Raffaelle Sollecito: Worse Off

I have previously written that given the enormous power of American prosecutors to persuade defendants to plead guilty in exchange for reduced sentences and dropped charges, Amanda Knox, prosecuted for murder in Italy, was better off there than she would have been had she been charged for a similar crime in the United States. Recent developments point to another result of the contrasting inability of Italian prosecutors to engage in these kinds of deals with defendants: Knox's co-defendant, Raffaelle Sollecito, would probably have fared better under the U.S. system--and is therefore worse off in Italy. While Knox hides out in Seattle, Sollecito (an Italian citizen) is preparing to serve a 25-year sentence (barring appellate relief) in an Italian prison. At the outset, Knox and Sollecito (romantically involved at the time of the murder) adopted the complete joint position that both were entirely innocent. Reports now out of Italy show that with Sollecito left holding the bag this long-time alignment is crumbling. Sollecito says now Knox wasn't actually with him at the time of the murder, that there are text messages implicating Knox, and that Knox was acting bizarrely in the hours after the murder. Italian appellate judges might find all of this too little too late to save Sollecito. But we know how things would have played out instead in a U.S. courtroom. In exchange for promised lesser charges (lying to investigators for example) and a reduced sentence (maybe 5 years), Sollecito would have been at the very outset the government's chief witness against Knox. Prepped by prosecutors he would have been available to deliver damning evidence at trial against Knox: she left the house, she persuaded me to say she was with me (which I did because I loved her and didn't think she was capable of murder), when she came home she was clearly agitated, and so on. Or, more likely: she told me she did it and she needed my help to get away because she couldn't go to prison. Sollecito would by now be almost done with his sentence. Knox (who would have almost certainly pled guilty under these circumstances) would be serving a lengthy term.