Amanda Knox, who maintained that she and her former Italian boyfriend were innocent in her British roommate’s murder through multiple trials and nearly four years in jail, was vindicated on Friday when Italy’s highest court threw out their convictions once and for all.
“Finished,” Knox lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova exulted after the decision was read out late on Friday. “It could not be better than this.”
The surprise decision definitively ends the seven-and-a-half year legal battle waged by Knox, 27, and codefendant Raffaele Sollecito, 31, to clear their names in the gruesome 2007 murder and sexual assault of British student Meredith Kercher.
Photo: EPA
Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation panel deliberated for 10 hours before declaring that the two did not commit the crime, a stronger exoneration than merely finding insufficient evidence to convict.
Instead, had the court of final resort upheld the pair’s convictions, Knox would have faced 28-and-a-half years in an Italian prison, assuming that she would have been extradited from the US, while Sollecito had faced 25 years.
“Right now I am still absorbing what all this means and what comes to mind is my gratitude for the life that has been given to me,” Knox said late on Friday, speaking to reporters outside her mother’s Seattle home.
The case attracted widespread media attention due to the brutality of the murder and the quick allegations that the young US student and her new Italian lover had joined a third man in stabbing to death 21-year-old Kercher in a sex game gone awry.
Vacillating verdicts of guilty, innocent and guilty cast a shadow on the Italian justice system and polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic, largely along national lines.
Though it cleared Knox of murder, the court upheld a slander conviction against her for wrongly accusing a Congolese-born bar owner in the murder.
The court reduced the sentence for that crime to three years, and since Knox already spent nearly four years in Italian prison, she is not required to serve that time.
The decision to overturn the convictions without ordering a new trial amounted to a rebuke of another high court ruling two years ago that vacated Knox and Sollecito’s 2011 acquittal, ordering yet another trial.
Such a direct contrast in decisions by two high court panels is as rare as the double rainbow that arched over the monumental courthouse near the Tiber river during the deliberations.
The five-judge panel’s reasoning will be released within 90 days.
Across the Atlantic, a shout of joy erupted from inside the Seattle home of Knox’s mother as the verdict was announced. Several relatives and supporters filtered into the back yard, where they hugged and cheered.
Dalla Vedova said he called Knox to tell her the news, but said she could not speak through her tears.
“She was crying because she was so happy,” he said.
Kercher, 21, was found dead Nov. 2, 2007, in the apartment that she shared with Knox and two Italian lawyers-in-training.
Kercher was found half-nude beneath a duvet soaked in blood with her throat slashed. Investigators determined she had been sexually assaulted.
DNA evidence in Kercher’s room led police to arrest a man from Ivory Coast, Hermann Guede, who was convicted of the murder in a separate trial and is serving a 16-year sentence.
The court that convicted Guede ruled that he did not act alone, citing the absence of defensive wounds on the victim and concluding that bruises on Kercher’s arms indicating she was restrained while one or two others inflicted numerous stab wounds.
The Kercher family attorney, Francesco Maresca, was clearly disappointed by the decision.
“I think that it’s a defeat for the Italian justice system,” he said. “Whoever was Guede’s accomplice does not have a name.”
Kercher’s mother, Arline Kercher, told Britain’s Press Association news agency that she was “a bit surprised and very shocked.”
“They have been convicted twice so it is a bit odd that it should change now,” she said.
Also disappointed by the decision was the bar owner, Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, who was jailed for two weeks after Knox falsely accused him of the murder and is convinced of Knox’s guilt.
“It is a strange justice for me, long, uncertain, a little opaque, a lot of darkness,” he said outside the courtroom. “This is a judicial error in Amanda’s case.”
Knox and Sollecito were convicted by a Perugia court in 2009, then acquitted and freed in 2011, and then convicted again in 2014 in Florence after the Cassation court overturned the acquittals and ordered a new appeals trial.
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