Court urged to overturn Knox acquittal
Ms Kercher’s half-naked body, with more than 40 wounds and a deep gash in the throat, was found in the apartment she shared with Knox in Perugia in 2007.
The court of cassation, Italy’s final court of appeal, is due to decide at 9am today Irish time on whether to start the process for a retrial or to uphold the 2011 verdict and close the case definitively.
“In this trial the judge lost his way,” state prosecutor Luigi Riello told the court, urging it to accept the request for an appeal from Perugia prosecutors and Kercher family lawyers, who say the verdict was flawed and left central aspects of the case unexplained.
Both Knox’s lawyer Luciano Ghirga and Giulia Bongiorno, a lawyer for Knox’s former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, said they were confident the court would uphold the verdict.
Prosecutors accused Knox and Sollecito of killing Ms Kercher in a drug-fuelled sexual assault. They were initially found guilty and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively after a trial that grabbed headlines all over the world.
In 2011, their convictions were overturned and they were released after serving four years in prison.
“We all still miss Meredith terribly,” her sister Stephanie said yesterday in a statement. “A beautiful young girl, my little sister, was taken from us far too soon in such a brutal way with too many unexplained factors.”
This mornings’s ruling will decide if there were any procedural irregularities that give grounds for a retrial, rather than examining the facts of the case. Prosecutors last year filed a motion to appeal against the acquittals, calling the verdicts “contradictory and illogical”.
Francesco Maresca, a lawyer for Ms Kercher’s family, said in a statement yesterday that the acquittals had been “defective” and “lacked transparency”.
“There was a lot of external pressure and the judge showed a will from the start to acquit,” said Maresca.
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