welcome welcome welcome to the hamel family lecture the truth matters featuring amanda knox
i am so thrilled that we have ms knox joining us this evening i'm sure that many of us have read about
ms knox's wrongful conviction in the italian courts but what a difference it will be
to hear ms knox tell her own story the hamel family professor of law and
social psychology at the university of san francisco dr richard leo will be introducing amanda knox and it
is my pleasure to introduce dr leo to you dr leo is an internationally renowned
expert on police interrogation practices false confessions and wrongful convictions it is
impossible for me to do justice to dr leo's long list of accomplishments in the brief time i have allotted
because the list is just too long dr leo has published more than 100 articles
in leading scientific and legal journals as well as seven books with many of those publications
translated into multiple languages and several of them earning literary prizes
the wall street journal named dr leo as among the law professors most cited by united states appellate
court which shows that while tens of thousands of academics read and rely on his
publications those publications also make a difference in actual decisions
in an actual life professor leo has been awarded numerous career and lifetime
achievement awards for his contributions to the study of social problems criminology psychology and related
fields and his professional honors and awards are so numerous that his curricular vitae does not list
them all dr leo acts as an expert witness and consultant
in cases involving false confessions and wrongful convictions and in doing that he puts his expertise
to practice in the service of justice which is what usf law is all about in
fact we will be announcing soon that last week our racial justice clinic
under the leadership of professor laura bazelon secured the release of a wrongfully convicted client
in new orleans after two years of representation and eight years of the client serving uh
in jail in prison we are so privileged to have dr leo on our faculty here at the usf school of
law and delighted that he occupies the prestigious hamel family chair
i would like to thank jan and steve hamill for their generosity in establishing the
hamill family chair and in giving generously to the law school and university for more than 40 years since just after
steve's graduation from usf law steve and jan have contributed to scholarships
fellowships the renovation of kendrick hall and the building of our beautiful z flyer and they established the hamel
family endowed chair to quote support a person who is distinguished in law and
exemplifies the ideals and values articulated in the university's vision
and who recognizes the importance of advancing justice and ethics in his or her
teaching and scholarship and that's richard leah
jan and steve your generous investment in the law school enables us to make a difference not only
in the lives of our students but in our greater society through the inspiring and impactful work of dr richarlio
thank you for the hamel family chair which also supports this thought-provoking annual lecture series
where we host conversations on the most pressing topics in criminal justice today
and thank you professor leo for all that you do now please join me in welcoming
professor richard leah thank you dean freewald i want to uh
thank dean freewald under whose successful leadership of law school we recently posted an 81
bar pass rate i think if we were doing this in person we'd all be giving her a standing uh a
standing ovation uh it would not have happened with her without her hard work
and the reforms that she instituted and the way in which she inspires faculty and students
to do better both on intellectual things but also on uh very practical things um in the study
of law and in preparation for being a lawyer and for passing the bar exam so my hat is off to dean freewald and i
also wanted to before introducing amanda knox i just want to thank
the hamels as always for being such generous people and generous supporters
not only of this chair but of the law school and of the success the ongoing success
enduring success of the law school and most importantly of our law students future lawyers
dedicated to the ethical practice of law as well as to making society a better place
so uh it's my great pleasure to introduce amanda knox amanda knox
um i invited amanda knox to give this talk prior to the pandemic
and so the talk was delayed by about six months and i was going to assign amanda knox's
book waiting to be heard in my interrogation and confession seminar so it's going to
be paired with what we were talking about in the sam seminar and prior to teaching
that seminar for the last 15 years at usf i've taught a seminar on the wrongful conviction of the innocent
and amanda knox's case as i'm sure she will discuss raises lots of interesting questions
about wrongful convictions and about interrogations and confessions
in particular so i want to just make a couple comments about that about her case and then i want to segue
um to amanda knox and and what she's been doing since her exoneration so
um what is striking from a scholarly perspective about amanda knox's wrongful conviction is that
this is not a case where there is any doubt about amanda's innocence there is a ton of dna
at the crime scene that absolutely links to the true perpetrator of the crime and that absolutely exonerates her if
this had happened in america and amanda knox had been exonerated by peter neufeld and barry
sheck of the innocence project her exoneration would be as strong as any of the 400
individuals who have been exonerated by innocence projects across the country
in the last 30 years and looking at her case as i'm sure she will talk about
um it has many of the classic aspects of wrongful convictions in america botched
police interrogation tunnel vision and confirmation bias coerced false confession
and a naive and vulnerable subject so
it's an so the question is well why then do so many people still think or
did so many people think that amanda fox amanda knox was guilty
um and if you watch the netflix documentary the
journalist nick pisa who is on the documentary basically says well we had to get these
stories we had to sensationalize it we couldn't be bothered with double checking or getting the facts right
because we might lose the scoop and so so um it's always been a
curiosity to me why um a case that never should have been prosecuted
that is so clear gains such international fame and unfortunately for
amanda of course she was wrongfully convicted i believe not once but twice spent four years in an italian prison
before being acquitted not once but twice and ultimately declared factually
innocent by the italian supreme court now
since her release in 2011 amanda knox has done a lot and one of the reasons i admire
amanda knox is because having spent many years studying and working with and even writing books
on the wrongful conviction of the innocent a lot of people who are wrongfully convicted
just move on to other things amanda knox has done a lot and a lot to educate the world about
wrongful conviction gender and wrongful conviction to try to make the world a better place
and to help reform the criminal justice system in addition to writing her book she's been a journalist for the west seattle
herald she hosted on facebook watch
the scarlet letter reports which exam examined the gendered nature of public shaming of women um
with her husband chris robinson who is going to join us in the question and answer she hosted five seasons of the podcast
the truth about crime and is now hosting an even more interesting podcast in its first season
called labyrinths i would encourage everyone to subscribe to that she has written about
a number of topics on wrongful convictions including gender and wrongful convictions and as i mentioned earlier she has she
is committed to criminal justice reform not only educating people about the problem of the wrongful conviction of
the innocent but also about the many other problems that our criminal justice system faces
so it's with great pleasure that i introduce to you amanda knox
thank you so much um i really appreciate the opportunity to be here i'm
honored to be here asked by professor leo because he's such a rock
star in the criminal justice world it's pretty fabulous to be able to
be recognized by him and to share the stage with him thank you for having me so we're all
here to talk about wrongful convictions and whether or not the truth matters
and what i have found is first of all a few things my case
one could argue is pretty extraordinary for a number of reasons one of the major
ones is that i'm not your typical exoneree right i am
a young woman i come from a socio-economic uh privileged
background i am um i'm not the kind of person who you would
think would be obviously vulnerable uh to the criminal justice system
um that said oh and also this case became an international phenomenon that
took over you know a lot of the tabloid media for
a good decade um and meanwhile there are a bunch of
wrongfully convicted people whose stories just get swept under the rug and no one ever hears about them um they
don't get you know a netflix documentary or if they do it's it's very rare so we're talking about
like this weird case where for some reason there is a ton of interest in this case in
particular and in at its sort of focal point me um okay why is that
well the reason for that actually sort of comes down to a lot of
the problems with any wrongful convictions case the first and foremost one that focus
was steered away from where it should have been focused so not only was
the victim of this crime meredith kircher my roommate my friend of
several weeks her the sort of ongoing investigation into
the truth of what the horrible thing that happened to her was swept under the rug for the sake of
a story and the true center of this story of
what happened is someone who despite the international
attention that this case has received goes largely unrecognized
and that is meredith's killer rudy g'day so a note about rudy g'day and and
you know his the being the person who should have been
recognized as being the sort of force that happened in this case um
he was a troubled guy like many young men who are coming from
a you know he didn't have a lot of support in his life he was in the weeks leading up to the
crime he was breaking and entering into people's houses he was on a burglary spree
um he had been known to be wielding a knife um and in the so that
is leading up to him showing up at our apartment one night and meredith being
the only one who happened to be there when he did
he ultimately fled the country immediately after the crime occurred and when he fled he
left his dna all over the crime scene all over meredith's body he left his fingerprints and footprints
in her blood and he was eventually found
guilty of this crime he was arrested in germany he was he was put on a fast track trial
sentenced to 30 years which were later reduced to 16 years on appeal
and again like the surprising thing about this case is for how famous it is very few people have
ever heard of him and that is because
of another factor that factors into wrongful convictions cases um the police and the prosecution made a
mistake they and they were under pressure by the media
so in the immediacy of this crime occurring um and its discovery
there were television cameras across the street um taking video of the crime scene as the
police were showing up in their you know in their gear um the italian authorities were under
immense pressure to solve this case fast because here we are
in this beautiful countryside town that's known for its tourism and its its student population
and suddenly this student is found raped and murdered it's a terrible horrific crime that
crosses national boundaries it is um it is horrific and
also tantalizing to the tabloid media so
the italian authorities have a lot of pressure on their backs to solve it immediately and they've developed a theory based
upon investigative intuition um this is their words actually they had
investigative intuition also gut instinct that was not guided by
any particular piece of evidence because honestly by the time that they were making arrests 44 days later
they didn't really have access to a lot of evidence they were still gathering evidence at that point um
and what ended up happening is they targeted
me uh one of meredith's roommates and my boyfriend of five days
who happened to be my alibi for the evening why did they target us well there's a
lot been said about how i behaved badly or i behaved in ways that were not usual
um i stuck out like a sore thumb for whatever reason i call bull
on that i think that's a really um uh convenient retroactive thing that a
lot of the police say um i think what ended up being a major factor in them choosing me
over anyone else like my my other roommates for instance was that i
was the most vulnerable so my other two roommates were legal students they worked at law
offices they had representation at the time i did not
i was the first person to alert the police that there was something wrong at my house that
ultimately led to the discovery of the crime scene so of course as the first person to to
discover the crime scene and to call the police i was targeted um and
you know what ended up happening
is that i spent every day after we discovered meredith's body at
the police station hours and hours and hours a day telling them anything i could possibly
think of that could help them and this was despite the fact that i was getting calls from my mom
telling me to come back home to the united states i wasn't safe family members in germany telling me
come and stay with us until this is all figured out there's a killer on the loose we don't know if they're if this killer is targeting your house
and maybe they're looking for you like we don't know we just there was not enough information to know
meanwhile i'm thinking oh my gosh if i had been home that night i could be
dead right now but maybe i have access to some
knowledge that would help really crack this case this is what the police were telling me we need you here amanda because you're the
first person to arrive home you knew meredith the best out of all of your roommates maybe there's just some interaction that
you witnessed at one point while you guys were out dancing or when you were you know out having dinner and somebody
looked at her in the wrong way maybe that is going to be the secret that is going to crack this case so
i'm sitting there for hours and hours and hours with these police officers answering the
same questions over and over and over again after on the on the fifth day
after gosh um it it was an obscene number of hours
that i was ultimately questioned over those um five days but
i was being recorded at all times leading up to that i didn't know that i
didn't know that they had tapped my phones or my cell phone i didn't know that
every time i went to the police station and they brought me into a room to ask me questions that they were recording everything
i had no idea because i thought i was just like they said i was a witness
[Music] the final night that they brought me in they didn't actually bring me in
they brought my boyfriend in they called him in it was 11 p.m at night and because i was afraid to be
alone anywhere i mean my roommate had just been murdered when she was at home alone i accompanied
him to the police station and while they were questioning him i was in
the waiting room minding my own business um doing my homework honestly when a police officer came up
and asked me what i was doing and i said i was doing homework waiting for rafaela to come out
and he said well if you're here you might as well be answering questions
so let's bring you inside and get you into a room and that's where everything
went haywire both rafaela and i were subjected
to extremely coercive interrogation techniques over the course
of that night in order to break us they already had a head start
on rafaela screaming at him lying to him telling him that he was never going to see his family again denying him the
right to an access to a lawyer um and they started in on me
maybe an hour after they started in on him um the there were threats
of physical and psychological violence i was ultimately
told that after i had been told that everything that i had ever said to them was a lie
and was wrong that either i was lying to them or
that i had amnesia and i had witnessed something so
traumatic and horrible that i forgot it and i had rewritten my
memories to remember something completely different now i know that this sounds
crazy and that like who who would ever be open to that kind of suggestion
but when you are being yelled at after 53 hours of
interrogation over five days in a foreign language that you understand about as well as a
ten-year-old for hours and hours and hours with the illegal authority of
people who are twice your age telling you that you're wrong and you're never going to see your family again unless
you tell them everything you know and they know that you witnessed something so you better tell them what
it is i started to believe them i started to believe them that the only
reason that they could be treating me that way was because i must have witnessed something
and i didn't remember it i was too traumatized and so what the
police did is they went and took my cell phone
my mom was calling me meanwhile she was on her way to italy and they knew that because they had
tapped into my phones they inv in fact interrogated me that night
knowing that my mom was arriving the very next day um and they combed through my phone
until they found a text message between me and my boss at the time a man named patrick lumumba
they wanted to know who patrick lumumba was they interpreted my last text message to him to mean that i had
made an appointment with him the night of the murder what i had actually written to him was
okay have a good night see you later translated directly into italian
they don't say see you later the same way that we do here in english but i did not
know the correct translation so they interpreted my direct translation of see you later
to mean i will literally see you later tonight when you commit this murder basically
so they wrote statements and had me sign them and told me
that i was a a really important witness of course
within hours i recanted those statements i said this is not true i feel like i this is not what i
remember i can't go in front of a jury and say that i saw this or witnessed this i
don't have that they told me don't worry your memories will come back later
you're just confused meanwhile they're gonna take me to some
way someplace special some safe house for my own protection
that's what led to my arrest um i was stripped naked photographed i was
put in handcuffs the entire time thinking this was all some sort of necessary part of being a witness
because that's what they told me and i was taken to prison where
i was put into an isolated cell i didn't have access to anything related
to the outside world no tv no newspapers no phone calls no
access to attorneys for three days and there i waited
wondering if my mom knew where i was if she thought i was dead if there was any way to get a message to
her and all of that is a horrible traumatic experience but
one that a lot of exonerees have experienced before um
this is the work that professor leo has dedicated himself to this kind of
breaking of a person because the there is no more powerful evidence in court than
some kind of false confession or false admission by an innocent person because no one thinks that innocent people would
ever say anything that would incriminate themselves
um another really big aspect of my case that's super standard across the board
um from the moment that they arrested me and they had their sort of theory in
mind the police and the prosecution pursued their investigation
based upon that premise amanda's guilty she's involved somehow and so all exonerating evidence
was written off or ignored so the fact that i had no history of criminal behavior or violence
i had no relationship or even special knowledge of who the killer was
like i didn't know rudy g'day i knew that some dude played basketball with our
neighbors but i didn't know who he was i didn't like i didn't have his phone number i didn't know his name
um and there was no dna of me at the crime scene i lived in this house
so there was dna of me in the house but meredith had been murdered in her room and there was no traces of me in her
room all of that was written off well amanda just didn't happen to you
know amanda cleaned up her traces of dna and left all the dna of the other guy that's why her dna isn't there um
you know which as we all know is impossible um so that that was ignored and a bunch
of incriminating evidence was manufactured out of whole cloth so what are we talking about um there's
a lot of there was a lot said about a knife a
knife that was retrieved from my boyfriend's house at the time a chef's knife that i had used in cooking
at his house so my dna was definitely on the handle it was said that there was a trace
amount of meredith's dna on the blade and for the longest time
my defense experts fought long and hard with the
prosecution's forensic experts to gain access to the raw data by which they came to that
conclusion and the prosecution fought every step of the way to refuse us
access to that information indeed they tried to refuse that information
to the independent experts who were called in on appeal um at all times they were
trying to just say trust our conclusions don't question our methodology
the prosecution put forth this theory that it was some kind of sex game gone wrong at various times it was
stated that it was satanic in nature or that it had to do with drug use or that it had to do
with um i mean the major one that they put forth was jealousy so the idea being and
this was put into the mouth of like this was put into my mouth by my
prosecutor he's described he like during closing arguments he described how i was telling meredith how she was
such a pure and honest girl and i was going to corrupt her because i'm an adulteress and you know
i was called luciferina um the the girl with the face of an angel but
the soul of a devil um it was claimed that i did this
not because i had a history of violence or any interest in violence but that one night i just decided to do
evil for the sake of evil and i was given a nickname
foxy noxie this nickname was taken from my social media
and um it's actually a nickname that my soccer teammates gave me
um way back when i was a kid um because i would you know based upon how i would bound
around the soccer field and because it rhymes with knox um as professor leo noticed in the
introduction and that character became the focal
point of this whole case it wasn't about the evidence it was about the character
who is this girl how did she what kind of sex games was she into was she into
devious sex um what kind of sex toys did she have was she fighting with meredith do we have any
knowledge of that of course not well of course they're girls they're gonna fight and all the time that my trial was going
on um it took two years for the entire thing to play out
before i received a verdict so two years that i spent in prison waiting believing that no matter what people
were saying out there in the world out there in the media what mattered was the truth so
yes was there horrible lies being said about me absolutely was there false evidence
being presented in court absolutely was i
totally ill-equipped to defend my character
in a in this way yes but ultimately i believed
that the court is like a scientific laboratory where a whole bunch of information gets
boiled down to truth beyond a reasonable doubt and so for those two years leading up to my verdict
i was actually optimistic i was sad i was stuck in prison but i was waiting
to go home and this is what my family told me again and again and again
we're in a tunnel but there is a light at the end of this tunnel because the truth matters
and so i had faith that my innocence would ultimately prevail
that somewhere along the line there had been a huge misunderstanding but that ultimately when it all came
down to it i didn't do this so i was gonna go home with my with my parents um
the night i received my verdict was december 9th or sorry december 4th 2009
and um it was in the middle of the night because the jury had deliberated all day
and um [Music] my mom bought me a coat
to wear she bought me a green coat because she thought it was lucky and
and i remember going into the courtroom and the first thing i noticed was
um every time i went into the courtroom leading up to that day it was the courtroom was madness
there it was packed with people not just with our attorneys and with their staff
but with paparazzi and media just filling the space as much as they
possibly could and whenever i walked into the room they they flashed their cameras at me and
shouted questions at me and i had to be sort of carried basically in between these two
guards and brought over to my lawyers and this time
the courtroom was quiet it was still packed but it was quiet
everybody was silent no one said a word to me and i was brought in
to stand between my lawyers and one of them luciano grabbed my hand
and he told me koracho courage and my entire family was there
they were all behind my lawyers waiting to hear the verdict even though they didn't understand a word of italian
so they were really relying on having the word passed to them um
and then the court secretary announced la corte the judge and the jury filed in
and the judge started reading my verdict and it it's so bizarre i remember
how i didn't even really hear the words that he was saying
all i heard was someone behind me say no a second before i heard
him pronounce colpevole guilty i didn't hear
him sentenced me to 26 years i heard
ringing in my ears from then on i heard the sounds of my family crying
i was crying and i was carried out of that courtroom
and back into that prison van and back to the prison
um trying to understand what had happened
to me this was an existential crisis what had just
happened was that i had proof
that the courtroom is not a scientific laboratory
but it is a battleground of storytelling where the most the most truthful story
cannot win against a more compelling story and the compelling story
that one that day was of foxy noxi
my doppelganger the fictional version of me that was the ice queen with the ice eyes
and the murderous adultery [ __ ] that had captured everyone's
imagination and
suddenly my reality had been rewritten my past my present and my future
so not only was i stripped of my promised freedom that day i was stripped
of my identity i was no longer a lost tourist waiting to be allowed to
go home i was a prisoner and when i arrived back at the prison i
realized that the prison was my home
hopefully no one here has spent time in prison i don't recommend it
but it was an eye-opening experience for me i think the thing that
every prison is different and so they're going to be different traumas depending on where you're at but
the thing that is absolutely common to the prison experience
is losing your humanity because you lose your right
to a sense of privacy and bodily autonomy and human potential
and when i realized that this was not just a place that i was by
accident that this was a place that the rest of society had deemed i needed
to be i of course thought about suicide
because what was this life that i was living
um certainly wasn't the life that i expected i was going to live i thought i was
going to go to school and learn how to speak a foreign language and work as an interpreter
and be a bridge builder between cultures um and so i spend a decent amount of
time thinking about how i would do it um
it's tricky you don't have access to a lot of things that you do on the outside world
but i sort of settled on if i did do it i would try to um
cut my wrists in the shower and hopefully not be found in time
but of course this was
this was a choice that was in my mind as a possibility
um not because i felt like somehow my life was over
but because i didn't know what kind of ground to stand on anymore if the truth didn't
matter then what fight was i in
what how do i convince people that this is wrong if the truth doesn't
matter everything that i had thought i could do
or count on was gone well almost um i still had my family
and of course i carried this great fear that i was going to grow old without
them i was already missing milestones i thought about how after 26 years i would emerge from
prison barren meanwhile this was impacting my family tremendously
they were strained financially emotionally psychologically one of my sisters dropped out of school
another one of my sisters started getting into fights with kids at school when they called her amanda
and my youngest sister who was eight at the time that i went into prison
she started having daily panic attacks my mom totally stopped eating
it's not just the person who is at the center of a wrongful conviction who's impacted
but there are ripple effects that are deep and scarring for everyone that is around
them my family did everything they possibly
could to be close to me in this time and it was difficult because not only was i halfway across
the world but i was only allowed 10 minutes of a phone call once a week and i was only
allowed six hours of visitation a month and every time it was for an hour at a
time so my family never missed a single visitation hour
and that meant that someone in my family was in italy at all times during my
incarceration four years it was incredibly lonely time
for any person who was visiting me because they would very likely be alone they'd take time off work
and they'd spend weeks alone in a foreign country waiting for the next hour that they could see me
and of course i tried to make those hours count they were the only time that i had with
the people that reminded me of my real life and i remember this one time my dad
came to visit me it was not that long after i had been convicted
and i was still grappling with the idea that the truth didn't matter and
i didn't know what was going to become of me if there was any hope
and usually when i went to visitation i tried really hard to be
upbeat i tried really hard to tell my dad what i had accomplished in the days between
our visitations um how many sit-ups i was doing and
you know how many letters i wrote what books i was reading but this one
time i just really couldn't pull it together i was having a really bad day and
my dad was there in the visitation room and as soon as i saw him i immediately
started crying i he embraced me
he held me and i begged him
to save me i did that knowing
that he was just as helpless as i was
and yet i didn't
i so when i said that to him
my dad started crying and that's when i knew
how bad of trouble i was in because i had never seen my dad cry
before in my entire life um and the next two years of me being on
trial were very much defined by
a new sort of emotional and psychological default setting i was sad i woke up sad
i went to bed sad um which was unusual for me because i've
tended to always be an upbeat kid and my mom who's ever the optimist
was just telling me no don't give up don't lose heart we're gonna fight this
to the end there's a light at the end of this tunnel we just have to keep fighting we
just didn't know how long this tunnel is however long it takes we're gonna get you out of there
and the thing was was that i wasn't sure of that anymore
i had no proof that there was light at the end of the tunnel anymore if the truth matters then what is the
light at the end of the tunnel like i had to
instead embrace uncertainty the fact that i didn't know
if i was ever going to get out even as my appeal was going on
and my appeal was going on you know like it it took an it took a year
for my appeal to start and then a full year for my appeal to progress in the courts and
my appeal was going well independent experts came in that totally called into question
everything that the police had done especially in their forensic work and all the while i kept thinking
i don't know if anyone cares what the truth is so i don't know what the outcome of this
case is and i was afraid to hope so
while i hadn't given up on the fight for my innocence i had given up on the assumption
that innocence means freedom that the story of my innocence
could ever trump the story of a guilty [ __ ]
and i also knew that even if i were legally vindicated
there was no guarantee that anyone would ever truly believe me that anyone would ever truly question
the foxy noxi narrative over that time i did a lot of what
i now recognize as mindfulness training which was taking each moment
for itself at a time one day at a time one moment at a time starting over
whenever i felt too weak or too angry or too
stuck i did a lot of talking to my younger self
i imagined a version of myself who hadn't yet gone through what i was going
through and i tried to big sister her through the experience
as a way of guiding myself through my sadness um
and after two years i was acquitted so
my wrong my wrongful conviction was overturned and it turns out
the truth did matter at least a little insofar as forensic experts came in
and called into question everything the prosecution said about the dna evidence in my case
but what preceded me into the world was a doppelganger version of me foxy noxie
and as i came back into the world of freedom
i was i found that i was being held to an impossible standard of femininity
of normalcy i was so thoroughly misre misrepresented in
court that there was nothing i could do that that wasn't seen through the lens of
foxy noxi and what i found was that
the the controversy continued to matter more than the truth that people were
more interested in the controversy of amanda knox than they were
of who i really was um so one legal note in italy
the double jeopardy doesn't work the same way um both uh defense attorneys and prosecutors can
appeal verdicts and in my case my prosecutor appealed my verdict
um my acquittal my acquittal was overturned i was put on trial
again i was found guilty again and i spent
four years not knowing if i was going to be sent back to italy um i didn't know
if i needed to i was making plans to turn myself into the police here in seattle hoping
that they would let me serve out my sentence here in the united states so it wasn't such a hardship on my family
meanwhile i'm going to school i'm at college i'm i'm living a double life
where my life is still on edge i'm in limbo i can't plant
roots i can't get a job i can't trust anyone but i'm free
um and that went on until 2015 when the supreme
court in italy overturned my second conviction
acquitted me per navato for not having committed the crime they
found me what is the italian legal equivalent of factually innocent
and that was a tremendous relief i remember not expecting that because it
is astounding for the supreme court in italy to make that kind of decision
usually what they'll do is if they don't like a decision that was made by a court they'll send it back to a lower court to
be retried again so best case scenario i was thinking was that i would get another trial
i was not expecting for them to overturn it and then just put an end to the whole situation
right there and then so suddenly i went from hunted prey animal who had been living
the last eight years of my life at the mercy of this ax that was hanging over my head
to an actual free person someone who was not being hunted down
anymore who was free and
i wasn't being hunted down anymore by the courts but i have continued to be hunted down
by the society at large um i found that like many
wrongfully convicted people i tend to be defined by the crime that i'm associated with
even though i have nothing to do with it i found that i continue to be vilified in the media
accused of not showing enough remorse in relation to the crime despite the
fact that i'm innocent i'm constantly compared
to meredith the victim of this crime by people who seem to think that there
can only be one victim of this crime and that i as a secondary victim
of the crime couldn't be a victim of the criminal justice system
i've been told that people are tired of hearing from me that i should just be
grateful that i'm not in prison and that i should disappear
which is quite the world to exist in when i the last thing i wanted to be
ever in my life was the girl who was accused of a murder she didn't commit i came home
to a world that didn't want me to go back to the life that i had before
that life didn't exist for me anymore i had i tried
for a while to just go back to my old life until i realized that the world had changed and i had changed with it
and the only thing that made sense for me now
was to understand what i had gained from this experience and what i had gained
was a stunningly new perspective about the world that i never would have
had access to before i didn't know what prison was like i
didn't know what the criminal justice system was like all of these issues were the farthest
thing from my mind because once again this crime crime was not a part of my life i
grew up in the suburbs i i was a poetry nerd i was doing yoga
this was not my world i was fortunate that this was not my world and i also
thought that it would never be something that i would encounter and i felt terribly alone coming home
because i didn't know anyone else who had gone through what i went through and it wasn't until my mom
um who had been in contact with some people from the innocence project told me that i didn't have a choice i
was coming with her down to portland for the innocence network conference
the last thing i wanted at that time in my life was to walk into a room full of hundreds of people who would recognize
me and know my name i knew what that experience was like it came with judgment
and it came with weird like people being pushy and and
weird and and cruel and that was the last thing that i needed at that time
but my mom promised me that it was going to be good for me
so we went and it was in a hotel like everyone was gathering in one
of those you know basement ballrooms with the bad lighting and the bad carpet
and i was shaking i remember but my mom sort of pushed me through the
doors into this ballroom and immediately these two men
came up to me and they embraced me and they said you don't have to explain
a thing little sister we know and these were two men who had
each spent over a decade in prison for crimes that they didn't commit this was a room full of
hundreds of people who had spent way longer in prison for crimes that they didn't
commit mostly men mostly disenfranchised impoverished
men who i never would have encountered in my world
and they became my family and i realized that
the one thing that i had was the ability to build a bridge
between this community and the community of people who had no idea that any of this
happened or mattered people like me before it happened to me
which is why i've turned my world and my career and my life
towards making these stories known and accessible to people i know that there's a ton
of attention on my case and it's not the most egregious case in the world i think it's pretty egregious
but it's not the most egregious case in the world and i didn't lose 40 years of my life to prison but all
the same mechanisms that happened to me happened to tons of people before me
and unfortunately are still happening to tons of people after me and if i can build a bridge between them
and the people who don't know or wouldn't think to care before
that is something that i feel is worthwhile that is a way that i can rebuild
my identity on my own terms not constantly in reaction and in
conversation to this crime that i had nothing to do with
that's what i do today with the both the podcasts that i do the truth about true crime and labyrinths
and actually i speak more in depth about my case on a lot of my
episodes i'm constantly trying to build those bridges and make connections and empathize and do
what do for others what the media didn't do for me which was open the floor to someone to
have their own voice that is heard with compassion and nuance
and without judgment and i'm similarly looking into
cases and the ongoing processes that lead to mass incarceration
and over sentencing in my reporting especially at crimestory.com
and that's where i'm at um i'm happy to take questions about my case if anyone's
interested or other specific issues that are more broad because honestly what i've found
is that my story opened or my experience opened me up to a
world of realities that i did not have access to before and now i just spend all of my time
learning and thinking about and writing about and sharing these realities so i'm happy to speak to
any of that as well
thank you amanda knox for that wonderful wonderful wonderfully moving talk i'm gonna
moderate the questions we have about a half hour four questions um i was supposed to make an announcement
at the beginning of the talk that i did not make let me just say before i do this that
there are some questions queued up in the q a so if people would like to ask questions please enter them in the q a i've
already looked at at some of them and they're overlapping so i will go through them and select the ones that
stand out the most okay so as you saw from the powerpoint at the
beginning usf is sharing a recording of the zoom
webinar on its us on its youtube channel but everyone by attending the session
agrees that the content is protected by copyright laws and that usf strictly prohibited the
recording or reproduction of the session including through any apps
or other devices or screenshots so i know that message was made earlier i just wanted to repeat it
since i forgot to make it at the beginning of the session okay and i at some point i'm gonna
ask a couple questions too again thank you amanda for a truly compelling and insightful and
inspiring talk oh thank you and by the way it was at uh one of the uh national innocence
conference meetings that we first met many years ago okay so some of these questions also may have
been answered in part in your talk so
i think the questions some of the questions were asked along the way
so one question is has there been any acknowledgement by the italian government of the errors of its system
have they offered any compensation for your lost years and the damage done to you
and your family so the answer to that is no um my
co-defendant um and the boyfriend of five days who was my
alibi that night he actually filed for wrongful
imprisonment and tried to be recognized as a wrongfully imprisoned person
and was told that his um his actions during the course of the
investigation so basically the fact that he signed
like the basically signed the statements that the police wrote down for him to sign he
misled the investigators and therefore was found responsible for his own wrongful conviction
and was found to not be meriting of wrongful imprisonment compensation
so he has not been compensated i have not been compensated for my wrongful imprisonment
the one thing that i have continued to fight about was my interrogation
during my interrogation i was denied my right to a lawyer and i was i was
physically and psychologically abused i was slapped and i brought my case to the european
court of human rights that did rule in my favor they ruled that that indeed my human
rights had been violated and that my interrogation was illegal and i received a
you know a small amount of compensation for that i think it was something like i don't even i don't remember i mostly
went to my attorneys i think it was like 18 000
um but i have in no way been recognized as a you know
wrongfully convicted person and i still actually remain wrongfully
convicted of slander in regards to my interrogation so that has yet to be
overturned it's something that i'm still attempting to fight but it also it costs a lot of money to be going through the
court system so it's not something that is easily accessible to me um
so no i have not been compensated i have not been apologized to
i was found innocent and uh the idea that i get from a lot of
people in italy is that i got off lucky so i should be grateful
i should add and amanda knows this of course given her work on on with the wrongfully convicted but
it's rare that victims of wrongful conviction are apologized to we have mechanisms
here for compensation but it's rare that um that the
courts and the prosecutors and the police who are responsible for the wrongful conviction take responsibility for it
publicly acknowledge it and apologize for it on this theme of governments there's
sort of two questions that that some of the questions are converging on people are
interested um both in what the u.s government and the embassy if anything did in your
case to help you out and people are also interested post conviction what your take is on progressive
prosecutors in the united states um great questions um and
i want to also emphasize that you're right professor leo that absolutely what we find across the board is that
wrongfully convicted people don't get acknowledgement for the the crimes that they've been subjected
to basically and very often it's this ongoing
sort of tension between law enforcement that doesn't want to recognize fault
and definitely makes it so that there's never a sense of closure
um in terms of the government aspect of it um while i
was on trial it was while i was on trial and in italy
representatives of the united states would come every six months or so
to ask me about you know my rights as a prisoner they wanted to make sure that i was
getting fed that i was i had access to my parents as the number of hours that i was allowed to
but they weren't interfering with my case um primarily they their their biggest role at that
time was that they as soon as my mom arrived in italy they put her in touch with a lawyer
who could speak english and he became one of the two central lawyers
in my case so that was a big help because my mom landed in italy to the news that i had
been arrested and did not know what to do but that's about it they couldn't really do anything
meanwhile after i was acquitted the first time and released from prison and i was on trial here in the united
states i did not know what the united states
government would do for me so technically um at any point if i'm
on u.s soil i'm a u.s citizen the us government can decide that they're not going to extradite me for whatever
reason but they do have an extradition treaty with italy and so the expectation would be that
they would extradite me unless they wanted to suffer some kind of political loss
um so again it was very much a situation where i was at the mercy of
the italian courts and you know for all of my prosecutors blustering that
the u.s was interfering and telling you know italy how to do its job
um i was not reassured by anyone in our government
that i was going to be safe
oh oh and progressive prosecutors okay um re progressive prosecutors um i'm
actually really interested in this movement for progressive prosecutors i don't think that by definition
prosecutors are all corrupt crimes happen in fact i am an indirect
victim of a crime my friend was murdered and as a result like someone murdered my friend and
could have killed me and that is a situation that needs to be addressed um i do think that in fact
i've actually got um quite a big piece that i've written coming out um on crimestory.com about progressive
prosecutors and the movement for progressive prosecutors who are trying to either curb the powers of the prosecutor's
office so to actually limit the powers of the prosecutor's office by not you know by not prosecuting with
gang enhancements or gun enhancements or three strikes or the kind of progressive
prosecutor who is wielding that immense power that they have but quote benevolently
it's really interesting to see that that happen across the united states we
see um d.a gascon in l.a compared to like dan satterberg here in
king county um and it's it's interesting to see
how prosecutors are talking about the amount of power that they have and whether or not they should wield it
some are willing to give it up and some are not willing to give it up until
there is a greater infrastructure for community community accountability so
the number of progressive prosecutors who i speak to who genuinely do want there to be
they want to address mass incarceration and they want to have the system be more fair are yet
saying but the community has basically made all of its problems my
problem and these are the tools that i have to to work with those problems so until the community can take
accountability and not like push through all of their problems to the prosecutor's office like
what do i do um it is a very interesting question but it's it's one that
i think is a very very crucial moment that we're at right now when we're
talking about how do we fund these alternatives and are we going to be
pulling the um funding from like the police say in order to finally fund these alternatives that we
have been asking for for so long anyway i think that it's i think there's a lot
of work that needs to be done still and you know it's one thing for a prosecutor to say
i'm going to be a good prosecutor and another thing for a prosecutor to say i'm going to prove to you that i'm going
to be a good prosecutor because i refuse to say go for the death penalty
right like that's a very different thing and hand over their power to
you know basically just say i'm not going to wield the hammer of the law as much as i possibly could just because
i can so it's an interesting conversation that's happening across the country and
it's happening in different ways across the country interestingly thank you amanda
so i'm going to try to join a couple questions here um i should tell you in the q a there
are a lot of people thanking you for giving this inspiring talk oh thanks
everyone you're crazy you're you're so i'm going to read this and then i'm going to join
it very briefly to a second related question your case brings out many of the pathologies of the adversary system
prosecution's indifference to truth desire for quick convictions you as the defense having in effect to
prove your innocence the behavior of the tabloids and the stereotyping of you without caring about the consequences in a
dog-eat-dog atmosphere should we develop a better system in which compassion
and nuance and concern for both you and the victim are the primary um our primary and the
focus of the investigation and i want to join that to a question about restorative justice now
our own laura basilan who as dean freewald mentioned had uh had an amazing
reversal of a wrongful conviction in new orleans this week just did fabulous work on that case has
written a book about wrongful conviction and restorative justice and i've promoted that book but i
haven't always been sure that wrongful convictions and restorative justice
pair as well as restorative justice pairs with other aspects of our
adversarial criminal justice system so i want to join those two questions one on restorative justice and wrongful
conviction as well as and related to building a system with more compassion and nuance
if that would have made a difference yeah so i do think that if we had a um
a less adversarial less punitive criminal justice system a lot of the
incentive structures that lead to wrongful convictions would wouldn't necessarily go away
fully but would be lessened so there would be less of a stake like you know the prosecution
would have less of a incentive to build their case on their terms at
whatever cost regardless of the exculpatory evidence if it was a system in which they didn't
feel like their job was to just build the best case according to their guilt
scenario that they possibly could so i do think that a a world
in which we grapple with crime and real crime like real
people are hurt by crime that addresses the needs of the victim
in response and that addresses the true
causes of crime for the defendant um in its in its
so it's it's it should be for the sake of finding truth truth should be
fundamental to that and when we're constructing opposing narratives truth often gets destroyed basically
it's it's reshaped into a black and white narrative to fit a certain outfit that either demonizes a person or
or not and if we live in a world in which getting the
maximum punishment is not what is considered justice anymore but instead
is a sort of understanding of what happened why it happened how do we fix this problem how do we
address the needs of the victim how do we address the needs of the perpetrator that is a world in which i think black
and white narratives fail to compel because they don't
actually um address the reality of what are many times complicated situations that
lead to crime in the first place if you take for instance in my own case we're talking about rudy gaday
a transient kid who didn't have the support system that he needed he was getting into drugs he was
losing control he was breaking into people's houses he was clearly a troubled
kid and he needed more support in his social world than he had he was
isolated he was angry and he erupted one night
i it and the result was a person died and how could we have
responded in a way that first of all how can we set up a society where that kind of situation
is less likely to occur and then how do we address the needs of this person that doesn't
just involve like you know saying well your life is over
because this person's life is over and that's somehow going to make up for it it doesn't
it like we think that it brings back a balance and it really doesn't so i think that
if we if we divorce you know the prosecutor's like career and
promotions and things that he can get for like winning cases um and instead promote a world in which
nuanced complicated difficult conversations are taking place wrongful convictions are less likely to
occur because people have less of a stake in those black and white narratives
thank you um and i want to thank all the people who've been asking questions we still have about seven minutes left for
questions and i i'm not going to be able to get to all of them but i'm trying to join them and i think i will reserve the
right hopefully to ask the last one so i think these questions go together there's
a question about what you would advise young women
traveling to europe and whether you yourself would
go back to europe go back to italy rather and there's also a question which i hope
connects about the comments you made about mindfulness and whether you're aware of more opportunities for mindfulness
in the in in the criminal justice system okay um so i absolutely um
fully promote um young women being able to travel to to invest
themselves in other cultures and other people of course the world is a little more uh
scary for us we are more vulnerable so that does mean that when we find
ourselves at 18 years old or 20 years old in a new environment that it's okay to ask for help and it's
okay to follow us like a radar in your head that if you're just not feeling safe
remove yourself from the situation as much as you can at the same time that doesn't fully save
people meredith was not out on the town in the middle of the night when she was
sexually assaulted and murdered she was at home and that should not have
happened to her it was unfortunately a thing that can happen um
i do think that the vast majority of times these things don't happen fortunately
but there's no there's no way to be safe one hundred percent um that isn't to say that these things
don't happen here in the united states however so the idea that somehow you are particularly vulnerable
abroad the reason why you're particularly vulnerable abroad is because you don't have that same social
network that you normally would so don't be afraid to ask for help the
biggest thing that i regret was feeling like because i was a 20 year old person
and i was so important to help solve the case that i couldn't ask for help i just had
to do what the police told me to do and i didn't know that they were
targeting me because it was so obvious to me that they would understand that i was innocent and had nothing to do with
it in terms of going back to italy um i actually have gone back to italy since
all of this has happened um and that's a whole other crazy story um that i couldn't possibly get into
in the last five minutes that we have but let's just say that the italy innocence project which did not
exist while i was in prison invited me to their first ever sort of public event presenting the idea
of wrongful convictions to italy they invited me to speak about trial by media and
particularly how my case had been influenced by how the media presented it to the people
of italy um and then the final part of that question
was well it was it was about
it was a compliment to your coping strategy in a foreign country italy um
and then a question about whether there are opportunities for mindfulness that you're aware of in the criminal justice
system so yes so
my coping mechanisms were very much uh sort of intuitive mindfulness trying to be
present trying to um make the best of what i had
where i had it so in any given day i had to make the choice to do what the
best i could do in that moment at that time so if that was write a letter to my mom
that made that moment worth living if that was do a bunch of sit-ups that made that
moment worth living and so it was a constant sort of choice to make life worth living by
a simple step that could take 10 minutes say and then i would worry about the next 10
minutes later um there are some things that i have seen um
in that are trying to bring mindfulness to the prison system but it's really like hodgepodge volunteers who are
putting forth ideas for instance i once worked to raise money for yoga
behind bars which is a local group of basically just women who do yoga who are like
hey we can do yoga with people who are in prison who are dealing with like emotional stress and maybe it'll help
them out and so they they organized this whole program and and brought it to the prison system
here in washington state um but it's very much something that is happening
by volunteers and people who are just trying to fill a need that they have one thing that i think would be
wonderful um is you know i use the um sam harris
waking up app i would love it if um if people had access to those kinds of meditative
apps while they were in prison and you know i actually think sam harris
recently made that free for prisoners in i don't know what state
but i think he's been trying to bring that to the prison environment or you know anywhere that people can it's
just like when how do you have access to an app when you're in prison well yeah
um so i think that there are things that are happening but again it's very hodgepodge
it's very much at the will and mercy of people who are willing to step in and offer that service to their local
place um i i'm gonna exercise the prerogative of the
moderator to ask the last question um i i will say that um i i've heard sam harris say on his podcast and in
interviews that he makes his stuff available for free to anyone who asks no questions asked
absolutely and i i do know that uh there are a lot of cell phones that make their way into prisons
so my question amanda has to do with the netflix documentary
i'm just curious as with your talk uh i found the netflix
documentary very compelling in a lot of ways and i know you didn't have
editorial control over the netflix documentary a lot of people i think have learned about your case through the netflix
documentary um people perhaps who were weren't of a certain age then
um or haven't read your book for example um and um at the same time i was
disappointed with the documentary perhaps because it um glossed over so quickly
what you spent more time talking about today which is the um the coercion the psychological
coercion the 53 hours the physical abuse the threats
the way in which they got you to question your memory doubt your memory and believe them and
confess essentially to an alternative reality of their creating yeah and so i
i wondered i don't want to put you in the position
of criticizing the documentary but i wonder if you had a conversation with the
documentarian today i think what maybe that was done two or three years ago
and you could suggest it hadn't come out yet and you could suggest doing anything differently adding
something to it emphasizing something differently if there's anything they got wrong that
should have been emphasized differently what what that conversation would be like
with the documentarian the story on netflix well you know um so the netflix
documentary that came out about my case came out in 2016. um and this was you know
it was before all of their like six-part docu-series getting into all the nitty-gritty with all of all of these
cases and i remember one of the sort of regrets of the filmmakers
is they didn't get a six-part series they they had like a 90-minute shot to like tell the story
of this huge story about misconduct and forensic evidence and how
the media played a role and so there are a number of things that didn't make it into the cut
including very astutely um everything that's involved with the interrogation process and i think that
remains one of the big key issues of controversy surrounding me and my case is i'm
constantly attacked as being someone who lied to the cops and implicated an
innocent person and i must be a racist i must be a liar and and there is little recognition
that what happened to me during my interrogation is no different than what is happening
and other false confessions as that happened here in the united states where i was lied to i was abused
i was coerced i was i signed statements that were written by the police themselves not that i had written
and so you you we could have spent a whole episode of a six-part docu-series
talking about that interrogation and how they broke down both rafael and me um in in the way that they were able to
do justice to that kind of thing with the central park five or you know these other cases um
i do think there's also a really interesting factor that people don't know about which is that my
prosecutor was on trial for misconduct while he was prosecuting my case
so he he was on trial um for for misconduct in a prior case
the monster of florence case and um that is an interesting
like the way that he conducted himself during that trial very much was mirrored
in his in the way that he tried to you know present me in his trial are in
the trial against me but for those who don't know the monster of florence case which is
which he prosecuted um back in the day was a cold case of a serial killer in florence and my
prosecutor reopened this cold case on a lead that had to do with like cults and
the mate the masons and satanism and corpses that had been dug up and and replanted and you know all of this
crazy you know psychic evidence and when two journalists started
investigating his investigation into this case he accused them of being the monster of florence and he
imprisoned one of them and he was on trial for um abusive
office while he was doing my case um so that's an interesting aspect of
this case and i think those are the two big ones um
that are are major but like i think the the big thing that i've always regretted
about the way that my case has been presented throughout the world including in the
netflix documentary is that it has always centered on me
so it's you know called amanda knox and the whole world made this case about amanda knox to the extent that like
when meredith's killer was released from prison after 16 years or after 13 years
he got off a little early for good behavior the headline was amanda knox's
roommate's killer released so at no point was his name mentioned
her name mentioned somehow i became the center the focal point for this story that i had absolutely
nothing to do with and for which i was actually the agent of least uh cause so
of all the people who had power and agency in this equation i was the one of the least
people so what i did actually had very little impact on what happened in this case it what
the police were doing what the killer did what the prosecution was doing all of these people were the ones who
were really making the story happen and i was just there for the ride and so
one thing that i would love is for this for ultimately this story
to de-center me and my so my way of like trying to
de-center myself from that is to say look i have a crazy story like i no doubt i have a crazy story of what i
went through but it really isn't about anything i did i feel like i'm more of a witness
just like everyone else who watched the netflix documentary of this crazy story that happened to a person named amanda
knox and she just happens to be me and i saw i witnessed it from the inside out um
so anyway i have a whole actual episode of my um podcast about this
because i kind of got into an argument with malcolm gladwell he he like does this thing where like
and i you know malcolm gladwell great great guy did a great job discussing my case really putting
the facts at the forefront when he was discussing my case in his most recent book
but he still sort of decided that how the case played out hinged upon
people's perceptions of me and i sort of pointed back to him that
like it could have been anyone it wasn't me it was i was just at the wrong place at the
wrong time and everyone's trying to find answers in my behavior and the look in my eyes and
they're not looking into the cognitive biases of the investigators or the incentive structures
of the you know adversarial system um they're not looking at the historic
prejudice against young sexually active women it's it's like there are a lot of factors that really
played into what happened that had nothing to do with me um so if anything
that's that's how i think this story should have been told well i want to thank you i got a private
email just moments ago describing in capital letters uh the
amazing and powerful talk that you gave and thanking us for you on so i i didn't get to all the
questions i tried to encompass as many of them as i could obviously we're in this artificial zoom
format but thank you so much amanda and thank you to everyone for coming and thank you
again to the hamels for making this possible good night everyone thank you so much everyone good night