Hey y’all!

It’s been a while but let’s jump right into what is going on in the news this week.

The Italian Court of Cassation (the top criminal court in Italy) has officially thrown out the guilty verdicts of Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend  Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian native.

On November 2, 2007 the body of 21-year-old UK citizen, Meredith Kercher, was found in the home that she shared with Amanda Knox in the college town of Perugia, Italy. Amanda Knox, her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede (from the Ivory Coast) were all prime suspects and were eventually tried and convicted of Kercher’s murder.

In the first trial in 2009, Amanda Knox was convicted of murder, sexual assault, and slander with an original sentence of 26 years in prison. Raffaele Sollecito was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Rudy Guede was later tried and convicted of murder with a 16 year sentence; he admitted to being inside the home when Kercher was murdered and his DNA was found all over her bedroom where her body was found.

In 2011, Knox and Sollecito appealed and the court throw out the original convictions, except for Knox’s slander charge which required only a year of prison time that was counted as served in the four years that Knox had already spent there. But in 2013, the high court in Italy reversed the acquittal and required another appeals trial. Then in 2014 the new appeals trial held the original 2009 conviction and ordered Amanda Knox to serve 28 1/2 years in prison (including the one year for slander) but kept Sollecito’s time to 25 years.

But finally, in March of this year the Italian high court found that Knox and Sollecito did not murder Kercher, and just a couple of days ago the court released its final statement and reasoning behind this decision.

The Court of Cassation wrote that there was an “absolute lack of biological traces” of Knox and Sollecito in Kercher’s bedroom or even on her body. The Court also noted that there was a plethora of omissions and poorly executed investigations into this case.

Case in point, the original prosecutor Giuliano Mignini was one piece of work. While he was prosecuting Amanda Knox, he was making his own court appearances for indictments starting in 2006 for “abuse of office power” and “abetting” in connection to another high profile case. So, essentially the prosecutor seemingly liked getting his way by any means necessary and encouraging others to break the law too.

Now, I have been following along with this case for quite sometime and I have a hard time distinguishing the truth. Sometimes I believe that Knox was not involved but then other times I have to wonder if she really was. Some of Knox’s actions are consistent of a scared 20-something living in a foreign country but then there are other things that scream she knew at least that something was going on. We may never know the truth, but this latest ruling by the court should put an end to the saga of Amanda Knox’s fate, and let the family of Meredith Kercher move on with their lives.

Allison Dawson

Allison Dawson was born in Germany and raised in Mississippi and Texas. A graduate of Texas Tech University and Arizona State University, she’s currently dedicating her life to studying for the LSAT. Twitter junkie. Conservative. Get in touch with Allison at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Celebrities are constantly in the spotlight, with cameras watching their every move. Magazines speculate over the details of celebrities’ lives like vultures, working to photograph every moment that they can. For those who enjoy following the lives of their favorite celebrities, the paparazzi can be seen as a good thing because they provide an inside look at our favorite stars. But the celebrities being followed often don’t agree. Over the years, celebrities have gotten very creative in the ways that they have tried to get rid of the paparazzi. Naomi Campbell definitely falls into that category, and she recently got into a lot of trouble in Italy for that creativity.

Campbell was just convicted of assault by a Sicilian court after scratching paparazzo Gaetano di Giovanni’s eye with her purse in August 2009. The English model had reportedly just gotten to the Sicilian island of Lapri when the photographer began to immediately snap photos of Campbell and her then-boyfriend, Vladimir Doronin. Di Giovanni then continued to take photos of her as she walked the streets, and she proceed to hit him with her purse, scratching and bruising his eye in the process. The photographer reportedly sought medical treatment and took three days to recover. In 2013, when Campbell was ordered to stand trial, di Giovanni said, “I had just started taking some shots of her and I did not expect such a violent reaction.”

Campbell’s lawyer was able to reach an agreement with the photographer so that he withdrew the charges against her, but prosecutor Francesco Massara ordered the trial to go ahead for public interest reasons because of the gravity of the charges against her, Italy’s national news agency Ansa said. She was recently found guilty of assault and received a six-month suspended prison sentence. Essentially that means she probably won’t actually face jail time, unless she gets in trouble again during that time period or fails to finish her community service requirements. However, Campbell has also said that she will be appealing her sentence.

This isn’t the first time that Campbell has had to defend her actions in court. In the past, the model has faced legal troubles due to her quick temper, as early as 2002. In addition, she has been arrested and sued for different acts of violence and abuse, including assaulting police officers in 2008, and throwing her phone at her personal assistant and maid on different occasions.

But while Campbell has had a history of aggression, that doesn’t mean the paparazzi is completely innocent. Di Giovanni originally dropped the charges because he was not distraught by the situation, but ended up pursuing the lawsuit anyway, possibly because he wanted to take advantage of her being a public figure.

The entire situation is certainly messy, and does say a lot about the expectation of privacy that celebrities simply don’t have. There have been many who have spoken out about the way they’re treated by the paparazzi–for example, last year Kristen Bell created an anti paparazzi campaign, calling for the paparazzi photographing children to stop. Campbell was probably in the wrong for hitting di Giovanni, but there’s two sides to this story, and the harassment that celebrities have to undergo certainly does deserve to be taken into account. Campbell’s appeal is now pending, so this fight, and the overall question of celebrity privacy, is far from over.

Angel Idowu

Angel Idowu is a member of the Beloit College Class of 2016 and was a Law Street Media Fellow for the Summer of 2015. Contact Angel at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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