PERUGIA, Italy — She’s free!
Sobbing uncontrollably after an Italian judge read aloud the verdict, Amanda Knox was set free after an appeals court today threw out her murder conviction.
Knox collapsed after the verdict was rendered inside a packed courtroom, crying tears of joy as she hugged her lawyers.
Knox left prison in a black Mercedes a short time later, just after 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
In its ruling, the judges also cleared Knox’s co-defendant and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito of murder.
Knox, however, was found guilty of defamation and has to pay financial compensation to bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who she had initially blamed for the grisly murder. She was sentenced to three years on that charge, but was sentenced to time served.
Knox did not speak to reporters as she was rushed outside the courthouse.
The verdict came 11 hours after Knox had tearfully told the court she had nothing to do with the murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, as a jury spent the day deciding her fate.
Knox and Sollecito had been convicted in 2009 of sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher, who was stabbed to death in her bedroom. She had been found in a pool of blood.
Knox was sentenced to 26 years behind bars, while Sollecito got 25. Also convicted in separate proceedings was Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivorian man, to 30 years in prison.
VIDEO: AMANDA KNOX SISTER GIVE STATEMENT
VIDEO: KNOX DEFENDS HERSELF IN ITALIAN COURT
The Kercher family looked on in disbelief as the verdict was read out by the judge, who was flanked by the eight-member jury.
Outside the tiny courthouse, some of the hundreds of observers who’d gathered there shouted, “Shame, shame!”
During her plea to the court this morning, Knox frequently paused for breath as she spoke in Italian to the eight members of the jury in a packed courtroom. Her voice trembling and struggling to maintain her composure, Knox stood up in the frescoed, medieval courtroom in Perugia and declared: “I did not kill, I did not rape, I did not steal. I was not there.”
Knox, wearing a green blouse, black jacket and black trousers, addressed the court in the last act before the jury retired to consider its verdict.
“Members of the jury, it has been said many times that I am a different person to what I look, a different person because of the passage of time and people don’t understand who I am,” Knox said, pausing on the verge of tears.
Judge Hellmann told her: ”You can sit down if you want.”
Knox continued: “I am uncomfortable in every position. I am the same person I was four years ago. In four years, I have lost a friend in the most brutal and most inexplicable way. My trust, absolute in the authority of the police, has been betrayed. I had to face accusations absolutely unfair, without grounds and I am paying with my life for things I did not do.
“Four years ago, I was four years younger and I was fundamentally much younger than my age because I had never suffered in my life before four years ago. In that sense, four years ago I did not know tragedy, those things were things I only watched on television, they did not belong to me. I had never faced so much fear, so much tragedy and so much suffering, I did not know how to face it or internalize it. So how did I feel when we discovered that Meredith had been killed?
“I could not believe how was that possible, first of all, then fear because a person with whom I was sharing my life, who had her bedroom near mine had been killed in our house and if I was there that night I would have been dead, like her. The only difference was I was not there that night, I was at Raffaele’s.
“It was luck that he was there, not only for this but also for afterwards, he was everything for me at that moment. Yes, I called my family but in that moment, in that space, I had him.
“The other thing was my education, I had a sense of duty in front of justice/ I had a sense of duty before the authorities, which I trusted, because they were there to look for the guilty person and to protect us. I blindly trusted them, completely and absolutely. I made myself available up to exhaustion. I was betrayed between the nights of the 5th and 6th (in November 2007). I was not only pushed or stressed, I was manipulated as well.
“I am not what they say, the perversion, the violence, the lack of respect for life and for the person, that doesn’t belong to me. And I did not do the thing they suggest I had done. I did not kill, I did not rape, I did not steal, I was not there. I was not present at that crime.
“I did not know Rudy. I remember that the police asked me to make a list of all the people me and Meredith had ever met in that period Perugia. And I remember that I said something about that guy that me and Meredith met that time at the apartment of the guys downstairs and he played basketball with them.
“But I did not even know his name. Like many persons who go around, his face, it was not any person I had any contact with. So when they say you knew him, no. I have never done the things they say I have done. But they say, out of the blue, it’s not like this.
“I had a good relationship with everyone, with all my housemates. I was messy, I had no thoughts, no problems, I shared my life, especially with Meredith. We had a friendship and she was worried about me when I went to work. She was always kind to me.
“Meredith has been killed and I have always wanted justice for her. I don’t escape the truth and I did not run away from the truth, and I never did. In insist for the truth, I insist after this desperate four years, about my innocence, about our innocence because it is true and deserves to be defended and recognized.
“I want to go back home. I want to go back to my life and I don’t want to be punished, deprived of my life, my culture for something I did not do. Because I am innocent, Raffaele is innocent. And – we deserve freedom. Because we never did anything to deserve this. I have a lot of respect for this court and the care you have put into this trial and so I thank you and ask you for justice.”
Knox’s speech followed that of her ex-boyfriend who told the court: “I never hurt anyone, never in my life.”
As Sollecito spoke he continually shifted from one foot to the other and stopped to sip water. He said at the time of the murder he was in a great period of his life, close to presenting his thesis to graduate from university and having just met Knox.
The weekend Kercher was murdered was the first the pair planned to spend together “in tenderness and cuddles,” he said.
At the end of his 17-minute address, Sollecito took off a white rubber bracelet emblazoned with “Free Amanda and Raffaele” that he said he was been wearing for almost four years.
He said: “Now I have never taken it off. Many emotions are concentrated in this bracelet. Now I want to pay homage to the court. The moment to take it off has arrived.”
Kercher was stabbed to death in her bedroom on Nov. 1, 2007. Her body was found the following day.
With AP