People acquitted of murder

Germaine Berton (7 June 1902, in Puteaux – 6 July 1942, in Paris) was a French anarchist and trade unionist. She is known for the murder of Marius Plateau, an editor for the Action Francaise journal and a leader in the royalist organisation Camelots du Roi, in January 1923. Germaine Berton was defended by Henri Torrès during her trial and surrealists have used her mugshot in a number of art pieces. Despite confessing, Berton was acquitted on 24 December 1923.
Berton stopped engaging with anarchist organizations following a subsequent arrest in 1924. In 1925, Berton married Paul Burger, a painter before leaving him in 1935 for René Coillot, a printer. She died in 1942 due to an intentional overdose.

Ed Cantrell (December 21, 1927 – June 11, 2004) was the public safety director of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a town tied to widespread corruption, who killed one of his own officers in 1978 but was acquitted after trial.The son of Samuel Glenn Cantrell, a Nazarene minister and Vesta Marie (née Robinson) Cantrell, Ed was born in Bloomington, Indiana. He excelled in sports and graduated from Plainfield High School in 1945 with a football and basketball scholarship. Aspiring to be a coach, he had almost completed three years at Indiana State College when President Truman ordered the Berlin airlift in 1948. Cantrell immediately enlisted in the Army and spent three years as a military policeman in the "bombed-out ruin" south of Frankfurt, Germany. His tour of duty was then extended due to the Korean War. Upon discharge, he graduated with honors from the Indiana State Police Academy.
An avid hunter, fisherman and marksman, he later visited Wyoming and decided to relocate there. Accepted into the Wyoming Highway Patrol, he was assigned to the Rock Springs area in 1960. Although he liked his job, he later resigned from the highway patrol to lobby for a state police bill. "A little skeleton crew of highway patrolmen and a sheriff's department were understaffed," he said, explaining that he and his fellow officers were trying to create a more effective state police force.
The following January he was hired as a range detective in Lusk. His job took him all over Wyoming as well as neighboring states in pursuit of lawbreakers. Then, in 1976, following the death of his oldest son in a car accident, Cantrell and his wife decided to return to Rock Springs, where he worked for undersheriff Jim Stark. The following year Cantrell assumed the post of safety director of a badly demoralized Rock Springs police force. He then formed a detective division from existing officers and hired Michael Rosa as an undercover detective.

Raoul Villain (September 19, 1885 – September 17, 1936) was a French nationalist. He is primarily remembered for his assassination of the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, in Paris. Villain was acquitted by a jury of peers in 1919 and later fled to the Balearic island of Ibiza, where he was killed during the first stages of the Spanish Civil War.

Thomas Cullen Davis (born September 22, 1933) is an American former oil tycoon who is best known for being acquitted of murder and attempted murder in two high-profile trials during the 1970s. At the time of his first trial, Davis was believed to be the wealthiest man to have stood trial for murder in the United States.
First he was accused of murdering his 12-year-old stepdaughter on August 2, 1976, during a contentious divorce from his second wife, Priscilla Davis. He was found not guilty. The second trial, two years later, involved allegations that Davis attempted to hire a hitman to kill both Priscilla and the judge overseeing his divorce from Priscilla. Again, Davis was acquitted.

Amanda Marie Knox (born July 9, 1987) is an American author, activist, and journalist. She spent almost four years incarcerated in Italy following her wrongful conviction for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation.Knox, aged 20 at the time of the murder, called the police after returning to her and Kercher's apartment following a night spent with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and finding Kercher's bedroom door locked and blood in the bathroom. During the police interrogations that followed, the conduct of which is a matter of dispute, Knox allegedly implicated herself and her employer, Patrick Lumumba, in the murder. Initially, Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were all arrested for Kercher's murder, but Lumumba was soon released due to him having a strong alibi. A known burglar, Rudy Guede, was arrested a short time later following the discovery of his bloodstained fingerprints on Kercher's possessions. He was later found guilty of murder in a fast-track trial and was sentenced to a 30-year prison sentence, later reduced to 16 years. In December 2020, an Italian court ruled that Guede could complete his term doing community service.In their initial trial, in 2009, Knox and Sollecito were convicted and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. Pre-trial publicity in Italian media, which was repeated by other media worldwide, portrayed Knox in a negative light, leading to complaints that the prosecution was using character assassination tactics. A guilty verdict at Knox's initial trial and her 26-year sentence caused international controversy, as US forensic experts thought evidence at the crime scene was incompatible with her involvement. A prolonged legal process, including a successful prosecution appeal against her acquittal at a second-level trial, continued after Knox was freed in 2011. On March 27, 2015, Italy's highest court definitively exonerated Knox and Sollecito. However, Knox's conviction for committing defamation against Lumumba was upheld by all courts. On January 14, 2016, Knox was acquitted of defamation for saying she had been struck by policewomen during the interrogation.Knox subsequently became an author, an activist, and a journalist. Her memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, became a best seller. In 2018, she began hosting The Scarlet Letter Reports, a television series which examined the "gendered nature of public shaming".

Nathaniel Benjamin Levi Bar-Jonah (born David Paul Brown; February 15, 1957 – April 13, 2008) was an American convicted child molester and suspected cannibalistic serial killer who was sentenced to 130 years in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of the kidnapping, aggravated assault, and sexual assault of various children.