Amanda Knox welcomed home after acquittal

Amanda Knox returned to her hometown of Seattle on Tuesday and was as overcome with emotion as she was a day earlier in Italy, when she was acquitted on murder charges after four years in prison. "Thank you for being there for me," she tearfully told her supporters in front of a crowd of reporters from two continents.
"I'm really overwhelmed right now," she said at a news conference minutes after she was escorted off a British Airways flight out of London. "I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn't real."
Knox's life turned around dramatically Monday when an Italian appeals court threw out her conviction in the sexual assault and fatal stabbing of her British roommate. On Tuesday, a courtroom picture of the 24-year-old Knox crying after the verdict was read appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Italy, the United States, Britain and around the world.
After arriving at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Knox sobbed at the news conference and held her mother's hand as her lawyer Theodore Simon said her acquittal "unmistakably announced to the world" that she was not responsible for the killing of Meredith Kercher.
After her parents offered their thanks to Knox's lawyers and supporters, Knox spoke briefly, saying, "They're reminding me to speak in English, because I'm having problems with that."
"Thank you to everyone who believed in me, who has defended me, who has supported my family," she said. "My family's the most important thing to me so I just want to be with them."
Knox's acquittal, fueled by doubts over DNA evidence, stunned the victim's family and angered the prosecution, which insists that she was among three people who killed Kercher, 21. But for Knox's grandmother Elisabeth Huff, "it was like the weight of the world had gone."
"We all are as happy as can be. I can't tell you how long we've been looking forward to this day," Huff said outside her home in West Seattle, a tight-knit community a few miles across Elliott Bay from downtown.
Friends and family who held spaghetti dinners, bowling events and concerts to raise money for Knox's defense were thrilled to have her home, though her supporters were a small presence at airport compared with the media: dozens of U.S. and international reporters, along with cameras and satellite trucks.
"WELCOME HOME AMANDA," read the marquee at a record store in the neighborhood where Knox grew up. Another welcome sign was hung at her father's house. A bar offered half-price drinks to celebrate her acquittal. At least one TV station in Washington state tracked the progress of her flight on the air using a plane-tracking website.
Knox was a University of Washington student studying abroad in Perugia when Kercher was killed in 2007.
Kercher's family said during an emotional news conference Tuesday that they were back to "square one."
"If those two are not the guilty parties, then who are the guilty people?" asked Lyle Kercher, a brother of the victim.

Amanda Knox DNA Evidence-Missing is her Vindication

​There are dozens of reasons that Amanda Knox's and Raffaele Sollecito's convictions for murder were overturned in Perugia, Italy today.

Here are the 10 of the most compelling.

10. No motive. Amanda Knox was a typical college student on a study-abroad trip in Italy, and was, by all accounts, having the time of her life. Convincing her boyfriend (of about a week) and a complete stranger to kill her roommate, Meredith Kercher, would have benefited Knox is no way imaginable, other than to bring her good times in Italy to a screeching halt.

9. A case built entirely on character. With an utter lack of physical evidence tying Knox and Sollecito to the murder, prosecutors instead attacked her character. Knox was called a "she-devil", a "spell-casting-witch", "evil incarnate" and all manner of colorful terms, each of which had no legal merit and was used only to get an emotional response from the jury. These kind of techniques would never fly in an American court. Yet because of this method and because of some strange behavior which was seized on by the media, Knox's character went on trial, instead of evidence. Fortunately, on appeal, evidence suddenly became important once again.

8. A criminal prosecutor. Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini is, in nearly all aspects, a horrible human. This is a man who once arrested a journalist and falsely accused him of being the serial killer that he was writing about. He's been accused of having journalists beat up for writing negative things about him and of using interrogation techniques that might be straight out of Dick Cheney's handbook. Mignini was convicted of abusing his office last year and given a suspended sentence of 16 months in jail.

7. No murder weapon. Prosecutors in the case said that a kitchen knife found in the home of Raffaele Sollecito was the weapon used in the murder. Further review by independent experts, however, concluded that there was no way that this knife made the wounds found on Kercher.

6. Irresponsible media. During Knox's original trial, tabloids around the world (most blatantly in the UK and Italy) seized on every salacious report of supposed character flaws to be found in Knox and Sollecito. Naming her "Foxy Knoxy" after an old soccer nickname, the rags ran photos of Knox at parties, and went into detail about purchases of lingerie and sex toys, claiming that an adult woman in college who was sexually active must therefore be capable of rape and murder.

5. No criminal history. Though it's possible that a person with no criminal history whatsoever might one day decide to conspire with two other people she barely knows to rape and murder a roommate, it's much more probable that that simply wouldn't happen. For Knox, a first-rate student, athlete and all-around good person, it's hard to imagine why she would suddenly throw that all away to commit a pointless murder.

4. A guilty person already convicted. As opposed to Knox and Sollecito, the evidence implicating Ivorian drifter Rudy Guede is rock solid. His DNA was found all over the crime scene. He admitted to being there the night of the murder. And he has an extensive criminal history. Indeed, all the evidence points to Guede, and it took very little time for a judge to convict him. Somehow, however, prosecutors convinced themselves that other people must have been involved, so they didn't rest until they convicted Knox and Sollecito as well.

3. No confession. With great emphasis prosecutors had used the supposed confession of Amanda Knox to prove once and for all that she was responsible for the murder. That confession, however, was the result of hours of forced interrogation in which no attorney was present for Knox and the prosecution reportedly invented dozens of possible scenarios for what happened, until Knox agreed to one.

2. No witnesses. The only witness to identify Knox and Sollecito being specifically at the murder scene was one man, Antonio Curatolo. He said he saw them talking near the crime scene. The problem is, that witness couldn't even remember what day he saw the pair speaking and, furthermore, is a homeless heroin addict whose ability to recall important details is highly suspect.

1. No DNA evidence. The DNA evidence that originally put Knox and Sollecito behind bars would have never been admitted into a U.S. court. The samples were too small and too contaminated, and when an independent panel of forensic scientists viewed the evidence they found more than 50 critical errors in how it was collected, tested and stored. In short, there was no DNA evidence linking Knox and Sollecito to the crime.

Amanda Knox

​In the world's most-watched verdict since the Casey Anthony trial, Amanda Knox was exonerated today.
But not according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail, which apparently made a major flub by posting a story that said Knox was found guilty.
It included details that could not possibly have happened, saying Knox "looked stunned" as the guilty verdict was read.
"As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears," the story said.