Italy’s top criminal court has slammed prosecutors for presenting a flawed and poorly-constructed case against Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
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Her half-naked body was found in a pool of blood in a back room of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, central Italy.
In March, the court acquitted Knox and her Italian ex-lover Raffaele Sollecito of Kercher’s murder, ending an eight-year legal saga which saw the two convicted, acquitted and convicted again before being finally cleared.
Italy’s highest appeals court highlighted the “glaring errors” in the investigation into the killing of Meredith Kercher in 2007.
The quality of the prosecution case was attacked, citing the high profile and media frenzy surrounding the events to have had an effect on the investigators.
Knox and Sollecito would have been acquitted years ago if not for “stunning weakness”, “Investigative bouts of amnesia” and “blameworthy omissions of investigative activity” in the case, the report says.
‘The global 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 worldwide public opinion, certainly didn’t help the search for substantial truth, ‘ the judges wrote.
The court’s ruling against Guede stated that he did not act alone, but the acquittals of Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito mean that no-one now stands convicted of acting with Guede to kill Ms Kercher.
The court’s explanation for the verdict is tantamount to a “great censure, a note of solemn censure of all the investigators”, Carlo Dalla Vedova, Knox’s defence lawyer, told The Associated Press.
“At the same time, it’s a very sad story”.
They had always proclaimed their innocence.
A bra clasp of the victim, which prosecutors argued carried a trace of Sollecito’s DNA, was on the floor of the murder scene for 46 days, and then “was passed from hand to hand of the workers, who, furthermore, were wearing dirty latex gloves”, the panel said.
But that decision was found to be flawed by the Court of Cassation in 2013, leading to a retrial in Florence which reinstated the initial convictions and increased Knox’s sentence to 28 years and six months.
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The court upheld a sentence against Knox for falsely accusing Congolese barman Patrick Lumumba of the murder.
