Knox Freed

AP

Italian magistrate speaks, translator starts in, microphone starts in ringing, disrupts the work of the translator, who stops, deafness enveloping the courtroom scene like a surreal moment out of Twin Peaks.  "It's happening again..."  A momentary break in the feedback...  Guilty...  On the first charge of slander...  Three years...  The feedback takes over.  Newscasters scramble.  The closeup on Amanda jitters.  You can see her breathing fast and shallow.  Riiiiiiiiing...
Then her head collapses into her hands, sobbing.  The room reverberates--audiovisual recoil...
She is suddenly being led out rushed along a chain of functionaries of the court.  A moving line, propelling the crying girl forward in the line, toward the exit, past the flashing cameras.  The video feed shifts from camera to camera along what must be a similar parallel line, snaking its way out into the hallway, past the onlookers, through the functionaries and the photographers, all the way to the threshold of a second, smaller auxiliary hallway, bathed in florescent glow, green and narrow and receding into a catacomb of procedure.  Amanda is maneuvered through its opening and digested.
By now, the newscaster has finally figured it: not guilty of murder.  Time already served for slander.  She will be freed, presumably, when that narrow green hallway relaxes its grasp of her.