An Italian court has overturned the murder convictions of 24-year-old Amanda Knox of Seattle and her former Italian boyfriend in the 2007 slaying of Knox's roommate, Meredith Kercher. Both were released immediately.

An appellate court jury of eight Italians, which included two judges, delivered their verdict after more than 11 hours of deliberations. Ms. Knox and her supporters packing the court let out whoops of joy and relief as the verdict was read on live television, prompting court officials to shout for silence. Ms. Knox broke down in tears.

The decision overturns the December 2009 ruling that convicted Ms. Knox to 26 years in prison and her co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, a former boyfriend, to 25 years in prison for the 2007 stabbing murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, a Briton who shared an apartment with Ms. Knox. The case was built largely on DNA evidence that legal experts called flimsy and suspect.

Ms. Knox, 24, from Seattle, was returned to prison to collect her possessions and left less than a few hours later.

All three figures in the trial were young, promising students in the picturesque central Italian city of Perugia, a fact that largely ignited the media hype that surrounded the case from the start. The unprecedented international attention in a murder trial in Italy was fueled by looming question marks over means and motive that made the case a classic whodunit.

“We’re thankful Amanda’s nightmare is over,” Ms. Knox’s sister, Deanna, read in a statement after the verdict. “We’re grateful for the support we have received from all over the world.” A lawyer for Mr. Sollecito, Giulia Bongiorno, said, “We’ve been waiting for this for four years.”

Earlier in the day, Ms. Knox read a tearful statement in fluent Italian beseeching the court to overturn the verdict, claiming her innocence. “I did not kill, I did not rape, I did not steal. I was not there," she said. “I want to go back home. I want to go back to my life. I don’t want to be punished. I don’t want my life and my future to be taken away for something I didn’t do.”

The elation at the acquittal extended to Ms. Knox’s circle of friends and supporters in Seattle, who had rented a fancy hotel suite at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel to watch the verdict broadcast on television. They cried with joy as the news was read shortly before 4 p.m. Eastern time. “There was no ways she did this,” said John Lange, Ms. Knox’s theater teacher at Seattle Preparatory, a Jesuit high school. “She never did anything to hurt anyone. She was not conniving. She was not mean-spirited.”

The joyful reaction of the defendants and their families and friends contrasted sharply with the looks of ashen disappointment by relatives of Ms. Kercher.

The British media had openly sympathized with the tragic figure of Ms. Kercher and her family, which backed the prosecution in seeking to uphold the original trial’s outcome. “The lower court found the defendants guilty,” said a lawyer for the family, Francesco Maresca, said at a news conference earlier Monday, as deliberations were under way. He said the Kercher family wanted to “have the verdict confirmed.”

Hundreds of people had massed outside the courtroom before the verdict was read. Many cheered as the acquittal news filtered out to the crowd, but some shouted “shame!” in apparent sympathy with the murder victim’s family.

The trial and retrial of Ms. Knox attracted widespread attention partly because of its sensational details and the starkly differing portraits of the main defendant, who was alternately described as a hard-working college student caught up in an arcane foreign justice system and a marijuana-smoking criminal.

Ms. Kercher was found stabbed in her room on Nov. 2, 2007, in what prosecutors described as a game of rough sex involving Ms. Knox and her boyfriend that went horribly wrong. Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito were arrested a few days later.

The appeal, which began last November, was dominated by the re-examination of the DNA evidence.

Court-appointed independent experts said that the DNA had been collected in a way that could have allowed for contamination and that the genetic information on two main pieces of evidence could not be matched to the defendants with certainty. Ms. Bongiorno argued that the evidence collected 46 days after the police first went through the scene should have been thrown out.

In their closing arguments, prosecutors dismissed the findings of the independent experts, calling them inept and inexperienced. They also reiterated other evidence from the first trial, including eyewitness evidence placing Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito at the scene.

The appeals court upheld Ms. Knox’s conviction on a charge of slander for accusing a bar owner, Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, of committing the murder. The court set the sentence for that conviction at three years — meaning time served — and a fine of 22,000 euros, or about $29,000.

A third defendant, Rudy Guede, 24, was also convicted of Miss Kercher’s murder in a separate trial and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. His conviction was upheld on appeal but his sentence was shortened to 16 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/world/...court.html

Could Amanda Knox Have an Autism Spectrum Disorder?



Amanda Knox, the 23-year-old American college student who was convicted of sexually assaulting and killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Italy in 2007, allegedly after an orgy gone wrong, got good news this week. Independent experts working on her ongoing appeal said that the traces of DNA used to convict Knox may have been contaminated and are "unreliable."
With the DNA evidence excluded, the only substantiation of Knox's guilt includes a possibly coerced confession and her bizarre behavior after being arrested. But could those two things have the same explanation? Is it possible that Knox has an underlying condition — Asperger's syndrome, a less severe form of autism — that caused both her unusual social behavior and a gullibility that triggered a false confession?

Knox's link to Kercher's murder was always sketchy: for one thing, there was no physical evidence of the orgy that the prosecutor claimed led to the killing. Knox was said to have helped stab her 21-year-old roommate to death when Kercher refused to participate in sex games with Knox's boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, then 23, and Rudy Guede, 20, an African immigrant. No other motive was ever presented.

But Guede's bloody footprints and handprints were found at the scene, his DNA was found in Kercher's body — and he was a prior robbery suspect known to carry a knife. The simplest and most logical view of the crime would be that Guede alone killed Kercher. And in fact, he was also convicted of the murder.

However, by the time his involvement was discovered, Knox had already confessed after hours of questioning by police, implicating herself and Sollecito. What's more, her behavior after her arrest was bizarre and seemed callous.

In a riveting feature story on the case, Rolling Stone writer Nathaniel Rich describes how Knox's odd actions may have led to her conviction. He writes that while at the police station with Sollecito, she did not act normally:

"Knox and Sollecito would make faces, kiss each other, while there was the body of a friend in those conditions," said homicide chief Monica Napoleoni.

"I couldn't help thinking how cool and calm Amanda was," said Giacomo Silenzi, a neighbor who had been having a fling with Kercher. "Her eyes didn't seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved."

Officers would later complain that Knox, after sitting for hours in the stiff waiting-room chairs, had started to do cartwheels and even splits. Convinced that she was psychotic, the guards begged her to stop, explaining that such behavior was "inappropriate." And a detective complained when he saw Knox sitting on her boyfriend's lap. "Inappropriate," he said.

Could this be evidence of Asperger's? In people with the condition, odd emotional reactions and atypical responses to stress are common. Women with autism spectrum disorders tend to be better at appearing socially skilled than men do, which often leaves them undiagnosed.

Valerie Gaus is a psychologist who has worked with hundreds of autistic people and is the author of Living Well on the Spectrum. "Everything I read would be consistent with it and it could be one alternative theory for the behavior that made her seem suspicious," says Gaus, while stressing that she has not met Knox and cannot diagnose her. "When people on the spectrum become anxious or nervous, they won't necessarily show it through facial expressions and they may use odd behavior to regulate anxiety. You might see that in odd gestures or strange tics or body movements. If she did have it, her cartwheels might have been [her way of] trying to regulate overwhelming anxiety."

Rudy Simone, author of Aspergirls and herself a woman on the autism spectrum, says, "While I'm not a diagnostician and haven't seen anything on the tapes we've all seen that would indicate she has Asperger's, if she did, theoretically, the kind of behavior she displayed before, during and after her arrest would be in line with the many psychological or neurological differences [that mark] Aspergian behavior."

Another example of "self-soothing" behavior common to autism could be Knox's frequent loud singing, which Kercher's sister told Rolling Stone had been annoying to the victim.

Knox's lack of social skills, unusual reactions to emotion and lack of concern about appearance — all common in autism spectrum conditions — were clear to everyone who knew her:

"She's a little dork who doesn't wear matched socks," says her best friend, Madison Paxton. ...

[Sollecito said]: "I noticed that her opinions on the music were odd. ... She didn't concentrate on the emotions it provoked but only on the rhythm — slow, fast, slow."

And, like many autistic people, Knox was highly intelligent but also extremely naïve and gullible:

"She's the smartest person you'd ever know" but "dumb as a rock" when it comes to "street sense," [her stepfather said]. In conversations with her friends and family, a portrait emerges of a person with a childlike innocence. She was, as her mother, Edda, puts it, "oblivious to the dark side of the world."

"The common term we use is naïve but from a clinical perspective, what can cause that is that people on the spectrum have difficulty with perspective-taking. They have a difficult time thinking about or understanding what another person might be thinking," says Gaus.

"We just don't understand other people," says Simone. "We don't read faces. Social language is always a second language to us that we're never particularly fluent in and alongside that is a childlike naivete."

That can lead to gullibility because if you can't understand the world from other people's perspectives, you can't recognize when they might be trying to manipulate you, or even that such a thing is possible to do. This makes people with Asperger's particularly prone to false confessions both because they get easily overwhelmed by stress and because they don't understand the intentions of the police.

"In my own practice, I've seen a fair number of young people get in trouble with the law because of naivete," says Gaus.

Knox's apparent penchant for casual sex, which was extensively covered by the British tabloids, can also be seen in some women on the autism spectrum. "With females on the spectrum, sometimes promiscuity is a way that you connect and they learn early on that they can get attention for being sexual. That wouldn't be surprising," Gaus says.

Notes Simone, "Because of our open demeanor towards others, what we see as friendly is often consider flirtatious and often misread."

Also, Knox's utter lack of awareness of her own beauty — detailed in the Rolling Stone story — could be a symptom. Appreciating your own good looks "involves the ability to imagine how others perceive you and people on the spectrum have problems with that," Gaus says.

Yet another potentially telling characteristic: Knox's desire for justice, not only for herself but for others. Rich describes how Knox would try to help strangers on the street and how she insisted on staying in Italy to help the police with the case, even after her other roommates had gotten attorneys and left the country. "A strong need for justice is common," Gaus says.



Of course, whether or not a formal diagnosis of Asperger's would help or hurt Knox's case is hard to say: the stigma associated with autism spectrum disorders might make her seem more suspicious, rather than less, in the eyes of some legal authorities. But Gaus believes that screening her would be appropriate and that it could help her come to terms with what happened. It could ultimately help her have a better future if she is, as seems likely, exonerated.






Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/30/co...z1ZlHgEIDM

I've been following this case since the beginning. While it does seem very possible that Ms Knox was involved in the murder, I have little doubt that the police and the prosecution set out to build a case against her and perhaps "bolstered" the evidence here and there.

Whenever I hear about a case like this I am reminded of why I don't support the death penalty.

I don't think she did it, personally, although I will never know for sure obviously. I know what its like to be on the shite end of the corrupt pig stick. I myself want to sue the bejeebers out of the scumbags for what they did. Didn't they torture her or something? Poor girl :/

I also followed this- I don't know for sure when the beginning was - but I recall thinking the girl just basically met the "boyfriend", as i(as if) something didn't add up... intuition sort of.

I am so happy I had been checking the news all day (online) hoping to hear if it was overturned. SOSOOOSO happy for her family.

First I am hearing of it - good news! Total catastrophe averted.

This post was last modified: 10-04-2011 02:51 AM by windy.

I never knew of this until now. I had never heard of her either. If I ever get falsely accused of a crime, I am using my AS as a defense just in case I do anything odd or in case I don't act right so I am not seen as guilty. But sucks to those who don't know they have it. If they were undiagnosed, I bet they be evaluated and be getting a diagnoses just to help them with the false conviction.

"The sex was great ...but then there was the knife..."

Something about "it went wrong" seems to not make sense to me.

Please, please don't turn this into a thread about diagnosing (in)famous people over long-distance.

This would be a nightmare for me; if Miroslaw got away with murdering* my friend. Luckily, he confessed, so this isn't going to happen, but still - I feel for the friends and family.

*I have no idea if Knox did it, and no knowledge of the case. Just sayin'.

This.

I didnt DX her , just posted the story cause it was interesting..

And that was the title of the story, not my words

This post was last modified: 10-05-2011 01:05 AM by skyblue1 .

Just read this part at the end of skyblues first post

quoted"Rudy Simone, author of Aspergirls and herself a woman on the autism spectrum, says, "While I'm not a diagnostician and haven't seen anything on the tapes we've all seen that would indicate she has Asperger's, "

the time i first saw this on the news, the video was of her and the boyfriend playing kissy-face (as has been mentioned previously) while they were watching the scene. the media played it over and over.  over the next couple of days, it was the same scene.  she looked so callous....+ she's cute and american.  of course the law went after her.

i've only spent a couple of months in italy and thankfully did not get involved with the local officials.  i was with local cycling teams training and had no time for craziness.  the italians seemed to be completely  filled with contempt for police/government.

pbs did a piece on the prosecutor in the case and it was really something.  not a guy you would want after you.

I wouldn't pin her as being aspie, personally.

In some countries you are guilty until proven innocent.

Beware.  When someone is dead or dying.   Wear black.  Do not dance, laugh, or appear to have a good time.  

You will be suspect anyway just because you are a foreign devil.

From what I hear, the pig involved in interrogating/busting/prosecuting knox is as bent as a nine bob note.