On Tuesday, Italy's Court of Cassation accepted a request for a retrial from prosecutors and Kercher family lawyers who said the earlier ruling was "contradictory and illogical," Reuters wrote. But judging from media reports, the entire ordeal -- from the discovery of Kercher's stabbed, half-naked body to the acquittal -- was an illogical, clumsy disaster.

Prosecutors lacked a motive or any clear evidence linking Knox to the scene of the crime. Knox didn't know she was a suspect even as she was signing her confession. Nathaniel Rich's excellent 2011 story about the case in Rolling Stone provides a chilling look at some of the other myriad flaws in the investigation that put Knox behind bars for four years of her 26-year sentence:

Sollecito called the carabinieri -- the Italian military police -- and the couple went outside to wait. Two officers soon arrived. They weren't carabinieri, however -- they were postal police, a sleepy, junior-varsity unit of the state police responsible for investigating crimes like Internet fraud and stolen phones.... For starters, the carabinieri would have prevented anyone from tramping through the crime scene. The two postal-police officers, however, allowed themselves to be led through the house in search of clues by a band of child sleuths out of Scooby-Doo... Italy's carnivalesque judicial process, where there is never order in the court, the lawyers and defendants constantly interrupting the proceedings with groans and catcalls and wild gesticulations, while the press in the gallery yammers away like the kids in the back of the classroom. The prosecution's failure to establish motive or intent ("We live in an age of violence with no motive," said one prosecutor). And the fact that prosecutors did not immediately drop the case against Knox and Sollecito after the bloody fingerprints and footprints came back matching a 20-year-old petty thief named Rudy Guede.

Guede was convicted in a separate proceeding and is serving a 16-year sentence.

To be fair, Perugia is a small university town and seemed to lack the kinds of hot-shot lawyers and judges that might be involved in a similarly important case in a larger city. The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, told journalists that while it brought him little joy to send a young woman to jail for decades, "things are often touched by Satan" and referred to Knox as a "sex-and-drug-crazed she-devil."

"Nobody here's good at their job," Frank Sfarzo, a local blogger who has followed the trial more obsessively than anyone, told Rolling Stone. "If they were, they wouldn't be in Perugia."

And granted, Knox didn't help her case by reportedly doing "cartwheels and splits" in the immediate aftermath of the murder and canoodling with Sollecito during the police investigation.

The news of Knox's retrial might appear, to Americans, as yet another glitch in a what seems like a broken legal system: It wouldn't have happened in the U.S., legal scholars write, because Italy doesn't forbid double jeopardy, a cornerstone of American law.