Amanda Knox, the Seattle student studying abroad in Italy who was convicted, then acquitted, of murdering her roommate, is facing another trial, though it’s unlikely that she’ll be extradited from Italy.
Knox was last decade’s alleged murderer with sexytimes overtones. Then there was Casey Anthony, who was accused of killing her daughter but convicted only for lying to prosecutors. Now, there’s Jodi Arias, who is on trial for the murder of her boyfriend.
The strange thing about all these trials is that they occupy hours of television time but it’s possible that you’ve heard very little about them unless someone you know is following the trial. I hadn’t heard about Casey Anthony until I went home for a visit and my cable-watching relatives told me about it. The same is true of Arias, who apparently has spent a couple of weeks testifying on her behalf, but hasn’t been on the front page of the Post, Times or Guardian, at least that I’ve seen.
Am I the only one who manages to stay almost completely ignorant of these trials? I’m not complaining, mind you, but whenever I find something like this I wonder what else occupies a great deal of people’s time that I know nothing about.
Wilson Heath
I’ve unfollowed people on the Twatter for going OCD on this nonsense.
deep
Nope, it’s just the opiate of the masses doing its job. The problem is you think to much.
Highway Rob
My office has a screen in the elevator bay that is used as either a building directory or a CNN feed. They have this Arias character on every day, and I still have no idea what’s going on. I’ve assumed it’s the moral equivalent of the daytime soap opera — low production values, low production costs, but the tawdriness keeps butts in seats.
Napoleon
Consider yourself lucky.
I knew enough about the Anthony case to conclude she was a wacko that was stone cold guilty and a few minutes reading about Arias makes it clear she is as well.
Lee
@Highway Rob:
That is an excellent analysis. I had not thought of it that way.
I don’t follow this stuff either. I might actually know the trial is going on but little to nothing about the details.
cmorenc
The one pleasure in occasionally following the Kacey Anthony case was watching HNN cable network’s sensational crime show host Nancy Grace’s head explode when a not guilty verdict was announced. If there’s actually anyone slimier than Kacey Anthony, it’s ex-prosecutor Nancy Grace, whose motto seems to be “let no prejudicial stone of coverage of the evidence or witnesses go unturned. Her show is a complete disgrace to the justice system and cable “news” or infotainment.
Soprano2
There’s a local restaurant where hubby & I often eat breakfast on the weekends. The past couple of months every time we go in there the TV is on the channel that’s covering the Jodi Arias trial, it’s the same channel with that witch Nancy Grace on it. That’s the only reason I even know it’s happening. Her b/f sounds like a real douche, although that’s not a reason for her to kill him.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
The people who follow these tv trials everyday are the same people who cause gaper delays. It’s rubbernecking for couch potatoes.
kerFuFFler
I don’t follow the trials either but they seem about as valid a source of entertainment as sports or other pop culture entertainments—-you know folks, bread and circuses.
Soprano2
I hadn’t thought about them being like soap operas, but that’s exactly right. I think a lot of people follow these type of trials for the salacious details.
NonyNony
No. I prefer my melodrama to be fictional, so I avoid these “trials” as much as humanly possible. It’s actually pretty easy to do – unlike the OJ trial they rarely seem to bleed over into normal news until a verdict is handed down.
4tehlulz
>Am I the only one who manages to stay almost completely ignorant of these trials?
I find that not being on Facebook and Twitter makes this easier.
Baud
If you are a white woman who wants to become famous, go missing or get accused of murder.
MattF
For me, it’s like one more kind of genre fiction that I’ll never read. I’ll read mysteries, some kinds of scifi/fantasy, some kidlit, but there’s vast amounts outside my field of view. Particularly, no fucking vampires, or vice versa.
geg6
Nope, you’re not the only one. I was only aware of the Knox and Anthony cases because I was still watching traditional network and cable news when they broke. I’ve seen some articles online with a headline about the Arias case but I have no clue whatsoever it is about and I could not possibly care less about it. Good looking woman + murder + sensationalism = ratings/page views. And I’m not all interested in most of the shit that gets ratings or page views for the MSM.
Sly
No.
I made a commitment to severely curtail my television viewing hours about a decade ago, and eschew Cable News entirely, and found that there are all sorts of social preoccupations that fail to show up on my radar. To the extent that if you put me in the same room with Casey Anthony, Kim Kardashian, last year’s winner of The Voice, and the entire cast of NCIS, I probably wouldn’t know who is who.
c u n d gulag
Of such, are the shiny baubles of distraction made, to keep people from seeing the Malefactors of Great Wealth at work on the destruction of everyone else’s future, for their own personal profit, and general all-around shit’s and giggles for themselves, and their cronies in the Rentier Class.
JPL
The Andrea Sneiderman trial will take place this summer in Atlanta. Although someone has already been convicted in the death of her husband, she is being charged as a conspirator. Since I don’t have cable, I didn’t watch the other high profile cases.
Baud
To echo the sentiment, I too am blissfully ignorant of these things.
Suffern ACE
No, I try not to follow these things. That way when they show up years later on “Who the Hell did I Marry?”, I have some sense of suspense at how it ends.
arguingwithsignposts
Never heard of Jody Arias, and I’m a frequent user of both FB and Twitter. Of course, I follow a certain group of people related to my field of interest who have better taste than to focus on bullshit like this.
Also, I love how wikipedia describes the murder: “his wounds consisted of 29 stab wounds, a slit throat, and a shot to the head; the death was ruled by the medical examiner to be a homicide.” Glad they ruled out suicide! ETA: Is passive voice required at wiki?
Xenos
People have facebook ‘friends’ who update with details of celebrity trials? I put up with some hardcore wingnuts, but that has got to be going too far.
Amir Khalid
Shrug. At least it’s not as bad as when the condemned were hanged in public as a popular weekend entertainment.
cmorenc
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
People have a lurid fascination with the tawdry behavior of the “trailer trash” stratum of society. For one thing, it gives them examples of people they can unambiguously feel superior to.
maurinsky
I have a couple of friends who are really into “true crime” shit, so I get to hear all about these trials. Not my thing at all. I didn’t want to hear any more about OJ Simpson while he was still driving his Blazer down the freeway. It is entertainment to them, they like to pore over the clues and talk about the body language of the prosecutor, whether they like the judge or not, whether the jury is stupid or not.
Whatever. People like all kinds of things that I’m not interested in, and I like all kinds of things that other people aren’t interested in. I think my things are better, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be so interested in them, but I don’t want to be judgey about what other people find interesting.
handsmile
Anthony and Arias: never heard of either one. But then again, I had no idea who Manti Te’o or Seth MacFarlane were/are. I find it strangely comforting to learn how impregnable my own epistemic bubble appears to be.
Of course, every day I despair about how little I know – and the dwindling time available to learn – about things that actually matter.
Narcissus
Ye Olde two-Minutes Hate
geg6
Personally, I’m much more concerned about crazy ass legal cases that actually affect me and my community:
http://www.timesonline.com/news/police_fire_courts/beaver-county-sheriff-george-david-indicted-on-charges/article_9c7db6ce-2a28-576e-b7b8-be1bdb9a3964.html
This guy (who I’ve known pretty much my entire life) has been a crook forever. His brother is one of the biggest bookies in the county and, perhaps, the region. The trogolodytes who run the Beaver County Democratic Party and the general voting public keep supporting this asshole. I hope he goes down like a ton of bricks.
Napoleon
@arguingwithsignposts:
Even better, she is claiming self defense, a camera was found at the house with deleted pictures of him in the shower before the stabbing then after, and she continued to call his phone and leave VMs after the fact.
This is total non-news. Its some local wacko who obviously is guilty being brought up on charges. As some say up-thread it is simply being used as a soap opera instead of real news coverage.
Baud
@arguingwithsignposts:
Love that CSI shit.
different-church-lady
The same is true of most of the political nontroversies that consume our parts of the internet. Everyone has their own form of distraction porn.
There’s hours and hours of time to be filled, and that’s true whether you’re the network or the audience. I say throw it in the dustbin along with the smartwatch.
different-church-lady
@kerFuFFler:
Yeah. Hey, when do we get the bread?
NonyNony
@Napoleon:
Please. This doesn’t affect real news coverage at all. It’s being used as filler for 24×7 “news” channels because they only have about 8 hours of useful national news in day, international news gets no ratings unless it is actually national news in disguise, and local “news” isn’t covered by the 24×7 news outlets unless it’s sensationalist tabloid crap. (If I honestly believed that losing this tabloid crap would get us more international coverage, I’d be outraged too. But if suddenly the market for tabloid homicide trials dried up CNN would flip to an E! celebrity tabloid clone so fast your head would spin off your neck).
The best thing that could be done for our public good – short of forcing the 24×7 “news” networks off the air entirely – is if they could be convinced to switch their filler to syndicated reruns of old sitcoms and old movies. Show the same roughly 8 hours of news that you currently show, but play some Andy Griffith during the day instead of Nancy Grace. I bet their ratings would improve…
JPL
@different-church-lady:
Are you be thinking about Tunch and gang?
Suffern ACE
@Napoleon: I think what got the press interested in the first place is that the police found sexy time pictures on the camera.
chopper
so what you’re saying is that watching all this means there’s not a lot going on emotionally for these people right now?
I did outgrow the worry over what others are watching and the rest of what mixie wrings his hands over a long time ago. Human beings are really a silly bunch, and they always will be.
Rick Taylor
Amanda who? Know I’d never heard of her, nor any of the other folk you mention.
jibeaux
I just really couldn’t follow them if I wanted to, especially the ones where a child has been killed. I am a hothouse flower about violence, I just can’t handle it. What’s the opposite of lurid rubbernecker?
JPL
Hopefully the Knox case doesn’t turn into some type of international event. The next presidential candidates could campaign on the save Amanda Knox platform.
Napoleon
@Suffern ACE:
I have no doubt the sex angle is a huge part of why all 3 cases got attention.
Jane2
It’s the lead story in the Guardian, and just below the lead in the Post and NYT. So your implied above-it-all papers aren’t really above it all, at all.
Brian R.
When someone blathers on about one of these cases, I just ask innocently:
Why is this national news? Why do you care so much about this particular crime, when there are literally thousands just like it?
Oh, the teevee told you it was important? OK, then.
BAtFFP
Christ almighty, we got so much of Amanda Knox here in Seattle. it went on and on and on, tales from her student days on the Univ of WA campus, stories of her weeping parents, anecdotes about that one time she worked in a bakery once…
I pity people from the same town as Casey Anthony and the Arias lady. Missed all of those trials myself, but the poor inflicted locals must have been miserable.
bemused
I avoid this stuff as much as possible. I didn’t watch any Casey Anthony segments but I knew the story just from the countless blurps on network tv when I just wanted to catch local news and weather. I have no idea why people are hooked on these stories. I was shocked to read that MSNBC’s prison shows are extremely lucrative for the cable network. I wonder who are these people who enjoy this crap and then think of the movie Idiocracy.
If I see even a glimpse of Nancy Grace, I get an upset stomach.
Amir Khalid
Upon further reflection, I am not very happy with the post headline. Neither Casey Anthony nor Jodi Arias has been convicted of murdering anybody. Anthony was convicted of something else. Arias’ trial is still going on. And Amanda Knox’s initial conviction has been reversed, so now she’s facing a re-trial.
I can’t think of any defence for using the word “hussy”.
Mark S.
Imagining all those cable news anchors creaming in their pants over this shit is making me think about skipping breakfast this morning.
J.W. Hamner
@Amir Khalid:
It’s sarcasm. I.E. The sexual aspects are what have people apparently glued to their TV sets.
oldster
“I wonder what else occupies a great deal of people’s time that I know nothing about.”
Uhh… football? “March Madness”?
gogol's wife
I think you mean extradited TO Italy.
I hate this court voyeurism. It really goes back to OJ and it’s quite pernicious.
Cassidy
I love threads like this. They give me a chuckle. All I can think is that no one is willing to admit it, but a lot of people listen to Nickelback.
Napoleon
@Amir Khalid:
I can – the use of it is attributing to the media their mindset in running stories like theirs. He is not indepenantly agreeing that is what they are.
rikyrah
have no clue about these trials.
RSA
I’m yet another. Like a couple of commenters above, I managed to avoid seeing any of the OJ trial, for instance.
different-church-lady
@Cassidy: I honestly know more about Amanda Knox than I do Nickelback.
Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal mistermix
@Napoleon: Bingo.
dan
Not following. “extradited from Italy” or “to Italy”?
Mark S.
@bemused:
Grace is a bitch. HLN is the sleaziest fucking channel. I used to belong to a gym that had that stupid channel on 24 hours a day, and I seriously would almost have preferred Fox News.
different-church-lady
@chopper:
No, no, if they were insistent that the ability to watch all this on a wrist TV is life changing, then there’s not a lot going on emotionally for them.
Hey, I don’t make the rules…
Cassidy
@different-church-lady: Nickelback is a metaphor. Everyone claims to hate them, but they are one of the bestselling bands in the US. Someone’s buying the albums. Odds are, people you know who claim to hate them. My personal theory is that it’s cool to hate on them, but everyone has a song of their’s they sing when they think no one is looking.
What I’m getting at is that all this [in my horribly accented snooty voice] “I don’t watch TV” and going back to the other threads where people here claim to only watch British shows or cable shows and movies only made by certain directors like fine connoisseurs of TV and movies, but deep down they know they laughed their ass off at some stupid parts [almost the whole damn movie] of Lil Nicky…I just find it amusing is all. It’s like catching a beer snob drink a Natty Light.
Tone in DC
@NonyNony:
Their ratings would improve if they showed nothing but old Gallagher gags with the smashed produce and the mallet.
Vlad
The Knox case was actually deserving of the attention it received, given the many ways in which the Italian police and prosecutors totally screwed up the case. She and her boyfriend were probably wrongfully accused.
Robert
Even if Knox and her boyfriend were likely suspects, the prosecutors’ case hinged on calling her a she-devil druggy slut and her DNA on a bread knife in her shared apartment that wasn’t used in the murder. That’s it.
chocotoco
2 of those 3 cases gives a bit of insight into the minds of a couple of “not-terribly-bright” sociopaths. Our society doesn’t really reflect much on sociopathy unless it’s on the occasion of a salacious murder. Perhaps people will be able to extrapolate from these data points when dealing with the fraction of sociopaths who are malignant but not the sort that channel that malignancy into “lurid” crimes.
The other case offers insight into the deep dysfunctionality of both the Italian media and their criminal justice system. It’s a serious mess. It makes many complaints one may have about American media or justice just pale in comparison. It also serves as a template for what to avoid as we improve our own systems. Hell, a black man in the custody of Keystone cops in 1950’s Mississippi has a better shot at actual justice than the average person arrested in Italy.
It’s just unfortunate that these data points are only really broadcast because of penises and vaginas.
Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal mistermix
@chopper: Hey, Fox News called and they wanted their false equivalence back, can you send it over?
Nicole
@gogol’s wife:
It goes back much further than that. Heck, Kander and Ebb wrote a whole musical about it.
Seanly
HLN has been dry humping the Jody Arias case for several months. I watch in the mornings as I get up the courage to go to work. The obsession with the Jody Arias trial has at least mitigated their fawning American Idol/Survivor/Dancing with the Stars 5-minute recap.
RE: the Knox case, the crazy Italian prosecution makes me want to avoid ever going to Italy.
bemused
@Mark S.:
Fox News or Nancy Grace…hard to decide which torture I’d pick if I was forced to.
I have a couple of very intelligent friends who do watch Nancy Grace. I am totally mystified by this. It’s so incongruous. If they start talking about one of Nancy Grace’s shows, I tell them to stop or I will seriously start screaming.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Cassidy: I also know much more about Amanda Knox than Nickelback. But the procedural aspects of other criminal justice systems is an interest of mine, no doubt stemming originally from professional curiosity. And the Knox case is an example of enhanced interrogations in the police realm. By which I mean simply how coercive interrogations tend to be. Plus the investigation was less than pristine, to put it politely.
But I agrees with your premise nonetheless.
quannlace
Just what I was gonna say: it’s obvious you don’t watch Nancy Grace. Her nightly show should be retitiled ‘Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”
Though she’s not the only offender, when the Casey verdict came down, CNN went live with it, for nearly half a day.
Cassidy
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Yeah. I have no professional knowledge, but what I caught about it in the gym sounded very hinky to me. Occassionally, I’ll pull up a CNN article to get caught up. I’m always interested in US citizens being prosectued overseas because of being stationed overseas and Soldiers protected by SOFA.
The Arias case is weird; the girl sounds seriously, clinically crazy.
Carl Nyberg
Astute observation that we live in separate media worlds.
There are people who follow the more serious conversation and people who follow the more titillating, less public policy oriented conversation.
'Niques
@cmorenc: People have a lurid fascination with the tawdry behavior of the “trailer trash” stratum of society. For one thing, it gives them examples of people they can unambiguously feel superior to.
This is why I call it Smug TV.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Baud: You have to be at least an upper middle class woman, or maybe gorgeous, you can’t be a trailer trash mama.
ricky
Getting obsessed with white women who kill their hubby, lover, roommie or babies is crucial in an era when high school football players from a crummy town digitally rape a drunk girl after a party. It keeps people from living with the fear they might have been the one in the texts or doing the texting.
But all in all it beats worrying about a crazy guy who brags about drowning government in a bathtub actually committing such a crime.
Ben Cisco
Haven’t seen (nor care to) any of the Arias trial, but from what’s been said in my presence, if she looked like Little Kim, the trial would’ve been over already.
kc
It’s not just you; I was stuck in car repair shop for a couple of hours last week and HLN was on the TV. It was two hours of Arias coverage, interspersed with little bits about the Steubenville trial. I’d heard of Arias but had no idea why her case merited such intensive coverage.
It was pretty … trashy. Like having the National Enquirer broadcast at you.
RareSanity
I have no idea what is going on with this Amanda Knox thing. Never even heard the name before.
The other two, I guess I could say that I am/was aware of them. But only to the extent that I recognize their faces from scattered cable news video clips. Mostly ones in doctor’s offices or the airport.
I just know that I constantly see them shown in courtrooms, and they seem to be the ones in trouble. But if someone were to ask me who Casey Anthony or Jody Arias were, without also showing me a picture of them, I would have absolutely no answer for them.
Full Metal Wingnut
You mean extradite *to* Italy. She’s back in the U.S., isn’t she? I would be very upset if our government sent her back.
I know that much of the time, our legal system (especially with regards to criminal justice) is a joke, but Italy’s is a fucking farce (I’ve often written how one of the things I love about America is that we have more of an emphasis on legal versus factual guilt, but it’s way beyond that).
Speaking of which, I wonder what that would mean for travel in Europe-would she have to worry about Interpol? Actually, if I went through an ordeal like that, I don’t think I would leave the U.S. for a long time after I returned.
The Moar You Know
Hot chicks who kill. What’s not to like? Everybody likes sex and danger; pairing the two is a no-fail package.
Woodrowfan
I knew about the Knox case because the British press I watch covered it when she was acquitted. And yeah, her prosecution would have made the Sacco/Vanzetti prosecutors say WTF??
The Moar You Know
@chocotoco: Russia is worse, if you can imagine.
99.6% conviction rate.
I have rubber stamps that are more impartial than that.
NonyNony
@Cassidy:
First of all – the people around here are clearly NOT your average citizen of the USA nor the average watcher of television. I don’t find it at all unbelievable that there would be a larger proportion of Anglophile TV viewers, PBS watchers and people whose TV consumption comes solely from downloaded Torrents on this site than the average population. I also don’t find it hard to believe at ALL that the people on this site avoid cable news like the plague – especially when you consider that mostly these “stories” are covered by Nancy Grace in search of ratings and blood to feed her insatiable demonic hunger.
Second of all – nobody actually watched Little Nicky. The large number of people who are reported to have bought tickets for Little Nicky are part of a Reptoid conspiracy to convince Adam Sandler that he shouldn’t put effort into his movies. If you found Little Nicky to by funny you are part of the problem and why Adam Sandler will never become a better actor.
maya
I still haven’t gotten over the Lizzie Borden acquittal.
The Moar You Know
@bemused: They cost literally nothing to produce and there’s a dismayingly large percentage of the population who would rather spend an hour of their lives imagining some poor fucker getting raped by large angry tattooed guys than doing something worthwhile, like, God forbid, picking up a book and learning something.
Keith G
Madonna/Wh0re/Assassin?
Three archetypes in one.
ricky
@NonyNony:
Living with the second hand guilt of possibly contributing to the “phone it in” thespianism of Adam Sandler is certainly incentive enough to strive for above average Americanism. Totebagger pride.
The Moar You Know
@NonyNony: I fall under most of your categories.
Torrents or more often for me, Amazon Prime these days. When the wife and I got married in 2010 I insisted that she get rid of cable. I hadn’t had it since 2000 and didn’t want to start again. Now we have this big screen on the wall and it just sits there. I’d hook a computer up to it but it’s plasma, and uses a really weird resolution that no video card supports.
Haven’t watched TV news since the early 2000s except for when I get my oil changed (they run a TV in there) or when I’m on travel and eat breakfast at the hotel (always a fucking TV in there, and it’s always on Fox). I do not understand how people can submit to that shit voluntarily. It’s not just the lies. I could deal with that. It’s that they transparently assume you’re stupid as a fucking rock.
As to Adam Sandler, I’ve seen seven movies in the last twenty years and he hasn’t been in any of them, so I’m not qualified to have an opinion.
Avery Greynold
If Krugman, Atrios, Digby and Pierce have no interest in it, I’m OK without it. After running these murder cases through Wikipedia, I feel dirty and think worse about humanity. Is that the attraction of it?
Cassidy
@NonyNony: You know you watched it and laughed. And you watched Grandma’s Boy. lol
I got nothing against well made TV and movies, although I’ll disagree on what well made means, my supreme distaste for anything helmed by Wes Andersen nonwithstanding. I just don’t understand the need, bordering on pathological, that people of intellect (which describes most of the people here) to assure people they aren’t watching the same TV and movies, watching the same news, and listening to the same pop music as others.
I just find it amusing. I watched the latest episode of Glee last night [With the kids. I had no interest. ;)], and it was about guilty pleasures. They were singing Wham!, the Spice Girls, Barry Manilow, and the whole time I was thinking, I’ll listen to the shit out of some Spice Girls and have the windows down. 80’s hair bands and glam rock? Crank it up. I don’t get it. There is no shame in participating in common culture.
Yutsano
@maya: Too soon?
MattR
@Cassidy: No discussion of how much Nickelback sucks is complete without a link to this video.
bemused
@The Moar You Know:
People who skip the evening MSNBC evening shows, Rachel, etc but regularly tune into prison palooza…weird.
Larkspur
@Robert: @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I didn’t follow the Knox case from the start. I just assumed she was guilty.
Then I read about it just as her acquittal was coming down – The Fatal Gift of Beauty, by Nina Burleigh. Burleigh goes into great detail about the Italian court system, the town of Perugia and its history, and (kind of depressingly) the international student scene, with its population of brash, uncertain, careless young people, and their inevitable sex and drugs experimentation. (And yes, I had hideous flashbacks.) It kinda makes you want to home-school your kids till they’re 30. Luckily I don’t have kids.
hitchhiker
Okay, I admit to knowing all about Amanda Knox. The others, no clue, don’t care.
I’m in the Amanda’s mom demo — couple of daughters, one of ’em gets into UW, wants to spend part of college junior year abroad, you take her out to SeaTac for the big adventure, next thing you know she’s in an Italian jail for murdering her roommate with a knife. And she stays there for years.
What?
It was a wretched story, start to finish, that all of us in the Amanda’s mom demo wanted to see come out right somehow. I still do.
Violet
I knew about the Amanda Knox story because it was on every news show when it was happening and now again it’s the lead story on the morning network shows. The whole thing seems awful. Didn’t some other guy–not Knox or her boyfriend–admit to the murder?
Semi-aware of the Casey Anthony story. Saw bits of interviews with various family members. Whole family seems crazy.
Only heard of the Jody Arias trial. Saw a clip of it on the news and had no idea who she was or what she was on trial for.
Robert
@Larkspur: I’m going to have to get that book. It looks fascinating.
I really want to understand how calling Knox a demonic sex-crazed drug-addled slut and praying to god that the demon be cast from the streets led to a conviction since that was all the prosecutors focused on. The stuff in the book about the town seems like a good place to start.
Larkspur
@Robert: Yeah, I think it’s worth reading. Amid all the historical and procedural analysis, Burleigh also tried to figure out Knox, and I think she does so perceptively.
At one point, late in the book, Burleigh says this:
Woodrowfan
yes, and he’s in prison now.
Unsympathetic
Arias admitted to being the murderer long ago, the trial is simply to determine death penalty or life without parole.
She was clingy, BF tried to leave on good terms, so she stabbed guy over 30 times and shot him in the head.
The reason for the fascination: Arias is a typical hot girl who attracts guys.. yet we see what horrible acts she has committed. So there’s a part of guys wondering: “Could I be attracted to a girl who’s actually like this?” The answer, of course, is yes.
Eric
The Knox case shouldn’t be lumped with the others. It deserved to be national news because it was a case of a US college student being railroaded by corrupt and incompetent foreign police. Something that anyone considering sending their kids on study abroad programs should be aware of.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
maybe smartwatches come with a cool app you can use to judge others for what they’re interested in, as long as it isn’t ‘owning a smartwatch’.
fuckwit
oj is still guilty.
Another Halocene Human
@cmorenc: She walks the streets despite causing a probably innocent person to commit suicide. Vile.
Another Halocene Human
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: I feel like they’re trying too hard to make Arias happen. These soap opera trials like OJ mean ratings and money.
Maybe it’s just Florida, but I still have coworkers bring up Casey Anthoney. For some reason they were hooked by the case. And this is while Arias is all over HLN. Nobody’s watching that shit. Duck Dynasty is on, y’all. And March Madness.
Another Halocene Human
@bemused: I was shocked to read that MSNBC’s prison shows are extremely lucrative for the cable network. I wonder who are these people who enjoy this crap and then think of the movie Idiocracy.
Now hold on a minute. I know people who watch those shows, maybe not obsessively, but they watch them.
One wanted to become a prison guard. It pays better than the job she had and after some attempts, she finally got it.
The others have family members, even brothers, who have been or are locked up. They could relate to what the juvenile offenders were going through and the shows also relate to fears they have for their families, for their own children. What happens when a working class parent’s child rearing isn’t successful. Watching prison drama was almost soothing. (Again, they were watching the juveniles. The stuff about adults in prison and their tattoo businesses under the noses of the wardens seems a bit more reality tv and I haven’t seen anyone watching that lately.)
Another Halocene Human
@Cassidy: L’il Nicky was hilarious. Never understood why people hate on that movie. Back when Sandler could make a funny movie.
Groucho48
I followed the Knox case at the time. Lots of interesting stuff going on. I didn’t follow the other two cases at all, but, I knew of them. Just like I don’t follow college basketball at all but I know about March Madness and kind of know the media storyline behind the teams that get to the semi-finals.
I don’t quite get folks who proudly proclaim they know nothing of current popular culture. I’m basically a hermit but I pick up snippets of stuff just from normal social interaction. Yes, watching Maury Povich daily is unhealthy, but, not even knowing who he is just seems to indicate a total isolation from the normal discourse of society.
dance around in your bones
Well, I’ll fess up.
I followed the Amanda Knox trial because (to me) it was obvious that she and her boyfriend were being railroaded by a crazy prosecutor and the insane Italian criminal justice system. The whole thing was surreal.
I followed the Casey Anthony trial because (to me) it was obvious that she was guilty – the lies she told to everyone, including the cops, her father (an ex-cop) smelling decomposition in the trunk of her car, and on and on. My theory (FWIW) is that she used to drug her kid and put her to sleep in the trunk of the car while she partied, and one night it went horribly wrong.
Never heard of the Arias case.
My husband used to watch Nancy Grace because he found her hilarious in a point and mock way – the frowns, shaking her head and shouting, the ridiculous “experts” she brought in who all seemed obliged to copy her style. The way she hounded that kid’s mom who committed suicide was execrable.
In my defense, we were in Baja and finally got DishMex which had a dearth of shows in English. We watched some shows in Spanish but it got tiresome for me to constantly have to translate for my husband, thus missing the next dialogue. Cappadocia was a great TV show in Spanish.
Perhaps it’s available w/subtitles now in the US.
For me, it’s more about the psychology and motivations of the people involved than anything else. Fascinating, Captain.
dance around in your bones
That link I provided about Cappadocia didn’t tell you much. Here’s a short summary:
Cassidy
@Another Halocene Human: It’s dumber than shit, but I love it.
dance around in your bones
And of course the TV series I mentioned is spelled Capadocia, one p.
It’s hard to type with a two yr old bouncing on your bed.
Robert
I followed the Casey Anthony trial to watch Nancy Grace’s head explode. I thought she’d be convicted until the trial started and the prosecutor went all science and no narrative. The jury had that hundred yard stare my students get when I start explaining theater history or music theory during rehearsal. They weren’t processing the science, but they sure as hell processed the defense’s all feeling tactics.
ShadeTail
I hadn’t heard even word-one of Casey Anthony until the verdict was announced. Then, suddenly, everyone and their cats were banging on about this woman I had never heard of before. And it wasn’t because I hadn’t cared to find out, I had just honestly never heard of her. I don’t watch TV, and nobody at the on-line or real-life haunts I inhabit had ever mentioned it.
I *still* have only one opinion about Casey Anthony: the people who actually cared about that case were fucking morons.
tatateeta
Nope. I don’t have cable and rarely watch TV.