HispanicBusiness

American student Amanda Knox won another battle in her quest to overturn a conviction for murdering her British roommate in Italy when an appeals court rejected a prosecutors' request Wednesday for more DNA testing.

The decision is good for Knox because it means that an independent review of DNA evidence -- previously ordered by the appeals court and hugely favorable to Knox -- will stand. It deals a blow to prosecutors who had sought to counter the results of that review, which harshly criticized how genetic evidence was used in the case.

The ruling by Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann also clears the way for closing arguments, which are set to begin Sept. 23 with the prosecution going first, followed by civil plaintiffs and the defense.

Knox's father, Curt Knox, said his daughter has started seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel."

However, Knox's lawyer Luciano Ghirga warned that the court's rejection of new DNA testing was not equal to a positive outcome of the whole appeals trial.

Knox was convicted in 2009 of sexually assaulting and murdering her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, while they were studying in Perugia in 2007. She was sentenced to 26 years.

Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian who was Knox's boyfriend at the time, also was convicted and sentenced to 25 years. Both have maintained their innocence and are appealing the verdict.

Without a clear motive or convincing witnesses, the DNA evidence is crucial, and much of the appeals outcome hinges on it.

In the first trial, prosecutors maintained that Knox's DNA was found on the handle of a kitchen knife believed to be the murder weapon, and that Kercher's DNA was found on the blade. They said Sollecito's DNA was on the clasp of Kercher's bra as part of a mixed trace that also included the victim's genetic profile.

Those findings were always disputed by the defense, and the appeals court agreed to nominate two independent experts to review the evidence. The experts found that much of that evidence was unreliable and possibly contaminated, that police had made glaring errors in collecting the evidence, and that the below-standard testing raised doubts over the attribution of DNA traces.

A third person, Rudy Hermann Guede of the Ivory Coast, also was convicted of Kercher's murder in a separate proceeding. Italy's highest criminal court has upheld Guede's conviction and his 16-year prison sentence. Guede denies wrongdoing.