Italy’s highest court acquitted Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito 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 reasonable doubt, and cited a complete lack of “biological traces” in connection to the crime.

Meredith Kercher murder: Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito acquitted Read more

The 52-page legal motivazioni, published on Monday, detailed the reasons for the acquittal of Knox, a US exchange student, and Sollecito, who each served four years in prison for Kercher’s murder 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.

They also said that the murder investigation was ultimately hindered by the fact that investigators were under pressure to come up with answers once the case was 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” – suggesting, for instance, that Knox had been resentful of her flatmate – with few facts to back them up.

The judges denounced the prosecutors’ argument that there was not more physical evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime because they had selectively cleaned the crime scene as illogical. Such an act would have been impossible, they said.

Who is Amanda Knox? Read more

Instead of being wary of the lack of evidence, the judges said the lower court in Perugia that initially found Knox and Sollecito guilty in 2009 had ignored experts who had “clearly demonstrated possible contamination”. The lower court had also misinterpreted evidence about the knife that prosecutors argued was 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 them to have been Knox or Sollecito.



The judges added that the only crime of which Knox was guilty was the false accusation she made to police days after her roommate was killed, in which she blamed her boss, Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, a bar owner, for the crime. Lumumba spent two weeks in jail 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.



On Monday Carlo Dalla Vedova, one of Knox’s lawyers, said the judges’ explanation was tantamount to a “great censure, a note of solemn censure of all the investigators”. Speaking about his client, the lawyer told AP: “She is very satisfied and happy to read this decision. At the same time, it’s a very sad story. It’s a sad story because Meredith Kercher is no longer with us, and this is a tragedy nobody can forget,” he added.

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

The case began on 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. Her throat had been cut and she had been sexually assaulted.

Kercher family have a bitter pill to swallow after verdict Read more

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 found guilty, 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.

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



