in her head which came out of her mouth only after hours of relentless interrogation.  In the end, both Knox and Sollecito had under duress signed confessions composed by their interrogators.

Even during the trial, irregularities and improprieties in the investigation were brought to light.  The interrogation was determined to be inadmissible, but as the details were already well discussed in the press, the damage had been done.  After two years, Knox and Sollecito were convicted.  By this time it was widely known that the African seen by witnesses was the actual murderer, Rudy Guede who had fled Perugia but was returned to stand trial separately and given 30 years for the murder and sexual assault of Kercher in 2008.  Knox and Sollecito's convictions were automatically appealed.   By the time of the second trial, momentum against the false confessions of Knox and Sollecito coerced by the police and for the story that both originally told, placing them at Sollecito's apartment when the murder was committed gained enough traction that the convictions of both were thrown out.  Knox's conviction for false accusation of Patrick Lumumba held, but she was sentenced to time already served.  After 4 years, Amanda Knox left Perugia Prison on October 3, 2011.*  On returning to America, she has made a career out of advocating for those falsely convicted, and has published books, cooperated in the production of documentaries and news programs about her case and now co-produced with fellow redeemed unjustly fallen woman Monica Lewinsky this powerful and (be forewarned!) truly harrowing fictionalized account of her story.

As is often the case, Kercher's family has apparently had a hard time letting go of the original conviction and have been critical of Amanda Knox's involvement in media that they feel capitalize on their daughter's murder.   This is commonly seen in American cases as well and happens because families searching for answers for their loved ones' deaths often work closely with the Prosecutors of those accused of responsibility for their murders. For my part it seems obvious that Italian prosecutors and police (like their American counterparts all too often) in an effort to bring swift "justice" to the victim and the victim's family -- indeed to the public which had become so invested in the verdict-- composed a pleasing narrative out of the scraps that were strewn about them.  But you only need to apply Occam's razor to conclude that the pleasing narrative was false.  The notion that a 20 year old American foreign exchange student just spreading her wings in an excitingly new language and country was actually a calculating murderess of her roommate on a lark who, when cornered by police, falsely implicated her boss-- to protect the identity of her actual accomplice?-- was the stuff of utter fantasy.  It seems inconceivable to me that, knowing the true story of her own murder, Meredith Kercher would describe her friend Amanda Knox's ordeal as justice.

The problem I am certain lies in the western system of justice that Italian and American law have in common-- particularly the notion of prosecution and defense.  In both systems, organs of the state are tasked with identifying parties to accuse of guilt, and while the burden of proof is on the state, in practical terms, the accused must raise their own defense with the assistance of lawyers procured by themselves or by the state.  In short, what is supposed to pass for justice is really a contest between the considerable forces of the state and whatever defense the accused can muster.  Only one side will win.  It is not clear to anybody that the state's victory actually amounts to justice.  Imprisonment or even capital punishment of the convicted rarely restores justice to the bereaved, and it frequently spreads injustice to the family of the convicted.  Never more spectacularly than in cases like Amanda Knox's in which trumped up charges of innocents are fabricated out of whole cloth in sacrifice to the bloodthirsty God of Punishment.  As practiced in most of the developed world verdicts are ground out compulsively as if in service to a tic of society that demands that vengeance on a designated perpetrator be the sufficient reflexive response to every incidence of a wrong.

In order for real justice to occur, the pursuit of it must be, not a competition, not a gotcha for the accused, but a shared effort between all parties.  The focus of justice should be restoration, not revenge or retribution or pwning of the accused.  The process should be more akin to science or history and not at all akin to biblical vengeance or to game shows.  Restorative justice is how injuries heal.  This is how the false pleasing narratives of police keep from ruining innocent people's lives as a settled for substitute for true justice.

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* Three more legal steps had to be cleared in Italy in her absence following her release from prison before she was finally legally absolved for the murder: The Italian Supreme Court of Cassation (the highest court in Italy) reversed her acquittal and sent the case back to the lower court for a re-trial demanding further DNA tests to correct the errors of the original investigation.  The lower court again found Knox and Sollecito guilty, a verdict which was immediately sent for appeal back to the Supreme Court of Cassation.  In the second Supreme Court trial, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted for the murder for lack of evidence of their physical presence at the crime scene.  Nevertheless, based on the inadmissible coerced confessions of the two defendants from their first trial, the court determined (perfunctorily and incorrectly in this blog's estimation) that Knox and Sollecito had been present at the Villa when the murder occurred as witnesses.  Nevertheless, they were permanently free from the possibility of facing trial again for the murder.

One Angry Man

I had virtual jury duty today. I only found out it was virtual last night when I called the automated messaging service to check in, though it turned out the news was on my official summons if I had only bothered to read it.  I hadn't read it because I've had jury duty before and thought I knew the routine.  But that was pre-COVID.  Post-pandemic or pre-, it is not my favorite activity, which is probably not a revelation to anyone, but I have known people who get it into it for legitimate reasons-- the best among them perhaps genuine civic duty, and enthusiasm about an opportunity to participate in the assurance of justice.  My feelings about it are always a bit of a mess, and I was able to experience just about all of them today.

The last time I was summonsed to jury duty was about a week before the pandemic hit.  Though my colleagues at work expressed doubt that it would actually happen in light of the lockdown, this is not the kind of luck I generally have, so I made my plans to go and dutifully checked in the night before fully expecting my desire to get out of jury duty to be trumped by my okayness with being in lockdown-- but wouldn't you know for once the universe granted me a break and cancelled my jury duty.  

My karma with jury duty is a bit more anomalous -- and weird-- than it is with everything else in my life. The prior time I reported to jury duty was the day that Beto O'Rourke announced his candidacy for Senate against Ted Cruz in 2018; I got dismissed early due to a continuance in the trial I was waiting to be selected for.  The prior time, after being rejected for one jury, I learned that my wife, who had been forced to take public transportation because of my extraordinary need for the car, had stepped into a pothole, fallen and broken her ankle on the way to the bus stop so I got dismissed from jury obligations for the rest of the day to attend to her.  In short, jury duty has always been eventful for me but never resulted in my being selected for a trial.  

That day that my wife broke her ankle-- as I sat in the voir dire dreading the interview, I thought about how my personal experience as a victim of a mugging some twenty years prior had been a sort of get out of jail free card (so to speak) in prior voir dires and searched inside my soul to interrogate myself about whether this experience had truly prejudiced me in a way that would inhibit my impartiality or prevent a fair and just hearing on my part in a criminal trial.  I had healed from the trauma, and in any case, I had never generalized my feelings about crime as being that of a victim in search of vengeance from any criminal. I decided that, on the contrary, having searched the depths of my heart I had concluded that I would be able to separate my own experience from the facts of a case to such an extent that I could truthfully state that I could serve impartially.  But when I had made my case to the judge for my fitness to serve, the defense attorney decided to use one of his free passes to reject me without cause.  Justice's loss!  But I felt I had dodged a bullet.

For this reason, I was almost certain that today was not going to be my lucky day.  Even though virtual duty meant I did not have to drive an hour to the county courthouse at an ungodly hour of the morning.  Even though when I got called into a voir dire for a civil case, I was given lucky 21 as my juror number out of 30 in the running for 6 juror slots plus 2 alternates.  As I sat  in the zoom waiting room looking at the live muted feeds of my fellow prospective jurors, I observed that one of them was actually connecting from his job behind the wheel of a delivery vehicle, while others were shuffling papers and obviously multi-tasking both jury duty and their jobs.  Did they forget to get excused from work for jury duty or were their employers not compensating them for attending to their civic duty?  The gods were not smiling on the prospect of me overcoming my jadedness.  To pass the time I made a fateful decision to browse through my brother's twitter feed, scrolling through what was a particularly contentious morning of tweets fully emblematic of the decrepit state of our current society and particularly with respect to our judiciary and system of justice.  

In the virtual jury room, the visual chaos of the muted jurors was suddenly broken by the commanding voice of a new face that materialized toward the center of things.  I quickly gathered that this was the judge and that the selection process was beginning.  The judge  told us about the nature of the case (a civil suit between a gentleman injured in a crash and the gentleman who drove the other vehicle) and went through the initial survey of all participants.   I raised my hand to the questions about law firm employment (though not as a legal worker) and medical training (sleep lab technician), but sat on my hands for the question about beliefs, opinions or other reasons that would prejudice and impair me in the performance of making a fair decision on the basis of the evidence.  When the judge left the jury room, as I waited for my interview with the judge, I realized that it wasn’t my law or medical experience that made me suspect as a juror, but in fact my belief in Universal Healthcare and in the notion of restorative justice in which there aren’t winners and damages and losers and penalties but the restoration of justice between two parties in what even our language recognizes is an accident.  The more I waited the more I stewed in the juices of anger that in order to get your life back after an accident this is what you have to go through.  How else could you afford the rehabilitation and work loss in this rotten system than to hire a shyster lawyer to take it out of some other sucker's hide in court?  That’s what prevented me from believing that I could give justice by going along with this charade.  

And when I found myself suddenly virtually materialized by myself before the judge, a clerk and the two lawyers in the case, that’s what I told the judge when she questioned me.  Though she begged to differ with me that the outcome of this one case had anything to do with the failures of our system of healthcare delivery and justice,  she was very kind to me about my honesty in expressing my opinion (and I was not rude about it, though I did get inspiration from looking at the turkey lawyers while I was expressing myself.)  

After I was dismissed, which consisted of being popped out of the virtual judge’s chambers like a cartoon character and back into the waiting area, I did not know how successfully my spiel had gone.  I mean was there a chance that rather than be convinced by my self-assessment they would be so impressed by my honesty and argument that they would want me on the panel to try to enhance the possibility of actual justice happening?!  But assuming it had worked, part of me thought, ok, I was clever enough and angry enough at society to perhaps get the chutzpah to make this kind of ploy, but what if everyone else had my attitude about our fucked up systems of healthcare and justice?  Was it fair that I got to cleverly get out of it just because I was highly motivated to come up with such a scheme?  I didn’t know!

As it turns out it worked.  My number was passed by when they called the selected jurors. At the time I was proud of myself and felt I’d spoken some truth to power and perhaps maybe increased justice just a tiny bit in the world, but in retrospect I'll bet they just looked at me as one of those kooky old cranks who was better sent along back to his bat cave (and maybe have NSA check up on his surfing activities just to be on the safe side, mk?)  

Whatevs am I right??  Out of it for 3 years at least they said!

Crime and Punishment

Learning details of the crimes perpetrated by the Golden State Killer and Rapist in the wake of last week's arrest of a suspect, my anti-capital punishment reflexes have been put to the test.  The crimes were vile; the killer, an extremely degenerate sadist.  The numbers by themselves are horrendous: at least 12 murders, more than 50 rapes, over 100 burglaries mostly perpetrated over the decade from 1976 to 1986.  The nature of many of the burglaries reveals the baseness of the killer's modus operandi, which was to inflict as much damage and terror as he could wring from his victims and their families during and after his attacks.  This paragraph from the Wikipedia article gives a flavor:

The offender at times spent hours in the home, ransacking closets and drawers, eating food in the kitchen, drinking beer, raping the female again, or returning to utter more threats to the victims. In some instances, the victims believed he had left their home and began to move, but he then "jump[ed] from the darkness". The offender typically stole items from the victims as well, often selecting personal objects and items of minimal monetary value, although he stole cash and firearms also. The offender would eventually leave in a stealthy fashion, and victims were usually unsure as to whether or not he had left at all. He was believed to escape on foot through a series of yards and then use a bicycle to travel home or to a car. He also made extensive use of parks, schoolyards, creek beds, and other open spaces that allowed him to stay off the street.

Leading up to an attack, he would stalk his victims-- apparently strangers chosen merely from prolonged surveillance of neighborhoods and areas with features he preferred such as wooded abutments that he could use for access and escape --  and prepare his crimes sometimes for months. He relished his victims learning the scope of knowledge he had acquired about them, occasionally calling them sometimes years after the fact to remind them of their encounter with him.  It was the lengths of his preparation that led some investigators to guess correctly that he was or had been a police officer.  Profiling and victim's descriptions had only gotten the investigation so far (did you know that many of his victims reported he had a smaller than average penis?). But it was DNA that id'ed him this past week, giving investigators and victims the hope that they may have actually finally got their man in suspect Joseph James deAngelo.*

As I say, the more I've learned about the crimes, the greater the challenge to my highest ideals about justice.  The death penalty is legal in California but has rarely been carried out since 1972 when it was temporarily abolished as unconstitutional.  Although the penalty was reinstated by voters within months, the state has not executed a prisoner since 2006.  But if there is a case for the death penalty, this man's crimes could just be it.  I can in fact imagine and by proxy enjoy the pleasure and relief of the victims in seeking to return any measure of what was perpetrated on them to their transgressor.  Surely death would be too good for him.  I can for instance imagine the catharsis of conducting the trial with the defendant seated in court with electric cables hooked up to various parts of his body*,  through which his victims could administer jolts at will for every smirk, rolled eyeball  and sigh-- or just for the hell of it.   But for me, the key word is justice, which does inspire me to get my head on straight.

I have two overarching objections to the death penalty, and 2 reasons to prefer permanent incarceration as an alternative.  My first objection alone could be considered adequate: What if the verdict is wrong?  If so, the death penalty is an irreversible mistake on the state's behalf.  What could be more cruel and unusual than for the state to kill the wrong person?  From experience, we've learned that justice is rarely perfect. It convicts the innocent and acquits the guilty.  It is only as good as its practitioners, who have repeatedly been shown to be, as a class, less than ideal.

But in these days of DNA testing and other forensics, and given that in spite of the problems, justice still does occasionally manage to get done, there could still be cases where a conviction is nearly unanimously agreed to be correct, and this could well be one.   Thus, my second objection: if premeditated killing is a crime, the state should not engage in it.  If you do not trust the state to collect taxes, wage wars, pass laws and regulations (and for many reasons in this muddled age of what government is you should not), then it makes no sense to trust the state with premeditated murder.  To illustrate why states should not be entrusted to be impartial (let alone competent) in the administration of this responsibility, one need only look at statistics on race of those executed.  As the US General Accounting Office's own study has shown, "In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks."  Why would we want to irrevocably imbue any such flawed and capricious entity with the power to kill with impunity-- which is after all a power that we must necessarily grant to it over ourselves?

Compared to my objections to death, my reasons for preferring life are optimistic and idealistic.  The first is my belief that true justice must include the possibility that the guilty can be brought to remorse.  For me this is the essence and ideal of justice, that the perpetrators of crimes against fellow humans can come-- perhaps through empathy training or therapy-- to see the errors of their ways, to see their victims for who they are and not merely as pesky wills to be overcome in getting what they want.   In this way, those justly sentenced to life can properly take part in rehabilitating themselves for as long as they live, which may be as long as it takes for remorse to be achieved.  It could be objected that this is a naive hope. No one knows of a way to bring anything like this about for every shade of narcissistic sociopath, or for those perpetrators who perceive themselves to be victims entitled to reparations from strangers.  Yes, that may be true today.  Can anyone say that there will not be advances in our understanding of how to bring about empathy in a remorseless heart or otherwise reform it tomorrow? 

Which brings me to my second reason for preferring a life sentence: it affords us the opportunity to try to understand the motivations of those who perpetrate the most heinous acts toward prevention of further crimes.  The pursuit of this understanding should be practiced fearlessly.  I suspect true understanding of what brings the mostly male perpetrators of the worst crimes to these behaviors is not pursued because of the threat its exposure could pose to dearly held values about masculinity and power*.  It could also implicate social structures that are in need of restructuring and obstacles to success that are in need of removal.  What if violent random crime could demonstrably be reduced by increasing advantages to the most desperate, or by ensuring returning veterans get proper support and treatment for PTSD, or by sensible regulation of gun sales?  We have somehow "decided" as a nation that "killing the irredeemable" is worth it in hopes that others may be deterred by it; can we not decide that understanding why such crimes occur in hopes of preventing them is as worthy of pursuit?  I propose that part of a life sentence should be mandatory subjection of the convicted to ongoing research that is well designed and peer reviewed by accredited experts in a broad range of fields, from criminology to various disciplines of psychology to jurisprudence to sociology, and that this research be made available for pubic policy discussion.  To my first point, a remorseful and reformed subject would be an asset to any such investigation.

I'll grant you that my notions of justice may not be to everyone's taste.  I imagine the spectrum of opinions on what justice is for those who might still believe in it run from eye-for-an-eye vengeance, revenge and extraction of satisfaction from the corpses of those deemed to be society's enemies to pie-in-the-sky pleasing notions of rehabilitation and redemption in this lifetime for all, especially for those most in want of it.  I've also lived long enough to know that social idealism has been declared an enemy of our corporate hierarchy and has taken a tarnishing from public relations firms and think tanks (and often from ourselves via lessons we've absorbed from the masters), so chances are if you've made it this far you're fighting a smirk for each mention of the word ideal.  I myself can hardly imagine America returning to a state in which policy is enacted and executed toward an end of improvement of both society and of the lots of people in it, no matter how demonstrably low they may have fallen or how far from adequately cared for they've been from the start.

I wish I had a "however" to follow that sentence with.  Instead, I admit my belief in the prospects for sane constructive justice procedures and a penal system that does more than make money for corporate profiteers or exact revenge regardless of the quality of the verdict or the effectiveness of the act as a deterrent is dim.   But it's not yet illegal to hope for something better.

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* Did I mention the unusually small penis?