FRANCES D'EMILIO
AP
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 Monday 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.
...
The Cassation panel of five judges essentially concluded that while there were indications Guede could have had accomplices, nothing in the prosecutors' case proved that either Knox or Sollecito were involved in the murder.
It also wrote that the Florence appeals court which convicted them last year ignored expert testimony that "clearly demonstrated possible contamination" of evidence and misinterpreted findings about the knife allegedly used to slit Kercher's throat, in what prosecutors had described as a sexual assault.
"The kitchen knife, found in Sollecito's house and the supposed crime weapon, was kept in an ordinary cardboard box, like the kind that Christmas gadgets are packaged in," the Cassation judges noted. In any case, no traces of blood were found on it, they wrote.
Examples of investigative ineptitude abound in the report.
"The computers of Amanda Knox and Kercher, which perhaps could have furnished information useful to the investigation, were, incredibly, burned by imprudent maneuvers by the investigators, who caused an electric shock" apparently through a charging error, the panel of judges wrote.
Even the supposed time of death, as argued by prosecutors, reflected a "deplorable approximation," they wrote.
A bra clasp of the victim, which prosecutors argued carried a trace of Sollecito's DNA, was on the floor of the murder scene for 46 days, and then "was passed from hand to hand of the workers, who, furthermore, were wearing dirty latex gloves," the panel said.
...
The Cassation panel said Knox did deserve her conviction and three-year sentence for slandering a Congolese-born Perugia pub owner whom she initially indicated as the murder suspect. The man had been jailed until an alibi led to his release. Because Knox served prison time for the initial murder conviction, she didn't face prison when the slander conviction was upheld in March.
http://news.yahoo.com/italy-top-court-knox-conviction-based-poor-case-125434208.html
