Amanda Knox is free but the truth remains elusive

AMANDA KNOX and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have been cleared of killing UK student Meredith Kercher following a successful appeal in Perugia, Italy. For some it was a triumph of Italian justice, for others it revealed its failings..

Flawed investigation

She was painted as a siren who could apparently entice a virtual stranger to commit murder with her hypnotic sexual charms, says Gordon Rayner, in The Daily Telegraph. Over the past four years, the Italian legal system has "served up a steady diet of salacious, sensational claims about the American's 'demonic' sex life".

But last night a jury decided this portrayal of "Foxy Knoxy" was nothing more than a myth invented and perpetuated "to distract attention from a seriously flawed police investigation".

Yes, the case against former University of Washington student Amanda Knox was always just too far-fetched, says an editorial in The Seattle Times. A story of a seemingly normal college girl turned she-devil and drug-fuelled sex games gone bad.
 
But this murder case "is a tragedy on many fronts". For Kercher's family who want justice for their slain beloved daughter, and "for a Seattle family and Knox, who has spent more than 1,000 days of her young life behind bars".
 
Bravo for Italian legal system

Bravo for Italy, says Timothy Egan in The New York Times. "We have to thank an Italian legal system that essentially gives every convicted criminal a do-over — more formally, an appeal before fresh eyes." Were Knox being tried in the United States, as the recent Troy Davis case showed, "she might well be on her way to an execution".
 
Falling for the femme fatale myth

Knox was a textbook victim of our never-ending fascination with the femme fatale, says Nina Burleigh in the Los Angeles Times. Men batter and kill their girlfriends and wives daily and their perp walks rarely make it onto TV. But "Foxy Knoxy" has been a continual headline grabber from the moment of her arrest.
 
The prosecution painted her as a she-devil – but it was precisely because she wasn't a monster that she could do so little to defend herself. Knox was immature, a cipher "onto whose photogenic, smiling face some Italians could see the archetypal Madonna-whore and, in whose pale eyes, others saw a psychopath".

Miscarriage of justice

Well, Knox is free now, but the truth about Meredith Kercher's killing remains elusive, says Richard Allard Greene for CNN. The jury must have had sufficient doubts to overturn a verdict rendered by eight of their compatriots less than two years ago. That means that "either Knox and Sollecito were the victims of a miscarriage of justice then, or that Kercher is now".

Dubious fame

So what does the future hold for Knox, asks The Independent. She is a young woman famous for not having committed a brutal murder. When Knox returns to the US she will run the gamut of "accidental celebrity".
 
There will be lucrative interviews, movie offers and book deals. There have already been 10 books about her case, but "her memoir would effortlessly trump them all". These are the dubious perks of fame, "but fame nevertheless will open up new vistas if she cares to contemplate them". ·