Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  Milani was more than a teacher. He was a true friend, who always asked after my well-being and brought rile presents, most memorably a Rubik's Cube. He guessed, correctly, that it would be a good distraction to while away the hours. It took me three months to solve the riddle of that cube, something that engaged the attention of my father because he remembered that a Rubik's Cube was part of the plot of The Pursuit of Happyness, the film he saw on the night of Meredith's murder. Such are the coincidences of my life.

  The other bright spot was that I was put to work in the library to update the catalog and set up a computerized lending system. Not only did this get me away from the rapists and the perverts for a few hours each day; it was also a sign, I think, that the prison administrators were looking out for me and maybe even felt sorry for the bind I was in. It was a welcome relief from the numbing monotony of the protected section and gave me a structure and a purpose for each workday other than endless immersion in my legal case. When I asked for help with the library work, they gave me an assistant from the ordinary section of the prison, a thoroughly engaging local scam artist named Carlo Merluzzi, who, when he wasn't cataloging with me, played chess and teased me about my relationship with Amanda.

  "Stop writing to her all the time!" he would insist. "Don't you have anything else to do?"

  She was hardly my only correspondent; I was writing to dozens of family members and supporters all the time. True, Amanda and I were regularly exchanging letters and books and music CDs, but that seemed only healthy to me; we were enduring the same unjust punishment and we were helping each other through it. Amanda sent me a number of Kafka novels, including The Trial, which hit home in ways most students who read it in college can scarcely imagine. I sent her an Italian novel by Anna Marchesini entitled II terrazzino dei gerani timidi (The Balcony of the Timid. Geraniums), about a young girl coming to grips with a mystifying adult world.

  The central character was a little like me—introverted and living in her own poetic imagination.

  My family, as usual, didn't understand why I was in such close touch with Amanda. When they visited, our conversations were fraught with tension and frustration, which quickly got me down. Since my new cellmate, Gaetano Raucci, was a psychiatrist, I had an opportunity to talk the situation over with a professional.

  Raucci was an odd bird, not immediately approachable. He and his wife had gone through a bitter divorce, during which she had accused him of molesting their infant daughter. He was found not guilty in the lower court, but then sentenced to prison on appeal. I could never figure out whether I thought him guilty or innocent, but he was, understandably, an angry guy. He'd watch current-affairs programs on TV and vent for hours about Italy's political leaders. Or he'd tie himself up in knots over his favorite soccer team, Inter Milan.

  When it came to my family, though, his wisdom shone through. I shouldn't act too defensively, he said; it was a mistake to adopt a posture of knee-jerk opposition to them. If I wanted them to listen to my point of view, I should offer something, even a symbolic gesture, to soften them up. Following Raucci's advice, 1 made collet. for family visitors and brought cups to each of them, with the right amount of milk or sugar. They were no less hostile on the subject of Amanda, but at least they gave me the time of day. And, for a while at least, I kept my cool.

  * * *

  My family was not beating up on Amanda entirely without cause. What I did not know at the time, because they preferred not to fill me in, was that they were exploring what it would take for the prosecution to soften or drop the case against me. The advice they received was almost unanimous: the more I distanced myself from Amanda, the better. The legal community in Perugia was full of holes and leaks, and my family learned all sorts of things about the opinions being bandied about behind the scenes, including discussions within the prosecutor's office. The bottom line: Mignini, they were told, was not all that interested in me except as a gateway to Amanda. He might indeed be willing to acknowledge I was innocent, but only if I gave him something in exchange, either by incriminating Amanda directly or by no longer vouching for her.

  I'm glad my family did not include me in these discussions because I would have lost it completely. First, my uncle Giuseppe approached a lawyer in private practice in Perugia—with half an idea in his head that this new attorney could replace Maori—and asked what I could do to mitigate my dauntingly long sentence. The lawyer said I should accept a plea deal and confess to some of the lesser charges. I could, for instance, agree that I had helped clean up the murder scene but otherwise played no part in it. "He'd get a sentence of six to twelve years," the lawyer said, "but because he has no priors the sentence would be suspended and he'd serve no more jail time."

  To their credit, my family knew I would never go for this. It made even them uncomfortable to contemplate me pleading guilty to something I had not done. It was, as my sister, Vanessa, put it, "not morally possible."

  The next line of inquiry was through a different lawyer, who was on close terms with Mignini and was even invited to the baptism of Mignini's youngest child that summer. (Among the other guests at the baptism was Francesco Maresca, the Kerchers' lawyer, who had long since aligned himself with Mignini in court.) This lawyer said he believed I was innocent, but he was also convinced that Amanda was guilty. He gave my family the strong impression that Mignini felt the same way. If true—and there was no way t confirm that—it was a clamorous revelation. How could a prosecutor believe in the innocence of a defendant and at the same time ask the courts to sentence him to life imprisonment? The lawyer offered to intercede with Mignini, but made no firm promises. He wasn't willing to plead my cause, he said, but he would listen to anything the prosecutor had to offer.

  Over the late spring and summer of 2010, my father used this lawyer as a back channel and maneuvered negotiations to a point where they believed Mignini and Comodi would be willing to meet with Giulia Bongiorno and hear what she had to say. When Papal presented this to Bongiorno, however, she was horrified and said she might have to drop the case altogether because the back channel was a serious violation of the rules of procedure. A private lawyer has no business talking to a prosecutor about a case, she explained, unless he is acting with the express permission of the defendant. It would be bad enough if the lawyer doing this was on my defense team; for an outside party to undertake such discussions not only risked landing me in deeper legal trouble, it also warranted disciplinary action from the Ordine degli Avvocati, the Italian equivalent of tile Bar Association.

  My father was mortified. He had no idea how dangerous a game he had been playing and wrote a letter to Bongiorno begging her to forgive him and stay on the case. He was at fault, he said, and it would be wrong to punish her client by withdrawing her services when I didn't even know about the back channel, much less approve it. To his relief, Bongiorno relented.

  My family, though, did not. Whenever they came to visit they would suggest some form of compromise with the truth. Mostly they asked why I couldn't say I was asleep on the night of the murder and had no idea what Amanda got up to. Vanessa, one of the most vocal advocates of this line of defense, later acknowledged that they had all "hammered my balls" over it. And it didn't work. I became hostile and defensive; they would accuse me of losing my head over Amanda; and so the merry dance would go round and around until we were all furious and exhausted.

  I had little peace even from some of my more casual visitors. In early October, I received the first of two visits from the bishop of Bari, Don Luigi Martella, whose niece was a big supporter of mine. He too wanted to know why I would throw away my life to "save" Amanda's. I explained, once again, that I was not acting out of some amorous obsession but because I knew her to be innocent. To be fair, Don Luigi was very responsive, and we talked at length about how difficult it was to accept suffering for something I had not done. I should take strength from Christ's example, he said; sometimes the acceptance of suffering is what gives a person's life meaning. I apprec
iated that, and I also appreciated him looking around the prison and saying, "This is not your house." I derived a lot of strength and encouragement from that remark.

  A few days later, I finally plucked up the courage to tell my family I wasn't going to take their hammering anymore. I wrote a letter to my aunt Magda—but intended for all of them—in which I made clear I wasn't going to abandon Amanda, especially since she was growing more despondent with every passing month about the chances of regaining her freedom. "I'm really fond of her, zia," I wrote, "and I don't know what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to do it. Unfortunately I've understood that NO, Vanessa, you, zia Sara, and many others in the family do not have any sympathy for her, because I've been told over and over that her behavior has been one of the causes of the trouble I'm in. You don't know how deeply this position of yours upsets me. For more than three years I've had to fight against it, against the thinking of my own family."

  Rereading the letter now, I'm proud of what I wrote because it expressed all the indignation I felt at the time and drew a clear line in the sand. There were some things I just wasn't prepared to do, and my family needed to understand that in unambiguous, uncompromising terms.

  "Have you ever asked yourself," I went on, "why I am sometimes reluctant to write to you unless you write first and ask me to respond? It's for this reason. I no longer have the strength to put up with your desire to blame Amanda for things she is not responsible for and does not deserve. I hope you'll understand and send this message to the other members of the family. Papa told me a little while ago that he thought I was doing all this because she doesn't love me anymore and I'm desperate. In other words, that I'm frantically trying to get her attention even though she's ignoring me.

  "Well, that's not the way it is. First, she is not ignoring me; I he affection and the desire to help each other are mutual. Secondly it's of no consequence to me whether she loves me or not, seeing as there's nothing I can do about it in this situation. I'll resolve that issue by myself once we get out of here, and you can rest assured I won't go crying to anyone if I end up disappointed."

  Then came the crux of the matter: "Amanda and I are one now."

  Io ed Amanda siamo una cosa sola adesso.

  This was my manifesto. "'Whoever mistreats her, mistreats me," I said. "Whoever speaks ill of her does the same to me. Whoever thinks bad things about her does so to me as well. These are not just words. It's the truth. Jesus said the same thing on behalf of all human beings who are faithful to the Word of God. More humbly, I am saying the same thing about a girl for whom I feel an immense affection, whom I consider more than a sister and closer to me than if she were of my own blood, my own DNA, my own flesh."

  I think they finally got the message.

  My father, who had been less vehement than some of the others but was nevertheless part of the general anti-Amanda chorus, wrote a letter back saying he would always be on my side, no matter what, and that he had nothing to do with the attempts to get me to change my testimony.

  His concern, he said, had been mostly about the letters I'd been exchanging with Amanda, because he was afraid the police or the prosecutors might intercept them and misuse them as evidence against us. Now, though, he had the grace to back down, which I appreciated. As he put it, what was the point of distancing myself from Amanda at this juncture, three years after our arrest and close to a year since our conviction in Judge Massei's court?

  I had made many mistakes over the course of my long and painful misadventure. But my determination to stick by Amanda, and by what I knew to be the truth, was one thing I knew I had exactly right. Nothing in the world—not the people I cared about most, and certainly not the threat of further punishment for a crime I did not commit—could induce me to change my mind.

  * * *

  I never felt at home in prison—how could I?but I did slowly get used to its strange rhythms and, peculiarities. Where once I was appalled by the jokes and the not-so-subtle threats my fellow inmates made at each other's expense, I found myself beginning to join in. One of the most pathetic figures in the section was a man convicted of raping a number of wheelchair-bound women. He was short and stubby and covered in tattoos, and we knew him only by his last name, Pozzi. Mostly, we steered well clear, but one day one of the transsexuals decided to jump on a food trolley and have himself wheeled past Pozzi as a sexual offering. "Don't worry," the transsexual said, "I can't move my legs!"

  Another contemptible inmate was an old man with no teeth who had brutally raped a ten-year-old boy in his basement and stuck a broomstick up his anus. We never let him forget it. "Hey," people would call out when he passed, "do you have a broom I could borrow?" I even did it myself once. Not my proudest moment.

  I had the creepy feeling, when I thought on it, that I was slowly turning into one of them.

  * * *

  The appeals court took eight months to read through (he files before convening its first session at the end of November 2010. It was difficult to imagine any judge looking at our case objectively, because we'd had our hopes raised and crushed so many times. On the other hand, we knew that Italian appeals courts tend to reverse rulings, if only to leave all options open for the Corte di Cassazione—hence the much-observed (and, to me, absolutely hair-raising) maxim that in Italy, 50 percent of all criminal court decisions are routinely wrong.

  Our hopes rested largely on our request for an independent assessment of the forensic evidence. Not only were we confident that such an assessment would turn out in our favor; if the appeals court granted us such a review, it would be a strong early indication that our judges were, finally, fair-minded people. What were the chances of that? The presiding judge, Claudio Pratillo Hellmann, was originally from Padua, in the north of Italy, and his deputy, Massimo Zanetti, was from Viterbo, outside Rome. So they weren't lifelong members of the Perugia establishment. Beyond that, the "popular judges" were a little better educated than the ones we had under Judge Massei because the rules governing appeals hearings called for a high school diploma as the minimum qualification. Was that a guarantee of anything? At this point, who knew?

  At the second hearing, on December 10, Judge Zanetti offered a lengthy review of the case and immediately raised our hopes that the court intended to look at the evidence afresh. "We have to start from the one objective fact that is certain and beyond dispute," he said, "that on November 2, 2007, shortly after 1 p.m., the corpse of the English student Meredith Kercher was found at Via della Pergola, 7." The prosecution was furious at what it saw as a cavalier dismissal of other evidence it had worked so hard to establish and later argued that the court had been biased from the outset. But Zanetti's point was simply that he and Judge Hellmann would not make assumptions or indulge anyone's theories without hard evidence. Only in the context of a trial as flawed as ours could that be viewed as a controversial statement.

  Later that same day, Amanda got up and made an impassioned plea on behalf of both of us. It was by far the longest speech she had delivered in court, and she did it entirely in Italian, which she now spoke fluently. My lawyers, and especially Bongiorno, did not want

  me to say a word, so all I could do was listen and root for her in silence as she made the case that we were both victims of a terrible miscarriage of justice.

  She started with Meredith, her friend, who she said had been kind, intelligent, and always willing to help out when asked. "Met' edith's death was a terrible shock for me. She was a new friend, a reference point for me in Perugia. . . . I always felt an affinity For her, and immediately after she was killed, I felt how terribly vulnerable I was too." Amanda described how she leaned on me for emotional support, and also on the authorities, whom she trusted to get to the bottom of the crime. "It took me a long time to accept the reality that I was being accused and unjustly redefined as a person. I am not the person the prosecution insists that I am, at all. They would have you believe I'm a dangerous, diabolical, jealous, uncaring, and violent girl. Their whole case r
ests on that. But I'm not that girl and never have been."

  Amanda was indeed calm, considerate, and understated, the antithesis of the she-devil depicted in the tabloids. "I stand before you more intimidated than ever. Not because I'm afraid or because I'm a fearful person by nature, but because I have already seen the justice system fail me. The truth about me and Raffaele has not yet been recognized, and we are paying with our lives for a crime we did not commit. . . . I am innocent, Raffaele is innocent. We didn't kill Meredith."

  The judges were rapt. For the first time since the beginning of our nightmare, I dared to believe that someone was listening to us.

  * * *

  My hunch was correct. Fight days later, Judge Hellmann issued the order we had been yearning for: he appointed two independent experts from La Sapienza University in Rome to review the DNA samples found on the kitchen knife and the bra clasp, "to establish whose genetic profiles may be found there or, alternately, to explain why such an attribution is not possible."