A Florence court on Tuesday ruled that a petition to review the case of Ivorian Rudy Guede, who is serving a 16-year sentence for the murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007, was "inadmissible". Guede's lawyers said they might appeal to the supreme Court of Cassation. A lawyer for Kercher's family, Francesco Maresca, said "I'd say this story is finished." The court was reviewing documentation from the supreme court's conviction of Guede and its acquittal of two other former suspects, American Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Guede's defence team had argued that his conviction was based on the "necessary participation also of Amanda Know and Raffaele Sollecito", something that the supreme Cassation Court has "absolutely ruled out".
The attorneys representing Kercher's family, Vieri Fabiani and Francesco Maresca, instead denied that Guede's conviction implied that Knox and Sollecito had played a role in the murder.
Fabiani said there were no grounds to revise the trial because new evidence had not been presented and Guede's conviction was not incompatible with the acquittal of Knox and Sollecito.
"What has not been proven is that the murder could not be committed without those accomplices", as claimed by Guede in his petition, Fabiani noted.
Maresca added that the petition to revise the trial was also "not sufficiently motivated".
Guede's DNA was found inside Kercher and all over the murder flat.
Knox and Sollecito's conviction was based on DNA evidence that was later ruled unsafe, leading to their final acquittal.
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