With a few short sentences, it was over. In a crowded courtroom in Perugia, an Italian court found Amanda Knox not guilty, on appeal, of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox had spent the last few minutes before the judgment grimacing from stress and occasionally sobbing. She was found guilty only of slander — for what she had alleged was a forced confession — in which she accused a local nightclub owner of the assault, a crime ...

On a cold rainy day last week, curious Parisians packed a dingy courtroom in the Palais de Justice to hear a red-robed judge pronounce sentence on Mathilde Carre. She was a pert, petite woman with bangs —the very picture of a Parisian gamine. The French thought they understood Mathilde, though they could not forgive her.Daughter of a substantial family of professional soldiers, Mathilde Carre was on the loose in Paris just after the German conquest. She was young, attractive, divorced, and she found it all too ...

One afternoon when Joanne was nine years old she came home from school and noticed something missing. Her father's jewelry box had disappeared from its usual spot on her parents' bureau. Worse, her mother was still in bed. "Daddy's moved out," her mother told her. Joanne panicked. She began to sob. And even though Joanne is 40 now, a married Los Angeles homemaker with children of her own, she clearly remembers what she did next that day. Her vision blurred ...

Like many other popular attractions in Orlando, the Casey Anthony trial requires tickets. Hundreds of people show up each day to watch the murder case unfold. But only those who arrive well before 8 a.m. and wait in June swelter can get a pass allowing them into the soaring, chilly top-floor courtroom where Anthony is trying to avoid the death penalty. Anthony is accused of murdering her 2-year-old, Caylee, in 2008. In December of that year, investigators found ...

"Wanted: Employment as mercenary on full-time or job contract basis. Preferably in South or Central America, but anywhere in the world if you pay transportation. Contact Gearhart, Box 1457, Wheaton, Md. 20902." That ad appeared last January in Soldier of Fortune, a magazine aimed at military buffs and mercenaries. It got Daniel Gearhart, 34, a Viet Nam veteran who was deeply in debt from family medical bills, a job the next month as a mercenary in the Angolan civil war. ...

The aging bosses seated at the defense table in the packed federal courtroom in lower Manhattan look harmless enough to be spectators at a Sunday-after noon boccie game. Anthony Salerno, 75, the reputed head of the Genovese crime family, sits aloof and alone, his left eye red and swollen from surgery. White-haired Anthony Corallo, 73, the alleged Lucchese family chief, is casual in a cardigan and sport shirt. Carmine Persico, 53, is the balding, baggy-eyed showman of ...

In a packed courtroom on the 13th floor of 100 Centre Street, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, dressed in a black suit, stood before Judge Michael J. Orbus and calmly said "not guilty." Although he didn't say much else, the defense that the former director of the IMF and his lawyers — who proclaimed his plea a "powerful statement" of his innocence — will now most likely begin building is that his encounter with the Sofitel employee was consensual. Early ...

Court on Thursday, June 2, started in typical Rod Blagojevich style. The former Illinois governor arrived and signed autographs in front of the Dirksen Federal Building. The day, however, ended in blistering fashion. "Mr. Blagojevich, you are a convicted liar, right?" U.S. assistant attorney Reid Schar boomed into the courtroom late that afternoon. And in response, Blagojevich flung back a yes — over his lawyer's objections. The long-awaited cross-examination was under way, and like two caged animals posturing to ...

Socrates, the famed Greek philosopher, made a rare public appearance on May 12, in the Ceremonial Courtroom of Manhattan's Federal Courthouse. In fact, he took the corporeal form of famed defense attorney Benjamin Brafman, currently representing embattled IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was highly animated in his defense against the millennia-old impiety and corruption charges levied against the Athenian. Fortunately, there was not a toga to be seen in the audience. The court was in session on a ...

Tareq and Michaele Salahi were hoping for reality TV stardom when they strolled uninvited into a Nov. 24 White House state dinner. Legal experts say the party-crashing duo may have to settle for the reality of a courtroom fight instead — and possibly a prison cell. "There's no question the Secret Service is likely to push very hard for a criminal charge," says George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. "They are famous for lacking a sense of ...