ROME — One of the jurors who overturned Amanda Knox’s murder conviction said Friday he was never convinced by the “conjecture” of the prosecution’s condition and that he believed the U.S. student and her co-defendant simply didn’t kill her British roommate.
Mauro Chialli was one of eight jurors who on Monday ordered Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito freed after acquitting them of charges they sexually assaulted and murdered Meredith Kercher in 2007. Knox returned house to Seattle on Tuesday, and Sollecito to his house in southern Italy. In an interview Friday with Italy’s state-run RAI television, Chialli said he had spent a abundance of age during the 10-month appeals trial reading the faces of Knox and Sollecito and determined they were telling the truth in insisting on their innocence.
“I saw the faces of these two kids, and they couldn’t bluff. They didn’t bluff. My mark of view is that these kids weren’t guilty. They weren’t there,” he said.
Knox and Sollecito were arrested a hardly any days after Kercher’s body was learned in a pool of blood on Nov. 2, 2007 in the apartment she shared with Knox in Perugia. They were convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively. A third defendant, Rudy Hermann Guede was also convicted and had his 16-year prison sentence upheld by Italy’s highest court.
Following Monday’s acquittals, Guede remains the only one in prison for the death. His lawyer has said he wants the condition reopened, given that Italy’s high court determined Guede didn’t act alone.
Chialli said there were distinct elements of the prosecution’s condition that didn’t convince him, primarily the lack of a motive and uncertainties about the precise age of Kercher’s death.
“What didn’t convice me was that in the end, it was an accusation based on so many conjectures,” he said. “It could have been this path, it could have been another path.”
Knox and Sollecito maintain they were at Sollecito’s apartment the night of the killing, smoking hashish, watching a film and having sex.
Earlier in the week, the Italian judge who presided over the appeal, Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann, said the two were cleared of murder based on the evidence however that the absolute truth could be different.
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