Amanda Knox DNA evidence contaminated, appeal court hears
Experts brand as unreliable the key evidence that Raffaele Sollecito's DNA was found on victim Meredith Kercher's bra
The appeal by Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend against their convictions for the killing of British student Meredith Kercher took a significant turn on Wednesday when independent, court-appointed experts dismissed as unreliable forensic evidence crucial to the prosecution case.
Two Rome university professors said there was no certainty that traces of DNA found on the alleged murder weapon, a knife, belonged to Kercher.
They added that the vital piece of evidence which linked Knox's ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, to the scene of the murder a trace of his DNA on Kercher's bra clip could have got there by contamination, as the defence maintained at the trial.
The DNA traces on the knife, which was discovered by police in Sollecito's kitchen, "appear unreliable in as much as [they were] not supported by scientifically validated analytic procedures", the experts' report said.
Defence lawyers argued at the trial that it was only to be expected that Knox would have used the knife on visits to Sollecito's flat. But they said that it could not have been the murder weapon, arguing its profile was inconsistent with the slash wounds to Kercher's throat.
The potential breakthrough for the appellants came just two days after their case suffered a hefty setback. On Monday, Rudy Guede, who has also been convicted and jailed for the murder, repeated his claim that Knox and Sollecito had carried out the killing.
What sealed the case against them at their trial, however, was testimony from a string of police scientific experts that appeared to support the prosecutors' claim that Kercher died in a bizarre sex game involving all three defendants.
The appeal court's experts were scathing yesterday in their criticism of the reliability of that evidence.
"The international procedures for the inspection [of the scene of a crime]! were no t followed," professors Stefano Conti and Carla Vecciotti said in their report.
Nor had the police respected international standards for the collection and bagging of exhibits.
Knox and Sollecito are currently serving sentences of 26 and 25 years respectively for the murder. Guede was given a reduced, 16-year sentence after a plea bargain.
Kercher, aged 21, was found dead in November 2007 in a flat she shared with Knox and two young Italian women. Both the British woman, from Coulsdon in Surrey, and her American flatmate were studying at Perugia's University for Foreigners. Knox was arrested after she signed a statement that she had been present in the house at the time of the killing an admission she almost immediately retracted. At that stage, police and prosecutors were unaware of forensic evidence that put Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter, at the scene of the crime.
But despite his arrest, indictment and subsequent, prosecutors held to the sex-game theory used to explain Kercher's supposed murder by Knox and her boyfriend.
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