A Florence court upholds guilty verdicts for U.S. student Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito on charges of murdering British student Meredith Kercher. Nathan Frandino reports.
TRANSCRIPT
REPORTER: In a packed Florence court, crowds of journalists await the ruling in a major international retrial. U.S. student Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito are found guilty in the 2007 murder of Briton Meredith Kercher. Kercher's family sat patiently waiting, hoping for justice after the original 2009 conviction was overturned by an acquittal. Here's Judicial Council President Alessandro Nencini.
PRESIDENT OF JUDICIAL COUNCIL, ALESSANDRO NENCINI: "Having assessed the presence of aggravation as described in the article 61 number 2 of the criminal code in relation to the crime 368 second comma, it determines the punishment for Knox Amanda Marie to 28 years and six months of prison. It confirms in every other aspect the verdict that was appealed."
REPORTER: The verdict sentences Knox to 28 years and six months in jail. Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years. Knox is in the U.S., and would have to be extradited to serve the sentence. Sollecito is free pending a definitive confirmation of the verdict by Italy's highest court but he cannot travel out of the country.
VOCABULARY
Plenty of legal vocabulary in this report: uphold, guilty, verdict, sentence, court, acquittal, extradite, justice, overturn, charge, jail, punishment, prison, crime, retrial. See here for an online Legal English vocabulary trainer from Cambridge, and here for a free unit from The Lawyer's English Languge Coursebook.
