Where Seattlest Gets All Mudede About Amanda Knox

It's probably too late at night to be writing this sort of piece, but sitting around a lonely house, sipping a glass of Scotch and trying to forget about our more quotidian problems, we found ourselves reading today's (or yesterday's, we suppose) Seattle Times article about the ongoing Amanda Knox trial. In the piece, AP reporter Alessandra Rizzo goes on at length about how Knox didn't seem to show any remorse in the police station following her roommate Meredith Kercher's murder. She quotes three prosecution witnesses (all friends of the victim, apparently), who testified that, "Everybody was upset and she didn't seem to show any emotions," or that she "'made faces,' such as crossing her eyes and sticking her tongue out. She was 'giggling' and kissing [then-boyfriend and co-defendant Raffaele] Sollecito," and finally that, "She didn't show any sadness. She wasn't crying. She seemed quite angry and a bit frustrated and sometimes happy."

Without intending to suggest either Knox's innocence or guilt, we have to admit that what all this reminded of us was nothing so much as Albert Camus's The Stranger, where a man essentially gets convicted of murder for not showing remorse at his mother's funeral. As in Camus's novel, the trial (also something of a media fixation) turns over the perceived personal failings of the individual rather than the facts (admittedly, Merseult did kill the Arab; at issue is whether it was premeditated), on the grounds that the individual's perceived lack of human emotion and apparently incongruous personal pursuits "proves" him guilty, because, in other words, he's a sociopath.

From the prosecution's close in The Stranger (and here, at the risk of seeming even more Mudede-esque, we must admit that, having sold our copy back in college, we're quoting from the old, inferior, Stuart Gilbert translation, which is all we could find online; interested readers should stick to the Fred Ward version—-he captures the tone much better):

He said he’d studied [my soul] closely—and had found a blank, “literally nothing, gentlemen of the jury.” Really, he said, I had no soul, there was nothing human about me, not one of those moral qualities which normal men possess had any place in my mentality. “No doubt,” he added, “we should not reproach him with this. We cannot blame a man for lacking what it was never in his power to acquire. But in a criminal court the wholly passive ideal of tolerance must give place to a sterner, loftier ideal, that of justice. Especially when this lack of every decent instinct is such as that of the man before you, a menace to society.” He proceeded to discuss my conduct toward my mother, repeating what he had said in the course of the hearing. But he spoke at much greater length of my crime—at such length, indeed, that I lost the thread and was conscious only of the steadily increasing heat.