Top court slams lack of evidence, shoddy police work for acquittals
ROME — Italy’s top criminal court has scathingly faulted prosecutors for presenting a flawed and hastily constructed case against Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend, saying Monday it threw out their convictions for the 2007 murder of her British roommate in part because there was no proof they were in the bedroom where the woman was fatally stabbed.
The Court of Cassation issued its formal written explanation for its March ruling — vindicating the pair once and for all in the murder of Meredith Kercher in the apartment the two women shared while students in Perugia, Italy.
There was an “absolute lack of biological traces” of Knox, an American, or of co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito in the room or on the victim’s body, the judges said, slamming the quality of the prosecution’s case.
The path of the case took was “objectively wavering, whose oscillations are ... the result also of stunning weakness or investigative bouts of amnesia and of blameworthy omissions of investigative activity,” the court wrote.
Had the investigation not been so shaky, “in all probability” the defendants’ guilt or innocence could have been determined from the earliest stages, the panel said.
In March, the high court declared Knox, now 28, and Sollecito, now 31, didn’t murder Kercher, 21. Had the Cassation Court upheld the 2014 appeals court convictions, Knox would have faced 28½ years in prison, assuming she would have been extradited from the United States, while Sollecito had been facing 25 years.
They had served nearly four years in prison after a first, lower court conviction, but had always proclaimed their innocence.
A man from Ivory Coast, Rudy Hermann Guede, was convicted in a separate trial and is serving a 16-year sentence.