The link she provided clearly says "certificate of innocence" but Vixen chose to substitute that with "exoneration". I doubt that was unintentional.
I'll go with misleading...... but there's a nuance that everyone is missing here.
Both Knox and Sollecito spent time in prison, but that time (one year for Knox, four years for Sollecito) was solely because of precautionary detention.
Neither the Massei nor the Nencini convictions count, not until Cassation confirms them which in this case it did not.
This is different than in the US where a lower court conviction is a conviction, and any jail time is because if guilt. If a person is subsequently released on appeal because the appeals court reverses the conviction, then in the US that person could be said to be both innocent and exonerated.
As it relates to the murder, under Italian law the pair had never been convicted, not really. Nor did the Hellmann acquittal count as an acquittal, not until Cassation signed off on it.
No one here knows, not really, if Cassation's 2015 annulling of Nencini was a
de jure agreement or reinstatement of Hellmann's acquittal - where is Grinder when you need him?
So "exonerated" has the nuance to it that someone had first been legally an
definitively convicted of murder. Neither Sollecito nor Knox had been, indeed, in the eyes of Italian law they'd been innocent throughout without interruption.
However, there is also a
de facto sense of "exonerated". In the US and Canada that term is perhaps used that way, towards Knox, even among 100s of lawyers as she's referred to as such in multiple bar associations and law schools in two countries.
Someone has to keep Grinder's spirit alive! Vixen may have been purposely misleading, but she was not entirely wrong.
