Italian court finally releases written report: "stunning flaws" in the case against Amanda Knox
and Raffaele Sollecito.
The two were falsely accused of the murder of Meredith Kercher, and spent four years in prison and more than seven years going through a series of trials before the High Court finally acquitted them in March.
Amanda is still facing one more legal action: she was charged with slander for saying that the police hit her during her interrogations, a charge that carries criminal penalties. And she is appealing to the European Court a conviction that she slandered Patrick Lumumba when she caved in and agreed to the police claims that he'd been in the cottage.
(Today Amanda is a reporter at the West Seattle Herald, where she has a weekly column.)
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/07/amanda-knox-acquitted-because-of-stunning-flaws-in-investigation
"The trial had oscillations which were the result of stunning flaws, or amnesia, in the investigation and omissions in the investigative activity,” the judges wrote.
They also said that the murder investigation was ultimately hindered by the fact that investigators were under pressure to come up with answers once the case was prominently covered in media around the world.
“The international spotlight on the case in fact resulted in the investigation undergoing a sudden acceleration, that, in the frantic search for one or more guilty parties to consign to international public opinion, certainly didn’t help the search for substantial truth,” the judges wrote.
SNIP
The judges denounced the prosecutors’ argument that there was not more physical evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime because they had selectively cleaned the crime scene as illogical. Such an act would have been impossible, they said.
SNIP
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/09/07/italy-top-court-amanda-knox-conviction-based-poor-case/71844786/
ROME (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.
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Stunning flaws" is kind of an understatement!
