The Italian appeal court judge who freed Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in October after they spent four years in jail for killing British student Meredith Kercher has criticised almost every stage of the investigation that led to their convictions.
In a 143-page document explaining his court's acquittal, released on Thursday, judge Pratillo Hellman seeks to discredit witnesses who saw Knox, a student from Seattle, and her former boyfriend Sollecito, at the scene of the crime, and questions DNA evidence.
But he refused to speculate on what actually happened to Kercher on 1 November 2007, when her throat was slashed in the apartment she shared with Knox in Perugia.
"It is not up to this court to speculate about what really happened," he wrote, "or whether one or more people carried out the crime."
One man, Ivory Coast-born drifter Rudy Guede, has been convicted for his role in the killing.
Hellman has no doubts that the evidence does not pin Knox, 24, and Sollecito, 27, to the murder, pointing out how the judge who convicted the pair in 2009 to 26 and 25 years in prison used the word "probably" 39 times in his written explanation of the conviction.
Hellman ridicules attempts to demonise Knox because she bought G-string underwear days after the murder "rather than a more conservative type of underwear", and dismisses investigators' suspicions of Knox after she kissed Sollecito before questioning and turned cartwheels at the police station. Her behaviour, he writes, "was part of a need to find a minimum of normality in the context of a tragic situation".
Once ushered in for "obsessive" questioning that dragged into the night with no lawyer present and accompanied by an interpreter who "induced her to drag up memories", Knox was placed under "psychological pressure", eventually stating she was in the apartment at the time of the murder and implicating a local barman after police found a message from him on her mobile phone. "By giving the name to those who were interrogating her in such a tough fashion, Amanda Knox hoped to end the pressure, which had become, after long hours, a real torment."
A statement she wrote hours later suggesting she was in the apartment at the time of the murder was the product of "total confusion", Hellman said.
Knox was held in jail after the barman, Patrick Lumumba, provided an alibi, as investigators collected evidence against her and Sollecito.
Hellman refers at length to the court-ordered review of DNA evidence which discredited the police theory that a knife found in Sollecito's kitchen drawer was the murder weapon, stating that police tests "were not completely in line with international scientific protocols". He also questions techniques used to find Knox and Kercher's DNA in blood drops in their bathroom.
On the subject of witnesses, Hellman notes that a local tramp who placed Knox near the apartment on the night of the crime was a heroin addict with little sense of time. A shopkeeper who reported that Knox had bought bleach from him the morning after the murder when she claimed to be in bed only stepped forward with his story a year later "following the continued pressure of a young apprentice journalist who lived near his shop".
Police believed Knox and Sollecito broke a window at the apartment to fake a break-in and fool them into believing that Kercher had been killed by a burglar, but Hellman writes that Guede might have easily smashed the window and climbed in, a method of entry he had used in previous burglaries.
Guede, he added, could have used a nail found in the wall as a foothold to reach the window.
Knox has returned to Seattle since her release, while prosecutors have said they plan to appeal against her acquittal in Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation.
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