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Italian court: 'Stunning flaws' led to Amanda Knox conviction

Italy’s highest court acquitted Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, her former boyfriend, of the 2007 murder of the British university student Meredith Kercher, because there were “stunning flaws” in the investigation that led to their convictions, according to judges’ legal reasoning.

A panel of judges at the court of cassation in Rome found that the state’s case against the pair, who were definitively cleared of murder in March, lacked enough evidence to prove their wrongdoing beyond a reasonable doubt, and cited a complete lack of “biological traces” in connection to the crime.

Related: Meredith Kercher murder: Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito acquitted

The 52-page legal motivazioni, published on Monday, detailed the reasons for the stunning acquittal of Knox, an American exchange student, and Sollecito, who each served four years in prison for the murder of Kercher before they were released and then retried.

Releasing the details involved in a court decision months after a verdict has been announced is common practice in Italy’s highest court.

“The trial had oscillations which were the result of stunning flaws, or amnesia, in the investigation and omissions in the investigative activity,” the judges wrote in their decision.

The judges also said that the probe into the murder was ultimately hindered by the fact that investigators were under pressure to come up with answers once the case became prominently covered in media around the world.

“The international spotlight on the case in fact resulted in the investigation undergoing a sudden acceleration, that, in the frantic search for one or more guilty parties to consign to international public opinion, certainly didn’t help the search for substantial truth,” the judges wrote.

They also criticised prosecutors and lower court judges for failing to establish a clear theory on what would have prompted Knox, who is now 28, and Sollecito, 31, to commit the murder, and that they instead had bought into a “theory of complicity” – for instance suggesting that Knox had been resentful of her flatmate – with little facts to back them up.

The judges denounced as “illogical” the argument by prosecutors that there was not more physical evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime because the then suspects selectively cleaned the crime scene, saying that such an act would have been impossible.

Related: Who is Amanda Knox?

Instead of being wary of the lack of evidence, the panel said the lower court in Perugia that initially found Knox and Sollecito guilty in 2009 had ignored experts that had “clearly demonstrated possible contamination”. The lower court had also misinterpreted evidence about the knife that prosecutors argued was used as the murder weapon.

They said evidence pointed to the guilt of one man – Rudy Guede, a drifter from Ivory Coast, who received a 16-year prison sentence for Kercher’s murder following a fast-track trial in 2008. At the time of his conviction, it was stated that he did not act alone. In their decision, the judges said Guede may have had accomplices but that prosecutors had not proven those to have been Knox or Sollecito.


The court added that the only crime of which Knox was guilty was the false accusation she made to police days after the killing of her roommate, in which she blamed her boss, Diya ‘Patrick’ Lumumba, a bar owner, for the crime. Lumumba was in jail for two weeks before he was exonerated. Although the charge carried a three-year sentence, it was deemed moot because of the time Knox had already spent in prison.


The Knox case became a media circus in Italy and was the subject of intense attention in the press, which nicknamed the young American “Foxy Knoxy”. The Washington state native was portrayed in sensational reports either as a harmless innocent or a sex-crazed killer.

The case began on the morning of 2 November 2007, when the body of Kercher, a 21-year-old Leeds University student from Surrey, was found in the bedroom of the flat she shared with Knox in Perugia, central Italy, where both were studying abroad. Her throat had been slashed and she had been sexually assaulted.

Related: Kercher family have a bitter pill to swallow after verdict

Kercher’s family expressed profound dismay when Knox and Sollecito were acquitted in March. At the time, the family’s lawyer, Francesco Maresca, called the decision a “defeat for the Italian justice system”.

Today, the case itself – and the fact that Knox and Sollecito were first found guilty, then not guilty, and then guilty again, before finally seeing their case thrown out – is seen by many as an indictment of the Italian court system.

While the case continues to captivate people’s interest, the court said there was no possibility that Kercher’s death would be investigated again. It would be impossible to offer, at this late stage, any more “answers of certainty”.

Lawyers for Knox and Sollecito did not return requests for comment.


美人だからて殺人が無罪にはなるんでしょうか！？？

イタリアの法廷：
『衝撃的な欠陥』は、アマンダ・ノックス確信につながりました。

殺人免除！！！！

omg...