Articles Posted in Domestic Violence

The Fifth Amendment is at issue this week in two high-profile cases: the marital mishap of professional golfer Tiger Woods and the surprise convictions of the American student perhaps wrongfully convicted of killing her roommate, Amanda Knox and her boyfriend. The Constitution protects each and everyone of us from false confessions or prosecutorial twisting of our words. Simply put, it grants us the right to remain silent. Tiger Woods has, of course, invoked this right. Amanda Knox, however, spent days talking with Perusian investigators without an attorney. She was deprived of sleep and told to “imagine” scenarios under which her roommate could have been killed. She did. Investigators then called those scenarios “explanations” and within days of the murder, she was publicly touted as her roommate’s killer.

The Amanda Knox trial has received so much attention because of the lack of otherwise credible evidence. Although there was a ton of forensic evidence, none of this evidence linked the girl to the crime and the defense was not allowed to bring in its own forensic evidence, showing she could not have committed the murder. The conviction of this young girl with no known motive and no criminal record led former OJ Simpson prosecutor John Kelly to declare this “the most egregious international railroading of two innocent young people I have ever seen… It’s a public lynching based on rank speculation.”

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