Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation is hearing the prosecution’s appeal of a lower court’s descision to quash her conviction on Monday. If the court rules in her favour she’d be subject to retrial. Knox of course is back in the US, and I doubt she ever plans on setting foot in Italy again. Could she be extradited back to Italy? Dual criminality is in effect since murder is a crime in both countries, but hows does her appeal play into this. In the US prosecutors aren’t allowed to appeal an acquittal, but she wasn’t acquitted at her original trial. She was found guilty and only accquitted on appeal. Can US prosecutors appeal an appeal to reinstate the trial court’s original verdict?
Article VI of the US-Italy extradition treaty from 1983 states:
I don’t know how this has been interpreted in other cases.
It looks irrelevant to me. She hasn’t been tried or pardoned here.
Whoops, requesting vs requested parties. My mistake.
It looks like a retrial has been ordered, but Italy can’t or won’t try to extradite her unless she’s convicted again in absentia.
I wonder, does she provide counsel for defense? If she doesn’t, what happens?
They’ll draw on Italian precedent and appoint someone to speak for her.
Wow. I totally misunderstood this news item, then. I thought she had already been acquitted by appeal, and that said acquittal had been declared invalid.
The double jeopardy implications were quite irking to me.
I’m in an even worse position: I still think that’s what happened. Is it not? What did happen?
She was convicted by the court of first instance.
On appeal, the intermediate court of appeal set aside the conviction and entered an acquittal.
On further appeal, the Court of Cassation set aside the intermediate appellate court’s decision and ordered a new trial.
Bricker has done a very good job in the other thread explaining that this exact pattern can also occur in the U.S. as well, without breaching double jeopardy: Amanda Knox and Double Jeopardy.
I think a lot of confusion stems from the use of the word/term “acquittal.” In the U.S. an appellate court wouldn’t normally “acquit” someone if they disagreed with a lower court. They’d set aside the conviction or something which would allow the prosecutor to appeal that decision and/or actually conduct a new criminal trial depending on the specifics of the situation.
So is there a translation problem, or was the appeals court ruling not actually an acquittal as we would understand it?
NP, with respect, that other thread shows how convictions can be vacated and mistrials declared, leaving no verdict at all in place, which is nothing new. But it has nothing about how an actual acquittal can be vacated here, because it can’t.
That doesn’t appear to be what happened in the Maxwell case that Bricker cited at post 36. He noted that the intermediate appellate court entered a dismissal, which barred the state from re-trying. The state then appealed that decision, which set it aside and reinstated the conviction.
A dismissal vacates the case entirely, including the initial charge, leaving *no *verdict in place, while an acquittal leaves the case in place *along with *a not guilty verdict, right?
But in that particular case, the dismissal by the appeallate court barred a re-trial.
I understand, but it still was a dismissal, not an acquittal.