Amanda Knox’s Attorneys Convinced Her Not to Send Her Condolences to the Kercher Family

The Amanda Knox prison memoir Waiting to Be Heard comes out on Tuesday, and, in an effort to wring just a little more juice out of the story before everyone has access to the memoir, newspapers that obtained advanced review copies have been sharing tantalizing little excerpts with parsimonious discretion. The latest such morsel they’ve chosen to share? A passage in which Amanda Knox recalls writing and ultimately deciding not to send a letter to the family of Meredith Kercher, the British student whose gruesome murder launched a judicial witch hunt in Italy that eventually led to Knox’s 2009 incarceration.

In this latest excerpt, an ingenuous Knox explains how her lawyers dissuaded her from sending the Kercher family a letter that read:

I’m not the one who killed your daughter and sister. I’m a sister too and I can only attempt to imagine the extent of your grief. In the relatively brief time that Meredith was part of my life, she was always kind to me. I think about her every day.

Yeah, probably not the best idea, but hey, kudos to Amanda Knox for listening her legal counsel’s chorus of prudence and restraining herself from doing something that might seem reasonable to an innocent person. For the legions of observers who remain unconvinced of Knox’s innocence, this excerpt probably does little to assuage their fury, though an open-minded perusal of Douglas Preston’s Kindle Single Trial By Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case might do the trick. Preston, himself a victim of Perugia’s most infamous public prosecutor, offers some insight into why so many people seem will to heap abuse on Knox, even after the Kercher murder investigation and Knox’s interrogations were revealed to be riddled with procedural errors (hint: the Internet can turn even the most reasonable people into members of a seething mob).