Trial by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case by Douglas Preston

The bitch needs to die naked tasting her own blood.
Your daughter will come out of prison a hard nosed lesbian (with her sex drive)I hope you are dead before that happens I really do. Meredith Kercher is dead and you dont give a shit about her or her family. But you are the victims arent you? Rot in hell.
And Raffaele? He’s such the pervert he needs to be locked away for life. … Raffaele was perfect for Amanda infusing the sort of wicked and wonderful temptation of evilness that comes with pranks and mutual masturbation. They know nothing of love and compassion but only of spontaneous and twisted self gratification.
There are a whole lot of women who instinctively think she is a total fake, has not fooled any one of us, believes she is foul to the bone and we hope she rots in prison and dies in hell.
I hope Knox stays in jail where she is safe feom me and others like me because if she ever makes it home to Seattle she will suffer that same fate as her victim. None of you can stop me either.
    On November 2, 2007, in the ancient and lovely hill town of Perugia, Italy, a British girl named Meredith Kercher was found murdered in the cottage she shared with several other students. Her half-naked body lay on the floor of the bedroom, covered by a duvet; her throat had been stabbed, and there were signs of sexual assault and robbery. It was one of the most brutal murders in Perugia in more than thirty years, and it made front-page news in Italy. Four days later, police and prosecutors held a triumphant press conference in Perugia, in which they proclaimed that they had solved the case and arrested the killers. “Case closed,” they announced. Among the three alleged killers was a twenty-year-old college student from Seattle named Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The ensuing investigation, trial, conviction, and appeal of Amanda and Raffaele lasted 1,428 days and became one of the most sensational murder trials of the new century. On October 3, 2011, an appeals court in Perugia declared them innocent. Amanda went back to her family in Seattle and Raffaele to his in Bari. On March 26, 2013, Italy’s Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a retrial on points of law as yet unspecified. The retrial may well involve more years of appeals and reviews. Amanda was arrested when she was twenty; she could be thirty by the time her case is finally resolved.
    Within days of Amanda’s arrest, public opinion began lining up on either side. It eventually coalesced into two groups, the so-called “Guilters” and the “Innocentisti,” anti-Amanda and pro-Amanda bloggers. These two groups have been brawling online ever since. People sometimes note the transient, ever-changing nature of the Web, but in fact the opposite is true. The Web is a gigantic tar pit that traps and fossilizes every electron that ventures within. On March 29, 2013, as I was putting the final touches on this article, I conducted an experiment. I Googled “Amanda Knox” and got 7.1 million hits. I then tried “Amanda Knox” and “bitch,” which returned 1.7 million hits. “Amanda Knox” and “pervert” came back at 880,000 hits, and her name coupled with “slut” yielded 380,000. “Amanda Knox” and “innocent” returned 482,000. The quotations that opened this article were gathered in about fifteen minutes of surfing. There are millions of similar comments about Amanda like this, and most of them will survive in digital form for a long time — perhaps, given Web archiving efforts, close to forever. Amanda’s great-great-grandchildren may find that this ugly archive is only a few clicks away.
    The extreme viciousness of the anti-Amanda commentariage is startling. There are countless statements calling for the murdering, raping, torturing, throat-cutting, frying, hanging, electrocution, burning, and rotting in hell of Amanda, along with her sisters, family, friends, and supporters. This silicon Inquisition is