Raffaele Sollecito, the Italian who, along with Amanda Knox, was definitively acquitted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, has said he will no longer accept being called a murderer and needs “time to heal” following the seven-and-a-half year legal saga.
Sollecito, 31, and his former American girlfriend served four years in prison after Kercher was found dead in Perugia in 2007. On Monday, he expressed a sense of disbelief that the battle to prove his innocence was finally over after the unexpected verdict from Italy’s highest court.
“It’s affected my heart, it’s affected my mind. This wound will always bleed,” he said at a press conference in Rome.
He added that he had briefly spoken to Knox, who is living in Seattle, and had congratulated her after the ruling from the court of cassation came in on Friday night. The two did not, however, have any plans to meet, he said.
Sollecito’s words seemed reflective and defiant, even as some press accounts of the surprise verdict continued to raise questions about the night of the murder and the unanswered questions surrounding the circumstances of Kercher’s death.
“I don’t expect from now on to be called an assassin and I’ll be ready to defend my dignity,” Sollecito said.
Sollecito, who has been fully exonerated, did not explicitly say he would seek compensation for being wrongly convicted and imprisoned. But his attorney, Giulia Bongiorno, said that her client was “evaluating” whether to seek payment. If he did, she said, it would not be as an act of revenge.
“We are not going to whip the people who made mistakes,” she said, adding that they would wait to read the legal rationale for the judges’ decision before acting.
The full decision will be released in less than 90 days. Sollecito denied being surprised at the verdict even though his own attorneys seemed stunned when it was read out by the presiding judge in the case.
Such outright acquittals are exceedingly rare in the high court, but Sollecito insisted this one had been inevitable. “It had to end this way because this is what happened. This is the right ending,” he said. He added: “It was the beginning of a new life.”
Kercher and Knox met while they were studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. They were housemates when the Briton, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was sexually assaulted and killed in November 2007. Rudy Guede, a petty criminal who was known to Perugian police, was convicted of Kercher’s murder but was not believed by judges to have acted alone.
Both Sollecito and Knox were convicted of her murder but then acquitted in 2011. That ruling was subsequently reversed and their convictions were reinstated in 2014. The long-running legal saga came to a definitive end on Friday, when the high court threw out the charges.
Usually, the high court would send a case back for re-trial or uphold a prior conviction. The Kercher family have said that the annulment verdict surprised and shocked them. But Sollecito said he had been accused of murder “without an element of proof” and that the high court’s decision was like a “rebirth”. “I am very sorry that Meredith’s family is disappointed about the verdict,” he added.
Speaking in English at the end of the press conference, he said it was hard to imagine a life that was no longer in limbo. “Seven years and five months is an unbelievably long time and it is hard to think that now everything has changed,” he said.
