Italian Appeals Court Finds Amanda Knox and Rafael Sollecito Guilty, Again

Previously the case had been sent back to a lower court, which found them culpable.

But the Italian system requires an appeals court to agree with the finding for it to be an official conviction.

Which they've now done.

An Italian court says it convicted Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend of murdering her onetime roommate in part because of evidence showing that more than one person killed the British student.

The Florence appeals court released its explanation Tuesday, less than three months after it convicted Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in Meredith Kercher's 2007 death in a retrial.

In the more than 300-page document, the court said that a third person convicted in the murder, Rudy Guede, did not act alone, and cited the nature of the victim's wounds.

Ruling Judge Alessandro Nencini, who presided over the second appeal in the case, said Kercher, 21, and Knox disagreed over the payment of the rent in the house they shared in Perugia and that "there was an argument, then an elevation and progression of aggression."

The Florence court in January said that Knox, who also was convicted of slander, was sentenced in absentia to 28½ years in prison. Sollecito's sentence was 25 years.
They were first convicted of murder in 2009, but the verdicts were overturned on appeal in 2011.

Through her attorney, Knox released a statement proclaiming her innocence.

...

The judge also reasoned that Knox's false accusation of her former boss, Patrick Lumumba, whom she accused of the killing the night she was arrested, proved her guilt.

...

Nencini wrote that the accusation against Lumumba was "indispensable in understanding the crime" and that the accusation "cannot be separated from the murder."

So now it's a trivial argument about the rent (which was like $300 per month) which "escalates" into a brutal three-way rape/murder with a drifter.

Incidentally, this "argument about the rent" is making its first appearance in the Knox/Kercher saga. This has never been proposed before, never been testified to before, and, as far as I know, the judge is just speculatin' about things that coulda maybe happened.

The "argument about the rent" is the Italian court system's third attempt at a motive.

The first attempt was a Satanic Sex Cult Game Gone Wrong (and seriously, how often do they go right?). This was inspired by Harry Potter books, because, for serious, Harry Potter is Sex on Wheels.

The second attempt was when the judge in the first trial basically edited out that silly, embarrassing motive, and suggested a new motive: There was no motive. The organized three-way rape/murder just happened in the twinkling of an eye, without previous planning, and without any actual motive for it.

This third attempt constitutes an advance for Italian justice, as this judge realized, it seems, that Satanic Sex Game Gone Wrong was not a very convincing motive, and yet the alternative motive -- That there was no motive -- also lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

So he constructs a new motive, about something that people actually kill people over (money).

The only problem is that there has never been any evidence of any kind of argument about money or rent (in fact, Amanda and Meredith didn't argue about anything, except that Amanda was too messy and didn't clean the toilets enough, and also that she played her guitar and sung too often -- again, not your classic murder motives).

So now they had a huge argument that no one ever heard of before over the trivial monthly rent that both could easily afford and that led to Amanda using her Sexual Wiles to enlist a smelly drifter to come up to their flat and join her and her new boyfriend in a Satanic Sex Cult Game Gone Wrong Extreme Rent Mediation Session.

posted by Ace at 01:09 PM

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