Amanda Knox: released but not free

I am pleased that Amanda Knox has been released from the Italian prison in which she should never have been incarcerated in the first instance.

While we may never know what happened to Meredith Kercher (lest we forget, the real victim at the centre of this) and while her family will inevitably be seeking answers to emotionally tough questions, I welcome the fact that a miscarriage of justice has been rectified.

The evidence against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito was never compelling and should not have been sufficient on which to make a conviction.

And so, as Amanda Knox travels home to Seattle, there are more questions left open than there are answers. Why did the Italian police stop looking once they had pre-determined the guilt of Knox and Sollecito? More pertinently, why was effective trial by media, with the emphasis on Knox’s alleged sexual preferences and physical attractiveness allowed to dictate events? “Foxy Knoxy” was assumed guilty because she was deemed to have a voracious sexual appetite and was sufficiently unfortunate to be young, good-looking and female. Newspapers across the world were keen to depict her as a sex-obsessed killer, with even prosecutors describing her as a “she-devil”, an “enchanting witch”. Even during the hearing last week, prosecution lawyer Carlo Pacelli, obviously taking inspiration from the celebrated 1612 trial of the Pendle Witches, launched into an attack on Knox in which he described her as “"diabolical, satantic, demonic... She was muddy on the outside and dirty on the inside. She has two souls, the clean one you see before you and the other." He went on to intimate that Knox “likes alcohol [and] wild sex.”

The implication is that no-one could possibly be innocent if they like alcohol and sex. Well, not in this warped man’s mind. Sadly, it’s the public expression of primitive attitudes such as this – emphasising the sexual power of women – that demonstrate that there is more that needs reforming in Italy than the way in which its police services obtain evidence.

Can anyone seriously imagine a man being subjected to such ridiculous and damaging character assassination, or being targeted by the tabloid press on the basis of their personal physical attractiveness? That moral judgments can be – and were – made on the basis of such superficial criteria not only evidence the sexist prejudices at the heart of what passes for a justice system in Italy; it speaks volumes about similarly prejudicial perspectives that have been allowed to be perpetuated by the mainstream media here in the UK.

The crime was dreadful enough without having to create pantomime villains in the shape of witches and she-devils and playing up the alleged sexual deviancy of the accused without a shred of evidence to back up such claims. Even the supposed “fact” that a “sex game” preceded Meredith Kercher’s murder was never more than supposition and hypothesis, but the world’s media were not likely to let such detail get in the way of a good story involving a beautiful but evil sexual predator: an object of both male heterosexual fantasy and anti-feminist bigotry. None of this served the interests of justice.

The case – and more tellingly the media’s transformation of a frightened young woman into “Foxy Knoxy” – made Knox a celebrity, albeit one whose identity has largely been invented for her. How she uses her fame now her freedom is secured remains to be seen. Such freedom that Knox has will inevitably be limited by the way in which she has been portrayed. It is one thing to be released from prison; labels and artificial personalities created by the world's media are less easy to escape from. She has been released but perhaps will never be free from her ordeal or the image in which she has been created.

What is certain, however, is that her celebrity status overshadows the appalling tragedy of Miss Kercher’s death and trivialises the seriousness of the crime as well as the pain the Kercher family are so obviously experiencing. Media obsession with Knox has not only provided the American with the unenviable task of rebuilding her life after four-years' imprisonment in the glare of the world's media, it has belittled and marginalised the needs of Meredith Kercher's grieving family. There are no winners in this sorry saga - unless of course you happen to be editor of The Sun, today making money-spinning headlines as it hails the freedom of the young woman it had previously declared guilty...