Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  But not Bongiorno. She was incapable of pussyfooting around, and while I was not happy about her message, I was grateful she had the courage to deliver it. "They want Amanda," she told me gravely, "and that means they're going to ask for a life sentence for both of you. They're going to argue that the bra clasp ties you to the murder scene, and they'll get to Amanda that way because you both say you were together that night."

  Bongiorno asked, one last time, if I had anything to say that could put some distance between Amanda and me. I had heard that same question in different forms from everyone—my family, the police, and all my lawyers. Was I absolutely sure I wanted to vouch for Amanda's whereabouts on the night Meredith died, even if it meant tossing my life away after hers?

  I was adamant: "I have nothing to add to what I've already said. If we want to fight this battle, we have to do it my way, and that means establishing Amanda's innocence as much as mine. There is no other way."

  Bongiorno listened and said no more. But, she also believed me. As she later confided, she wanted me to understand that arguing for Amanda's innocence alongside my own made her task more challenging. Now, though, she was beginning to conclude that she had no choice.

  My father was all over the place. He knew exactly how bad the news was, but he wanted to shield me as best he could. "Whatever happens, don't worry," he told me. "There's always the appeal. 'I he work we've done won't go to waste."

  Vanessa, characteristically, was much blunter. She'd started coming to the court hearings following the dismissal of her criminal complaint and couldn't help noticing the atmospherics: the confidence in Mignini's demeanor, the way he took Stefanoni and

  Napoleoni out to lunch, the warmth he showed to the Squadra Mobile members as he put a paternal arm around them.

  "Raffaele's going to be convicted. I can feel it," she announced. She said this not to be a killjoy, but because she cared passionately about me, and it broke her heart to think the struggle for my freedom would probably continue for years longer. My father was furious—not because she was wrong, but because she voiced her thoughts out loud.

  * * *

  Mignini and Comodi strode into court for closing statements as though they owned the place. Mignini made a point of mentioning that he had known both Judge Massei and his deputy, Judge Cristiani, for years and congratulated them on the way they'd handled the hearings. My family found that particularly nauseating, the closest thing to an open admission that the judges and the prosecution were part of the same chummy fraternity. According to Mignini, anyone who agreed with him—his fellow lawyers or the media—was admirably objective, while anyone who criticized him deserved condemnation for attempting to de-legitimize the proceedings.

  Still, Mignini's swagger belied a considerable insecurity, which became more obvious as he kept talking. First, he abandoned his sex-orgy-gone-wrong theory entirely. 'I he new motive, as he expressed it, was that Amanda hated Meredith—for being too strait laced, for having too many English friends, for criticizing Amanda when she forgot to flush the toilet. Mignini didn't postulate any motivation for me whatsoever, saying only that I was Amanda's in separable fidanzatino, her "little boyfriend," who presumably would do whatever she asked. Was this really Mignini's idea of why people kill each other? Over an unflushed toilet?

  Second, Mignini unexpectedly changed his tune about the murder weapon. He still insisted that my kitchen knife had inflicted the fatal wound, but allowed that it was too big for some of the other incisions. He suggested, instead, that I had brought along one of my pocketknives to initiate the attack on Meredith—a theory for which he did not have a shred of evidence. This switch in story lines sounded alarming at the time because it placed me at the center

  the action, but in retrospect it was obviously a sign of prosecutorial weakness.

  Mignini had to scrabble around to explain how Amanda, Guede, and I could have formulated a murder plan together without any obvious indication that we knew each other. Guede, he postulated, could have offered himself as our drug pusher. I could have been taking acid and cocaine as well as marijuana: "It's difficult to say for sure." Mignini's speech became so bogged down with might haves and could haves and perhapses and arguments of plausibility and compatibility and non-incompatibility that it was unclear how many hard facts he was relying on. He acknowledged that his en tire reconstruction of the crime was oviamente ipotetica----obviously hypothetical. One startling admission he made would prove useful to us later on. If the break-in had not been staged, he said, "the two defendants would have to be innocent. . . . The break-in would be attributable to an outsider acting without help from either of them." Our point exactly. Mignini's line appeared to be a tacit admission that he had no other solid evidence to go on.

  To maximize our role in the crime, the prosecution felt obliged to minimize Guede's, to the point where they seemed to be taking his side. Mignini referred to him as "poor Rudy"; Comodi, in her own summation, described him as a "poor, disaffected young man" who had been deprived of the usual social protections and thus had valid reasons for going off the rails, unlike Amanda and me. Guede, she said, had not supplied the murder weapon. He had not staged a break-in. He had not chosen to attack the police or the investigators. Unlike us, he had shown signs of remorse, even pity as he brought towels from the bathroom to soak up Meredith's blood.

  This was an outrageous argument from start to finish. How were Amanda and I supposed to show remorse for a crime we had not committed? How could Guede, whom the authorities themselves believed deserving of a thirty-year prison sentence, be characterized as a victim of circumstance?

  Comodi didn't pause to justify her arguments; she merely kept on making them. She called me impassive and cold, willing to do absolutely anything to win the approval of others. Amanda, she said, was narcissistic, manipulative, and aggressive, incapable of empathy or emotional warmth, and focused so completely on satisfying her immediate needs she didn't care what anybody else thought.

  After hours of this, Amanda jumped up to make another impromptu statement. She couldn't bear to listen without defending herself, which she did with all the calm she could muster. "Meredith

  * * *

  Bongiorno was brilliant, as we expected her to be. She showed up the nonsense of Guede's being my accomplice when we didn't know each other. She showed up the nonsense of my nonexistent motive for murder, saying I had been portrayed by the prosecution as a "bafflingly silent afterthought" to the whole story. She ridiculed the introduction of the kitchen knife based on Inspector Finzi's "instinct" and ridiculed, too, the last-minute introduction of an unidentified second knife at the scene of the crime. She noted that the prosecution and the courts had been mistaken about attributing the bloody Nike shoe prints to me and expressed similar skepticism about the bra clasp. If I had really left my DNA on the clasp, she said, I would have had to be a human dragonfly, darting in and out and betraying no other sign of my presence in Meredith's room.

  She was engaging, to the point, and absolutely devastating to the prosecution. But we had no idea at this stage if anything she said would make the slightest difference.

  * * *

  The judges and their retainers retired for just ten hours before returning with a decision. While we waited, through the evening and into darkest night, the entire Squadra Mobile lined up in full uniform as though anticipating a victory parade. The atmosphere was downright sinister. My uncle Giuseppe was so afraid of breaking down if the judgment went the way we feared that he stayed in his hotel. Vanessa surveyed the scene and called him to say she was sure we would lose.

  She was right. Judge Massei convicted us as charged, on all counts. Mara, my stepmother, yelled out, "Forza, Raffaele!" Keep your strength up. But her voice sounded strangled, her protective instinct toward me masking her despair. Amanda broke into help less streams of tears, grabbed her lawyer, Luciano Ghirga's, arm, and moaned, "No, no!"

  My stomach was churning and my head felt ready to burst, but I betrayed no outward
sign of emotion. didn't want to give my tormentors that satisfaction.

  The only glimmer of good news was that Massei did not give us life sentences, as Mignini had requested. Instead, he gave us twenty five and twenty-six years (one more for Amanda than For me). It was a mind-bogglingly long time to contemplate behind bars, but it was a softening of sorts, which Bongiorno immediately took as an admission that the case was flawed. Later, we would learn that Judge Massei had taken note, however wealdy, of all the points she made in her closing statement. They were the only things that held him back from giving Mignini everything he wanted.

  To everyone's surprise—not least her assistants' Bongiorno gave me a hug in the few moments before the police escorted me away. She said, "Don't worry, we'll work to make sure things go differently on appeal." In the darkest moment of my life, I was pleasantly surprised to note that I still trusted her.

  What even Bongiorno couldn't sugarcoat was the length of time we'd now have to wait for the next round. It could take a year, maybe longer, for an appeal to begin, then another six to twelve months for the second trial. We'd have to go through the whole thing again--with Mignini and Comodi and all the witnesses, and the civil-suit lawyers sniping at us, and the press parsing our every smile and wink and facial contortion. It was too much even to think about.

  Bongiorno told the media that for her this was not just a conviction. It felt like "the painful deferral of an acquittal that is hound to come." I didn't dare believe this could all still come out right, but the word painful was spot-on.

  For the next several days, I slept and slept, first at Capanne and then back in Terni. I didn't even want to think about what had just happened, much less pick up the pieces and move on.

  IV

  JUSTICE

  How do judges not feel tormented by the idea that, because of

  their mistakes, innocent people languish in prison their whole

  lives? A magistrate I know answered this way. It may be that

  half of the sentences handed down are unjust, he said, and

  therefore half of those in prison are innocent; but by the same

  reasoning half of those acquitted and set free are in fact guilty

  and should be in prison. Instead of worrying about individual

  cases, its important to look at the bigger picture and understand

  that every error is compensated by another in the opposite

  direction. So the scales of justice are in balance and we judges

  can sleep easy at night.

  —Piero Calamandrei, Elogio dei giudici

  (In Praise of Judges), 1935

  Chapter IV

  Justice

  0ne thing about being convicted of murder: you certainly find out who your friends are.

  Amanda enjoyed an outpouring of support from investigators and law enforcement veterans, and from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who thought they could do some good by intervening. Rocco Girlanda, an Italian member of parliament and president of the Italy-USA Foundation, paid her a visit at Capanne within days of the sentence and declared that she was nothing like the conniving harpy depicted in court. Maria Cantwell, a US senator from Amanda's home state of Washington, issued a statement saying the trial had not only failed to prove Amanda's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but also suffered from flaws in the Italian justice system itself—the lack of an adequate jury system, the "harsh treatment" to which Amanda had been subjected, and the fact that the prosecutor was himself facing charges of misconduct, yet had not been removed from the case.

  My first reaction to all this was, What about me? How come all the attention was on Amanda? That I too had been sentenced to a quarter of a century behind bars seemed to pass most people by. Not that I didn't have friends and supporters of my own; of course I did. I had dozens of them, in my hometown, across Italy, and across the world, and I was grateful to them all. Many reached out to me precisely because they felt I was being unjustly ignored.

  As I watched the continuing media coverage, though, I began to feel relieved that nobody was launching a political campaign on my behalf. The sentiments in support of Amanda provoked an immediate backlash, with the leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera asking in scathing terms if perhaps the Marines weren't about to land in Perugia to pull Amanda out from behind enemy lines. It also suggested, none too subtly, that the US government might want to close its military detention center at Guantanamo Bay before giving any international lectures on fair treatment of prisoners.

  I felt sure that Mignini and his colleagues were not remotely swayed by Cantwell's intervention, or by Girlanda's awkward public fantasies about Amanda's innocence, or by reports that Hillary Clinton was taking a personal interest in the case. On the contrary, the prosecutors made it clear on several occasions that they regarded the public campaign on Amanda's behalf as an intolerable intrusion on the workings of the Italian justice system. The press reports just made them dig in their heels.

  The next piece of bad news came down within three weeks of our being found guilty. Rudy Guede's sentence, we learned, had been cut down on appeal from thirty years to sixteen.

  The thinking of the appeals court was that if Amanda and I were guilty, then Guede couldn't serve a sentence greater than ours. If I had supplied the knife and Amanda had wielded it, as Mignini and Comodi postulated and Judge Massei and his colleagues apparently accepted, we needed to receive the stiffer punishment.

  I didn't think I could feel any worse, but this was an extra slap in the face and it knocked me flat. Not only were Amanda and 1 the victims of a grotesque miscarriage of justice, but Meredith's real killer, the person everybody should have been afraid of was inching closer to freedom. It wasn't just outrageous; it was a menace to public safety.

  My father said it best. "I'm sixty years old," he told a television reporter, his head shaking in disbelief, "and still I don't understand anything about the way justice is administered in Italy."

  * * *

  I have just two notes in my diary from late December 2009, that miserable end to a miserable year. The first was the Russian phrase for Merry Christmas. I was, after all, in the gulag. And the second, a more hopeful one, was a line from a Shakespeare sonnet: For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings . .

  I wasn't thinking of Amanda so much as everyone who was rooting for me. The only way I could imagine surviving was by holding on to that emotional bond and having faith that it would see me through to whatever conclusion this story would eventually reach.

  * * *

  My family felt that they were solidly behind me, but their support was far from cohesive. Actually, they were in an ugly mood, and the atmosphere grew only uglier over the following days and weeks. They spared me at the time, but I found out later they were at each other's throats, looking for reasons to blame each other, or the lawyers, or whomever they could lunge at, for the calamity that had struck us all. Vanessa said the air was so thick with recrimination and anguish that it was almost impossible to breathe; as soon as the holidays were over, she raced back to Rome.

  First, though, she chimed in with Giuseppe and Sara to insist that Luca Maori had to go. My father, as usual, resisted, and so did Giulia Bongiorno. Both of them, in their different ways, were optimistic that the lower-court verdict was a temporary setback, and that, if we kept pursuing the same course, we'd be in good shape for the appeal. This lawyerly way of thinking drove some of the other family members mad. What were we supposed to do in the meantime? Did we have to just sit and wait, for years, until the justice system finally saw the light?

  I know my father shared this impatience; he would have done anything to spare me even an extra day behind bars. But, under Bongiorno's influence, he was perhaps more realistic than the others. Maori wasn't that involved in the case anymore; Bongiorno was in charge of my appeal, and my father was more steeped in the minutiae of the case than Maori or anyone else. I think the decision had a personal dimension as well. Papa couldn't hel
p liking Maori, despite everything, and the same was true of Bongiorno. She had learned, early on in their association, that Maori owned an apartment just a few steps away from the parliament building in Rome, and she was now living in it as his tenant. I don't think for an instant that she put her personal convenience ahead of my legal interests. But it emphasized how the team dynamic had been set, for better or worse, and provided an additional reason to keep things the way they were.

  For my part, I wasn't nearly as concerned about Maori, whom I'd long ago dismissed as a lightweight, as I was about some of the other members of the family, especially my aunt Magda and her husband, Enrico, who kept on at me about Amanda and said it was time to cut myself loose from her because I hardly knew her and had no idea what she might have done—or could still do. It was the same old refrain I'd heard many times before. Coming from them, it hurt more than it could have from any lawyer. 1 was infatuated, they insisted, and my infatuation had done quite enough damage. I )id really want to remain behind bars until I was an old man?

  Hearing this made me so angry I wanted to punch a wall. Bongiorno understood that the only way to get either of us out of prism was to get us both out; she'd said as much in her closing statement at trial and went out of her way to defend Amanda, who wasn't even her client, as vehemently as she defended me.