Amanda Knox’s Trip to Italy

Let’s face it: It could be many, many months before Season 2 of Making a Murderer is released — although my book on Avery and Dassey will available April 4th.  In the meantime, be sure to watch the Netflix documentary Amanda Knox.  It’s just like Making a Murderer, only set in beautiful Italy instead of Manitowoc, Wisconsin.  Okay, it’s not just like it, but there are numerous, uncanny parallels between the Amanda Knox case and the Avery and Dassey cases, including these:

1. A young woman is murdered. 
2. The police think they can “know” things without evidence, and therefore jump to conclusions.
3. Innocent people agree to talk to the police and, in the process, unwittingly dig their own graves.
4. The police have tunnel vision and won’t stop interrogating suspects until they get the answers they want.    
5. The government contaminates physical evidence and even misrepresents it at trial.   
6. The public rushes to judgment based on incredibly superficial, emotion-inducing media coverage. 
7. The prosecutors are obsessed with irrational, wild theories of who murdered the victim and why they murdered her.    
8. The media ignores facts in order to report the story consistent with a sex-based “narrative.”
9. Journalists are motivated not to find the facts, but to be as sensationalistic as possible and, more importantly, to beat their competitors to press. 
10. The government uses dirty, nasty, underhanded tactics to win convictions. 
11. An appellate court saves the day for the wrongfully convicted defendants.    
12. Innocent people never quite recover from their wrongful convictions.       
13. The criminal process takes bizarre, unimaginable twists — all the way to the end.

Enjoy!  (And you’re welcome.)