Here are the New York Times, CNN, and NBC. Here is Wikipedia for background.
The case has made several appearances on LessWrong; examples include:
- You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event (December 2009)
- The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour Beats a Year in the Courtroom (December 2009)
- Amanda Knox: post mortem (October 2011)
- Amanda Knox Guilty Again (January 2014)
This makes for a good case study in base rate neglect. Girls like Amanda Knox almost never commit the type of murder she was accused of, so unless you have extremely compelling evidence you should think she is very likely innocent. Yet would we want our justice system to grant a higher presumption of innocence to pretty, smart, young women, then, say, lower class men?
No. This was already discussed here.
If she had been randomly sampled from the general population then the prior probability would have been exceedingly small, but she wasn't randomly sampled, she was investigated because she lived with the victim. When someone is murdered, there is a high probability that the perpetrator is somebody in a close or frequent relationship with them.
Realistically, the prior probability of Knox being a perpetrator would be around 0.01, the same for Sollecito, with high positive correlation between them.