The Tension Between Evidence and Storytelling in the Trial of James Hanratty

easy criticisms of their work. It seems safer to conclude that a convincing case could be made for Knox and Sollecito’s guilt or for their innocence.

If so, the Italian courts had simply illustrated the nature of truth as a social artefact: the truth is not what is, but what is agreed on. We are so accustomed to the words of the courtroom oath, which invoke ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’, that it is easy to operate with the assumption that the truth has an existence which is independent of all inquiries about it. The opposite perspective has been well expressed by philosopher Richard Rorty (1989 : 3) who wrote that ‘the truth is made, not found’. Applied to criminal cases, we would say that although the courts – and almost everyone else – usually operate as if the truth is found, they are actually constructing it. Two courts concluded that Knox and Sollecito were guilty and two concluded that they were not. Thus, perhaps we need to question if there is any point in clinging to some notion of an ultimate truth about the case that could somehow be ‘found’. As Nobles and Schiff (2000) observe, justice is always contested and uncertain.

To work with a vision of the truth as made is not to abandon a commitment to standards. Indeed, so much of the work that goes into the methods for collecting, handling and analysing evidence is designed precisely to aim for the highest standards possible, which is why courts in the legal domain – just like scientists in the research domain – can make legitimate, authoritative and convincing claims about the nature of events. Even for truths that are made there are better and worse standards of manufacture. The ‘best’ truths are those that are constructed with the best methods and, hopefully, subscribed to by the great majority of observers. But of course, they are always provisional, in the sense that new information or a new way of looking at the information might lead to a diff erent conclusion. In criminal cases, the ‘facts’ are only those bits of information that people agree about, or at least do not choose to question. And what the facts of a case will be, what is accepted rather than challenged, depends on the positions taken up by accuser and accused. In one case, all may agree that the defendant shot the victim but disagree about whether or not the defendant intended to do it; in another case, the accused and the accuser may lock horns over whether or not the accused is the shooter.

Viewing the truth as made, not found, leads to a diff erent perspective on criminal cases, both for those directly involved and those who are not. For those directly involved, it implies that the truth is actively constructed, and indeed the chapters in this book are concerned with the process of manufacture, sometimes conscious and explicit, at other times imperceptible or nearly so. For those who are not directly involved, despite the temptation it does not make much sense to ask if the accused was guilty or innocent but why they were judged to be guilty or innocent. For example, in the Knox/ Sollecito case, the key question for the uninvolved observer should not