Trial by Twitter

So Amanda Knox is innocent and now free, despite what the Daily Mail said very briefly on Monday night although this explanation does tell you how they screwed that up. And as much as I despise the Daily Mail, it's fair enough. But the thing that interests me is the comments that were getting made on Twitter when she was released and are still going on, by a huge number of people who know about as much as I do about the Italian Justice system, (I assume this is true for most of them anyway), which is pretty much nothing. But it struck me again that people believe what the propaganda is, and that there may yet be an issue with that.

Now there are still questions to answer in that case, Meredeth Kercher was murdered by someone and the Kercher Family do deserve answers, which they are not getting. In my view there are many unanswered questions about the case, and they may be able to get some from Knox and Sollecito if they are prepared to tell them, or what they tell the press. But this isn't what I'm talking about here, I'll accept the Courts verdict on guilt or innocence. But plenty others do't seem to.

We had the same kind of comments when Rebecca Leighton was released. People assumed guilt, mostly based on what was said in the press. There is an assumption of guilt when someone is arrested. People talk about not trusting the police, but they seem to automatically assume that when someone is arrested for a high profile crime that they must be guilty and it's ok to pronounce on that. I saw comments when Rebecca Leighton was freed that said how can they let her out when she's guilty, the comments were accusing her of Murder, with no evidence despite the fact the police have confirmed there wasn't evidence of it, people were still screaming that a murderer had been released. There were other cases you'll probably be aware of, mostly based on biased press reports and assumptions made by people hearing the news and not thinking properly.

I don't understand why we slag the press off so much and then accept much of what we're told as fact without thinking about it. When people are arrested and charged they are not guilty at that point, but people seem to accept that the police don't arrest anyone without cause for serious crimes, except when it is someone like them, or related to a cause the believe in, or something they follow. And even then they believe the papers, despite the general criticism of the police that they may make every day. We buy into hype too easily, and I'm not sure why that is for some people. It's just annoyed me. I'm not making a point here really,  I'm just thinking out loud, and there's no-one here listening.