Amanda Knox conviction based on poor case, top Italian court says

ROME – Italy’s top criminal court has scathingly faulted prosecutors for presenting a flawed and hastily constructed case against Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend, saying Monday it threw out their convictions for the 2007 murder of her British roommate in part because there was no proof they were in the bedroom where the woman was fatally stabbed.

The Court of Cassation issued its formal written explanation, as required by Italian law, for its March ruling – vindicating the pair once and for all in the murder of Meredith Kercher in the apartment the two women shared while students in Perugia, Italy.

It wrote there was an “absolute lack of biological traces” of Knox, an American from Seattle, or of co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito in the room or on the victim’s body. It slammed the quality of the prosecution’s case from the start.

The path the case took was “objectively wavering, whose oscillations are … the result also of stunning weakness or investigative bouts of amnesia and of blameworthy omissions of investigative activity,” the court wrote. Had the investigation not been so shaky, “in all probability” the defendants’ guilt or innocence could have been determined from the earliest stages, the panel said.

Media clamor was also a factor in what was ultimately a flawed case, the high court concluded.

“The international spotlight on the case in fact resulted in the investigation undergoing a sudden acceleration,” the judges wrote.

In March, the high court declared that Knox, now 28, and Sollecito, now 31, didn’t murder 21-year-old Kercher, a stronger exoneration than merely finding there was insufficient evidence to convict.

“I am deeply grateful that the Italian Supreme Court has filed its opinion and forcefully declared my innocence. This has been a long struggle for me, my family, my friends, and my supporters,” Knox said in a statement posted Monday on her website.

“I will now begin the rest of my life with one of my goals being to help others who have been wrongfully accused.”

Knox and Sollecito had served nearly four years in Italian prison after a first, lower court conviction by a Perugia court.

While the flip-flop verdicts and appeals ran their course, Knox became a cause celebre in the United States, where many saw her as an innocent victim of a miscarriage of Italian justice and of sloppy investigative methods.

Monday’s explanation effectively agreed with her supporters.

But the high court also concluded that some circumstances might never be known. It wrote that it couldn’t be ruled out that Knox and Sollecito might have been elsewhere in the house the night of the murder. And it raised the oft-cited question of why Knox identified an African man as the suspect when later another African man was convicted of the slaying.

The judges said they ruled out the possibility of ordering yet one more trial. Another trial would have been “useless,” they said, after citing contradictions in the prosecutors’ case and problems with handling of the evidence.

The Cassation panel said Knox did deserve her conviction and three-year sentence for slandering a Congolese-born Perugia pub owner whom she initially indicated as the murder suspect. The man had been jailed until an alibi led to his release.