BY GABRIEL PRINCEWILL
Ever since the conviction and subsequent acquittal of Amanda Knox for the murder of Leeds student, Meredith Kercher, the case has been back and forth in the court room with no precise direction on whether the American was in fact guilty of killing her fellow room mate, Meredith Kercher.
Ms Knox and Sollecito were first convicted by a Perugia court in 2009 for the Murder of Kercher found in a pool of blood in the apartment the two women shared i the University town of Pergia, and then acquitted after a first appeals court trial. They were convicted again in 2014, after a separate Cassation Court panel overturned those acquittals and ordered the Florence appeals.
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Discrepancies in her account of what transpired that fateful night, alongside the bothersome cessation in communication between her phone records and that of her boyfriend’s made for even higher suspicion of her innocence. The prosecution claimed that Meredith Kercher had been killed as part of a sex game gone wrong, on a night where the group had been watching a movie, smoking pot(marajuana) and having sex.
FRAME
Add to this the fact she tried to frame an innocent man for the killing- a despicable act in itself- and you were left almost certainly indicting her with the offence or at least being a participant in the joint enterprise of the crime. The corollary of this perspective is the fact that suspicion is never enough in law. In fact one can look so guilty of a crime and yet be entirely innocent.
LEGAL PRINCIPLE OF REASONABLE DOUBT
Their appearance of guilt could stem from other facts or issues the defendant may be trying to conceal for reasons best known to them. In law, the bar for ascertaining guilt for murder is very high. The jury must be convinced ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, which means that all that is needed to acquit a defendant for murder is reasonable doubt.
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The underlying logic to this legal principle is that it is better for a guilty man to go free than for an innocent man to go down. Nevertheless, nobody wants to see a guilty man go off but for the sake of precedent- a reliable measure for
future cases with similar facts- there needs to be absolute certainty in the minds of jurors before they convict. Jurors felt they had the requisite level of certainty when they initially convicted Amanda Knox, only for that verdict to be reversed on appeal.
CRITICISM
The case was sent back to court, but yesterday
Italy’s top criminal court issued a scathing criticism of the country’s prosecutor for presenting a “flawed and hastily constructed” case against Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend.
The Court of Cassation said it had thrown out their 2007 conviction for the killing of British roommate Meredith Kercher, 21, as there was no proof they were in the bedroom where she was fatally stabbed. No proof is not the same as saying they were not there, all it implies is there is no evidence to place them at the scene of the crime.
In March, the high court declared that Ms Knox, now aged 28, and Raffaele Sollecito, now aged 31, did not murder the British University graduate and stated that
there was an “absolute lack of biological traces” of Ms Knox, an American, or of co-defendant Mr Sollecito in the room or on the victim’s body. It slammed the quality of the prosecution’s case from the start.
WAVERING
The court said the path 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”. Which means the court in the original case was indecisive because of flaws in the investigation process. In particular, the written grounds criticized the fact the computer of Amanda Knox which could have yielded crucial information was unwisely burnt by prosecutors
It said had the investigation not been so shaky, “in all probability” the defendants’ guilt or innocence could have been determined from the earliest stages. Disappointingly, it also added that the court was under pressure by the world wide media attention, and this led to the case moving at a faster pace that ordinarily desirable.
ACCELERATION OF CASE AND GLARING ERRORS
In this vein, the court of cessation said “The international spotlight on the case in fact resulted in the investigation undergoing a sudden acceleration.” The implication is that this acceleration of the investigation led to a degree of negligence that undermined the quality of the findings, and resulted in the wrong conviction of an innocent person, or put another way, a person who was ‘probably not guilty’.
The court also added that there was ”no shortage of glaring errors in the underlying fabric of the sentence in question”The Court of cessation said prosecutors 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, according to the associated press.
“The kitchen knife, found in Sollecito’s house and the supposed crime weapon, was kept in an ordinary cardboard box,” the judges noted, adding that no traces of blood were found on it.
Additionally, one of Ms Kercher’s bra clasps, which prosecutors argued carried a trace of Mr Sollecito’s DNA, was left 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”.
What then is the implication of this last statement? That Mr.Sollecito’s DNA was found on the floor for 46 days or the dirty latex gloves the workers were wearing had traces of Sollecito’s DNA on it?
The analysis of the Court of Cessation itself has flaws in its reasoning, though there is some basis to some of the criticism levied against the prosecution team. It does not suffice to absolve Amanda Knox and her boyfriend of probable guilt, but what it does is provide the ‘reasonable doubt’ sufficient to adjudge a conviction of murder unsafe.
Still, the court of cessation has not explained how they conceive traces of Sollecito’s DNA might have appeared on the gloves of workers, or how it might have contaminated one of Ms Kercher’s bra clasps.
LIE DETECTOR
Lie detectors are often used in America for aid detectives in narrowing their investigation, although they are not admissible in court because of the margin of error attached to the process as well as the fact that lying about one thing in a murder case does necessarily imply guilt but can bias the jury if they are aware of the lie. Had this murder taking place in America, detectives would have included a polygraph test to aid their investigation. Detectives in Italy do not work that way, neither do detectives in England.
However, if I were Amanda Knox, I would volunteer a lie detector test to convince the American public and the world of my innocence. The decision to acquit her is legally right, as she may in fact be completely innocent. Trouble is I am not at all convinced she wasn’t at least involved in some joint enterprise in relation to the death of the bright Leeds graduate.
The court ruling against Guede was that he did not act alone, yet he alone is serving time for murder in this cruel crime.
The whole thing has been a farce of sorts and is reminiscent of the debacle that transpired in the murder case of OJ Simpson in 1994. OJ simpon was acquitted of the murder of his wife but later lost a civil suit on the same case. He is currently serving 33 years in prison at the Lovelock correctional facility in Nevada for Kidnapping and robbery.
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