Italy top court: Amanda Knox conviction based on poor case

Italy's top criminal court has scathingly faulted prosecutors for presenting a flawed and hastily constructed case against Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend, saying today it threw out their convictions for the 2007 murder of her British roommate in part because there was no proof they were in the bedroom where the woman was fatally stabbed.
The Court of Cassation issued its formal written explanation, as required by Italian law, for its March ruling vindicating the pair once and for all in the murder of Meredith Kercher in the apartment the two women shared while students in Perugia, Italy.

It wrote there was an "absolute lack of biological traces" of Knox, an American, or of co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito in the room or on the victim's body. It slammed the quality of the prosecution's case from the start.
The path of the case took was "objectively wavering, whose oscillations are ... The result also of stunning weakness or investigative bouts of amnesia and of blameworthy omissions of investigative activity," the court wrote.
Had the investigation not been so shaky, "in all probability" the defendants' guilt or innocence could have been determined from the earliest stages, the panel said. Media clamor was also a factor in what was ultimately a flawed case, the high court concluded.

"The international spotlight on the case in fact resulted in the investigation undergoing a sudden acceleration," the judges wrote.

In March, the high court declared that Knox, now 28, and Sollecito, now 31, didn't murder 21-year-old Kercher, a stronger exoneration than merely finding there was insufficient evidence to convict.
Had the Cassation Court upheld 2014 appeals court convictions of the pair, Knox would have faced 28½ years in an Italian prison, assuming she would have been extradited from the United States, while Sollecito had been facing 25 years.
Knox and Sollecito had served nearly four years in Italian prison after a first, lower court conviction by a Perugia court.

They had always proclaimed their innocence. A man from Ivory Coast, Rudy Hermann Guede, was convicted in separate proceedings and is serving a 16-year sentence.
The Cassation Court's written explanation is tantamount to a "great censure, a note of solemn censure of all the investigators," a Knox defense lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, told The Associated Press. Speaking about his client, the lawyer said, "She is very satisfied and happy to read this decision.