Image courtesy of [Ian Fuller via Flickr]
Law
Amanda Knox…Free at Last!
Hey y’all!
It’s been a while but let’s jump right into what is going on in the news this week.
The Italian Court of Cassation (the top criminal court in Italy) has officially thrown out the guilty verdicts of Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian native.
On November 2, 2007 the body of 21-year-old UK citizen, Meredith Kercher, was found in the home that she shared with Amanda Knox in the college town of Perugia, Italy. Amanda Knox, her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede (from the Ivory Coast) were all prime suspects and were eventually tried and convicted of Kercher’s murder.
In the first trial in 2009, Amanda Knox was convicted of murder, sexual assault, and slander with an original sentence of 26 years in prison. Raffaele Sollecito was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Rudy Guede was later tried and convicted of murder with a 16 year sentence; he admitted to being inside the home when Kercher was murdered and his DNA was found all over her bedroom where her body was found.
In 2011, Knox and Sollecito appealed and the court throw out the original convictions, except for Knox’s slander charge which required only a year of prison time that was counted as served in the four years that Knox had already spent there. But in 2013, the high court in Italy reversed the acquittal and required another appeals trial. Then in 2014 the new appeals trial held the original 2009 conviction and ordered Amanda Knox to serve 28 1/2 years in prison (including the one year for slander) but kept Sollecito’s time to 25 years.
But finally, in March of this year the Italian high court found that Knox and Sollecito did not murder Kercher, and just a couple of days ago the court released its final statement and reasoning behind this decision.
The Court of Cassation wrote that there was an “absolute lack of biological traces” of Knox and Sollecito in Kercher’s bedroom or even on her body. The Court also noted that there was a plethora of omissions and poorly executed investigations into this case.
Case in point, the original prosecutor Giuliano Mignini was one piece of work. While he was prosecuting Amanda Knox, he was making his own court appearances for indictments starting in 2006 for “abuse of office power” and “abetting” in connection to another high profile case. So, essentially the prosecutor seemingly liked getting his way by any means necessary and encouraging others to break the law too.
Now, I have been following along with this case for quite sometime and I have a hard time distinguishing the truth. Sometimes I believe that Knox was not involved but then other times I have to wonder if she really was. Some of Knox’s actions are consistent of a scared 20-something living in a foreign country but then there are other things that scream she knew at least that something was going on. We may never know the truth, but this latest ruling by the court should put an end to the saga of Amanda Knox’s fate, and let the family of Meredith Kercher move on with their lives.
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