Amanda Knox case update: Italy's highest court says decision came from 'stunning flaws' during investigation
Almost eight years after Meredith Kercher was found lifeless and half-dressed on her tiled student apartment in Perugia, Italy, the highest court has explained why Amanda Knox was convicted twice and also acquitted twice.
On Monday, Italy's highest court released its final say on the case in 52 pages, explaining why Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede of the Ivory Coast, were acquitted last March.
The documents cited "glaring errors, investigative amnesia, and guilty omissions," in one of the most controversial cases worldwide, which the five-judge panel said were mainly the reasons why the alleged murderers were finally convicted after four years in prison.
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According to CNN, the judges defended their decision to throw the case out without calling for a new trial. The judges said shabby police work during the initial collection of evidence has made it impossible to find "the whole truth." Basically, there was too much potential for contamination of the key forensic evidence that could have either wrongfully convicted Knox, or proved her guilt of the murder.
The judges noted that the knife with DNA initially attributed to both Knox and Kercher was hidden away in a cardboard box by forensic police, while Kercher's bra clasp that some experts said had traces of Sollecito's DNA was left on the floor nearly six weeks on the murder site before it was finally collected and signed up for the evidence list.
On the other hand, the judges admitted that Knox indeed said that she was in the house at the time of the killing, but prosecution failed to prove that she was in the same room as Kercher was at the time, calling the investigation an "absolute lack of evidence related to their biological traces in the room or on the body of the murder victim."
The judges also clarified that had it not been for the mistakes during investigation, "in all probability, the defendants' guilt, if it was to be, could have been determined from the earliest stages."
