Amanda Knox Update -- June 29, 2011

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito won a crucial legal victory today as an independent forensic report discredited key DNA evidence used to convict the two. Independent forensic experts appointed by the court, Stefano Conti and Carla Vecchiotti, from Rome's Sapienza University, have concluded that two key pieces of DNA evidence used to convict Amanda Knox and Raffaeel Sollecito are unreliable and have sited multiple errors made by investigators. This information is being described as “shocking” as it blazes through news outlets worldwide, and though it may be shocking to casual followers, for many it comes 3 ½ years too late.

Knox and Sollecito stand convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher in late 2007 and are serving 26 and 25 years respectively. Both have strongly denied any involvement in Kercher’s Murder and now DNA evidence which Judge Giancarlo Massei refused to allow additional testing on during the first trial, may very well help to secure their freedom on appeal.

The two pieces of evidence that have been discredited on review are a knife (that was said to be the murder weapon) containing the DNA of both Knox and Kercher, and a severed bra clasp said to contain DNA of Sollecito.

The knife was the prosecution's "smoking gun” said to have Knox’s DNA on the handle and Kercher’s DNA on the blade. An investigator claimed he retrieved the knife from Sollecito’s kitchen drawer because it looked clean. Investigators neglected to test any other knives from either Sollecito’s kitchen or the kitchen at the location of the murder, quickly concluding they had found the murder weapon. The knife was suspect from the start not only because of how it was found but also because it was too large to cause Kercher's fatal wounds and did not match a bloody imprint of a knife found on Kercher’s bed sheet.

Scrambling for answers, the prosecution claimed that a second knife must have been used. Failing to back up those claims with a single shred of evidence left their theory lacking credibility ,but denial of additional testing left the court to accept the initial DNA results, confirming the knife as the murder weapon.

Thankfully Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann felt it was necessary to grant the defense request for additional testing on appeal. If Judge Massei would have allowed this testing during the first trial, there may have never been an appeal to begin with as independent experts have now completely discredited the murder weapon concluding there was no blood on the knife, no DNA from the victim, no evidence to show the knife was involved in any way. They did confirm Knox’s DNA on the handle which would be expected because she used the knife for cooking at Raffaele’s apartment. The independent expert conclusion on the knife: unreliable evidence.

The second piece of evidence discredited on review is a bra clasp retrieved from the murder room. The clasp was horribly mishandled by investigators and should have never been admissible as evidence in the first place. The prosecution claimed the clasp, which was torn from Kercher’s bra during the attack, contained Sollecito’s DNA. No other evidence linked either Sollecito or Knox to the murder room making the clasp vital to the prosecution’s case. Several factors discredit this piece of evidence. Investigators neglected to collect the clasp for 47 days leaving it to be shuffled around on the floor as seen in crime scene video throughout that time frame.



When the clasp was finally collected, multiple investigators handled it with contaminated gloves, all captured on video.



On appeal, the independent experts have concluded that contamination could not be ruled out but more importantly that DNA testing done on the clasp was not performed correctly. They state that interpretation of the DNA profile was erroneous due to misrepresentation of the Y (sex) chromosome, determining the DNA attributed to Raffaele actually belonged to a female. Experts also concluded that methods used did not follow international procedures of inspection and international protocols for collecting and sampling of evidence. The independent expert conclusion on the clasp: unreliable evidence.

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