At that point, the two women's fates diverged sharply. Knox received a 26-year sentence for murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. Anthony, on the other hand, was acquitted of charges that she killed her daughter Caylee in Florida (though she was convicted of giving false information to law enforcement.) The two cases are different in nature, but they are eerily similar in circumstance.
Neither Anthony nor Knox seemed to act like assassins at their trials, and the fact that they're both women made their crimes unusual. Both became tabloid darlings thanks to their own bizarre behavior after the murders they were accused of committing, and both cases continue to thrive in the crime-obsessed blogosphere, where devoted followers endlessly pontificate about law and disorder under fabricated monikers.
Both women misled investigators during their initial interrogations—Knox by falsely accusing an innocent man, and Anthony through myriad mistruths that made her look like a pathological liar. Each woman suffered bias (both in the court of law and the court of public opinion) because of behavior so outlandish that it helped net each of them a denial of bail or house arrest. Instead, both young women had to spend the two to three years between their arrests and trials sitting in jail. And though each case had the requisite corpse, no murder weapon or clear sense of the homicides' exact circumstances ever emerged.
So why is Anthony about to go free and Knox still sweltering in a jail cell? Maybe Anthony (and her lawyers) can teach Knox (and hers) a few lessons as she readies for the final phase and verdict of her appeal.
First, it must be noted that the Italian and American systems are vastly different. In the U.S., suspects are innocent until proven guilty, but in Italy (unofficially, of course) it is clearly the other way around. Time, too, worked against Knox but in Anthony's favor. Once it started in January of 2009, Knox's Italian court, in typical European fashion, sat once or twice a week for a whole year, taking a six-week summer break, and the jury was free to read about the case between trial dates. By contrast, Anthony's Florida jury was sequestered, locked down in a hotel, and the judge wrapped the whole case up in less than six weeks, even working on the 4th of July holiday. Circumstantial evidence and character assassination played a major role in both cases, but it weighed more on Knox, where the concept of reasonable doubt is more abstract. In Italy, two professional judges guided the discussions based on their vast knowledge of jurisprudence, leading the Italian jury to a guilty verdict. The American jury deliberated alone with little legal guidance.
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