Category: Media developments

A Huge New Book On The Case, A Must-Read, Draws On Massive Documentation Only Now All Online

Posted by Peter Quennell





The lawyer James Raper is very cool. He has been connecting up the dots for years. He reads and reads and reads.

He rarely interacts with others, and has little interest in arguing with the apologists now years behind the curve and lost in a fictitious world. He has posted here on TJMK approximately 30 times on his own, and he prepared this huge and extraordinary Powerpoint with the equally brilliant Kermit which shows how the evidence dots connect.

His huge book Justice On Trial is now available on Amazon. It makes all the other non-Italian books instantly out of date and wildly short on all the facts. He delves very deeply into the law, the first book to ever do that. Without actually saying the process was twice bent (see review below which does say that), he takes apart the two court sentencing reports in 2011 and 2015 that were the results, and leaves two heaps of smoking rubble in their place. 

Justice On Trial: Review On Amazon:

Why is this the must-read book? Because the number of documents available in Italian and the number of translations available in good English have in fact doubled in the past two years. This was a well-handled and massively documented case. The DNA spreadsheet is quite astonishingly large. James Raper is the first writer to draw on all these documents, and he’s really good.

The court testimony by many of those in the questura on the night Knox claims she was hit (she WAS hit, by herself, many times) now all in English is really gripping. We see why her lawyers stated in court that she was never hit by anyone else, and what she was doing at the questura that night (making a list of names) and why Sollecito damned her in writing two days later and cold-shouldered her and refused to confirm her third alibi for 4 years all the way to the end of the Hellmann appeal. Sollecito’s lawyers said in court that she was on cocaine and we now know what Italians all knew, that she had had a drug dealer in tow since she arrived (she met him on the train) and directly caused his guilty verdict 18 months later.

In the UK and US no appeal would have been approved after that 2009 trial, during which the defenses became so overwhelmed, on some days they were no-shows in court. RS and AK would now be in the 8th year of their term. The top criminal judge, Judge Chiari, who had once devastated Bongiorno in court, was pushed aside (and then angrily resigned citing illegal manipulation) for Judge Hellmann, a business judge who had only handled one murder trial, and unsurprisingly a disaster was the result - and he was edged into retirement then. His “independent” DNA consultants were seemingly fed all they wrote from Hampikian in the US (he now admits he dealt with them) and the Carabinieri testimony at the second (Nencini) appeal in 2013-14 quite devastated them. They never proved even one DNA sample to be contaminated. They didnt know how to do a test the Carabinieri did with ease, they kept a key sample in a common fridge, Vecchiotti’s lab has been closed down for its appalling conditions, and investigations into both these guns for hire go on.

The final appeal should have gone back to the Cassation First Chambers (the one that handles murders) but again manipulations placed the case before unqualified judges - Judges Marasca and Bruno were political appointees, in the Fifth Chambers, which handles family and property cases, and neither had done a murder case in their life. That is behind the fiasco of a final report (three months late) which James describes and takes apart. Sollecitos lawyers were allowed to rant on to the Fifth Chambers panel about “corrupt” and “incompetent” cops (with zero proof) for three hours beyond the legal limit in March 2015, while the original Perugia prosecution and the Florence prosecution who really knew the case were not even there! It is MANDATORY that questions of evidence not be addressed by the Supreme Court, they have to be pushed back down to a lower court, but guess what? Judges Marasca and Bruno broke that law and garbled the tiny portion of evidence they did address in ways NO murder judge ever does.

And in their final report, Knox was still firmly placed at the scene at the time with blood on her hands, and Sollecito was probably there too. Why do maybe 90 percent of Italians believe the process was twice fixed? James doesnt say, but he describes all the dots for others to connect. I hope he publishes an Italian edition too, in Italy books like the self-serving and deceptive Preston & Spezi “Monster of Florence” and John Douglas’s book trying to prove a lone-wolf killer with mistakes on every page, merely meet with shrugs. There are some very good books in Italian on the case, and James’s fits in very well with them. A must-read.

Permalink for this post Posted by Peter Quennell on 10/01/16 at 09:40 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in News media & movies,  Excellent reporting,  Media developments • Comments here (10)

The Formidable Tina Brown Speaks Out On Barbie Nadeau’s Forthcoming Book

Posted by Peter Quennell



[Above and below: New York publisher and editor Tina Brown; click for larger images]

Someone you’d sure want to have in your corner if you have a good book to promote is New York’s colorful, driving Tina Brown.

A former editor first of Vanity Fair and then of the New Yorker, British-born Tina Brown launched the hustling Daily Beast news-site late last year. We get emails daily from the Beast on breaking news and, as a newspaper-blog hybrid, the Beast may have found the sweet spot that promises survival in this media day and age.

We believe that Tina personally sought out the Rome-based American journalist Barbie Nadeau to write a blog on Meredith’s case, and then Tina promoted the idea of a book - the Beast’s second book to be published, and one certain to be very high-profile. 

Here on MediaBistro’s Galleycat are Tina Brown’s first remarks about Barbie Nadeau’s book: Angel Face, The Real Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox

Q: What’s coming up next?

A: It’s called Angel Face by Barbie Nadeau. It’s about the true story of a student killer Amanda Knox. Nadeau was at every one of the sessions of the trial, so she covered it obsessively for the Daily Beast.

She gathered a huge following with us, and so we’ve given her the time and space to do a great 40,000 word narrative. She put the whole trial together into a really compelling narrative.

It’s terrific, I mean I couldn’t put it down; I was reading it this weekend.

Barbie Nadeau’s book on the student-killer Amanda Knox is due out early in April - the third book on Meredith’s case to hit the stores. The next three are expected to be Candace Dempsey’s polemic and then the cool factual studies by John Follain and Nina Burleigh.

Between now and the Knox-Sollecito appeal late this year, we expect to be posting first all of the judges’ sentencing report in English. The report is due out at the latest in a couple of weeks. And then many, many excerpts from the best of the books.

Those that see that, here, finally, true justice for Meredith really was done. 


Permalink for this post Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/18/10 at 07:31 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Various hypotheses,  News media & movies,  Excellent reporting,  Media developments,  The wider contexts • Comments here (2)