Mez: Posing Questions and Corpses -

Meredith Kercher Murder Case -

In Rome on Thursday, a symposium was hosted by
the Italy-USA Foundation headed by Rocco Girlanda.

It used the Meredith Kercher Murder Case as a focal point to compare and contrast the Italian and American legal systems. Their aim was not to criticize, but, rather, to bridge any gaps in understanding.

One of the questions they tried to explore was:

What would have happened in the US?

This is another good article by Andrea Vogt, but it doesn't tell us what the lawyers hashed out among themselves, so I'm going to make a comment.

Amanda Knox was remanded to custody in Perugia on a standard psycho hold straight out of the box: danger to herself or others. It is recognizable to many Americans and is a common occurrence here.

Here's the way it usually goes in the US: the police submit a request to a judge to sign such an order. All that is required is the judge's signature. It usually specifies "for observation" and gives a period of time; for example, 72 hours.

In this case in Perugia, the judge specified "until trial." His order was more elaborate than is customary in the US, which means that substantially the same thing would have happened to Amanda Knox in the US compared to what did happen in Perugia.

If I got something wrong about this procedure, you can correct it; but, more importantly, I want to point out: there is potential common ground here.

+ I have been busy making necessary updates to my software - long overdue. I tried to arrange them in groups in order to more easily manage them. There were more than I expected. I still have a few left in this interlude.

:: Andrea Vogt at SPI ::

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