FLORENCE, ITALY – Florence’s court of appeal said it will decide on January 10 on a petition to review the trial of Rudy Guede, an Ivorian who is the only person convicted of the 2007 murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia.
The court adjourned proceedings as judges requested documentation from the supreme court’s conviction of Guede and its acquittal of two other suspects, American Amanda Knox and her ex boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
Kercher was found dead on the floor of her bedroom. By the time the bloodstained fingerprints at the scene were identified as belonging to Rudy Guede, police had charged Kercher’s American flatmate, Amanda Knox, and Knox’s Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
The subsequent prosecutions of Knox and Sollecito received international publicity, with forensic experts and jurists taking a critical view of the evidence supporting the initial guilty verdicts.
Knox and Sollecito were released after almost four years following their acquittal at a second-level trial, and in 2015 they were exonerated by the Supreme Court of Italy.
Guede was tried separately in a fast-track procedure and in October 2008 was found guilty of the sexual assault and murder of Kercher. He subsequently exhausted the appeals process and is currently serving a 16-year sentence.