Introduction

On 5 December 2009, US citizen Amanda Knox and Italian citizen Raff aele Sollecito were convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in the Italian city of Perugia – a crime which had happened on 1 November 2007, and which soon attracted worldwide attention. They were convicted by two professional judges and six lay judges in the Corte d’Assise in Perugia. On 3 October 2011, they were acquitted by the Appeals Court in Perugia, comprising a diff erent team of two professional and six lay judges. On 26 March 2013, those acquittals were overturned and a re trial ordered by the Italian Supreme Court. Finally, on 27 March 2015, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted for a second time by the Supreme Court in Rome.

The procedural principles and routines of the Italian legal system meant that this case could be heard four times. Like most other European countries, Italy has what is known as a ‘continental’ or ‘inquisitorial’ system in which judges, sometimes accompanied by ‘lay judges’, decide on guilt and innocence: there are no jurors as we would understand them in the UK. A complementary feature is a strong appeals system in which higher courts can reconsider cases heard at a lower level, affi rming, overturning or reversing previous decisions. By contrast, in ‘adversarial’ criminal justice systems, such as are found in most English- speaking countries, juries decide on guilt or innocence while judges oversee due process. Adversarial systems usually produce defi nitive decisions at the fi rst sitting, rarely admit appeals about them and, if they do, more often than not uphold the original decision. Those who followed the Knox/ Sollecito case in the UK or US, and who did not understand the principles and practices of the criminal justice system in Italy, easily became critical of the shifting decisions – convict, acquit, convict, acquit – and were tempted to see in them the failings of the continental legal system. But the august fi gures sitting in the Italian courts, the time they took to hear and decide on the case, the extensive and public transcripts of their decision- making, and the fi erce international scrutiny of their judgments, belie any