Knox and Sollecito murder acquittals challenged

[dipsydoodle]

Italian prosecutors have launched an appeal against the acquittals of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the 2007 murder of Briton Meredith Kercher.

The pair's convictions for murdering Miss Kercher in Perugia were overturned by an appeal court last year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17030477

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Yep

It's standard operating procedure there . . . won't really amount to anything. Just the way their justice system works.

[dipsydoodle]

2. I'm not quite sure it's standard operating procedure

for everything to be appealed to the court of cassation which normally only consider point of law and procedure. As such it will disregard any evidence introduced in the second trial which was not introduced in the first trial.

[JustAnotherGen]

6. I don't know

They've been bringing back old 'acquitted' Camorra and Ndrangheta cases lately.

[Renew Deal]

3. She's not going back.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. The Anglo-American legal system is one of the few that

says that you can't be retried for a crime if you've already been acquitted.

When living in Japan, I was startled to hear of a case in which prosecutors were granted the right to retry a man who had been acquitted of murder some ten years before.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. The English system has been recently changed to allow it for "new and compelling evidence"

Dobson, Luke Knight and Neil Acourt were brought to trial in 1996 as the result of a misguided private prosecution initiated on behalf of the Lawrence family. The three defendants were acquitted on the judge's direction because of insufficient evidence.
...
How, then, was it possible to bring Dobson to trial? In a far-sighted recommendation, the Macpherson inquiry recommended in 1999 that the double jeopardy principle deserved "debate and reconsideration", perhaps by the law commission. If the law was changed, Macpherson predicted, fresh trials after acquittal would be exceptional and appropriate safeguards would be essential. But pointing out that Dobson, Knight and Neil Acourt could not be tried again as the law then stood, however strong any new evidence might be, the Macpherson inquiry suggested that "perhaps in modern conditions such absolute protection may sometimes lead to injustice".

The government's law reform advisers did indeed recommend reform of the double jeopardy rule in 2001 and the law was changed in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. That legislation says the court of appeal must order a re-trial if there is new and compelling evidence and it is in the interests of justice for an order to be made.

The new law was brought into force in 2005 and used successfully the following year in a case where an acquitted murderer had subsequently confessed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jan/03/double-jeopardy-change-law-retrial

[saras]

7. It would be nice if they allowed new and compelling evidence for the 'guilty' as well

But they've worked as hard as they can to keep objective evidence like DNA from being used.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. On the contrary - DNA evidence has been used in several successful appeals

to free someone, in Britain. And it was DNA evidence that was 'new and compelling' that convicted 2 of the Stephen Lawrence killers in the case above.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7946777.stm

[Darth_Kitten]

9. Good!

n/t