So I was a bit surprised to find that in the reporting from Seattle, in both the corporate media and the blogs, there was a lot of support for Knox and belief that she wasn't guilty of murder. She and her handlers have done an excellent job of presenting her as a sympathetic figure, at least to the Northwestern public (dunno what "America" thinks, since I don't believe the case has much of a profile outside the Pacific NW). It may have been the case that Knox's family and defenders calculated they had a better chance of winning in the US court of public opinion than in a Perugia courtroom.

Senator Cantwell's outspoken statement is a good example of how effective that strategy has been.

Knox's defenders are exploiting Berlusconi for their own purposes, painting Italy as a fundamentally corrupt place with a rigged system of justice, and they hold up Berlusconi as high-profile evidence of their claims, as if he somehow proves that the whole system is untrustworthy. The fact that Berlusconi's immunity was overturned by the Italian high court doesn't seem to have registered at all, and certainly hasn't dented the emerging view of Italy as a place where a cute coed can't get a fair shake.

Of course, this whole line of argument in Knox's defense says more about the US "system" of "justice" than it does about Italy. When a jury returns a verdict that the public dislikes, they've found ways to discredit the jurors and the verdict, and Knox's defenders assume the same playbook can be used against the Perugia court. Further, the notion that Knox got railroaded in an unfair court system is little more than projection, as it is the US justice system itself that is fundamentally and deeply unjust, with rampant corruption and a complete lack of accountability that makes a mockery of our claims to fairness and democracy.

And the world will live as one