ROME (AFP) Contradictions and illogical conclusions in the ruling that freed US student Amanda Knox from jail mean DNA evidence will be re-examined from scratch and witnesses may be re-heard, her lawyer said Tuesday. <\/p>\n
\"We were very surprised, we took it very badly,\" Luciano Ghirga said in reference to a damning report released by Italy's highest appeals court explaining why it quashed the acquittal of Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. <\/p>\n
\"The new court will re-examine all the evidence from the very start, with fresh expert evaluation and possibly fresh testimony from witnesses,\" he said. <\/p>\n
\"We are ready to fight, to answer every challenge point by point,\" he added. <\/p>\n
Knox and Sollecito -- originally sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison for sexually abusing and killing Knox's British housemate Meredith Kercher -- were acquitted by an appeals court in Perugia in 2011 after four years behind bars. <\/p>\n
In March, however, Italy's highest appeals court overturned the acquittal and ordered a retrial in a Florence appeals court, citing \"numerous examples of shortcomings, contradictions and incoherences\" in the original appeal ruling. <\/p>\n
The 74-page report accused the judges of glazing over clues and insisted the prosecution's claim from the original trial -- that the grizzly murder was the result of \"an erotic game that span out of control\" -- was a valid hypothesis. <\/p>\n
\"We had gone beyond that theory, proved there was nothing to it,\" Ghirga said, while Sollecito's lawyer Giulia Bongiorno added: \"If there was an erotic game, most certainly Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox were not part of it.\" <\/p>\n
The report claimed a third trace of blood found on a knife recovered from the house Knox and Kercher lived in should have been examined and was not. <\/p>\n
It found fault with the time-scale of the murder the appeals court followed, saying that the \"harrowing scream\" heard by several witnesses pushed back the time of the crime from between 21:00 and 21:30 local time to two hours later. <\/p>\n
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Read the original: ROME (AFP) Contradictions and illogical conclusions in the ruling that freed US student Amanda Knox from jail mean DNA evidence will be re-examined from scratch and witnesses may be re-heard, her lawyer said Tuesday. \"We were very surprised, we took it very badly,\" Luciano Ghirga said in reference to a damning report released by Italy's highest appeals court explaining why it quashed the acquittal of Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. \"The new court will re-examine all the evidence from the very start, with fresh expert evaluation and possibly fresh testimony from witnesses,\" he said. Continue reading
\nExperts to re-examine DNA clues in fresh Knox appeal<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"