Meredith Kercher's Killer Gets Day Release as Amanda Knox's Nightmare Drags On

John Sexton

Meredith Kercher’s killer is gaining new freedoms even as the shameful treatment of Amanda Knox by Italian courts drags on with no end in sight.

Rudy Guede killed British university student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy in 2007. He was a small time burglar who was known to throw large rocks through 2nd story windows in order to gain access to homes. There was a rock and a broken 2nd story window at Kercher’s flat when her body was discovered. Bloody hand and shoe prints matching Guede were found at the scene as were his fingerprints. His DNA was found on the body, under the body and even inside the victim’s body.

Guede was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his crime, but that was later cut to 16 years. Tuesday, reports surfaced that Guede will now be eligible for “day release” so he can pursue a degree in history. He will be studying only a few dozen miles from where the crime took place.

Parallel to the conviction of Guede, Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were tried and convicted of helping Guede
commit the murder. The conviction was based upon nothing more than the
prosecutor’s salacious claims that Kercher’s murder was revenge for some perceived
slight or part of a sex game gone wrong. No DNA of either defendant was found at the scene of the
crime. Both Knox and Sollecito were later released when an appeals court
ruled there was no evidence connecting them to the murder. By that time, each had already spent four years in Italian jails.

Knox returned to the United States and wrote a book
about her ordeal. But the Italian prosecutors appealed the
court’s decision. Late last month an appeals court reinstated the convictions
against Knox and Sollecito. Knox is facing 28 years in prison if she ever returns to Italy.

Knox responded to the new verdict against her with a photo containing a message in Italian which translates “We’re innocent.”

If you’d like to know more about the Knox case but aren’t ready to dive in to a book length treatment, I highly recommend a new Kindle single featuring author Douglas Preston and FBI profiler John Douglas. The Forgotten Killer is brief (about 80 pages broken into several clearly written chapters) and presents a solid argument about what went wrong–and is still going wrong–in this case.

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