Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  Then I walked, alone, toward the gates and the free world.

  Luca Maori and Donatella Donati were there to greet me, t heir faces awash in tears. "Finally!" Donatella shouted. "I'm so happy!" -What about my family? Before I could even ask the question, I saw my father rushing toward me, arms outstretched with a huge smile on his face. He didn't need to say a word. To hug his son as a free man was all he had dreamed of for four years.

  * * *

  We drove through the night, a carnival parade snaking its way down the Italian boot toward home. When we stopped at a highway service station, I asked for a beer, a Corona. It had been so long since I'd tasted one. Just the lights and displays in the service station what a thing of wonder. I couldn't stop touching things—the toys, the maps, the wrapped candy bars.

  I realized I wanted something else besides beer, something to remind me of my childhood, and that was a lollipop. I asked my friend Francesco to buy a Chupa Chups; we used to eat them together when we were little kids. It was like tasting one for the first time all over again.

  I remained in a daze of wonder and disbelief all the way home. Even before I crossed the threshold of my father's house, I was touching the plants and smelling the grass. I could have breathed them in until morning.

  After everyone had hugged me and headed to their beds, I sat in the kitchen, alone, and opened the refrigerator. I marveled at everything inside and just stared and stared. Then I moved on to the washing machine and stared at that too. So many things I'd taken for granted. So many bounties in life I couldn't properly appreciate until they were taken away. It was overwhelming.

  At length, Vanessa came and found me and asked if I wanted anything.

  "Yes," I said. "A glass of water."

  "Water? Sure."

  I sipped at it gratefully. Vanessa seemed perplexed.

  "You don't understand," I explained. "To me, this is like champagne. This is the first water I can remember that doesn't smell like a toilet."

  Vanessa looked at me, and at the water. She had tears in her eyes. And she understood that my ordeal was truly over, at last.

  I had a lot to get used to, a lot of things to relearn. But my life had just been handed back to me, and for that I would never stop being grateful. Like that glass of water, I intended to savor it to the last drop.

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  One might ask, even if the prosecutor and the lower court did not,

  how two innocent young people could spend four years in prison,

  with the prospect of staying another twenty, without going mad.

  —Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann

  Epilogue

  Five and a half months after my release, I flew to Seattle and saw Amanda again. We were no longer criminal defendants stealing glances from each other across a crowded courtroom, but free people fully able to reflect on our experiences and the peculiar way fate had thrown us together.

  That may sound like a perfect ending to our story, but in truth I wasn't at all sure it was a good idea to see her and I wavered back and forth even after I had booked my ticket. We had been through so much; perhaps we owed it to each other to live our lives and leave each other in peace. I had come out of prison to a world that was at once familiar and irrevocably altered. After the celebrations, the re unions, the nights out on the town accepting offers of free food and drink from friends and perfect strangers, I had to pick up the pieces of my interrupted life and forge forward. I was no longer the sweet, innocent, ordinary boy from Giovinazzo, but a scarred, more reflective ex-prisoner who could go nowhere without triggering sonic sort of conversation or expression of opinion. I couldn't stop wondering: Was it realistic for me simply to resume my studies, as if nothing had happened? Could I go out, make new friends, fall in love, and plan for the future like any other man in his late twenties, or would my past always be a drag on me, like some great, unmovable weight around my neck?

  For several months, I lived a life on hold, slowly recovering my familiarity with daily life, relishing my freedom and thinking, tentatively, about what might come next. This trip to the United States, my first outside Italy since my release, was an opportunity to explore the wider world without feeling that all eyes were on me. It was also a temporary respite from the concerns I had about my lingering legal liabilities and the bills my family had to pay. I spent an idyllic few days in Southern California strolling the Venice boardwalk, sipping wine in outdoor cafes and driving to Universal Studios in a brightly polished convertible. Nobody bothered me; nobody recognized me. Meeting up with Amanda, by contrast, felt like a step back into the lion's den.

  I wasn't just nervous about setting eyes on her again. I felt I was suffering from some sort of associative disorder, in which it became difficult for me to focus on my genuine and continuing fondness for Amanda without being overwhelmed by an instinctive, involuntary revulsion at everything the courts and the media had thrown at us. Two different Amandas—the real one, and the distorted, she-devil version I had read about and seen on television nonstop for four years—seemed somehow blurred in my unconscious mind. I couldn't think of the brief romance we had enjoyed, or the tenderness with which we had written and supported each other in prison, without also feeling deluged by the suffering and vulgar tabloid trash we had endured at the same time.

  My apprehensiveness reminded me of the climactic scene in A Clockwork Orange when Alex, the young delinquent played by Malcolm McDowell, has his eyes forcibly held open and he is saw rated with images of sex and violence until the very idea of touching a woman, once his greatest pleasure, induces immediate nausea. I wasn't a delinquent, but the artificially induced feelings of aversion were much the same. I felt brainwashed, and I imagined that everyone who followed the media coverage of Meredith's murder and our trials—especially those who obsessed over it and argued about our guilt or innocence based only on the media reports--must have been brainwashed to some degree too. Amanda and 1 had been ripped away from our real selves and forced to play the part of killers so vicious they would strike for no reason except their own amusement. It was these alternate selves who had been imprisoned, tried, and sentenced in Judge Massei's court. But of course it was the two of us, our flesh and blood, who had to bear the consequences. Did I want to relive all that just to be able to give her a hug and wish her well?

  Fortunately, I had other reasons to go to Seattle, which were a welcome distraction from my anxiety. I had many supporters of my own there, and I wanted to meet them and thank them in person. I was also interested in Seattle the digital mecca and had a meeting lined up with a video-game manufacturer I'd been corresponding with. But I could separate myself from Amanda only so far; these were connections I had made largely thanks to her family. Much as I dreaded it, it seemed crazy to think I would travel all the way to America's Emerald City and not get together with Amanda, even briefly.

  Paradoxically, the news media forced the issue. Word got out a few days before my visit that I was coming. My designated host for the weekend grew nervous about having paparazzi parked outside her front door, and I ended up staying instead with Edda and Chris Mellas, Amanda's mother and stepfather. They were experts at dodging the press and weren't afraid of them. I was given a special police escort out of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, so nobody saw me arriving, and I was left in peace for the rest of the weekend.

  Amanda was not at the Mellases' house when I arrived, but I was told she would be coming around shortly. My stomach hurt at the thought of it, but I kept my misgivings to myself. And then there she was, the old, familiar smile, those familiar blue eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. Her boyfriend, James, brought her around, but he was gracious enough to withdraw after saying his hellos and left us alone for a while. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and at last I was able to relax.

  We talked about our continuing studies—she was back at the University of Washington, and I was about to reenroll at the University of Verona—and about our new relationships. She sho
wed me pictures of herself with James, and I showed her pictures of the girl I'd been dating for a few months.

  I could tell Amanda had changed. She was no longer the carefree, playful twenty-year-old I had met at that classical concert, but a more considered, mature, cautious, serious twenty-four-year-old.

  "What's James like?" I asked her. "Are you happy with him?"

  She answered, "E bravo come te." He's a good man, just like you.

  * * *

  Our legal troubles were largely behind us, but they were not over. Our acquittal would not become definitive until it had been endorsed by the Corte di Cassazione, so we had one more layer of justice to work through. Amanda faced not only the outstanding charge of calunnia—criminal slander—against Patrick, which the appeals court had upheld, but also a new trial for slandering the Perugia police while on the witness stand.

  My family was still working through some minor lawsuits of its own. I was sick of the whole judicial circus and couldn't wait to put it definitively behind me. But the nature of the Italian system meant that it would probably be years before my family or I could stop thinking about the ghastly mess or talking to lawyers on .1 regular basis.

  Judge Hellmann's sentencing report was magnificent: 143 pages of close argument that knocked down every piece of evidence against us and sided with our experts on just about every technical issue. It lambasted both the prosecution and the lower court for relying on conjecture and subjective notions of probability instead of solid evidence. And it launched a particularly harsh attack on Mignini for casting aspersions on the very concept of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Mignini had dismissed it in one of his court presentations as a self-defining piece of linguistic trickery. Hellmann pointed out that reasonable doubt was now—belatedly—part of the Italian criminal code. A case built on probability alone, he said, was not sufficient and must necessarily lead to the acquittal of the defendant or defendants.

  The prosecution's rebuttal of the sentencing report, filed a couple of months later, was little short of astonishing. It accused Hellmann of indulging in circular arguments, the old rhetorical fallacy known to the ancients as petitio principii—essentially, starting with the desired conclusion and working backward. The criticism applied much more accurately to what the prosecution and Judge Massei had done themselves; everything, even the absence of evidence, bad been a pretext for them to argue for our guilt. But the author of the prosecution document, Giovanni Galati, chose not to dwell on such ironies. Instead, he attacked Hellmann—I wish I were joking about this—for resorting to deductive reasoning. Making yet more allusions to grand rhetorical principles, Galati said he had a problem with the appeals court taking the available evidence and seeking to make each piece follow on logically from the last. I take it he is not a fan of Sherlock Holmes.

  Galati seemed incensed that Hellmann had found the "super-witnesses" unreliable. He argued that Hellmann's problem with Antonio Curatolo, the heroin addict in Piazza Grimana, was not his failure to be consistent about the details of when and where he had supposedly seen us but rather Hellmann's own "unwarranted prejudice against the witness's lifestyle." Galati even dared to embrace Curatolo's argument that heroin is not a hallucinogen to insist he must have been telling the truth.

  These arguments, to me, made a mockery of civilized discourse. I don't honestly know how else to characterize them. From my experience, I also know they are the bread and butter of the Italian legal system, the peculiar language in which arguments and counterarguments are formed every day. Not only do innocents go to prison with shocking regularity, while guilty people, equally often, win reprieve or acquittal; magistrates and judges who make the most howling errors rarely pay for their mistakes.

  Paolo Micheli, the pretrial judge who didn't let his obvious intelligence and sharp questioning of Patrizia Stefanoni get in the way of keeping us locked up until the end of the trials, now sits in the civil section of the Corte di Cassazione. Giancarlo Massei, our lower-court judge, has been promoted to the Court of Appeals.

  Giuliano Mignini, meanwhile, managed to have his conviction on abuse-of-office charges vacated on a technicality. He argued on appeal that Florence was not the appropriate trial venue because the judges there were too close to the Monster of Florence prosecutors. In theory, his case has now moved to La Spezia, the naval port hall way between Florence and Genoa, to he reheard From scratch. But in all likelihood Mignini will wait out the five-year statute of limitations and have the entire case thrown out by default.

  We may have beaten him, but in an important and deeply depressing sense he has emerged a winner too. At least so far.

  Amanda and I steered clear of any legal discussion; we'd avoided talking about the case in prison, and we weren't about to depress ourselves by starting now. Instead, we shared many of the normal, joyful things that had instinctively brought us together in the first place: our noisy, rambunctious, warmhearted families, and our love of friends, good food, and large gatherings. On my last night in Seattle, Chris and Edda threw a big party to celebrate our freedom) and our reunion. We ate king crab and other delicious seafood, and I was presented with an all-American cheesecake to celebrate my twenty-eighth birthday.

  Amanda's younger sisters and cousins were there, and so was her best friend, Madison Paxton, whom I'd seen many times in court. We took a lot of photos; unlike so many of the shots of the two) 01 us taken at trial, we were smiling in every one.

  I did manage to have snippets of serious conversation with Amanda amid the celebration. She told me she now relied on a small handful of close friends but otherwise did not go out much. It made her too nervous. She was recognized almost everywhere she went, and while most people were supportive, she dreaded the times when she would hear someone shout out hateful, negative things. She had even received anonymous threats.

  I told her I sympathized. I'd gone through much the same thing. I, too, had days or weeks when I didn't feel like seeing old friends. I was dismayed, if not surprised, to realize that my was as volatile as ever. Vanessa was still boundlessly opinionated, only more depressed now that she was living back home, her career in tatters, and tending horses to make ends meet. My father would alternate between infinite patience and understanding, and explosions of indignation at the choices I was making and the company I kept. Both Amanda and I were contending with contradictory experiences. We had to get reacquainted with normal life, with its frustrations and banalities as well as its pleasures and prospects for future happiness; but at the same time we had to acknowledge we were ourselves still far from normal.

  I told her that when I was confronted with people haranguing me about the case, either to attack me or to presume more knowledge than they had, I ignored them. As a general rule, I tried to give as little weight as possible to the opinions of others. We had to focus on living our lives, I said, because nobody could live them for us. "If I had had that attitude," I said, "if I'd allowed other people to dictate what I should do and think and feel, I wouldn't be eating seafood here with you. I'd still be in prison."

  She agreed, and as our conversation continued, she looked visibly moved. "I want only good things for you, Raffaele. I'm very glad you came." She gave me a monster hug, the sort that only close friends or siblings give each other, people who share a special, unbreakable bond.

  Amanda and I will forever be associated, for better and for worse because of what we went through. I'll never be entirely comfortable with that, because of the memories it inevitably dredges up. But Amanda herself will always be a treasure. She was good to me from the beginning, and she stood by me when I needed her most, just as I stood by her. We are free today because of' the support we were able to offer each other in our darkest moments. The romance that made headlines around the world was a fleeting thing, but that deeper trust, the inherent faith we had in each other even as others dragged us endlessly through the mud, defines us as human beings.

  It's what kept us sane for four long years in prison. And, I am quite cert
ain, it will endure.

  My Lawyer Luca Maori, who stayed on the case despite the opposition of many members of my family.

  Me in court, Donatella Donati, with two police officers standing guard. My father is in the background, looking at his computer.

  Amanda in court, speaking with her attorney, Carlo Dalla Vedova, and several paralegals from his practice.

  My attorney Delfo Berretti demonstrates (August 2008), contrary to the opinion of Judge Massimo Ricciarelli,

  that it wouldn't take aspiderman to clamber up the wall of the murderhouse to enter Filomena's window.

  Public prosecutors Giuliano Mignini and Manuela Comodi display the kitchen knife taken from my apartment.