{"id":6616,"date":"2020-01-23T15:55:31","date_gmt":"2020-01-23T19:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=6616"},"modified":"2022-03-24T15:44:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-24T19:44:29","slug":"was-amanda-knox-guilty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/was-amanda-knox-guilty\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Amanda Knox Guilty? Why Did Everyone Think So?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Was Amanda Knox guilty? What were the issues with the Amanda Knox case? Why were so many people so sure of her guilt, despite the evidence suggesting otherwise?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll cover how Amanda Knox’s actions made her seem <\/em>guilty, and why we all have a hard time understanding strangers when they don’t act the way we expect them to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Amanda Knox Case<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On November 1, 2007, an American college student named Meredith Kercher was murdered in the small, Italian town of Perugia. Kercher\u2019s body was found by her roommate, Amanda Knox. Knox called the police to the scene of the gruesome crime. Almost immediately, Amanda Knox was added to the list of subjects\u2014she was ultimately convicted of murder and put in prison. Was Amanda Knox guilty?
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The arrest and conviction of Amanda Knox was a sensation in the media and tabloids. But it doesn\u2019t <\/em>make sense that Amanda Knox was implicated in the murder. There was no physical evidence that put Knox at the scene of the crime. Nor was there any motive that explained why she would have murdered her roommate. The police botched the investigation of evidence and DNA, and the prosecution relied on fantasy to make the case. Was Amanda Knox guilty? Somehow, eight years went by before the Italian Supreme Court declared Knox innocent. 
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There are plenty of articles and books that detail all of the mistakes made by the investigators and prosecutors in the Amanda Knox case. But the simplest theory of what went wrong with the Amanda Knox case is this: the police expected Knox to be transparent and she wasn\u2019t. Her case is an example of the consequences of assuming that the way a stranger looks is a reliable indicator of how she feels.<\/strong> Was Amanda Knox guilty? No, but she acted like she was.
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The Amanda Knox Case and Mismatching<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Was Amanda Knox guilty? Amanda Knox was innocent. But in the months following the crime, the way she acted made her seem <\/em>guilty. She was mismatched, like Nervous Nelly. The investigators on the case drew wild conclusions about Amanda\u2019s role in Kercher\u2019s murder based on the way she behaved. 
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Lead investigator Edgardo Giobbi said that he didn\u2019t even need to rely on any other kinds of investigation because he had observed Knox\u2019s guilt through her psychological and behavioral reactions to the murder. And the prosecutor on the case said that although the physical evidence collected had been very unclear, what was <\/em>clear was that Amanda\u2019s behavior was irrational.
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Amanda Knox (like most strangers) was a mystery to the people who didn\u2019t know her closely. She was the kind of outcast kid in high school who sang in the hallways and pretended to be an elephant in front of her classmates. Like most misfits, Amanda Knox had learned to be herself even when the people around her couldn\u2019t understand her. So, in the days following Meredith Kercher\u2019s murder, Knox didn\u2019t adjust her behavior to conform to peoples\u2019 expectations. 
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Why did people think Amanda Knox was guilty? Here are a few examples of how Amanda Knox behaved after Meredith Kercher\u2019s murder:<\/p>\n\n\n\n