Amanda Knox

Knox, aged 20 at the time of the murder, had called the police after returning to her and Kercher's flat following a night spent with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and finding Kercher's bedroom door locked and blood in the bathroom. During the police interrogations that followed, the conduct of which is a matter of dispute, Knox implicated herself and her employer, Patrick Lumumba, in the murder. Initially, Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were all arrested for Kercher's murder, but Lumumba was soon released. In the initial trial, Knox and Sollecito were convicted and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. Known burglar Rudy Guede was arrested a short time later following the discovery of his bloodstained fingerprints on Kercher's possessions. He was later found guilty of murder in a fast-track trial and is currently (as of 2019) serving a 16-year prison sentence.

On January 24, 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Italy to pay compensation to Knox for violating her rights in the hours after her arrest in Perugia. Italy was ordered to pay Knox 18,400 Euros (about US$20,800) for not providing her with either a lawyer or a competent interpreter when she was first held in custody.

Knox subsequently became an author, an activist, and a journalist. Her memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, became a best seller. In December 2017, Facebook Watch announced that Knox would be hosting a show, The Scarlet Letter Reports, produced by Vice Media on its service.

After returning to the United States, Knox completed her degree and worked on a book about her case. She was often followed by paparazzi. Her family incurred large debts from the years of supporting her in Italy and were left insolvent, the proceeds from Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir having gone to pay legal fees to her Italian lawyers. Knox has been a reviewer and journalist for the then West Seattle Herald, later subsumed into Westside Seattle, and attended events of the Innocence Project and related organizations. In a 2017 interview, Knox said she was devoting herself to writing and activism for the wrongfully accused. She hosted The Scarlet Letter Reports on Facebook Watch, a series which examined the "gendered nature of public shaming". Knox also hosts a podcast, The Truth About True Crime. She has been a featured speaker at fundraising events for non-profits, including the Innocence Project. In June 2019, Knox returned to Italy as a keynote speaker at a conference on criminal justice, where she was part of a panel titled "Trial by Media".

Pre-trial publicity in Italian media (and repeated by other media worldwide) portrayed Knox in a negative light, leading to complaints that the prosecution was using character assassination tactics. A guilty verdict at Knox's initial trial and her 26-year sentence caused international controversy, as U.S. forensic experts thought evidence at the crime scene was incompatible with her involvement. A prolonged legal process, including a successful prosecution appeal against her acquittal at a second-level trial, continued after Knox was freed in 2011. On March 27, 2015, Italy's highest court definitively exonerated Knox and Sollecito. However, Knox's conviction for committing calunnia (calumny) against Lumumba was upheld by all courts. On January 14, 2016, Knox was acquitted of calunnia for saying she had been struck by policewomen during the interrogation.

On March 27, 2015, the ultimate appeal by Knox and Sollecito was heard by the Supreme Court of Cassation; it ruled that the case was without foundation, thereby definitively acquitting them of the murder. Her defamation conviction was upheld but the three-year sentence was deemed served by the time she had already spent in prison. Rather than merely declaring that there were errors in the earlier court cases or that there was not enough evidence to convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent of involvement in the murder. On September 7, 2015, the Court published the report on the acquittal, citing "glaring errors", "investigative amnesia", and "guilty omissions", where a five-judge panel said that the prosecutors who won the original murder conviction failed to prove a "whole truth" to back up the scenario that Knox and Sollecito killed Kercher. They also stated that there were "sensational failures" (clamorose defaillance) in the investigation, and that the lower court had been guilty of "culpable omissions" (colpevoli omissioni ) in ignoring expert testimony that demonstrated contamination of evidence.

Judge Nencini presided at the retrial, and granted a prosecution request for analysis of previously unexamined DNA sample found on a kitchen knife of Sollecito's, which the prosecution alleged was the murder weapon based on the forensic police reporting that Kercher's DNA was on it, a conclusion discredited by court-appointed experts at the appeal trial. When the unexamined sample was tested, no DNA belonging to Kercher was found. On January 30, 2014, Knox and Sollecito were found guilty. In their written explanation the judges emphasised Guede's fast-track verdict report was a judicial reference point establishing that he had not acted alone. The Nencini verdict report said there must have been a cleanup to remove traces of Knox from the house while leaving Guede's. The report said that there had been no burglary and the signs of one were staged. It did not consider the possibility of Guede's having been responsible for faking a break-in.

At her trial, Knox testified that she had spent hours maintaining her original story, that she had been with Sollecito at his flat all night and had no knowledge of the murder, but a group of police would not believe her. Knox said, "I wasn't just stressed and pressurised; I was manipulated"; she testified to being told by the interpreter, "probably I didn't remember well because I was traumatised. So I should try to remember something else." Knox stated, "they said they were convinced that I was protecting someone. They were saying 'Who is it? Who is it?' They were saying: 'Here's the message on your telephone, you wanted to meet up with him, you are a stupid liar." Knox also said that a policewoman "was saying 'Come on, come on, remember' and then – slap – she hit me. Then 'come on, come on' and – slap – another one".

Knox wrote a letter to Corrado Maria Daclon, Secretary General of the Italy–USA Foundation, the day after regaining her freedom:

To hold my hand and offer support and respect throughout the obstacles and the controversy, there were Italians. There was the Italy–USA Foundation, and many others that shared my pain and that helped me survive, with hope. I am eternally grateful for their caring hospitality and their courageous commitment. To those that wrote me, that defended me, that stood by me, that prayed for me... I am forever grateful to you.

On March 26, 2013, Italy's highest court, the Supreme Court of Cassation set aside the acquittals of the Hellmann second level trial on the grounds that it had gone beyond the remit of a Corte d'Assise d'Appello by not ordering new DNA tests and failing to give weight to circumstantial evidence in context such as Knox's accusation of the bar owner in the disputed interviews. A note Knox composed in the police station (not mentioning Guede) was regarded by the Supreme Court as confirmation that she and Guede were present in Via della Pergola 7 while Kercher was attacked. A retrial was ordered. Knox was represented, but remained in the United States.

In May 2011, Greg Hampikian, director of the Idaho Innocence Project, a non-profit investigative organization dedicated to proving the innocence of wrongly convicted people, said forensic results from the crime scene pointed to Guede as the killer and to his having acted on his own.

A Corte d'Assise verdict of guilty is not a definitive conviction. What is in effect a new trial, Corte d'Assise d'Appello, reviews the case. The appeal (or second grade) trial began November 2010 and was presided over by Judges Claudio Pratillo Hellmann and Massimo Zanetti. A court-ordered review of the contested DNA evidence by independent experts noted numerous basic errors in the gathering and analysis of the evidence, and concluded that no evidential trace of Kercher's DNA had been found on the alleged murder weapon, which police had found in Sollecito's kitchen. The review found the forensic police examination showed evidence of multiple males' DNA fragments on the bra clasp, which had been lost on the floor for 47 days, the court-appointed expert testified the context strongly suggested contamination. On October 3, 2011, Knox and Sollecito were found not guilty of the murder.

A number of US experts spoke out against DNA evidence used by the prosecution. According to consultant Gregory Hampikian, the Italian forensic police could not replicate the key result, claimed to have successfully identified DNA at levels below those an American laboratory would attempt to analyse, and never supplied validation of their methods. Knox was indicted in 2010 on charges of defamation against the police for saying she had been struck across her head during the interview in which she incriminated herself.

In 2009, Knox and Sollecito pleaded not guilty at a Corte d'Assise on charges of murder, sexual assault, carrying a knife (which Guede had not been charged with), simulating a burglary, and theft of 300 euros, two credit cards, and two mobile phones. There was no charge in relation to Kercher's missing keys to the entry door and her bedroom door, although Guede's trial judgement said he had not stolen anything. There was a separate but concurrent trial of Knox with the same jury as her murder trial in which she was accused of falsely denouncing her employer for the murder. Knox's police interrogation was deemed improper and ruled inadmissible for the murder trial, but was heard in her nominally separate trial for false denunciation.

On December 5, 2009, Knox, by then 22, was convicted on charges of faking a break-in, defamation, sexual violence, and murder, and was sentenced to 26 years imprisonment. Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years. In Italy, opinion was not generally favorable toward Knox, and an Italian jurist remarked: "This is the simplest and fairest criminal trial one could possibly think of in terms of evidence."

In October 2008, Guede was found guilty of the sexual assault and murder of Kercher and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. His prison sentence was ultimately reduced to 16 years.

In Perugia, Knox lived in a four-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in a house at Via della Pergola 7 with 3 other women. Her flatmates were Kercher (a British exchange student) and two Italian trainee lawyers in their late twenties. Kercher and Knox moved in on September 10 and 20, 2007, respectively, meeting each other for the first time. Knox was employed part-time at a bar, Le Chic, which was owned by a Congolese man, Diya Patrick Lumumba. She told flatmates that she was going to quit because he was not paying her; Lumumba denied this. Kercher's English female friends saw relatively little of Knox, who preferred to mix with Italians.

Over the following days Knox was repeatedly interviewed, ostensibly as someone who might become a witness. She told police that on November 1 she received a text from Lumumba advising that her evening waitressing shift had been cancelled and she had stayed over at Sollecito's apartment, only going back to the house she shared with Kercher on the morning the body was discovered. Knox was not provided with legal counsel, as Italian law only mandates the appointment of a lawyer for someone suspected of a crime. On the night of November 5, Knox voluntarily went to the police station, although what followed is a matter of dispute. Police arrested Knox, Sollecito, and Patrick Lumumba on November 6, 2007. Charges against Lumumba were dropped a short time later.

Guede fled to Germany shortly after the murder. During a November 19, 2007 Skype conversation with his friend Giacomo Benedetti, Guede did not mention Knox or Sollecito as being in the house on the night of the murder. Later his account changed and he indirectly implicated them in the murder, which he denied involvement in. Guede was arrested in Germany on November 20, then extradited to Italy on December 6. Guede opted to be tried in a special fast track procedure by Judge Micheli. He was not charged with having had a knife. He did not testify and was not questioned about his statements, which had altered from his original version. Guede was convicted of murder, but the official judges' report on the conviction specified that he had not had a knife or stabbed the victim, or stolen any of Kercher's possessions. Micheli's finding that Guede must have had an accomplice gave support to the later prosecution of Knox.

Knox graduated in 2005 from the Seattle Preparatory School and studied linguistics at the University of Washington, where in 2007 she made the university's dean's list. She worked at part-time jobs to fund an academic year in Italy. Relatives described the 20-year-old Knox as outgoing but unwary. Her stepfather had strong reservations about her going to Italy that year, as he felt she was still too naïve.

Perugia, the city where Meredith Kercher was murdered in her home, is known for its universities and large student population. The city had reportedly not had a murder for 20 years, but its prosecutors had been responsible for Italy's most controversial murder cases. A charge originated by Perugia prosecutors resulted in the 2002 conviction of former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti for ordering the murder of journalist Carmine Pecorelli, and led to complaints that the justice system had "gone mad". The Supreme Court took the unusual step of definitively acquitting Andreotti the next year.

In early 2002, Perugia prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who enjoyed taking a detective-like role and was later to be in charge of the Kercher investigation, arraigned members of a respectable Masonic lodge for an alleged conspiracy. Mignini reportedly based the case on a theory involving serial killings and Satanic rites. Mignini investigated fellow prosecutors for complicity in the supposed plot and appealed dismissals of the charges; there were no convictions in the case, which finally ended in 2010. According to a scholar who researched comparative law in Italy, selective changes to the Italian legal system left it unable to cope when a prosecutor with Mignini's American-style adversarial approach used his powers to the fullest.

In 1989, Italy reformed its inquisitorial system, introducing elements of US-style adversarial procedure. The changes were intended to remove an inquisitorial continuity between the investigatory phase and the basis for a decision at trial, but in practice they took control of inquiries away from police and gave prosecutors authority over the preliminary investigation. Although they have considerable authority over early inquiries and discretion in bringing charges, Italian prosecutors do not customarily use their powers in the aggressive way common in the US system.

Amanda Marie Knox (born July 9, 1987) is an American woman who spent almost four years in an Italian prison following her conviction for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student who shared her apartment. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation.