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Updated 9.41am
ITALY’S HIGHEST COURT of appeal has overturned the acquittal of US student Amanda Knox and ordered a retrial over the murder of her British housemate in what prosecutors said was a drug-fuelled sex attack.
Knox and her Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito – originally sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison for killing and sexually assaulting Meredith Kercher in 2007– were acquitted on appeal in 2011 after four years in prison.
Both now face a retrial in a Florence court after judges upheld a 2012 prosecution appeal against their acquittals.
“It’s not been easy from the start. We have had to climb a mountain, but we draw great strength both from being innocent and from the fact the court’s ruling today is not a guilty verdict,” Sollecito’s lawyer Giulia Bongiorno said.
“The retrial means the court has decided some details need to be reviewed. The battle continues,” she said.
The judges were expected to rule on Monday, but unexpectedly sought more time for deliberations, pushing the decision back to Tuesday.
The postponement of the ruling until this morning had sparked unease among lawyers representing the former lovers at the Rome court. Sollecito’s lawyer Giulia Bongiorno said beforehand that the delay was “rare… and hard to interpret.”
Prosecutors addressing the court on Monday said they were convinced the former lovers were guilty of murdering Kercher. They called for the judges to “make sure the final curtain does not drop on this shocking and dire crime.”
The defence argued that errors in DNA evidence had seen Knox and Sollecito wrongly accused from the start and called for their acquittal to be upheld.
Knox and Sollecito could face a re-trial in Florence, though Knox will likely be tried in absentia.
The Seattle student returned home immediately after her release and the United States does not normally extradite its citizens to face legal action.
Carloa Dalla Vedova, the lawyer of Amanda Knox, talks to reporters in front of Italy’s Court of Cassation in Rome yesterday (AP Photo/Riccardo De Luca)
Kercher, 21, was found half-naked with her throat slashed in a pool of blood in her bedroom in the house that she shared with Knox in November 2007.
A third person, Ivory Coast-born drifter Rudy Guede, who like the other two has always denied the murder, is the only person still in prison for the crime.
Prosecutors had alleged that Kercher was killed in a drug-fuelled sex attack involving Knox, Sollecito and Guede. They had said that it was the American student who delivered the final blows while the other two held the victim down.
But the appeals judge quashed the convictions of Knox and Sollecito in 2011, largely over the admissibility of DNA evidence. The judges said the murder remained “unsolved” because it must have been carried out by more than one person.
Kercher’s family insists that 47 knife wounds on Meredith and the apparent use of two different knives in the attack meant that more than one killer was involved – which means that the second murderer is still at large.
In her first interrogation following the murder, Knox said – without a lawyer or an interpreter present – that she was in the house at the time, and falsely identified the owner of a bar where she worked as a waitress as the killer.
She later said that she was with Sollecito at his house all night and blamed her initial comments on exhaustion and police coercion.
The supreme court is also set to rule today on Knox’s appeal against a slander conviction for having blamed the bar owner, who was held in a cell for two weeks based on her allegations.
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Why was my comment deleted Journal.ie?
The Ukraine has one of the highest rates of HIV and drug resistant TB in the world.
@icaniwont: yeahhhhh!!! Let’s not help people if they’re sick.
@icaniwont: it’s just Ukraine, not The Ukraine. Just FYI.
@Nomad: that is recognised as a human rights violation by the UN. You neglect to mention that having HIV is commonly used to deny residency rights, work permits and travel visas. It is a discriminatory practice that does little to prevent transmission but contributed massively to discrimination and stigma.
The best way to prevent transmission is to ensure that people get tested and are diagnosed and receive access to treatment to prevent onwards transmission. The best way to make this happen is to destigmatise the process and provide adequate access to treatment which represses viral load and prevents transmission. The worst way to do that is to continue perpetrate or replicate stigmatising practices. That is what all the best practice evidence shows and you will see that the countries that have such regulations don’t have have great detection rates and do not have lower transmission rates, they just discriminate unfairly against people because they have HIV which is not the end goal or desired result of any health policy.
The best way to prevent transmission is to be celebate. The second best way is to only have sex with one other who also only has sex with you.
@Tom Mullally: Is that your approach Father Mullally?
@Tom Mullally: Telling people to have less sex has never ever ever ever worked.
You can tell god-fearing evangelicals they’ll go to hell for all eternity for pre-marital sex, and still end up with eye-watering teen pregnancy rates.
The reason is obvious: access to services. It seems covid was the primary impetus to roll out the remote testing service, but even before the pandemic, it was incredibly difficult to get appointments even in Dublin (never mind outside Dublin). Many clinics didn’t even want to see you if you had no symptoms of anything, because they were so underresourced.
Yet you get the same tired response: be absinent and you’ll be grand. Because asking people not to have sex has always worked out so well historically…
PrEP is extremely effective in getting HIV transmission rates down, but it’s still only available in a limited number of venues with limited appointment availability.
Just a case of party mad and horniness after lockdowns.
@Jensen Bhroin: sounds very similar to covid cert that was welcomed
@SquintEastwood: ahhhhh nice work there. And the level of intimacy required to transmit covid is just the same as with HIV?
If we had meaningful access to PrEP rates would fall like a stone. 56 Dean St in London has done amazing work here. From a human perspective it’s just the right thing to do and being cold-hearted, a lifetime of PrEP is less than 1% of the cost of HIV treatments and interventions.
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