The prosecutor in the Knox case has serious issues.I had doubts after reading The Monster Of Venice:

[Are_grits_groceries]

The Monster of Florence - a true story
Nestling in the lush, rolling hills of Tuscany, with the Arno river and Ponte Vecchio at its centre, Florence is an idyllic city. Florentines gave us the Renaissance and the city is the very cradle of Western civilisation.

Yet within all this beauty, Florence has a violent past, from public executions to bloody wars. Forming part of this shocking violence is the story of the Monster of Florence.

Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples – fourteen people in all – were murdered while making love in parked cars in the beautiful hills surrounding Florence. The case became the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history. Close to a hundred thousand men were investigated and more than a dozen arrested, many of whom had to be released when the Monster struck again. Scores of lives were ruined by rumour and false accusations. The generation of Florentines who came of age during the killings say that it changed the city and their lives. There have been suicides, exhumations, alleged poisonings, body parts sent by post, séances in graveyards, lawsuits, planting of false evidence, and vicious prosecutorial vendettas. The investigation has been like a malignancy, spreading backward in time and outward in space, metastasizing to different cities and swelling into new investigations, with new judges, police, and prosecutors, more suspects, more arrests, and many more lives ruined.

Despite the longest manhunt in modern Italian history, the Monster of Florence has never been found and, with the acquittal of the latest suspect in May 2008, the case is still unsolved.

In The Monster of Florence, Mario and I track down and interview a man we have strong reasons to believe may be the Monster himself. At the end of the interview, we asked him, “Are you the Monster of Florence?”

We’d be curious to hear from readers their thoughts on the following questions:

Do you think our suspect is the Monster? Why or why not?
If not, is there another person in the book you think may be the Monster?
And finally, do you think the case will ever be solved?

A Note from Douglas
The worst thing about the Monster of Florence case is that it has effectively exiled me from Italy, a country that I love. The chief prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini, has publicly threatened to have me arrested, and yet he refuses to release any information about my legal status to the U.S. State Department. Am I still under indictment? Is there a warrant out for my arrest? Will I be harassed by the police if I return? Investigated? Interrogated? I do not know. Having seen the arbitrary exercise of judicial power in Italy first-hand, I’m not inclined to take the risk and go back.

What most shocked me most about the Monster case was that this could happen in a civilized, educated, economically advanced Western European country, the country that gave us the glory of ancient Rome and the magic of the Renaissance. Indeed, across the centuries Italy has blessed the world with incomparable music, art, architecture, science, literature and philosophy. My own country has been immeasurably enriched by immigration from Italy. Beginning in the 1960s, Italy transformed itself yet again, rising from the ruins of World War II to create a modern industrial state with a standard of living that eventually surpassed Great Britain. (The Italians celebrate that singular event with a word: il sorpasso, “the overtaking.”) It is an amazing country, and the Italians are a fascinating, clever and exceedingly complex people.

And yet, today, Italy’s great wealth and power seems to have brought with it a spiritual and ethical malaise. The ambition, careerism, fecklessness, and dishonesty exposed by the Monster case is a symptom of this malaise, in which the concern for saving face, cutting a good figure, and advancing one’s career trumps the plodding and unglamorous search for the truth. The Monster of Florence is not just a book about a serial killer or a bungled investigation; it is a book about modern Italy itself.
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More:http://www.monsterofflorence.co.uk/?p=1

The conduct of Mignini is appalling. He doesn't seem to have changed one bit. ANY claim by him is not to be trusted IMO. His conduct prejudiced this case from the start.

If Knox was involved, his behavior puts any evidence of that in serious doubt. Another prosecutor who would present it without the melodramatics and devoid of links to corruption might stand a chance.

[mainer]

1. A GREAT book. Douglas Preston almost ended up in jail

just because he was asking too many questions.

That prosecutor is seriously off the rails.