14 DAY TRIAL // Amanda Knox was found guilty of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher in the retrial that took place in Italy, and her ex-boyfriend Rafaelle Sollecito, whom she was dating at the time of the murder, was served the same verdict.
Facing a sentence of 25 years behind bars, besides the 4 he’s already done right after the murder, Sollecito tells Anderson Cooper on CNN that he plans to fight the verdict because he’s done nothing wrong.
At the time the murder occurred, Knox shared the same room with Kercher. She, Sollecito, and another man are believed to have killed Meredith because she refused to engage in relations with all four. The second man has been doing time on murder charges ever since.
Sollecito and Knox were acquitted in 2011 but, last year, the Italian Supreme Court ruled a retrial was needed because evidence had been mishandled in the first one. Both maintained their innocence from the start, saying they were positive another trial would find them innocent.
Sollecito thinks the only reason he was convicted was because he happened to date Knox at the time and she acted weird during the initial stages of the police investigation.
“I'm trying to be as positive as possible in a situation like this. It's very traumatic, the situation here now. But on the other side, I still have to fight. I have chosen to be here and to fight against this ordeal,” he says.
“Why do they convict me? Why do put me on the corner and say that I'm guilty just because in their minds I have to be guilty because I was her boyfriend. It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know what to think, because objectively, there's nothing against me and nothing very strong against Amanda,” Sollecito says.
He also explains that he doesn’t want to be held accountable for someone else’s weird behavior, and insists that he didn’t try to flee the country when he was apprehended by police and had his passport taken.
Unlike Knox, who watched the trial from her home in Seattle, Sollecito was present for most hearings. He slipped out before the verdict and was apprehended at the Austrian border with his girlfriend.