Amanda Knox murder conviction overturned in Italy
On October 3 2011 in a decision that makes international headlines an Italian appeals court overturns the murder conviction of Amanda Knox an American exchange student who two years earlier was found guilty in the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia Italy.At the time of her 2009 conviction Knox then 22 years old received a 26-year prison sentence while her ex-boyfriend Italian college student Raffaelle Sollecito who also was convicted in the slaying was sentenced to 25 years behind bars.The sensational high-profile case raised questions in the United States about the Italian justice system and whether Knox who always maintained her innocence was unfairly convicted.On November 2 2007 the 21-year-old Kercher of Coulsdon England was found fatally stabbed in the bedroom of the home she shared with Knox and two other women in Perugia the capital city of the Umbria region in central Italy.
Investigators said the British exchange student had been slain the previous night.After questioning by police Knox a Seattle native and University of Washington student doing her junior year abroad in Italy was arrested.She denied any wrongdoing saying she was at computer science student Sollecitos house the night the killing occurred.
Police claimed Knox later gave them conflicting statements about her whereabouts at the time of the crime and said she also accused her boss at the bar where she worked who turned out to have a solid alibi of Kerchers murder.The American student who was first questioned without an attorney or professional interpreter said police coerced her into making the accusation as well as other incriminating statements.(The false accusation would later result in an extra year tacked on to Knoxs prison sentence.)During the nearly yearlong trial that followed in 2009 Italian prosecutors charged that Knox along with Sollecito and another man Rudy Guede an Ivory Coast native had viciously attacked Kercher in a sex game gone wrong.
(Guede was convicted for his role in Kerchers death in a separate fast-track trial in 2008.He was sentenced to 30 years in prison which was reduced to 16 years on appeal.) The prosecutions main evidence against Knox included tiny traces of her DNA and that of Kerchers on a knife discovered at Sollecitos home.Traces of Knoxs DNA were also found on a bra clasp belonging to Kercher.
Knoxs attorneys argued the bra clasp was found over a month after the murder at a contaminated crime scene and that the knife blade couldnt have made the wounds on the victim.The case received extensive media coverage in the United States and Europe where the attractive Knox was dubbed Angel Face and Foxy Knoxy by the tabloids.In the Italian and British press Knox was painted as a promiscuous party girl.
However in America she was often portrayed in the media as an innocent abroad a young woman who had worked several jobs to earn money to study in Perugia where she had been railroaded by an overzealous prosecutor.Knox and Sollecito appealed their convictions and at their subsequent trial court-appointed experts testified the original DNA evidence was unreliable and did not definitively link the young American and her former boyfriend to the crime.On October 3 2011 an appellate court jury of two judges and six civilians in Perugia acquitted the two defendants of murder.
(The court upheld Knoxs conviction on a charge of defamation for accusing her former boss at the bar of murdering Kercher.Knox was given time served along with a fine.) The 24-year-old Knox who been jailed in Italy since her 2007 arrest flew home to the United States the following day.
