Amanda Knox has returned to the United States wearing the halo of victimhood for a crime she presumably did not commit. But it should not be forgotten that in her long journey toward exculpation, she blamed an innocent black man for the murder for which she was accused.

Diya "Patrick" Lumumba -- a Congolese-born resident of Italy -- owned a bar in Perugia that he named Le Chic. Knox worked there part time. When the Italian police questioned Knox about the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, she implicated Lumumba. He was promptly arrested. And yes, we've seen it all before. Before there was Amanda Knox, there was Charles Stuart.

Knox told Italian police in a written statement that she saw Lumumba enter Kercher's room on the evening of Nov, 1, 2007. She later admitted that this version of events was made up but implied that it was made up under duress. Knox's attorneys say that she blamed Lumumba after enduring 14 hours of nonstop questioning from police and prosecutors who had "breached her civil rights."

But what about the civil rights of the man she maligned, who spent two weeks in an Italian jail before Knox's story fell apart?

That brings me back to Charles Stuart in Boston. I was having a conversation with a friend one night in October of 1989 when a local TV news station reported a story so dreadful that we stopped midsentence: A white couple coming home from a birthing class at a local hospital in the city had lost their way and had ended up in a "dangerous part of town" near a black housing project.

While looking for a way out, they were allegedly attacked by a dark-skinned mugger who came out of nowhere and fatally shot Stuart's pregnant wife, Carol, and wounded Stuart. That was the story Stuart told and the story that the police and most of the news media swallowed whole.

After ingesting the TV report, my friend said, "Something's not right about this story." For one, he had grown up not far from that location and said that it would take some effort to "get lost" in the area where the shooting took place.