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)
No, male-like murder levels would be higher than genderless murder levels. And, if I understand correctly, most of the excess male murder rate involves gang-related violence, which in this case was pretty clearly not involved.
Anyway, I agree that if you are doing pure Bayesian inference you have to condition on all kinds of available evidence, including gender, race, social class, nationality, etc. But we can't expect courts to consider this kind of evidence, for good reasons (avoid creating self-fulfilling prophecies and avoid incentivizing crime within certain demographics).
...and what do you think that implies about whether female murder levels are lower as I claimed?
Yeah, no. Think about that a little bit. (Also, please note the irony of responding to criticism about not conditioning by claiming it would be neutralized by further conditioning.)