The wrongful conviction of Raeffele Sollecito and Amanda Knox is one of the most outrageous examples of a prosecting attorney, Guillano Mignini ( the monster of Perugia ) misusing his position to convict people, who awaken his dark prejudices, for crimes they never committed. Raffaele Sollecito reads from his book "Honor Bound" next to a tribute to murder victim Meredith Kercher.blog.seattlepi.com/dempsey/2012/09/26/raffaele-sollecito-i-spent-that-night-with-amanda-knox/ QUOTE:
Raffaele Sollecito: I Spent That Night With Amanda Knox “Amanda Knox did not leave – could not have left – my house on the night of the murder,” says her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in his page-turning memoir, Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox.
“She didn’t have her own key, so if she’d gone out alone, she would have had to ring the doorbell and ask me to buzz her back in. Even if I’d been stoned or asleep when she rang, I would have remembered that. And it didn’t happen.”
Because
Italian police—and even Raffaele’s own family—spent years trying to get him to say the opposite, to cut a deal, this staunch defense of Knox is at the heart of Honor Bound. The former lovers did not murder Amanda’s roommate Meredith Kercher, he wants the world to know. They spent four years behind bars for a burglary/murder committed by drifter Rudy Guede, a petty thief who remains behind bars in Perugia, Italy. Indeed, ample DNA and other powerful evidence points to Guede.
Who’s at fault for this injustice? Raffaele pegs prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (famous for his involvement in the Monster of Florence case), police officers who “knew” the two college students were guilty, plus judges and journalists who lapped up Mignini’s sex, drugs and satanic ritual crime theories.
Prosecutors will appeal Amanda and Raffaele’s acquittal before Italy’s highest court in March 2013. Incredibly, the prosecution faults Judge Pratillo Hellman for using deductive reasoning to free them last year.
The prosecutor “had a problem with the appeals court taking the available evidence and seeking to make each piece follow on logically from the last,” writes Raffaele. “I take it that he is not a fan of Sherlock Holmes.”
Raffaele penned Honor Bound with the help of British journalist Andrew Gumbel who describes their collaboration below and the chilling final night of interrogations that put the two college students behind bars:
Andrew, how’d you land the ghostwriting job with Raffaele?
After Amanda Knox and Raffaele were released last October, it dawned on me that it would an ideal job for me to be Amanda’s ghostwriter. I’m British and lived in Italy and have written extensively about criminal justice and now I’m in the U.S. on the West Coast. So I reached out to contacts. Nothing happened. Then Sharlene Martin, Raffaele’s agent, put a notice on a list serve for literary agents and a friend saw it. I got the job.
British journalist Andrew Gumbel, who collaborated with Raffaele Sollecito on Honor Bound.
What drew you to the case?
A number of strange coincidences. When I was 20, I was arrested in Italy (for insulting a public official). I was slapped on the back of head in exactly the way Amanda described it, and when I met Raffaele, he said he’d been hit in just the same way. That rang true for me.
When you met Raffaele, he was just coming off four years of jail. What did he seem like?
A very sweet, gentle young man. It was difficult for him to think back on the trauma and delve into the details and relive it. He had a family and everybody had an opinion about what the book should and shouldn’t be. So there was a period of getting together and talking about that.
I said to them from the outset, I need to know everything. I can’t go into this worrying or wondering if you’re holding back and not sharing with me. The family said, ‘We’ll tell you everything, We’ve nothing to hide.’ Then they made the entire case file available to me. They gave me everything.
How did you collaborate with Raffaele?
At first we worked by phone and Skype. I had only a hazy impression of him. We established rapport when Raffaele came to Los Angeles with his father (Francesco Sollecito) and sister (Vanessa Sollecito) in March 2012. He also went to Seattle for the weekend and came back.
Then I worked one-on-one with Raffaele. It was hard. He was only a few months removed from this nightmare. He knows the case well but was not on top of it the way his father was. And he was traumatized by his experience and reluctant to delve into it. Documentation was key. We went over the case chronology and the documents together. He’d say, Oh, I remember that. He would read them, go over them with me, and then give me his memories. For instance, he’d go through the interrogation and I’d show him what the police drew up.
What was the most difficult part of the book to write?
For sure, the interrogation. Raffaele hadn’t talked about that night to anyone. It wasn’t recorded. It was his words against the police. Amanda had talked about that night in detail and Raffaele never had. So we had to tread carefully. But that night was very vivid for him. He was extremely consistent in his memories. He told me the same thing every time.
Describe that interrogation, which he says took 10 hours. Why did Raffaele “crumble” and say Amanda went to work on Nov. 1, the night of the murder?
He was exhausted. He’d been in and out of the police station for three days. He arrived sometime around 11 p.m. and Amanda was with him because she had no other place to go. She was sitting and waiting. He was quizzed over and over again about his memory of the night of the crime. In his own head he got confused between Halloween and the next night. He asked to see a calendar so he could get the dates straight, but they refused. When they asked if she went to work, he was confused. He just forgot what had happened a few days earlier.
So I don’t think he broke per se. He was questioned and muddled up the events. They wanted him to tell them what Amanda did on the night of the murder. He got confused between that night and Halloween night, when Amanda did go out and didn’t return until 1 am.
What might he have done differently?
He should have had some kind of protection. He asked for a lawyer; he asked to call his dad. The police refused. They took advantage of him. They were obviously trying to implicate him and it’s not legal to interrogate someone as a suspect without formally notifying them that they are under suspicion.
Raffaele was told he was being treated only as a persona informata dei fatti, a person with relevant information. The Corte di Cassazione later ruled that the evidence gathered by the police that night was inadmissible in the criminal proceedings for precisely that reason.
He was genuinely confused about what happened that one night. The tensest part came when they handed him part of the statement that he didn’t agree with. That’s described in the book. He said, ‘This isn’t right.’
They suddenly turned from bad cops to good cops. They said don’t worry, don’t worry. It’s no big thing, just sign it.
Then they went straight to Amanda and said, ‘Look at what Raffaele told us and what he signed.’
He could hear Amanda sobbing, right? That’s one of the revelations in the book.
Yes, they were interrogated in rooms close to each other. She was crying out for help. The next morning he heard her again, crying in a holding cell, because they took him past her door to complete his arrest.
You say the police pressured him to say Amanda wasn’t with him on the night of the murder. That in jail he doubted his own memory. When did he realize for sure that she couldn’t possibly have gone out?
He went over it in his head during the first few weeks in prison. Once he realized she couldn’t have gotten back in without a key, he never wavered again.
Raffaele now believes police and prosecutor Mignini knew he was innocent and only arrested him to get to her? Yes. Raffaele was challenged over and over, starting with his long night of interrogation in the police station, about standing up for Amanda. He was put under considerable pressure to turn against her. It seems that Amanda was the one they really wanted.The burden of proof was on the prosecution to prove Raffaele was guilty in his own right. But prosecutor Mignini didn’t present the case that way. For Mignini, Raffaele was the findanzatino, the little boyfriend, and no motive was assigned to him. Amanda was the guilty one; Raffaele was along for the ride.
Home for the holidays: Amanda Knox thanks supporters after her acquittal charges
Did Mignini ever enter Raffaele’s interrogation room, as he entered Amanda’s?
No, he wasn’t present during Raffaele’s interrogation. Raffaele was never directly questioned by Mignini except in a court hearing (presided over by Judge Claudia Matteini shortly after the arrests).
Was Raffaele’s family worried when Amanda got up on the stand and testified for two days about her own interrogation?
Yes, incredibly worried. One contradiction that came out of her lips could have sunk both of them. In the end they were remarkably pleased. It didn’t pay off until the appeal, but she did brilliantly.
In Italy, the prosecution decides what to investigate. What are some loose threads they didn’t tie up?
They claimed Amanda and Raffaele left his apartment on the night of the murder. There were surveillance cameras between the two houses. The family asked to see the footage on those cameras and the prosecution didn’t want to go there. They never did have the footage released.
What is life like for Raffaele now in Italy?
Many people recognize him, especially in his hometown. They are overwhelmingly on his side. He does have some discomfort; he comes across people who think he’s guilty. His attitude is to brush it off and not let it get to him.
His first day of freedom is described in the last chapter of the book, where he describes his wonder at something as simple as iced drinks out of a refrigerator. He went back to his friends. He started a relationship, which is now over. He was thinking about his future, resetting his goals. It was only after he came to the U.S. and worked on his book that he decided to go to graduate school in Verona, where he’s now enrolled. He’s getting an advanced computer science degree. He wants to be a video game programmer.
What do you think of the sensational press coverage?
Most reporters didn’t follow the story closely enough. So the prosecution could say whatever they wanted and it would hold up. The reporters didn’t do their homework.
The British press in particular wanted to draw a wedge between Meredith’s family and the other families. The truth is they’re all victims. They all have more in common than what separates them. Some reporters had a strong sense of what the story was. Others were invested in sensationalism and used the fact that the murder victim was British to drum up some team spirit. Here are the people who killed our Meredith. I found that pretty distasteful.
The story was too good to drop. A sex game gone wrong. Students taking drugs and having sex. We’re going to go with that. And when those elements disappeared, reporters didn’t have anything interesting to work with. So they had to go with what they originally had. They participated in the demonization.
While the families of Amanda and Raffaele celebrated their sudden release, the victim's family was forced once again to leave Perugia without her.
Since you’re a British journalist, have you met John Kercher, Meredith’s father, who also writes for British papers?
Never met him or spoke to him. But one of things that became very clear to me, in reading the case files, is that the Kerchers were not correctly informed about what was happening in court. I think their lawyer, Francesco Marcesca, did them a disservice. The Kerchers, in their public statements, appear to be confused about what happened and I don’t think their lawyer did a good job of informing them. Instead, the direction he led them was into getting as much money as possible by suing Raffaele and Amanda and their families. And the way to do that was to portray them as being as guilty as possible.
I didn’t reach out to them. They didn’t reach out to me. I know Raffaele and his family have reached out to them but they haven’t been interested.
It would be nice to think that the Kerchers could read this book and have some of their questions answered. It was a straightforward and awful incidence of somebody breaking into a house and looking for money and things spiraling out of control. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.
Any revelations you couldn’t put into the book?
There are one or two episodes we chose not to include for one reason or another, but nothing meaningful was left out. I’m satisfied that the story is as close to the truth as Raffaele knows it, as close as possible to the truth.
Do you have any worries that Honor Bound will hurt Raffaele when the Supreme Court of Italy looks at his case in March?
The decision to publish had been made before I got involved. Raffaele and his family are understandably nervous about the high court, but all informed legal opinion suggests it will be very hard to overturn the case at that point. Given the way the prosecution’s case fell apart on appeal, especially the DNA, it’s hard to imagine that the high court could argue that the decision to exonerate Amanda and Raffaele was procedurally incorrect.
From the beginning Raffaele’s lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, said that her eye was on that court, although she would of course have liked to win at the lower level too. She was careful to do everything by the book, laying down the evidence, so her client would go free. I know the Sollecito family has a lot of faith in her. I do as well.