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- Title
Confessions and the Right to a Fair Trial: A Comparative Case Study.
- Authors
Annitto, Megan
- Abstract
In 2015, Amanda Knox was fully acquitted by the Italian Court of Cassation, Italy's court of last resort. The acquittal brought to a close a long ordeal that directed harsh criticism at Italy's criminal justice system. That same year, Brendan Dassey's case was just entering the public consciousness on a global scale a decade after his conviction for murder in the United States. He was convicted just six months before Knox's arrest ignited an international frenzy. But despite the current interest in Dassey's plight, unlike in Knox's case, the original attention to his case did not focus on the flaws riddling his prosecution. Rather, it focused on the gruesome details included in his confession and on the details of his uncle's story. At first glance, the two cases have little in common other than the brutal murders at the heart of each. They occurred an ocean apart, one in a picturesque hill town in Perugia, Italy; the other in a run-down, rural area of Wisconsin. But Dassey's case encapsulates some of the very same problems that led to criticism of Italian court proceedings--a questionable interrogation coupled with troubling pretrial publicity involving extrajudicial statements related to a confession. Yet, in November of 2007, with all eyes turned abroad to Italy, teenage Dassey quietly began his life sentence after enduring the similar due process violations here in the United States. Italy has adopted laws that in theory go further than many other countries to protect against the use of unreliable confessions. Yet, even though they were suppressed, it is widely acknowledged that Knox's incriminating statements--even though they were suppressed--and drove the entire investigation and contributed to her initial conviction. Therefore, this Article takes a fresh look at the Knox case and compares it with Dassey's. Rather than viewing the Knox case as a condemnation of the Italian system as a whole, this Article uses two cases to compare Italian and American confession law and examines the limits of protection provided by suppression in the confession setting. It also considers how confession law interacts with extrajudicial speech and pre-trial publicity. Ultimately, both cases demonstrate strengths and limitations of existing protections in the confession setting and can inform confession law across borders.
- Subjects
UNITED States; FAIR trial; DUE process of law; FREE press &; fair trial; RIGHT to present a defense; CONFESSION (Law)
- Publication
Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2017, Vol 35, Issue 2, p181
- ISSN
1085-5718
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.15779/Z38Z02Z85H