The murder trial of Amanda Knox recorded another dramatic chapter last night when a Florence court found both her and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito guilty of the November 2007 murder of English student Meredith Kercher in Perugia.
Knox was given a sentence of 28½ years, while Sollecito received a 25-year sentence. Neither defendant, however, will go to prison immediately as both sets of defence lawyers announced they will appeal the verdict. For the time being, Sollecito’s passport has been withdrawn, and no action has been taken against Knox because she is living in her home city of Seattle in the United States.
Knox did not attend the retrial, however, having gone home to the United States after the previous appeal. “I am frightened and saddened by this unjust verdict. Having been found innocent before, I expected better from the Italian justice system,” Knox said in a statement.
Sollecito’s lawyer Giulia Bongiorno confirmed that her client would appeal to Italy’s highest court, and Knox’s lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said he was “stunned”. The court will publish the reasons for its verdict in 90 days.
For Kercher’s family, who had pushed to have the appeal verdict overturned, the reaction was equally raw. “We didn’t know what to expect. We are still in shock,” said Stephanie Kercher, Meredith’s sister, after the ruling was read.
If final appeals are heard, neither Knox nor Sollecito, who was banned from leaving Italy, would face arrest or jail time until a final verdict by the highest court.
Judicial ride
On November 1st, 2007, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, a Leeds university exchange student, was found half naked in a pool of blood in the Perugia house she shared with Amanda Knox. Her body bore knife wounds.
Knox and Sollecito, who were arrested four days after the murder, have been on a very Italian, helter-skelter judicial ride involving four trials over seven years in which, by turns, they have been found guilty and then not guilty.
Knox, who said she was “afraid” to return to Italy because she might be “wrongfully convicted”, was not in court last night. Speaking from her home in Seattle she told her defence lawyers that she was “horrified” at the court’s sentence.
If this sentence were to be upheld at a forthcoming appeal, then a delicate legal problem would present itself with the Italian state having to decide either to issue an extradition request or an international arrest warrant for Knox. Many commentators believe Italy would be unwilling to adopt such a course of action and the US even more unwilling to implement it.
Call for guilty verdicts
In his closing remarks to the court, prosecutor Alessandro Crini had called for guilty verdicts for both Knox and Sollecito, arguing that the murder had occurred in the context of "an explosive mine of sex, drugs and alcohol".
This Florence trial represents the fourth “level” at which this case has been tried. In the first ruling in December 2009, a Perugia court sentenced Knox and Sollecito to 26 and 25 years respectively for their alleged involvement in the murder.
That original conviction was overturned in October 2011 when Knox and Sollecito were acquitted after an appeals hearing, in part because of the testimony of court-appointed forensic investigators. They ruled that the original Perugia inquiry had been riddled with serious errors. In particular, forensic experts questioned the validity of DNA evidence taken from Ms Kercher's bra and from the alleged murder weapon.
Four years in prison
That court ruling set Knox free after four years in prison, allowing her to return home to Seattle.
Any suggestion that Knox’s dealings with the Italian justice system had ended with the 2011 appeals ruling, though, were shattered last March when a second supreme court appeals hearing overturned the October 2011 verdict, ordering a retrial of both Knox and Sollecito.
Knox's credibility was badly damaged when, shortly after her arrest, she wrongfully accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese-born musician, of the killing. Ivorian Rudy Guede, who was found guilty of Meredith Kercher's murder, was sentenced to 16 years in a separate trial in December 2010.
Additional reporting: Reuters