Hillary Clinton has said that she will meet a US senator to discuss claims that Amanda Knox was the victim of a flawed trial and anti-Americanism. The conviction of the 22-year-old Seattle student for murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher has opened the floodgates to a wave of antipathy in America towards the Italian justice system.As angry Americans promised to boycott Italian holidays, wine and food, a vociferous support group calling itself Friends of Amanda Knox urged people to email Barack Obama to ask him to support her appeal.
The conviction of the 22-year-old Seattle student for murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher has opened the floodgates to a wave of antipathy in America towards the Italian justice system.
As angry Americans promised to boycott Italian holidays, wine and food, a vociferous support group calling itself Friends of Amanda Knox urged people to email Barack Obama to ask him to support her appeal.
That all being said, there is a surprising amount of sympathy for Knox, particularly in the Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest as a whole. As I said in my reply to de Gondi above, I'm not exactly sure when and why that shift happened, but there is a widespread belief that Knox didn't deserve to be found guilty of murder, and that she didn't deserve a 26-year sentence.
Still, that doesn't necessarily translate into any meaningful movement against Italy; Rick Steves, a Seattle-based travel writer and TV host, won't have any problems selling his popular Italy guidebooks.
Hopefully Hillary can rein Cantwell in and defuse this tempest. And the world will live as one
