Honor Bound:

by Raffaele Sollecito

  If Bongiorno understood the stakes, why couldn't my own relatives?

  * * *

  The turning of the year was a particularly depressing time. I thought of the parties, the family celebrations, all the toasting that was going on far away from my four stone walls. In prison, every year is like the last. Nothing changes. There's nothing to look forward to and nothing to celebrate. The worst year of my life had come to a dose, and the year to come promised to be equally grim, if not worse.

  I remember reflecting on whether anything, really, could have been different. Had I missed an opportunity to escape this miserable fate? I wasn't at all sure that I had. Maybe, just maybe, I'd lied or compromised with the truth, I could have cut sonic deal and worked it to my advantage. But I also knew I could never have lived with myself if I had done so. I reread some lines from my journal I'd written sometime earlier and they seemed especially apt now: -Is there such a thing as a man who can feel remorse for something lie has not done? I don't think so. Is there such a thing as a man who would lie to save his own skin? Certainly, but I any not that man."

  I knew I was doing the right thing by sticking to my guns and telling the truth. I can't pretend, though, that it was easy. "It's horrible to be treated like a terminal patient when that's not what you are," I wrote in another journal entry. "We are all afraid of what we cannot control and whose outcome we cannot know. I keep feeling that fear, and I still have no idea how to shake it."

  * * *

  On January 22, 2010, Mignini was convicted on abuse-of-office charges and sentenced to sixteen months in prison, six more than even the prosecutor had requested. The judge in his case later wrote that Mignini and his codefendant, Michele Giuttari of the Florence police, had taken advantage of their positions to blackmail people and either order wiretaps or open investigations into their perceived enemies for reasons that had nothing to do with the business of criminal investigation. Mignini was upbraided for failing to accept any limits to his behavior, and for finding criminal intent "in the slightest hint of anything that might be susceptible to critical interpretation." That certainly sounded familiar from our experience.

  There remained, however, a crucial difference between Mignini the convicted criminal and Amanda and me. He was never placed in preventive custody. That meant, under the rules of Italian criminal procedure, he didn't need to worry about jail time until his case had been heard all the way up the Corte di Cassazione, a process that would take years and supersede any dealings we would have with him.

  In the meantime, the law recognized him as innocent until proven guilty; nothing and nobody could prevent him from continuing his duties as prosecutor, if he so chose. And he so chose. We were, after all, his passport to professional rehabilitation, and he showed no sign of letting up on us, even for an instant.

  * * *

  Vanessa was barely surviving in Rome. She was doing odd jobs waitressing, working as a personal trainer—while she and her lawyers pressed the carabinieri to reverse their decision and take her back. She was buffeted on all sides. One romantic relationship t hat had buoyed her for a while came to a crashing halt because of the case against me; Vanessa was tight-lipped on the subject, but apparently her partner didn't feel safe lying in bed and thinking about me knifing someone to death without warning. If 1 could do such a thing, then what might Vanessa, who shared my DNA, be capable of? Vanessa couldn't believe what she was hearing and ended the relationship immediately.

  "Really, Raff, how can I trust anybody?" she said. The only creature in the world she could count on absolutely was Ulisse, a stray cat she had found in a neighborhood park just a couple of months before my arrest. "He's never scratched me. All he does is caress and lick me," she would marvel. "No human in my life loves me so much. He's the most stable force in my life."

  My sister's bad luck struck again toward the end of January 2010. She was riding her moped to a friend's house for dinner when a bus knocked her flat on a busy stretch of highway running through the ancient city walls near the church of San Giovanni in Laterano. It was dark and rainy, and the driver did not see her. She and her moped skidded beneath the bus, and she managed to pull her head clear just a fraction of a second before the wheels thundered by. Her right hand lagged behind, and the rear tire ran right over it.

  At first she tried to convince herself she was fine. Me shock numbed her nerve endings and she felt nothing. Rut before long terrible shooting pains started running up her forearm and she yowled in agony. By the time she arrived at the hospital, her lingers had swollen badly; all of them except the thumb were broken. When the nurses announced they would have to cut off her rings, Vanessa screamed even louder than she had from the pain and told them it was out of the question. She was wearing the engagement ring my father gave my mother, which she had worn ever since Mamma's death. Nothing, she said, could be allowed to damage that ring. And so the nurses pulled it off, inch by agonizing inch, along the great welts that were forming and the crunch of mangled bone.

  I don't know where my sister gets her strength and determination, but she has enough for an entire army.

  For a long time it appeared Vanessa would not regain use of her hand. Most painful of all was the nerve damage, which made it intolerable for her to endure vibrations or movement of any kind. My father wanted her to go home to Bari for treatment, but she knew she could not bear a journey that long. So she stayed in Rome for the long weeks and months of her rehabilitation. Vanessa had two operations and had to fight to prevent the doctors from amputating the worst-affected finger, her ring finger. Eventually, she persuaded them to operate for a third time and insert metal splints to compensate for the loss of any workable bone structure. Her physical therapy was so painful she had to take morphine to get through it. But Vanessa would not let up.

  Over time, she regained partial use of her fingers and even adapted her riding technique to ensure she could hold a pair of reins and get on a horse again.

  The accident spelled the end of the road for her in Rome. If she'd still been with the carabinieri, she would have been pensioned off with lifelong disability payments or transferred to a comfortable desk job at the Ministry of Defense. Now she had nothing. The carabinieri would never take her back, no matter how many lawsuits she might win, because she was no longer physically capable of serving.

  I felt boundlessly sad and helpless. This was not: my limit, but it had come about as a direct result of the hell that my life and the lives of those around me had become. "Oddio," I said to Vanessa when she was finally able to visit later that spring. "Dear God—what else can happen to us?"

  * * *

  We received the sentencing report in early March 2010. I doubt an Italian court has ever published 427 pages quite this shameful, illogical, or flat-out ridiculous. It was not exactly a surprise to he ripped to shreds by Judge Massei (when he cared to remember that I existed), or to see him endorse Patrizia Stefanoni's forensic results, or to read yet another account minimizing Rudy Guede's actions and responsibilities. What I did not expect was to laugh out loud at the sheer absurdity of his arguments.

  The biggest surprise, which my lawyers saw as a huge benefit moving toward the appeal, was that Massei did not accept Mignini's theory of the crime. Massei had clearly paid attention to ( Bongiorno when she said I could not have planned a murder with Guede because I did not know him. So, instead of endorsing the premeditated crime conjured up by the prosecution, Massei imagined a spontaneous one. Amanda had not, in his telling, stoked the flames of hatred in her heart over an unflushed toilet, or otherwise marked Meredith for death over a period of days or weeks. Rather, the whole tragedy came about because Rudy Guede needed to take a shit on a cold night.

  Bear with me, because the judge's reasoning is every bit as crazy as it sounds. First, he claimed that Amanda and I spent the evening of November 1 at Via della Pergola. We were, he said, making love in Amanda's room while Meredith was minding her own business in hers. What evidence did he have for this? Precisely
none. "But," he noted, "there is nothing to confirm that Amanda and Raffaele were anywhere else late that evening." Massei appeared to have forgotten it is incumbent on the prosecution to prove its case, not simply to say there is no evidence to the contrary. But let's leave that to one side for a moment; the story gets better.

  Rudy Guede, in his account, was wandering the streets of Perugia when he realized he needed to go to the bathroom. Or decided he wanted to spend time with Amanda and me (even though he did not know me). Or was looking for a place to sleep (even though he had an apartment of his own just a few minutes' walk away). 'Whatever the precise reason—Massei said there was no way of knowing for sure—he rings the doorbell of the girls' apartment. And Amanda and I, even though we are busy having sex, decide we have to pause to pull on our clothes and let him in. Did we think it would be rude not to open the door to him, even though it was eleven o'clock at night and we barely knew him? Was there some reason why Meredith, whose bedroom door was still open in the judge's account, would not answer instead? Massei's report is entirely silent on the mechanics of this.

  In any case, Rudy comes in, goes to the bathroom, and takes a dump. We, meanwhile, go back to our lovemaking. Rudy supposedly finds this a turn-on, to the point where he forgets to flush, comes out of the bathroom, and decides he wants to get it on with someone. "Lured by the atmosphere of sexual solicitation and giving way to his own concupiscence," Massei writes in painfully precious terminology, he barges into Meredith's room to see if she's willing.

  She's not. Soon, she's fighting him off and yelling. That gets our attention. But, instead of stepping in to defend Meredith, we take Rudy's side. We have, after all, been smoking pot-- what other spur to irrational violence do two otherwise blameless college students need? Amanda produces my kitchen knife, which she just happens to be carrying around in her handbag, I pull out a pocketknife, thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, Meredith is dead. "This Court," Massei concludes, "can only take note of the choice made to engage in extreme evil." That, for him, was our motivation: extreme evil. Even Mignini had tried harder than that.

  What is perhaps most extraordinary about Massei's scenario is that it was not based on anything heard in court. It was his own imagination at work, from start to finish. Nothing in the Italian justice system prevents judges from taking off on such flights of fancy, but it certainly doesn't look good. Such sentencing reports effectively say, I don't like the way the evidence has been presented, so I'll come up with my own version, which pluck out of thin air if 1 have to. Naturally, Massei's report begged question after question, some of which he attempted to answer, however tentatively. Why, for example, would Amanda have had my kitchen knife in her handbag if we weren't planning on using it? "It's possible, even probable, given Raffaele Sollecito's relationship with knives," he wrote, "that Amanda was persuaded by her boyfriend to carry around such a knife for her own security so, if necessary, she could flash it at ill-intentioned persons encountered in the night." Why such an enormous knife? Do people really carry around large chopping knives for self-protection? Amanda's bag, the judge noted, was very spacious; he contented himself with the observation that the knife could at least fit. My lawyers later objected that such a knife Would inevitably rip the bag's lining to shreds, and. Amanda's lining was intact. It appears that Massei did not think of that.

  My knife posed all sorts of problems for the judge. Why, if it was the murder weapon, had no blood been found on it? "Just because the blood test came back negative," Massei answered, "does not mean there was no blood there." This was the sort of argument the US government used, none too successfully, when weapons of mass destruction failed to show up in Iraq; it was the notion, famously espoused by Donald Rumsfeld, that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Why stop incriminating Amanda and me just because nothing substantiated our guilt? There could have been blood on the tip that nobody spotted. We could have been at Via della Pergola even though no physical evidence supported that contention. Meredith could have been sexually assaulted, because the gynecological exam did not categorically exclude it.

  We had to wonder, was this dispassionate jurisprudence, or were these arguments of convenience concocted to justify a predetermined conclusion?

  Time and again Massei's reasoning got knotted up on points that seemed to defy logic, and he would pull out some extraordinarily convoluted argument to free himself from trouble. Yes, he wrote, Rudy Guede had thrown rocks through windows and staged break-ins in the weeks leading up to the murder. But the circumstances at Via della Pergola were completely different because Guede knew the occupants and would surely do nothing as violent as smashing a window in a house belonging to his friends. So a real burglary was out of the question. And Guede could not have staged a burglary either—because the staging would immediately draw attention to his standard operating procedure in a string of previous incidents.

  It took a moment to absorb this in its full circular ridiculousness.

  Or again, if Amanda and I had committed the murder, why did we lurk around the house for the police to find us? Because, Massei said, we knew the authorities would want to question us sooner or later, so we decided we might as well make it easy for them. Right, As first-time violent criminals always do. (My otherwise impeccably sober appeals brief later called this argument "mind-boggling.") Why, if I was trying to further the idea that there had been a break in, did I tell the carabinieri that nothing had been taken? Massei had to expend several paragraphs explaining this away. Because, he said, I wanted to establish some credibility with law enforcement and I knew, since I'd staged the break-in, that nothing had in fact been taken and I didn't want to get caught in a lie.

  Huh? I had to read that one several times too. It was nonsense even on its own terms. Meredith's money, credit cards, and cell phones were stolen, as the police later established. If I'd committed the murder, wouldn't I know these were gone? Massei chose not to go anywhere near that subject.

  Rather, he went on a mean-spirited tear against Amanda and tile over the tiniest details, much as Mignini and Comodi had done be fore him. If we knew on the night of the murder that we were going to Gubbio the following morning, he asked, wouldn't Amanda logically have taken a change of clothes to my house and showered there? Wouldn't that have saved time? (He appeared to forget she was expecting to go to work that night.) Why would she take a mop to my house when I had cleaning supplies of my own and needed only to wipe up a small amount of water? How come she slept in until ten or ten thirty when she was, by nature, a morning person? Didn't we want to take full advantage of the day?

  These questions all pointed to an exaggerated form of moral disapproval: because we didn't go to bed punctually and rise early, because we dawdled on our way to Gubbio—a mere forty-five-minute drive from Perugia—and didn't mind walking back and forth between our apartments to gather our things, we must somehow be degenerate people. More likely, in the judge's view, we simply lied about it all. We lied and we smoked a joint and we had sex. What other proof of murder did a court of law need?

  Even Massei understood that he needed to address the issue at the heart of the case, the DNA evidence, and he did so at great length, reproducing every argument he and his colleagues had heard over months of testimony. In the end, though, he ducked the whole question of which side the science favored. Instead of determining whether Stefanoni's methodology and results had met acceptable standards, he focused on her intentions. Nothing, he said, suggested that she had prejudged the situation or was looking for results to confirm the identities of the suspects already in custody. Because her intentions as an honest working professional were good, her results must also be good. "From a strictly logical point of view," he wrote, "there is no reason why Dr. Stefanoni would have wanted to manipulate the results from the [DNA] machine to seek out indications that one or other of the defendants was guilty."

  With that, he dismissed the entire controversy.

  As it turned out, Massei may not
have been entirely correct to say there was no evidence that DNA results were used to fit a predetermined story line. Giuliano Mignini, of all people, had given a television interview a couple of months earlier in which he stated quite openly that he was looking for a certain result from t he kitchen-knife analysis.

  Mignini was asked by a special correspondent for the show L'altra meta del crimine (The Other Half of the Crime) how lie could be so sure my knife was the murder weapon when the DNA read ings had come back "too low" and did not appear to conform to international standards. Mignini stuttered and danced around the question before replying in gloriously convoluted Italian, "Ho ottenuto di farlo risultare." I managed to get it to come out right.

  His answer didn't take refuge in science, or in Dr. Stefanoni judgment. He seemed willing to take full ownership of the conclu sions reached at the Polizia Scientifica lab in Rome.

  * * *

  Life in the protected section had two relatively bright spots that spring. The first was that an old professor of mine from Perugia, Alfredo Milani, agreed to come to Terni as often as twice a week to tutor me. He obtained special permission to come outside of normal visiting hours, so it didn't affect how often my friends and family could see me. And Milani was spectacular. We would go to the prison library, away from the protected section and away from the visiting room with its big concrete barrier, and work fin hours at a time. Milani liked to bring material on a CD-ROM so 1 could upload it directly to my laptop, but this made the prison authorities nervous and he was told he needed to obtain written permission. Sometimes he had permission; sometimes he brought a CD anyway, even if it meant risking confiscation.