Amanda Knox’s Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, right, arrives at Italy’s highest court building, in Rome
Italy’s high court took up the appeal of Amanda Knox’s murder conviction yesterday, considering the fate of the “very worried” American and her Italian former boyfriend in the brutal 2007 murder of Knox’s British roommate.
So many journalists and trial-watchers were on hand for the final arguments in the murder of Meredith Kercher that the judges moved the hearing into the largest available courtroom in the Court of Cassation.
The judges could decide to confirm the convictions and 28½-year sentence for Knox and 25-year sentence for her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, which would then raise extradition questions for Knox since she is free in the U.S.
The court could decide to throw out the convictions and order a third appeal trial. Less likely, it could overturn the convictions without ordering a retrial, tantamount to an acquittal.
To date, the high-profile legal saga of Knox and Sollecito have produced flip-flop guilty-then innocent-then guilty verdicts, polarizing observers in three nations. Knox has been portrayed alternately as a victim of a botched investigation and shoddy Italian justice, or a promiscuous predator who falsely accused a Congolese bar owner of the murder.
Knox, who has maintained her innocence throughout, was awaiting the ruling in her hometown of Seattle. She is “worried, very worried,” said her attorney, Carlo Dalla Vedova, who said a decision was expected late yesterday or today.
Asked if he would call Knox with the court’s decision even if it came in the middle of the night in the U.S., Dalla Vedova said: “I don’t think she’s sleeping much.”
Television crews mobbed Sollecito as he made his way into the courthouse, where he huddled with his attorney before the hearing began.
“I’m here all day, also tonight,” he said.
His attorney, Giulia Bongiorno, said she hoped the court would annul the guilty verdicts, saying the ruling was “littered with errors and absolutely littered with contradictions and by an illogical motivation.”
Kercher, a 21-year-old student from Britain, was found dead Nov. 2, 2007, in the apartment that she shared with Knox in the idyllic hillside town of Perugia where both women were studying. Her throat was slashed and she had been sexually assaulted. Colleen Barry and Frances D’Emilio, Rome, AP
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