I cannot even begin to imagine the extreme impulse to want to hide or disguise yourself for the rest of your life after having your character completely disparaged to the world like that. However, hiding or especially disguising might also be difficult to maintain over time. I know that people must do it all the time but having to lie to people for the rest of your life must get tricky and/or exhausting. She mentions how the media created a sort of evil doppelganger of herself that people would tend to see over the real Amanda. If she decided to hide or disguise herself, she would only be doing the same in a way and while I can’t blame anyone for wanting to do that, I applaud her for being true to herself and her innocence. Also, how is there no legal recourse for specific situations like this with the media? I read that Italy was ordered to pay her around $20,000 for specific violations but that’s only half of the equation. How can the media just get away scot-free in specific situations like this?

I was 17 when Amanda Knox was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 26 years in an Italian prison, but I think my parents followed the story more closely than I did as I vaguely remembered the details of her case (until reading this article of course) but I immediately knew who she was upon reading her name in the headline. While what happened to Amanda was horrific and completely unjust, this kind of situation is not uncommon especially if you are anything but white. This story reminds me of the Central Park Five, the five young black boys coerced by police into admitting that they brutally beat and raped a woman and left her for dead in Central Park, 1989. The similarities between the two cases, besides the wrongful conviction, being shoddy police work and unfair treatment by the media. The shoddy police work is what really grinds my gears. American or Italian, they were pressured so heavily to place blame quickly and preserve their reputations that ultimately their biases against the American woman or the black boys and their inability to admit their mistakes determined the accused. How are they not heavily under investigation especially after the accused were eventually exonerated? How are people that are so easily willing to lock up innocent people to save their own jobs allowed to be a part of a justice system?