Trial of Guede
Guede fled to Germany
shortly after the murder. During a November 19, 2007, Skype conversation with his friend Giacomo Benedetti, Guede did not mention Knox or Sollecito as being
in the house on the night of the murder. Later his account changed and he
indirectly implicated them in the murder, which he denied involvement in. Guede
was arrested in Germany on November
20, and then extradited to Italy on
December 6. Guede opted to be tried in a special fast track procedure by Judge
Micheli. He was not charged with having had a knife. He did not testify and was
not questioned about his statements, which had altered from his original
version. Guede was convicted of murder, but the official judges' report on the
conviction specified that he had not had a knife or stabbed the victim, or
stolen any of Kercher's possessions. Micheli's finding that Guede must have had
an accomplice gave support to the later prosecution of Knox.
The judges reasoned that Guede would not have faked a
burglary, because it would have pointed to him in view of his own earlier
break-ins (though at the time of the murder he was known to police only for
being detained for trespassing in Florence).
Despite Guede saying that Kercher had let him into the house through the entry
door, the judges decided against the possibility of Guede's having gotten in by
simply knocking on the door, because they thought Kercher would not have opened
the cottage door to him (although she knew he was an acquaintance of her
boyfriend, Giacomo Silenzi). In his original account, Guede had said that
Kercher's confrontation with her killer had started at the entry door to the
house. One legal commentator on the case thought that insufficient consideration
had been given to the possibility that Guede had called at the house on some
pretext while Kercher was alone there, murdered her after she opened the door
to him, and faked a burglary to cover his tracks.
In October 2008, Guede was found guilty of the sexual
assault and murder of Kercher and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. His
prison sentence was ultimately reduced to 16 years.
The first trial of Knox
and Sollecito
In 2009, Knox and Sollecito pleaded not guilty at a Corte d'Assise on charges of murder,
sexual assault, carrying a knife (which Guede had not been charged with),
simulating a burglary, and theft of 300 euros, two credit cards, and two mobile
phones. There was no charge in relation to Kercher's missing keys to the entry
door and her bedroom door; although Guede's trial judgement said he had not
stolen anything. There was a separate but concurrent trial of Knox with the
same jury as her murder trial in which she was accused of falsely denouncing
her employer for the murder. Knox's police interrogation was deemed improper
and ruled inadmissible for the murder trial, but was heard in her nominally
separate trial for false denunciation.
Prosecution case
According to the prosecution, Knox's first call of November
2, to Kercher's English phone, was to
ascertain if Kercher's phones had been found, and Sollecito had tried to break
in the bedroom door because after he and Knox locked it behind them, they
realized they had left something that might incriminate them. Knox's call to her mother in Seattle, a quarter of an hour before
the discovery of the body was said by prosecutors to show Knox was acting as
if something serious might have happened before the point in time when an
innocent person would have such concern.
A prosecution witness, homeless man Antonio Curatolo, said Knox and Sollecito were in a nearby square
on the night of the murder. Prosecutors advanced a single piece of forensic
evidence linking Sollecito to Kercher's bedroom, where the murder had taken
place: fragments of his DNA on Kercher's bra clasp. Giulia
Bongiorno, leading Sollecito's defense, questioned how Sollecito's DNA
could have gotten on the small metal clasp of the bra, but not on the fabric of
the bra back strap from which it was torn. "How
can you touch the hook without touching the cloth?", Bongiorno asked. The backstrap of the bra had multiple traces
of DNA belonging to Guede. According to
the prosecution's reconstruction, Knox had attacked Kercher in her bedroom,
repeatedly banged her head against a wall, forcefully held her face, and tried
to strangle her. Guede, Knox and
Sollecito had removed Kercher's jeans and held her on her hands and knees
while Guede had sexually abused her. Knox had cut Kercher with a knife before
inflicting the fatal stab wound; then faked a burglary. The judge pointedly
questioned Knox about a number of details, especially concerning her phone
calls to her mother and Romanelli.
Defense case
The defense suggested that Guede was a lone killer who had
murdered Kercher after breaking in. Knox's lawyers pointed out that no shoe
prints, clothing fibers, hairs, fingerprints, skin cells, or DNA of Knox's were
found on Kercher's body, clothes, handbag, or anywhere else in Kercher's
bedroom. The prosecution alleged that
all forensic traces in the room that would have incriminated Knox had been
wiped away by her and Sollecito. Knox's
lawyers said it would have been impossible to selectively remove her traces,
and emphasized that Guede's shoe prints, fingerprints, and DNA were found in
Kercher's bedroom.
Guede's DNA was on the strap of Kercher's bra, which had
been torn off, and his DNA was found on a vaginal swab taken from her body. Guede's bloody palm print was on a pillow that
had been placed under Kercher's hips. Guede's DNA, mixed with Kercher's, was on
the left sleeve of her bloody sweatshirt and in bloodstains inside her shoulder
bag, from which 300 euros and credit cards had been stolen. Both sets of defense lawyers requested the
judges to order independent reviews of evidence including DNA and the
compatibility of the wounds with the alleged murder weapon; the request was
denied. In final pleas to the court, Sollecito's
lawyer described Knox as "a weak and
fragile girl" who had been "duped
by the police". Knox's lawyer pointed to text messages between Knox
and Kercher as showing that they had been friends.
Verdict and
controversy
On December 5, 2009, Knox, by then 22, was convicted on
charges of faking a break-in, defamation, sexual violence, and murder, and was
sentenced to 26 years imprisonment. Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years. In
Italy, opinion was not generally favorable toward Knox, and an Italian jurist remarked: "This is the simplest and fairest
criminal trial one could possibly think of in terms of evidence."
In the United States,
the verdict was widely viewed as a miscarriage of justice. American lawyers expressed concern about pre-trial publicity, and
statements excluded from the murder case being allowed for a contemporaneous
civil suit heard by the same jury. Knox's defense attorneys were seen as, by American standards, passive in the face
of the prosecution's use of character assassination. Although acknowledging that Knox might have
been a person of interest for American police
in similar circumstances, journalist Nina
Burleigh, who had spent months in Perugia
during the trial, while researching a book on the case, said the conviction
had not been based on solid proof, and there had been resentment at the Knox
family that amounted to "anti-Americanism".
A number of US
experts spoke out against DNA evidence used by the prosecution. According to
consultant Gregory Hampikian, the Italian forensic police could not
replicate the key result, claimed to have successfully identified DNA at levels
below those an American laboratory
would attempt to analyze, and never supplied validation of their methods. Knox was indicted in 2010 on charges of
defamation against the police for saying she had been struck across her head
during the interview in which she incriminated herself.
In May 2011, Greg
Hampikian, director of the Idaho
Innocence Project, a non-profit investigative organization dedicated to
proving the innocence of wrongly convicted people, said forensic results from
the crime scene pointed to Guede as the killer and to his having acted on his
own.
Acquittal and release
On October 3, 2011, Amanda
Knox left Perugia Prison with Corrado Maria Daclon, secretary-general
of the Italy–USA Foundation.
A Corte d'Assise
verdict of guilty is not a definitive conviction. What is in effect a new
trial, Corte d'Assise d'Appello,
reviews the case. The appeal (or second grade) trial began November 2010 and
was presided over by Judges Claudio
Pratillo Hellmann and Massimo
Zanetti. A court-ordered review of the contested DNA evidence by
independent experts noted numerous basic errors in the gathering and analysis
of the evidence and concluded that no evidential trace of Kercher's DNA had
been found on the alleged murder weapon, which police had found in Sollecito's
kitchen. The review found the forensic
police examination showed evidence of multiple males' DNA fragments on the bra
clasp, which had been lost on the floor for 47 days, the court-appointed expert
testified the context strongly suggested contamination. On October 3, 2011, Knox and Sollecito were
found not guilty of the murder.
In an official statement giving the grounds for the
acquittals, Hellmann said Knox had been confused by interviews of "obsessive duration" in a
language she was still learning, and forensic evidence did not support the idea
that Knox and Sollecito had been present at the murder. It was emphasized that Knox's first calls
raised the alarm and brought the police to the house, which made the prosecution's
assertion that she had been trying to delay the discovery of the body untenable. She
and Sollecito's accounts failing to completely match did not constitute
evidence they had given a false alibi. Discounting Curatolo's testimony as
self-contradictory, the judges observed that he was a heroin addict. Having
noted that there was no evidence of any phone calls or texts between Knox or
Sollecito and Guede, the judges concluded there was a "material non-existence" of evidence to support the
guilty verdicts, and that an association among Sollecito, Knox, and Guede to
commit the murder was "far from probable".
The false accusation conviction in relation to her employer
was upheld, and Judge Hellman imposed a three-year sentence although this was
nominal, being less than Knox had already served. She was immediately released
and returned to her Seattle home.)
Knox wrote a letter to Corrado
Maria Daclon, Secretary-General
of the Italy–USA Foundation the day
after regaining her freedom:
To hold my hand and
offer support and respect throughout the obstacles and the controversy, there
were Italians. There was the Italy–USA Foundation, and many others that shared
my pain and that helped me survive, with hope. I am eternally grateful for
their caring hospitality and their courageous commitment. To those that wrote
me, that defended me that stood by me that prayed for me... I am forever
grateful to you.
Retrial
On March 26, 2013, Italy's
highest court, the Supreme Court of
Cassation set aside the acquittals of the Hellmann second-level trial on
the grounds that it had gone beyond the remit of a Corte d'Assise d'Appello by not ordering new DNA tests and failing
to give weight to circumstantial evidence in a context such as Knox's accusation
of the bar owner in the disputed interviews. A note Knox composed in the police
station (not mentioning Guede) was regarded by the Supreme Court as confirmation that she and Guede were present in Via Della Pergola 7 while Kercher was
attacked. A retrial was ordered. Knox
was represented, but remained in the United
States.
Judge Nencini presided at the retrial and granted a
prosecution request for analysis of previously unexamined DNA sample found on a
kitchen knife of Sollecito's, which the prosecution alleged was the murder
weapon based on the forensic police reporting that Kercher's DNA was on it, a
conclusion discredited by court-appointed experts at the appeal trial. When the unexamined sample was tested, no DNA
belonging to Kercher was found. On
January 30, 2014, Knox and Sollecito were found guilty. In
their written explanation the judges emphasized Guede's fast-track verdict
report was a judicial reference point establishing that he had not acted alone.
The Nencini verdict report said there must have been a cleanup to remove traces
of Knox from the house while leaving Guede's. The report said that there had
been no burglary and the signs of one were staged. It did not consider the
possibility of Guede's having been responsible for faking a break-in.
Forensic controversy
continues
Although not part of the defense's team of experts, an
authority on the forensic use of DNA, Professor
Peter Gill, publicly said that the case against Knox and Sollecito was
misconceived because they had a legitimate excuse for their DNA being present
on Sollecito's kitchen knife, and in the crime scene apartment. According to
Gill, the DNA fragment from Sollecito on the bra clasp could have got there
through Sollecito having touched the handle of Kercher's door while trying to
force it, enabling transfer of his DNA to the bra clasp inside the bedroom on
the latex gloves used by investigators.
Final decision
On March 27, 2015, the ultimate appeal by Knox and Sollecito
was heard by the Supreme Court of
Cassation; it ruled that the case was without foundation, thereby
definitively acquitting them of the murder. Her defamation conviction was
upheld but the three-year sentence was deemed served by the time she had
already spent in prison. Rather than merely declaring that there were
errors in the earlier court cases or that there was not enough evidence to
convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent of involvement in
the murder. On September 7, 2015, the Court published the report on the
acquittal, citing "glaring
errors", "investigative
amnesia", and "guilty
omissions", where a five-judge panel said that the prosecutors who won
the original murder conviction failed to prove a "whole truth" to back up the scenario that Knox and
Sollecito killed Kercher. They also
stated that there were "sensational
failures" (clamorose defaillance) in the investigation, and that the
lower court had been guilty of "culpable
omissions" (colpevoli omissioni) in ignoring expert testimony that
demonstrated contamination of evidence.
Compensation
On January 24, 2019, the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered
Italy to pay compensation to Knox for violating her rights in the hours
after her arrest in Perugia. Italy
was ordered to pay Knox 18,400 Euros (about US$20,800) for not providing her with
either a lawyer or a competent interpreter when she was first held in custody.
Personal and
professional life
After returning to the United
States, Knox completed her degree and worked on a book about her case. She
was often followed by paparazzi. Her family incurred large debts from the years
of supporting her in Italy and was
left insolvent, the proceeds from Waiting
to Be Heard: A Memoir having gone to pay legal fees to her Italian lawyers. Knox has been a reviewer and journalist for the
then West Seattle Herald, later
subsumed into Westside Seattle, and
attended events of the Innocence Project
and related organizations. In a 2017
interview, Knox said she was devoting herself to writing and activism for the
wrongfully accused. She hosted The Scarlet Letter Reports on Facebook Watch, a series that examined
the "gendered nature of public
shaming". Knox also hosts a
podcast, The Truth about True Crime. She has been a featured speaker at fundraising
events for non-profits, including the Innocence
Project. In June 2019, Knox returned
to Italy as a keynote speaker at a
conference on criminal justice, where she was part of a panel titled "Trial
by Media".
Knox is married to long-time boyfriend, author Christopher Robinson who is connected
to the Robinson Newspapers.
Media
Books
Burleigh, Nina
(2011). The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The
trials of Amanda Knox. New York: Broadway Books. ISBN 978-0-307-58860-9.
OCLC 748281716.
Kercher, John
(2012). Meredith: Our Daughter's Murder
and the Heartbreaking Quest for the Truth. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
ISBN 978-1-4447-4276-3. OCLC 986555718.
Knox, Amanda
(2013). Waiting to be Heard: A Memoir.
New York, New York: Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-221722-6. OCLC 843126750.
Sollecito, Raffaele;
Gumbel, Andrew (2012). Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back
with Amanda Knox. New York: Gallery Books. ISBN 978-1-4516-9640-0. OCLC
875073026.
Documentaries
48 Hours (April
10, 2008). "A Long Way from
Home". Produced by Joe
Halderman, Douglas Longhini, and
Chris Young. CBS News. A documentary
broadcast in the United States
Amanda Knox: Murder on
Trial in Italy, also known as The
Amanda Knox Story, February 21, 2011, An American true crime television film
that first aired on the Lifetime network.
"Amanda Knox: The
untold story". CBS News. October 9, 2011. Retrieved July 10, 2018.
Sawyer, Diane (April 30, 2013). "Murder
Mystery: Amanda Knox Speaks". 20/20. ABC News. Retrieved July 10,
2018. Diane Sawyer was the first to interview Knox after she was freed.
Amanda Knox, October 2016, a Netflix
Original Documentary
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