Amanda Knox Has Been Acquitted of Murder Charges by Italy's Highest Court

Ending a legal saga that went on for eight years and captivated the world's attention, Italy's highest court on Friday overturned the guilty conviction of Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in the murder of 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher.

The decision to throw out all charges against Knox and Sollecito was met with "gasps" in the courthouse, the New York Times reported. Last year's guilty conviction was the second issued by Italian courts after Knox and Sollecito were cleared of an original one in 2011, and was widely expected to be upheld. (The Associated Press reports that a total exoneration like this one is "unusual" for Italy's highest court.)

Kercher was found dead in her bedroom in Perugia, where she and Knox were studying abroad, on November 2, 2007. Shortly thereafter, Knox and Sollecito were arrested for her murder. Knox quickly became the subject of media speculation and public spectacle, nicknamed "Foxy Knoxy"—apparently for being an attractive young woman—by the European media. The couple consistently claimed their innocence, suggesting they had spent the night of Kercher's murder smoking weed and having sex at Sollecito's apartment.

In a hotly anticipated verdict, Knox, Sollecito, and a third man, Rudy Guede—whose fingerprints were found at the murder scene—were convicted of murder by a Perugia court in 2009. Early criticism centered around the prosecution's use of character evidence—arguably painting Knox as a sociopathic sexual deviant—and the impact of sensationalist media coverage on the trial's final results. Available evidence, like DNA traces on the murder weapon, was seen as inconclusive by Italian appeals court judges.

Despite protest from American attorneys, Knox, who has always maintained her innocence, spent four years in an Italian jail, where she claims she was subject to sexual harassment by her prison guards.

After the original 2009 conviction was overturned four years ago, Knox returned to her hometown of Seattle to live with her family. She was convicted again in Florence appeals court in 2014 after the Supreme Court of Cassation—the same high court that ruled Friday—overturned Sollecito and Knox's initial acquittals.

In an interview with the Guardian last year, Knox described herself as a having a target on her back—or at least some kind of scarlet letter.

"I feel marked," she said. "There's nowhere I can go where there's not this knowledge that I'm this girl who is convicted again. I'm never going to be OK with the idea that somebody can quote some judge's decision and say I'm a convicted murderer."

As of Friday, the only decision that need be quoted is one that found Knox and Sollecito not guilty—even if Kercher's family lawyer Francesco Maresca is calling the verdict "a defeat for the Italian justice system."

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