Her guilt or innocence has been the subject of hot debate for years, but a new report claims that American Amanda Knox is innocent of murdering her British roommate in 2007-and has only been targeted because she was an outsider in Italy.

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The article, an opinion piece by Nina Burleigh in the New York Observer, claims that Knox is in Italy what black men have been in the U.S. for some time-what she calls easy targets for prosecutors who make up their minds about guilt before truly examining evidence in a crime.

Burleigh begins her article by talking about time she had spent recently in Italy--the country whose judicial system has once again convicted Knox (as well as her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito) of murdering Knox's roommate Meredith Kercher-and talked about the Italian reaction to the recent Ferguson, Mo. riots in the U.S.

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'I spent the last few weeks in Italy, where the Ferguson riots were looped endlessly on TV," she wrote. "Alarmed Italian friends one after another took me aside to ask whether America was on the verge of collapsing into a race war."

"I explained that in fact, it's business as usual: Ferguson is only a small piece of the large, ugly truth, which is that our jails are packed with black males, many unfairly prosecuted or ill-defended and that police shootings of black men are unfortunately not unusual," she continued.

Burleigh then talks about the recent exoneration of two black men in North Carolina, Henry McCullom and Leon Brown, who were originally convicted of raping and murdering a child in 1983, and compared the European reaction to that crime (which saw the mentally-disabled brothers convicted by a DA who reportedly ignored other culprits), saying it gave them a sense of moral superiority that it shouldn't, because while the U.S. often targets outsiders as the ones who commit crimes, Italy targeted Knox in the same way.

"America's garish death rows, gun love and televised police brutality turns European stomachs, as it should but it also gives them a sense of moral superiority, which it should not," she wrote. "The truth is that powerless outsiders don't fare well in any justice system, including Europe's. I refer here to the ongoing saga of the Amanda Knox case, in which an outlier white female is the Italian version of the black man snapped in the jaws of a judiciary protecting itself with pit-bull ferocity."

Burleigh also defends herself against those who would call her someone who was paid by Knox's alleged massive PR machine that has worked tirelessly to defend her innocence, saying that if such a thing existed, Knox would have never been convicted-or served any jail time-in the first place.

'The Italians and Italy-based journalists who produced this idiotic meme forget, if they were ever aware, that Americans know how to run really effective 'massive PR campaigns'-and this wasn't one of them," she said. "A truly massive, American PR campaign on behalf of Amanda Knox would have had her out of Italy in a week or two. But her middle-class parents had no connections and no clue."

Knox was initially arrested for the murder of Kercher in 2007, alongside Sollecito, and a drifter, Rudy Guede. While Guede's trial was fast-tracked and he began serving a 16-year sentence, both Sollecito and Knox pleaded not guilty to the crime. They were convicted in 2009, but released after an appeal threw their convictions out in 2011. The two were reconvicted earlier this year, and are currently awaiting their final appeals trials either later this year or early next year.

If their convictions are upheld, Sollecito, who remains in Italy, would immediately begin serving a 26-year sentence. Knox, who resides in the U.S. would become the focus of an extradition battle. F extradited to Italy, she will face a 28 ½-year sentence.

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