Latest news with #wronglyAccused
Daily Mail
28-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
I was wrongly identified as Liverpool parade crash suspect after keyboard warriors shared my picture online
A man who was wrongly accused of driving a car into a crowd of Liverpool FC fans on Monday has hit out at the keyboard warriors who shared his photo online, blasting them for 'making money' with false accusations. Peter Cunningham, a father of three from Huyton on the eastern outskirts of the Merseyside city, found himself at the centre of an armchair detective probe after a man ploughed into fans on Water Street at 6pm on Monday, injuring 79. Mr Cunningham, 54, had his picture circulated online by keyboard warriors who were fervently trying to identify the suspect after Merseyside Police released information on the driver's identity. Ironically, the force is thought to have released some information on the suspect - a 53-year-old white British man from Liverpool - in order to avoid a repeat of the storm of misinformation online in the wake of the Southport attacks. But Mr Cunningham was wrongly fingered by social media ghouls as the man responsible despite the fact he is the wrong age, and from another area of Liverpool. He has, however, been forced to take the unprecedented and unusual step of denying it is him to bat off amateur sleuths. He told several media outlets today that he was not at the parade in Liverpool city centre on Monday afternoon - and has called on the police to release the name of the man currently under arrest. He told the BBC: 'It's not me. The police need to do something.' And speaking to the Liverpool Echo, Mr Cunningham said his phone began ringing off the hook as news of the incident in the city centre broke. He said: 'I'm stressed out, I don't need it all. It's a bad thing that has happened and the police need to do something about it and get his name out there. 'Other people's names have been shared. I was getting phone calls off family members and friends saying, 'What the hell is going on?'. 'These YouTubers and people on social media are just sharing it to make money.' UK police forces do not typically release the names of individuals suspected of crimes until they have been charged. A Merseyside Police spokesperson said: 'We have arrested a 53-year-old man from West Derby and he remains in police custody where he continues to be interviewed.' Earlier, the force said suggestions that anyone else has been arrested were 'incorrect'. Merseyside Police is thought to have released information on the identity of the suspected attacker promptly after its failure to do so in the wake of the Southport attacks stoked a fire of misinformation. Trolls claimed a Muslim illegal immigrant had carried out the attack at a Taylor Swift-themed summer holiday club last July. In reality, the killer was Axel Rudakubana, a British teenager born to Christian parents - but the misinformation nevertheless fuelled anti-immigration protests outside asylum hotels and riots in town centres across the country. Amateur sleuths have also been criticised for trying to get involved in high-profile police investigations, such as that of missing mother Nicola Bulley. TikTok trolls were seen trudging through areas close to where she disappeared, and had made cruel allegations that her friends were 'crisis actors' somehow covering up her true fate. It prompted Lancashire Police, which investigated her ultimately tragic death, to hit out at TikTokers for 'been playing (at being) their own private detectives'. Nevertheless, social media continues to ferment with speculation as to the identity of the driver in the Liverpool incident. A man thought to be the driver remains under arrest on suspicion of attempted murder, driving offences and driving while unfit through drugs. Some 50 people, including four children, needed hospital treatment following the carnage at the end of the Premier League champions' open-topped bus celebrations on Monday evening. Eleven victims were stable and recovering well in hospital last night, but police sources said it was a miracle no one had died. The attack occurred just after 6pm on Water Street, a road off The Strand – the main thoroughfare in front of the Royal Liver Building – which the team bus had passed moments before, as supporters walked home. Horrifying footage shows fans being catapulted into the air and some trapped under the wheels. Fire crews extracted four people, including a child, from under the vehicle. Mobile phone footage from neighbouring Dale Street shows the driver blasting his horn at fans, some of whom strike the vehicle with their fists and feet. He is thought to have tailgated an ambulance, rushing to help a suspected heart attack victim, through a roadblock and into the throngs of jubilatory fans. A source told the Mail that the incident was 'more road rage, not terror'. 'It seems the driver was panicked or frightened or both, but what happened next was terrible,' they said. Assistant Chief Constable Jenny Sims, of Merseyside Police, told reporters yesterday: 'An extensive investigation into the precise circumstances of the incident are ongoing, and we continue to ask people not to speculate on the circumstances surrounding the incident and refrain from sharing distressing content online.'
Globe and Mail
09-05-2025
- Globe and Mail
In new memoir, Amanda Knox looks for the sweet spot between anger and peace
Amanda Knox is still angry. When the writer, podcaster and advocate for the wrongly accused reflects on her experience, she still feels the tug of fury at what the system put her through: Her arrest as a college student in Perugia, Italy, for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. A trial and conviction. An appeal that saw this conviction overturned. A second trial and conviction in absentia. And a final, complete exoneration by Italy's supreme court in 2015. Knox spent four years in Perugia's Capanne prison prior to her first conviction being overturned in 2011, at which point she went home to her family in Seattle, where she was finally able to indulge in the luxury of rage at her situation. Books we're reading and loving: Globe readers share their picks 'Rage is an emotion that can make you vulnerable, ultimately. It makes you a little off kilter. It makes you impulsive,' she says over a Zoom call. 'I went very numb to those kinds of feelings when I was in prison.' It's a bit strange to hear Knox talk this way. In conversation, the 37-year-old exoneree, activist, wife and mother of two appears grounded and sanguine, quick to laugh even as she is describing the kind of harrowing experience most people could not imagine enduring. The kind of easy forthrightness Knox exudes is also apparent in her second book, Free: My Search for Meaning, which describes her prison experience, life after her release and attempts to reclaim her own identity following a legal ordeal that also saw her become front-page tabloid fodder internationally. In one respect, the media frenzy that surrounded Knox and turned her into a public figure in her early 20s was predictable given the elements the case threw up. There was the pretty, young American abroad searching for adventure and experience; her Italian boyfriend of five days, Raffaelle Sollecito, who became her co-defendant and was similarly convicted, and subsequently exonerated, for Kercher's murder; the prosecution's accusation that the killing was the result of sex games gone awry. So focused did the media become on Knox and the persona they created for her, they more or less ignored the figure of Rudy Guede, whose fingerprints and DNA were all over the crime scene and who was convicted in a fast-track trial for the sexual assault and murder of Kercher. Knox's resentment toward the media establishment is fervid, and justified to the extent that the media did not act as a locus of sober analysis so much as a vehicle to cash in on the most salacious and prurient elements of the story. 'They did not care what the truth was. They were just crafting a story and perpetuating it because it made money,' Knox says. 'Journalism itself is in a moment of crisis because content is so cheap and opinions are so cheap. But actual investigations and objective truth come at too high a cost.' Sex has always sold, and the notion of a crime that centred on an attractive white woman fed into persistent stereotypes of the Madonna-whore dichotomy that continue to dominate a supposedly more enlightened, post-#MeToo era. 'There's this idea that all women hate each other and are secretly in sexual competition with each other and you're either a free-spirited whore or an uptight virgin and ne'er shall the twain meet,' Knox says. 'A deep part of ourselves don't question it when we see that story presented to us.' Questioning deeply entrenched beliefs – about freedom, justice and society – is something that has been forced upon Knox by her experience. This condition is at the heart of her new book, which takes its subtitle from Viktor Frankl, the late psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor whose book Man's Search for Meaning Knox read while incarcerated. Frankl's text helped inform the attitude Knox adopted both inside prison and once she was released, an attitude that recognizes what she has gone through and does not try to deny or minimize it but instead use that experience to develop psychological strength and resilience. 'It is to provide a methodology for encountering the challenges that we face in life and not feel like they are meaningless and just live in a state of utter despair because of them,' Knox says. 'Ultimately, that feeling of being trapped in your life and having things happen to you that you didn't deserve, then having to make meaning out of those things, is a universal experience.' Her attempt to take some measure of control while inside found her reaching out to fellow inmates, many of whom were illiterate, to read and translate legal documents and other correspondence. After her incarceration, Knox took up a position on the board of the Innocence Center, a California non-profit dedicated to advocating for the wrongfully accused. In each instance, she has positioned herself as a support worker advocating for the kind of justice she wishes the legal establishment had shown her. 'I very much am in the business of calling out injustice when I see it,' she says. 'That's where rage is useful. Because rage is the signal to me that something unjust is happening.' One of those injustices is very close to home: the continuing accusations that Knox is exploiting her experience at the expense of her dead friend's memory. 'One of the most difficult things I've encountered since coming home is affirming that my life matters too,' Knox says. 'That what I experienced does not take away from the traumatic thing that happened to Meredith.' Knox credits Christopher Robinson, her husband and the father of her two children, with providing her room to deal with her post-traumatic stress and, importantly, not expecting her to be perfect. 'I do not feel that kind of pressure in my own home,' she says. 'My husband can see me when I'm angry and can hear me vent, knowing that once I have been able to express my rage to myself, I can then approach the world in the way I want to, which is not with rage at the forefront.' Which is not to deny these negative emotions, which Knox understands will probably stay with her for the rest of her life. But the sense one gets from speaking to her is that she is now able to channel her anger into more positive avenues, including her children, her family and her activism. She finds empowerment in locating common ground with others, even those who seem antagonistic. To that extent, she describes in her book a trip she took back to Italy to confront Giuliano Mignini, the Italian prosecutor who led the case against her in court. It seems like an act of radical empathy to extend an olive branch to the man who was responsible for sending her to prison, but it also appears to be a central part of her character. The final result of all Knox's attempts to wrest meaning from her experience, to find a calm centre in her life's chaos, is not rage but something altogether more surprising. When asked if she is happy, Knox is unequivocal. 'I'm very happy. I feel very, very lucky. I have a beautiful home and a beautiful life and I'm alive and I feel very purposeful and at peace with the way things are.'
