Amanda Knox: Judge Hellman, the first appeals judge, describes how he was punished after acquitting
her and Raffaele Sollecito of the crime of murder.
Judge Hellman was one of the two judges who heard the students' first appeal. This trial acquitted them and Amanda came home, but the prosecution appealed. Italy's high court annulled the Hellman court verdict and ordered a second appeals trial -- which found them guilty. That verdict went to the High Court to be confirmed, but the High Court surprised everyone by announcing that neither defendant had murdered Meredith Kercher, annulling the previous guilty verdicts.
Now Hellman has described how he was shunned into retirement after his court acquitted Amanda and Raffaele in 2011 -- a verdict that the high court has just concurred in.
http://www.amandaknoxcase.com/hellmann-interview-march-30-2015/
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito’s acquittal by the Supreme Court?
Hellmann: It’s not just the satisfaction for the implicit recognition of the validity of the verdict announced at its time by the Court that I presided over, but more than anything it’s the end of a great suffering. For three and a half years I’ve suffered for the fate of two youths that I believed innocent and who risked to undergo a very harsh punishment for a crime that they hadn’t committed.
Question: How come you left the judiciary right after that verdict?
Hellmann: I was practically forced to. Our decision was received with reactions of contempt. I can still remember the whistling and the shouting by a claque that had gathered outside the Court house on the evening of the verdict. From the next day I felt surrounded by a growing hostility. In the bars of Perugia they were saying I had sold out to the Americans, that I had yielded to the pressures of the CIA. Tall tales, of course, but what hit me more than the defamatory lynching that lasted years, was the reaction of colleagues in the judiciary. Nearly all of them stopped greeting me. In particular those who in various roles had been involved in the case. I realized that my Court had been a lone voice in a Courthouse where all the judges, starting with the GUP (Judge of the Preliminary hearing) up to those of various review courts, while criticizing the investigation, had endorsed the charges. In addition I had good possibilities of becoming the President of the Tribunal and naturally that position was assigned to another colleague who certainly was very worthy but I had some suspicion that it was a retaliation. So, six months after the sentence I decided to retire.
Question: What convinced you of Amanda and Raffaele’s innocence?
Hellmann: The fact that the investigation was completely flawed and for me wrong from the very start. So much so that initially Patrick Lumumba was arrested who then was found to be completely uninvolved in the events, becoming an injured party. I remember that my colleague Massimo Zanetti who presided over the Court with me opened by stating that the only thing that was certain was the death of Meredith Kercher. We ordered the expert appraisals that had not been done during the first trial and the contamination of the scientific proofs appeared in all its evidence. It was obvious that the knife seized from Raffaele Sollecito’s house wasn’t the murder weapon, the blade was not compatible with the wound. In addition I kept asking myself why there absolutely had to be three people to have murdered Meredith and why the possibility that it could have been only Rudy Guede was discarded from the outset.
SNIP
= new reply since forum marked as read
I feel bad for Judge Hellman...he seems like a good man.
Thanks for posting!
by refusing to buckle under the intense pressure to railroad Amanda Knox -- even though that meant the loss of Judge Hellman's career and four years in prison for Raffaele.
My applause to them all.
