Amanda Knox Not Guilty

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American student Amanda Knox, who was convicted by an Italian court for the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, was acquitted today by an appeals court.
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Her murder conviction in the 2007 slaying of her roommate Meredith Kercher was thrown out by the jury, and she was ordered immediately released from prison.
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Her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito was also found not guilty.
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Knox and Sollecito had been convicted in 2009 of sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher, who was stabbed to death in her bedroom. She was found in a pool of blood and covered by a duvet the following day.
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cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/03/501364/main20114867.shtml

The trials and accusations have gotten a lot of media coverage because of the lurid nature of the murder.
 
I have prayed for this happy day! Thank You, Father!:crossrc:
 
Peggy, did you follow this story? I know very little. Are the charges of corruption inside the Italian police legit?
 
Do you think Ms. Knox will be haing Italian food to celebrate? 😉
 
MJE said:
Peggy, did you follow this story? I know very little. Are the charges of corruption inside the Italian police legit?
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Yes, I have followed this story. She lives three miles from me. No, I do not know her personally.

I was totally upset by the handling of the DNA evidence.

I don’t know if the charges of corruption inside the Italian police are legitimate. I know only that I would not want to face charges in a country with a legal system so different than our own. I believe that in Italy a person is presumed guilty until proven innocent–Napoleonic Law.
 
telegraph.co.uk “Amanda Knox: Guilty or innocent, five reasons why”

FIVE REASONS KNOX IS INNOCENT
  1. Lack of motive.
There still seems to be no convincing motive for the murder.

Prosecutors said tensions between Knox and Miss Kercher had reached boiling point over disagreements about housework, hygiene and boyfriends. They claimed Knox was driven to rage by jealousy towards her British flatmate. But it seemed far-fetched to claim that such relatively minor differences would lead Knox to kill.
  1. Lack of DNA.
None of Knox’s DNA was found in the bedroom in which Miss Kercher was stabbed to death. The prosecution claimed that Knox’s DNA was on the handle of the presumed murder weapon, a kitchen knife, and Kercher’s genetic material on the blade, linking the American to the killing.

They also said that Sollecito’s DNA was found on the clasp, which had been cut or torn off the bra, proving that he took part in the attack too.

But a review of the evidence by two independent experts from La Sapienza University in Rome found that the DNA traces were too low to be reliable and so small that they could not be retested.

The bra clasp was only found six weeks after the initial crime scene investigation, by which time it had been kicked around the floor of Miss Kercher’s bedroom, leading to a high risk of contamination.
  1. No witnesses.
The prosecution struggled to come up with witnesses who could place Knox and Sollecito at the scene of the crime. A homeless drug addict, Antonio Curatolo, told the initial trial that he had seen Knox and her boyfriend arguing on the night of the murder near the scene of the crime. But during the appeal he gave confusing and contradictory evidence, mixing up dates, and admitted to regularly using heroin, further undermining his credibility.

Even Rudy Guede, the Ivory Coast-born drifter who was also convicted of the murder, initially said that Knox was not in the house on the night of the murder. He changed his story a few months after his arrest, saying that on coming out of the bathroom he had grappled with a stranger, who could have been Sollecito, and that he saw Knox’s silhouette outside the house.
  1. Doubts over the murder weapon.
Police and prosecutors said Miss Kercher was killed with a 6.5 inch long kitchen knife found in Sollecito’s apartment. But the blade of the knife did not match two out of three of the wounds to her neck.

Nor did it match a bloody, knife-shaped smear on Miss Kercher’s bedclothes. The trial judge said that two knives must have been used; the second has never been found.
  1. The false confession.
The defence said that when Knox “confessed” to being in the house on the night of the murder and could remember hearing Miss Kercher scream, she was traumatised and acting under extreme psychological pressure after an all night interrogation by police. Knox told the trial that during the questioning she had been cuffed around the head by an officer and told that if she did not start cooperating she would face decades in jail. She was questioned without a lawyer being present and at the time she knew only basic Italian.

FIVE REASONS KNOX IS GUILTY
  1. The confession.
Knox confessed that she was in the house on the night of the murder and that she heard Miss Kercher scream, identifying a Congolese bar owner, Patrick Lumumba, as the assailant. She told the court during the trial that the confession was made under duress but then repeated the entire account in a five page memorandum the next morning.
  1. The false accusation.
The prosecution said the fact that Knox falsely accused Lumumba of being the killer was a sign of her own guilt and an attempt to throw them off her trail. He was arrested in a dawn raid by armed police and spent two weeks in jail. It was only by chance that a Swiss businessman read about the case and came forward to say he had been talking to Lumumba in his bar on the night of the murder — offering him a rock-solid alibi. Lumumba says Knox nearly ruined his life and is suing her for defamation.
  1. The alibi.
Sollecito could not back up Knox’s alibi on the night of the murder.

She claimed she spent the evening with him, smoking marijuana, watching the French film Amelie and making love. But Sollecito told police he could not remember if Knox was with him that evening or not.

Even assuming his memory was hazy because of the drugs, it seemed odd that a young man who had just embarked on a new relationship could not recall whether he had spent the night with his girlfriend or not.
  1. Computer and telephone records.
Sollecito claimed he used his computer to download and watch cartoons and Amelie. But computer experts told the court that there was no activity on his laptop between 9.10pm on Nov 1, and 5.32am the next morning — the time frame in which the murder took place.

Knox and Sollecito turned off their mobile phones on the night of the murder, from around 8.40pm, and turned them back on at around 6am, inviting further suspicion.
  1. The staged break-in.
A bedroom belonging to one of Miss Kercher’s Italian flatmates was ransacked on the night of the murder, with a window smashed with a rock. But police said the break-in was staged - broken glass from the window was found on top of clothes scattered on the floor, suggesting the window was broken after the contents of the room were messed up. Prosecutors accused Knox and her boyfriend of staging the break-in to make the killing look like a burglary that had turned into rape and murder.
 
I remember reading an article in The Guardian (a UK newspaper) about the conviction of Amanda Knox and why it was unsafe, it did hinge on a corrupt official, a prosecutor, who had arrested the writer of the piece, accusing him of being a serial killer(!) after he wrote an article about the failures the prosecutor had made in said serial killings investigation. I’ve tried to find it on the website but I can’t. This article does talk about the problems of how the Italian system works: guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/06/amanda-knox-meredith-kercher-trial-perugia?INTCMP=SRCH. There is a huge problem in Italian justice, as the article said, due to the fact that the courts do not want to contradict the police and prosecutors and the jurors are judges. The courts are heavily influenced by the Italian cultural need to “save face”, so they usually convict and then leave it to the appeals court to sort out if the person is actually guilty or not.

I hope that those who are thanking God, will also pray for Meredith Kercher’s family. They must be going through Hell, as they now don’t really have an answer to why their daughter died, and do not know if the person who did it was ever caught. I am happy for Amanda Knox, but we can’t pretend that it’s a happy ending.
 
In addition, the prosecutor tried to bring our local newspaper, The West Seattle Herald to court in Italy, for printing opinions about the case that he didn’t agree with, that he claimed was “slander.”

Most Americans cannot wrap their heads around such a thing.
 
Rascalking said:
Do you think Ms. Knox will be haing Italian food to celebrate? 😉
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I heard she studied Italian for 4 years in prison just so that she could speak and be heard in court today. I wonder if she’ll toss that Rosetta Stone software now? 🙂
 
Let’s hope she can come home soon, put this behind her and have a nice, quiet life!
 
ProVobis said:
I heard she studied Italian for 4 years in prison just so that she could speak and be heard in court today. I wonder if she’ll toss that Rosetta Stone software now? 🙂
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It was my understanding that she was in Italy as part of a University of Washington overseas study, because she was studying the Italian language.
 
Another example of why the death penalty is wrong and should never be used.
 
kelvinf said:
Another example of why the death penalty is wrong and should never be used.
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That has nothing to do with it. Amanda Knox wasn’t put to death…At least, if she was, she must have had it pretty good! 😉
 
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