Bbcsdis Before we begin, I just want to flag that this episode deals with adult themes sexual violence, drugs, and it contains some very strong language.

Hey everyone, it's Maggie.

I want to welcome you to the first of two special bonus editions of Hands Tied.

Before we dive in, I want to thank you all for listening to the series.

Truly, it meant a lot to me that you followed along with us as we went into Sandy's case, and I really appreciated reading all of your questions and comments throughout the series.

In this episode, I'm going to catch up with the Innocence Project of Texas for some new developments in Sandy's case.

But first I want to share a conversation I had with Amanda Knox.

Amanda, you might remember, was accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kircher in Italy.

As a brief synopsis of what happened in Amanda's case in two thousand and nine, following a trial that gripped the world's media, she was found guilty and sentenced to twenty six years in prison.

In twenty eleven, she and her ex who was accused of the same crime, were freed on appeal.

In twenty fourteen, after a retrial, she was once again convicted of murder, and then in twenty fifteen that conviction was overturned and both Amanda and her ex boyfriend were exonerated.

So I am very close friends with the folks at the Texas Innocence Project, and I was really struck by how much Sandy's case resembles mine, which is odd because my case and her case are not your typical women's wrongful conviction cases, right.

It's very different than men.

Like they're accused of something happening to some loved one in their care and they're held to blame.

And the typical way that they are held to blame is that people look at the way that they acted and say, are they grieving properly?

Are they giving us sort of weird, suspicious vibes by the way that they're responding emotively to the tragedy that has occurred.

So that is sort of a universal response to how women get judged in the aftermath of tragedies.

But what's really interesting about Sandy's case, which is similar to mine, is that she was accused of an actual crime that occurred to someone who.

She cared about, who she lived with, but it was.

A crime that was committed in all likelihood by a man who had broken into her home and assaulted her husband and her and locked her in a closet and locked him in a closet and just happened to murder him and not her.

It's pretty clear that Amanda believe Sandy is innocent, and that is of course her opinion, and she's entitled to it, but that's not why I wanted to talk to her.

And researching Sandy's case and refamiliarizing myself with amandas I too was struck by some of the similarities that Amanda sees.

I think people might famously know that when I was studying abroad in Perusia, Italy at twenty, someone broke into my home and raped and murdered my roommate.

And I thankfully was not present when this occurred, but I was the one who came home and found the crime scene.

Me and my boyfriend called the police.

And what's very similar between Sandy's case and my case is immediately immediately when the police arrive, they assume that the break in is staged, that it's all part of a conspiracy to cover up from what really took place, which is, there was some sort of domestic violence sit situation that resulted in murder, and even more specifically, there was some kind of sexual violence domestic violence situation that resulted in murder.

So Sandy's you know, celebrating her wedding anniversary with her husband so like it's kind of a sex game, and then she murders him and gets him in the closet and somehow somehow locks herself in a closet while being bound to such a degree that she has to be cut free.

Similarly, in my case, you know, the prosecution took one look at my house and said, there's no way that a burglar actually broke in the way that the burglar actually broke in, So there must be some kind of someone in the house is covering up for the crime.

And they almost immediately fell upon me as being the foreigner, the youngest person in the house, the person who called the police, and the person who they assumed was reacting in not the way that you would expect an innocent person to react.

So in Sandy's case, they're looking at her behavior, they're questioning her in the aftermath and she's apparently making some inconsistent statements, and then of course they're also looking at her behavior.

They look at you and they go are you making eye contact?

Are you avoiding eye contact?

Does it seem like you want to be there?

Are you really crying or are you fake crying?

Like there's all of these sort of subjective interpretations of Sandy's behavior where they are viewing her from a lens of guilt.

They have a gut feeling that she's guilty, and then they're viewing her in her responses to their questions in light of this view.

Very similar thing in my case.

You know, I'm in a foreign country, so I'm having to speak a foreign language while I'm being interrogated, and there's some inconsistencies to my statements.

I think one because of just language difficulties, like I'm trying to explain a thing with a language that I'm not familiar with, and so there's some fumbling along the way.

But also like one thing that.

I did lie about very early on was the fact that everyone in the house smoked marijuana, and I was very afraid.

In fact, I was told by my roommates, do not tell the police that we smoke marijuana because we'll get into trouble.

So I lied about that, and they use that as a kind of way to say, well, if she's lying about that, what else is she lying about?

And then it unfolds the way it does so, viewing young women or women in general in a moment of existential crisis and stress and interpreting their behavior with a guilt presumptive lens weirdly similar in these cases because like, how often is a woman accused of orchestrating a death orgy a sex crime and covering it up by making it look like a break in when in fact and actual break in took place.

Like that's where Sandy and my case are very very similar and connected.

Yeah, I think that the assumption is something that I really want to dial into because in her interrogation video, even the first time I watched it, you kind of can't help but have these assumptions of how you expect someone to act right after you know, seeing that your husband's died, to being interrogated, but then you know, you have to remember it's late at night.

She has medical histories, right, and like these assumptions that we have, just like you said, of how we expect women primarily to act in moments of trauma.

Well, I'm not saying that investigators are just trying to frame innocent people.

In fact, I do not think that that's what happened necessarily in Sandy's case or in my own case.

It's just that police officers are trained to have confidence in their gut judgments of people.

But the unfortunate reality is that they are human beings.

They are capable of making mistakes in their judgment.

But once you have that cognitive bias in place, you are going to interpret really subjective things, like subtle things of behavior, like is she making eye contact with me or not?

Is she looking to the left or not when she's speaking, Like maybe you know, in her case, she's looking to the left because she's struggling to remember, or because she's had a head injury, like and in my case, maybe I'm looking this way or that way because I'm trying to remember what word it is in Italian that I'm trying to say, you know.

So, like, there's there's so many innocent explanations for a person's behavior, and I find it really obnoxious when because you have assumed guilt, you just find fault in the person that you have accused.

And that's especially tragic in a case where we were victims of crime before we became victims of the criminal justice system.

Right, what an utter betrayal.

It's just a continued trauma on top of a trauma.

How much do you think those first couple hours in the police interrogation set the same for the rest of your trial and examination from the Italian prosecutors.

Well, unlike Sandy, I was actually questioned for a lot longer.

So I was questioned for around fifty three hours over five days.

And we've had to sort of figure out that because none of my actual questionings were videotaped or recorded, because the police claimed that they were never interrogating me, they were only interviewing me as a witness, which is really frustrating.

But anyway, so I was around ten hours of day with them in their custody, answering questions, sharing information, going over what I found when I came home to the crime scene, all of that, and I was told from the very beginning that I was their most important witness.

I was the one roommate who lived with Meredith, my roommate who was murdered, who was around her age, who knew her comings and goings, who knew her friendships.

So it made sense to me that I was spending so much time with the police to help them solve this crime.

But at no point was I ever informed that I was a suspect.

I was never given my Miranda rights or the Italian equivalent of them.

What ultimately transpired was the police accusing me of lying, accusing me of covering up for the actual murderer, gaslighting me, lying to me, telling me that I had actually witnessed the crime but I couldn't remember it because it was so traumatizing, and ultimately sort of feeding me this idea that my boss, who had texted me the night of the murder, was actually the murderer and I was covering for him.

And so I eventually was coerced under duress to believing them and signing statements to that effect.

And I am convinced that I never ever would have been arrested, imprisoned, put on trial, and convicted were it not for that interrogation.

There was simply no evidence that I had anything to do with this crime.

The only evidence that the police ever were able to, you know, put out there in regards to me was that I lived in the house where Meredith was murdered, and everything else was unreliable, speculative, all of that, and you know, like no motive.

In Sandy's case, no motive.

They say that she's trying to escape an unhappy marriage.

In my case, they say, oh, I basically was trying to escape an unhappy roommateship, you know, And it's just where's the evidence where you know, where's the evidence of that conflict?

They had just been celebrating.

They were just in the hot tub together.

So I think that before they can get the answers from the forensic evidence, instead, they're going to hyperfolk some people's behavior, and if they have a cognitive bias to the effect of assuming the guilt of a certain person, they're going to see what they want to see.

And in my case, they saw what they wanted to see, and they put me through an interrogation to get the statement that they wanted to get.

End of story.

And you know, there's something moving on to the trial that you wrote in your book, which I think connects directly to Sandy's case, and indulge me.

I'm going to read it to you, Okay, So often our courtrooms are not like laboratories where competing information is boiled.

Down to truth beyond a reasonable doubt, but.

More like battlegrounds were the most compelling story, not the most truthful wins.

And I think Sandy's case to a lot of the jurors, you know, I spoke with one of the jurors, and to him, the prosecution had a better story.

It made more sense.

They were able to show a theory of how the prosecution believed that Sandy would be able to tie her hands and to lock herself in the closet.

To him, he felt like the defense didn't have that strong of a story.

So I'd love to kind of just cure your reactions to that and how story is such a big thing.

When it comes to trials and murder.

Yeah, I look at the prosecutions story in Sandy's case and I go, well, that's a much more interesting story.

Compelling in the sense that it's way more interesting.

The idea that a woman orchestrated this like sex game murder of her husband and then very cunningly tied herself up and locked herself in a closet.

That's interesting, But does it make sense?

I don't think so.

I think that what's interesting about that for me is I look at what might be the psychology of a juror who might connect the idea that an interesting story means that it makes more sense, like for some reason, it's a sticky story, a story sorry that stays in our head.

But does that mean that it actually makes sense.

That's where the disconnect for me happens, because I think it makes a lot more sense in both Sandy's in my case to just you know Ockham's razor this thing and go.

It looks like a break in, It smells like a break in, It talks like a break in.

It's a break in, like someone broke into the house and murdered somebody and took advantage of a situation, like a vulnerable situation.

So they said that in my case, you know that the window that the burglar broke into, he couldn't physically actually break into it when he has a history of breaking into second story windows.

They say that nothing was stolen from the house, Well, what do you mean nothing was stolen from the house, Like Meredith's money was gone, her keys were gone, her phones were gone.

They were stolen.

But because you have reinterpreted the facts of the case to be oh, well, that was just part of the staged break in.

Now you are just reinterpreting actual facts and saying that they aren't what they appear to be.

So again, I find it incredibly frustrating when and I feel so horribly for Sandy, and I wonder if this is the reason why I am free today and she is not.

Is that DNA evidence was found at the crime scene that the prosecution was not intending to find.

It was sort of inevitably found because my roommate was sexually assaulted and viciously attacked, and the murderer left copious quantities of his DNA all over the crime scene, on her body, in her belongings, his footprints and fingerprints were left in her blood.

It was very bad, but also it was inevitable that they were going to discover this person, whether they intended to or not, that he was involved in the crime.

And I think the twist with my story is even though they found that evidence of the intruder, they just decided to reinterpret that evidence of the intruder as, oh, well, it's not really a break in.

Yes, he has a history of breaking entering but in this case, he was let into the house by Amanda and just happened to be there to commit the crime with her.

Like that's the level of like twisting that the prosecution has to do to make sense of their theory.

In Sandy's case, there was unknown DNA found at the crime scene, but it remains unknown.

And as jurors, as people in society, we do not like we do not like cases to be unsolved.

And so if we have a person who's put in front of us to take the responsibility for a crime, and the police are telling us this is the person, we want to believe that the police are not just going to put an innocent person, just a random innocent person in front of us.

Where there's smoke, there must be fire.

And therefore, I think we too are inclined to be guilt presumptive, even in a situation where technically we are supposed to be hearing the various stories coming at us with truth beyond a reasonable doubt at the core of our reasoning.

But I think that that is a lot to request of human beings who want to find closure.

We are instinctively drawn towards closure and wanting some kind of finality and sense that the universe makes sense that somebody just couldn't be randomly assaulted and murdered.

So We're just going to take a quick break and then I'll be back with Amanda Knox when she talks Pixie Girls and prison hustles, amongst other things.

Welcome back.

I'm going to continue my conversation with Amanda.

We're pretty much the same age, and when I was reading her most recent book, I really was struck by some similarities, some similarities I wanted to share with her.

I just want to say personally, like I finished your book yesterday and I couldn't help it feel so much similarity to you, because I think I was around the same age that you were abroad, And like when you talk about Sailor Moon, I was like, I am regressing and have a Sailor Moon phone case.

Right now, Yes, girl, And like Harry Potter, and like I just like really felt for you, and like putting myself in the shoes of being twenty in a new country, totally naive and then being thrown into I can't imagine being thrown into the justice system here, let alone in another country.

Yeah, and I have actually another little like thing that I'm actually working on like a little stand up bit about because we're also have to remember that in two thousand and seven it was also like peak of manic pixie dreamgirl vibes, where like it was really cute to like strom a ukulele and dye your hair pink and just like be a sort of goofy girl up until your roommate gets murdered and then you become a law and Order episode because everyone's like, oh, you're a freaking psychopath.

So yeah, you know.

I Unfortunately, we weren't granted the right to interview Sandy.

It was denied because she's in a medical facility.

But I have been able to write to her and she kind of took me through the daily hum drums of prison, you know, the structure of it, and you know, one of the major takeaways and just reading that is that her world has become so small now.

And I'm wondering, you know, just from your experience, is that a self preservation technique?

How do you start to cope when your world just becomes smaller and smaller.

Well, I think that different people respond differently.

I know that my first two years of imprisonment, I was living in a kind of state of denial that I was.

I felt like I was living somebody else's life by mistake.

I also spent a significant amount of that time in isolation.

So when I was arrested, I was not immediately thrown into gen POP.

I was held in isolation for eight months, and so there was this weird limbo space period while the investigation was ongoing that I was like not a part of the greater world of the prison environment.

And then I was putting into gen Pop after the investigation closed after eight months of imprisonment, and then I spent another good amount of time in prison before I was actually convicted.

And I got through it by really believing in the justice system and believing that the truth would win out, and that eventually, once the adults sort of all gathered into the room and agreed beyond a reasonable doubt, I was going to go home.

I was going to get back to my life.

So I was just sort of waiting to live, and I was waiting to live in a very very scary, very foreign, very punitive environment.

But I was very much mentally feeling like I'm not here, I'm out there.

I'm writing letters to my family every day, I'm writing letters to my friends, every day, I'm reading books.

I'm just like hanging in there until I can get my life back.

And then everything shifted for me after I got convicted and I was facing a twenty six year sentence, and I realized that my life was not somewhere else out there, It was right here in the prison.

This was my life, and I was almost wasting my opportunities to live by waiting to live.

Like I started looking around me and going, Okay, what possibilities do I have to live in here?

And they were very limited?

Right, Like I cannot open a single door, There's very few people I can talk to.

I only have one ten minute phone call a week.

I only have one visitation a week that lasts for an hour, and only very specific people can come visit me.

I have very few opportunities in life.

I my opportunities weirdly expanded once I looked around me in the prison environment, and I realized that many of the women that I was in prison with were actually very less privileged than me, despite me being the innocent person in prison, and how unfair that was.

Like all of these guilty women around me did not have loved ones who cared about them could not read and write, were you know, dealing with mental illness or drug addiction.

I had none of those problems, and so I discovered that I could develop a prison hustle, so a sense of purpose in prison, where I started writing and reading people's letters for them, helping them understand their court documents.

And it became this like invaluable resource that both selfishly elevated me within the prison, you know, hierarchy as someone to not fuck with, you know, like you don't want to, you know, like this is Amanda writes our letters for us, do not bother her, you know.

And on the flip side, it was helpful to other people.

And so the possibilities for any single person in prison are very very limited, but they are there.

It's just that, you know, for me, surviving in prison meant that I took everything day by day.

I did not have dreams of my future.

I had a really hard time imagining how I could live a fulfilled life in prison, and I had to grieve the things that were stolen from me, like the possibility of having children.

Women who are imprisoned, and especially for long sentences, are facing our biological clocks running out while we are in prison, and so not only do we lose, you know, the opportunity of a career or anything like that, but we lose the opportunity of having a family of our own.

And I had to grieve that and try to imagine a life worth living that didn't have that aspect to it, and it was really, honestly too difficult for me to imagine.

So I instead focused on how do I make today worth living?

And I'll figure out tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Yeah, And I imagine.

You know, Sandy doesn't have the same circumstances, but it's a similar thing of the connections that she can get with her grandchildren, the connections that she can get with her daughter.

You know, one thing that you talk about which you know, even though I didn't get to meet Sandy in person, I do know her daughter and I spent a couple days with her in London.

And you know, Liz really talks about and you talk about it in your book too, as this before and after where she really remembers who she was before her dad's.

Murder and her mom's imprisonment and who she is now.

And you know, she talks about similar things that you talked about in your most recent book of not being able to trust anybody to feeling, you know, a gloraphobic, And I think that that would be a great thing if you could just kind of talk about your own experience of those two identities, you know, and I imagine please correct me if I'm wrong.

You know, you were talking about.

This fantasy of maybe getting out what life will be like, maybe isn't what you fantasize, and how you sort of start to make sense of this new life.

Yeah, I look back on my life and see it as as I've lived three distinct lives, right Like, there's before I was arrested for a crama didn't commit, and then there's the life that I lived in prison, and then there is the life that I have lived since I've been fully exonerated.

And they are very very different lives and very different people in a way who lived those lives, right Like, since you know, getting out of prison, I went back to Italy, because you know, while I was in prison, I had this fantasy that as soon as I got out, I would get to go back.

To that life of before prison.

I would get to go back to being the anonymous college student who was, you know, studying languages and doing creative writing, and this horrible thing that just happened to me that didn't really have anything to do with me would fade away.

Like it would go away.

And I was very rudely awakened to the reality that that was not the case when I got home, not just because I was still on trial after being released from prison, and the media were, you know, following me around, and I was still the girl accused of murder in the in the public imagination, I could never go back to being an anonymous person in the world, like I was carrying the stigma of that accusation forever with me from an external point of view.

But on top of that, there is the realization that the girl that nothing bad had ever happened to no longer existed.

And I was carrying with me a deep knowledge and experience of suffering that I didn't have before that had changed me and that I now was burdened with having.

To make sense of.

And it it changed me.

I mean, like I had emotions that I'd never really felt before, a big one being rage.

I was not somebody who experienced rage when I was a kid.

Like that was deep deep existential angst or I was never the kind of person who was triggered by being around other people.

Or there was this period of time and I got out when everyone in my family sort of had to walk around on eggshells around me because they didn't know what kind of thing was going to set me off, and because they had not, you know, walked through the prison experience alongside me, They had not been in the interrogation room with me, And so there were things that I experienced in the real world that had like just a little bit of resonance, or even just something like walking down the sidewalk and glimpsing somebody out of the corner of my eye who reminded me a lot of one of my cellmates.

And then immediately I'm just like back on the prison block, and I'm just and I have to like get that out of my head so I can just keep on walking to my job at the bookstore.

Right Like, there are these.

Things, like you feel haunted by these experiences that you've gone through, and you have to make sense of them in order to feel like you are not just utterly debilitated by them, which is the journey that I then describe in my new book, which is taking the question of like now what now that I've gone through this?

Now what how do I have a place in the world after this?

How do I trust people after this?

How do I trust myself after all of this?

Those are big questions that anyone who has gone through trauma is going to face, but especially someone who has been again victimized by crime and the criminal justice system, those institutions like collapsed beneath her, beneath me?

And how do.

You rebuild a sense of stability and confidence in the world and in humanity after having that taken away from you?

Right, We've all had loss, We've all had a.

Worse moment of our lives.

We've all had something happened to us that was out of our control.

And it is finding that common ground that we can see each other and support each other.

Beautifully said, thank you so much.

Yeah, I think so often it's hard for us to fathom what it's like going through something like Amanda did.

But if we can focus on the universal experiences she flagged, like loss, grief, having something happen to us outside of our control, it may help us better understand each other in the different.

Paths all our lives take.

So I want to thank Amanda again for taking the time to chat with me, and after a quick break, I'll catch up at the Innocence Project of Texas and hear some of the latest developments in Sandy's case.

So again, welcome back, appreciate you staying with us.

Before we hear from the Innocence Project of Texas, a quick reminder of where things were left.

Back in twenty twelve, on the night Jim's body was found, the police swapped the crime scene for DNA and took away more than one hundred bits of evidence for further testing, but because they were low level samples, many didn't reveal much.

As we heard in the last episode, technology has come a long way since then, and the Innocence Project is trying to get some of those bits of evidence retested.

We heard about the murder weapon, the knife that was found in the jacuzzi, and how a new test showed Jim's DNA was found on it, but so is at least one other person's, someone who isn't Sandy or anyone else in the family.

Now, other samples from the crime scene have been reanalyzed, like the fabric that was used to tie Sandy up in the closet where she was found, and Mike Ware from the Innocence Project of Texas explains what those tests reveal.

The bindings on Sandy.

They have reanalyzed the data taken from the swabs from the bindings on her arms and hands, and they have determined that her DNA's on there, but so is an unknown person's DNA on there.

It's not anybody in the families.

It doesn't belong to them who originally found her and untieder.

It is an unknown DNA.

Now it's not redundant of what's on the knife handle, which does tells us there were two people.

So there's Sandy's DNA as you'd expect on the bindings used to tire up, but there's also someone else's DNA, and that DNA is different to the DNA on the knife.

There's no reason to believe there was not at least two people.

I have no reason to believe there weren't two people.

One person's DNA on the bindings of Sandy, another person's DNA on the murder weapon, which I think is enough that she should win a writ on.

That, a writ of habeas corpus, which basically means they're asking for a federal court to re review Sandy's case because they believe she is wrongly in prisoned.

When you look at the evidence at trial vs.

IV, this new evidence, it's very powerful.

And then we decided that we wanted to DNA test the hair or hairs that were in Jim's hand.

They're fairly short, rootless hairs in around his hand.

This is not you know, a case where he was shot by a gun from across the room.

He was in a struggle that resulted in you know, however, many stab and cut wounds, and so this was a very as they say, up close and personal.

So if he has a hair or hairs, regardless of the fact that they're very short and rootless in his hands, that belonged to an unknown individual, once again, we would say that it's highly likely that that unknown individual that is not Sandy and is not him, is the person he was struggling with in his you know, last moments.

And the judge has signed the order ordering that done, ordering that testing done.

And so that's the first step to kind of start to figure out whose hair, If it isn't Gems or Sandy's, whose it could possibly.

Be well, it belongs to the murderer who's not Sandy.

That's whose it is.

Now.

The only way to identify whose it is is to have an alternative suspect and get a profile from that alternative suspect and do a side by side and if it's a match, that in and of itself might not be enough to convict that person because the numbers are not that high.

I know, in our last conversation you were saying that justice is very much a marathon and not a sprint.

But in terms of these new developments and these new angles, where are you on the hope spectrum?

I feel very cautiously optimistic.

And the thing about getting back into court and getting a judge involved, I mean, the DA's office has been very cooperative with us, but having a judge involved and having a formal motion and this is a formal what we call Chapter sixty four motion for post conviction DNA testing, we've got kind of those guardrails that you know, we've got a judge pushing us along too, so hopefully that will speed the process.

Well.

I hope that you'll keep us posted on how it goes in these results, because it seems like things are moving in ways that when the last time we talked it, it seems like there's more momentum now.

I think so, I think so.

Yeah.

We will continue to be following this story as it progresses, and I hope we'll be able to update you with any major developments.

Not to be all like in subc but liken subscribe and any new updates will be uploaded to the feed.

Next week.

I'm going to get into some of the stuff that didn't quite make it into the series, including more on the home invasions that we're plaguing parts of Texas in twenty twelve.

I hope you'll stay with us, and I hope to see you next week.

Thanks you've been listening to Hands Tied.

I'm Maggie Robinson Katz and the producer is Maggie Latham.

Sound design and mix is by Tom Brignoll.

Our script consultant is Emma Weatherall production support is from Dan Martini, Elena Boutang, and Mabel Finnigan Wright, and our production executive is Laura Jordan Raul.

The series was developed by Anya Saunders and Emma Shaw at iHeart.

The Managing Executive producer is Christina Everett.

And for BBC Studios.

The executive producer is Joe Kent.