Meredith Kercher Guilty Verdict, spotlight on Italian Justice

Of all the millions of words written about the marathon trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, some of the most revealing appeared in a dispatch from Italy's leading news agency, Ansa, on Wednesday.

"Certainly, the decision facing the [judges and jurors] will not be an easy one," wrote Ansa's reporter, Matteo Guidelli, as he looked ahead to the final phase of the trial of Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

"Sentencing to life imprisonment two young people, aged 22 and 25, would mean destroying their lives forever," he continued, "but letting them off would mean gainsaying not only the entire investigation, but also the judges who have reached decisions before them."

It hardly needs to be said that the "danger" of contradicting police and prosecutors would not exactly weigh heavily in the deliberations of a British or American jury. But Italy is not Britain or the US.

For the "Anglo-Saxon" reporters who followed the trial, it was about bloodstains and DNA; contradictory statements and suspicious omissions. So it was for their Italian counterparts.

But for them, as for their readers, there was always a further dimension. Italy is a country in which the preservation of "face" is of enormous importance. And in this case there were many people with reputations at stake: the detectives who investigated the murder, Perugia's prosecutors, who oversaw their inquiry, and the judges who indicted Knox and Sollecito and decided that the evidence was sufficient to keep them locked up for more than two years. Since the case attracted worldwide publicity, the images of Perugia and Italy were at stake, too – Italy's standing as a country that can find and punish murderers, and the city's reputation as one to which the parents of overseas students attending its university for foreigners can entrust their children without qualms.

The question being asked – if only half-openly – yesterday was how much weight the judges and jury had assigned to the factors cited by Guidelli before deciding that Knox and Sollecito were murderers.

The centre-left daily La Repubblica said the outcome was "surprising, and has a certain [Pontius] Pilate-like quality". The paper noted that last year the third accused, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, was sentenced to 30 years. Yet Guede had opted for a fast-track trial, which would normally secure him a lighter sentence. What is more, the prosecution in the trial that ended on Friday night, whose version of the killing was upheld, maintained that Guede was not the material killer. He was claimed to have sexually assaulted Kercher while Sollecito prodded her with one knife until Knox delivered the lethal, final blow with another. Yet Sollecito was given 25 years and Knox 26 years.

A theory voiced by defence lawyers and court reporters early yesterday morning was that the court that tried the two former lovers had deliberately constructed a self-detonating judgment whose internal contradictions made it, in the words of La Repubblica, "eminently changeable on appeal".

Defendants in Italy are allowed two appeals. One view was that Friday's judgment could thus be revised on the first appeal and overturned altogether on the second. That would allow all concerned to save face.

The overturning of the verdict and sentence would be widely ascribed in Italy not to any flaw in the investigation or trial, but to the foreign pressure that was already building up yesterday on the other side of the Atlantic. Clearly, this theory – or something like it – had reached the ears of the Kercher family's lawyer, Francesco Maresca, because he made a point of saying at a press conference in Perugia yesterday that it was "offensive to talk of compromise" by the court.

The decision facing the two professional and six lay judges was scarcely an easy one. And it was made even more difficult by the way investigations and trials are conducted in Italy.

In theory, the police's findings are secret until the moment at which the prosecutors ask a judge for the indictment of some or all of the suspects. In practice, everything of importance in a high-profile case like this one ends up in the media.

But what, in the heat of the chase, can seem like a vital clue or damning admission can later be shown to be untrue or misleading. The six lay judges – effectively jurors – were faced with the near-impossible task of disentangling what they believed they understood of the case when the trial opened from what they subsequently learnt in court.

Not that what they heard in court was all fact. The presiding judge, Giancarlo Massei, made a broad interpretation of what constituted evidence. Witnesses were allowed to repeat hearsay and to give their subjective assessment of people's attitudes and emotions. This was particularly important for Amanda Knox, because a key element of the prosecution's case was that her apparent lack of emotion after the discovery of her flatmate's corpse was an indication of her hatred of Kercher, and that her hatred of the British student had led her to murder her.

Yet very little evidence was produced to sustain that argument. Witnesses who knew them suggested relations between the American girl and her flatmate had cooled as they found new friends in Perugia. But no one claimed to have witnessed anything more than a contretemps between them.

Just what was the motive for the killing was never made clear. At the pre-trial hearing, Giuliano Mignini, who led for the state, hinted at satanic ritual, but that idea was dismissed by the judge in his report on the reasons for indicting Knox and Sollecito.

Other factors poured into the mix by the prosecution included cash belonging to Kercher that was found to be missing from the flat she shared with Knox. According to Mignini in his summing-up, Kercher was the victim of "an uncontrolled, unstoppable build-up of violence and sexual play", involving Knox, Sollecito and Guede. But for what reason?

"We do not know with certainty what intentions they may have had," were his exact words. "But it is possible that there was an argument, which then degenerated, between Mez and Amanda over the money that disappeared. Or perhaps the British student was upset by Guede's presence."

Possible. Perhaps. These were scarcely firm grounds on which to base 26-year and 25-year prison sentences. They were arguably sufficient, though, if the forensic evidence had been conclusive. And it was not.

The defence maintained that the traces of DNA linking Kercher to the supposed murder weapon were inconclusive. The British student's bra clip, which bore a trace of Sollecito's DNA, was not bagged by police until 45 days after the initial forensic inspection. And no evidence of any kind was produced to show Knox had been in the room where Kercher's half-naked body was found.

The room did, however, contain an all-important clue – one which was not there. In Kercher's bedroom there was not a single fingerprint belonging to either Knox or her boyfriend.

Could they have wiped them away? Impossible, said Sollecito's lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, in her summing-up.

Had they done so, they would have removed Guede's too. Yet "that room was awash with Rudy's prints", she told the court.

Quoting the head of Italy's forensic experts, Bongiorno added that "only a dragonfly" could enter a room without leaving a trace. And, she added, "since they are certainly not dragonflies, it means these two young people are innocent."

Yesterday, as the scaffolding holding the television cameras outside Perugia assizes court was being dismantled and the radio vans were preparing to edge out of the parking spaces they have occupied for more than a week, one of the few certainties in the case was that it had yet to run its full course

The Observer 2009