Reuters The overturning of the murder conviction and jail sentence against Amanda Knox has shone a spotlight on the methods of Italian police, accused of botching the investigation. The acquittal on appeal of the American student and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito of the murder of British fellow student Meredith Kercher is largely the result of an independent forensic inquiry that left the case against them in tatters. Knox's family, backed by a expensive publicity campaign and top lawyers, persuaded the Perugia appeal court to have the original scientific evidence reviewed by two independent experts, Carla Vecchiotti and Stefano Conti. The independent experts said the alleged DNA evidence of Kercher's blood on a kitchen knife handled by Knox and of Sollecito on the victim's bra clip was unreliable. In a damning conclusion they said that some of the evidence could have been contaminated. “International procedures for inspection and protocols for collection and testing of the evidence were not followed,” they said. With their scientific evidence torpedoed —a point driven home by the Knox campaign — the Perugia prosecutors could only resort to what some called a medieval view of women. They dubbed Knox an obsessed “she-devil” who had manipulated Sollecito into helping murder Kercher, while offering very little evidence to back this up. Italy has seen other cases in which investigators appeared to have decided early on who was guilty and then tried to build a case around their suspicions —resulting in dizzying twists and turns as different suspects were arrested and then released. In the notorious “Monster of Florence” case, eight couples were murdered outside the central city between 1968 and 1985. Four men were at various times convicted of the grisly murders and several other suspects arrested and released. Many Italians believe the real culprit was never found. It is said to have been the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history. There have been several other cases of multiple arrests or long unsolved murders that cast doubt on investigators' methods and training. Luciano Garofalo, former head of the Carabinieri paramilitary police scientific squad and now a professor of forensic investigation, told Reuters that police in every country had to improve the quality of evidence collection and analysis. In the Knox case, he believes there is a question over whether the independent experts were in fact more qualified than the scientific police, without excluding that mistakes were made by the latter. __
