Innocente

IT WAS every parent's most horrifying study-abroad nightmare come true. The victim was a British student, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, found dead in her room in the Italian university city of Perugia in 2007. Her killer, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast named Rudy Guede, was convicted in 2008 after police matched him with a handprint in Ms Kercher’s blood and multiple DNA samples retrieved at the scene. But before police had identified the evidence incriminating Mr Guede, they had also arrested Ms Kercher’s American flatmate, Amanda Knox, and Ms Knox’s Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

Instead of simply releasing Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito, police and a succession of prosecutors concocted a string of improbable scenarios attempting to link them to the killing as well. At first the couple were supposed to have joined Mr Guede in a satanic ritual; later it was depicted as an assisted rape that ended in murder. On March 27th, after a pre-trial hearing, a trial, two appeals and a retrial, the judges of Italy’s highest court put an end to the case and to the prolonged mental suffering of the two young defendants. The Court of Cassation in Rome found Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito not guilty on the grounds that they had “not committed the act”. Italian law recognises different levels of acquittal; this is the most categorical.