British exchange student Meredith Kercher, 21, was found dead, half-naked and in a pool of blood in the apartment she shared with Amanda Knox and two Italian roommates in the Italian university town of Perugia on Nov. 2, 2007. She died of a stab wound to the neck.

A Perugia court convicted Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito of Kercher’s murder on Dec. 4, 2009, and sentenced Knox to 26 years and Sollecito to 25 years. An appellate court overturned their convictions on Oct. 3, 2011, and Knox returned to Seattle a free woman.

On Tuesday, Italy‘s high court ordered a new trial for Knox and Sollecito, overturning their acquittals.

Here’s a look at the various versions of events the night of Nov. 1, 2007 in Perugia.

PROSECUTORS:

Italian prosecutors allege that Knox and Sollecito, then 20 and 23, killed Kercher in a drug-fueled sex assault involving a third man, Rudy Guede of the Ivory Coast. They maintained the murder weapon was a large knife taken from Sollecito’s house and found there by investigators. Prosecutors said the knife matched the wounds on Kercher’s body and had traces of Kercher’s DNA on the blade and Knox’s DNA on the handle. The prosecutors depicted Knox as a sex-obsessed, manipulative “she-devil.”

DEFENSE LAWYERS:

Her defenders portrayed Knox as an innocent girl caught up in an Italian judicial nightmare, brow-beaten into saying things she didn’t mean during a 14-hour interrogation by dozens of police. They claimed inept Italian police contaminated the Kercher crime scene and produced DNA evidence that was not scientifically sound.

APPELLATE COURT RULING:

The appeals court that acquitted Knox and Sollecito in 2011 said there was no murder weapon and determined that the DNA evidence used to convict them was faulty. It also poked holes in the motive described by prosecutors. The court said the lower trial court failed to prove the two were in the house when Kercher was killed and that the guilty verdict wasn’t corroborated by any evidence, but rather based on an improbable scenario: “The sudden choice of two young people, good and open to other people, to do evil for evil’s sake, just like that, without another reason.”

The three-judge panel stopped short …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News