Ms Anna Maria Sacco walked free yesterday after a jury acquitted her of the murder of her husband following a 15-day trial, the second she faced in a year.
The prosecution case that the teenage girl who shot Mr Franco Sacco with his own hunting rifle was "put up to it" by his wife was not accepted by the jury.
Mr Justice Smith had warned the jury in the Central Criminal Court that if they had any doubt about the girl's evidence, Ms Sacco was entitled to the benefit of that doubt.
He said that if a detailed statement by the girl in which she made extensive allegations of sexual abuse of her by Mr Sacco was true, then the rest of her evidence was not very credible.
In the witness box, the girl disowned the statement and claimed the abuse allegations were concocted at the suggestion of Ms Sacco and members of her family.
She made the six-page statement to three gardai in the presence of her mother, her stepfather and a friend just hours after the killing.
Mr Justice Smith told the jury: "If what she said in her first statement might even reasonably be true, then you cannot convict."
Having reread all the evidence to the jurors, the judge reminded them that the prosecution case depended on the teenager's evidence. "She's a very precocious young lady who was streetwise for a girl of 15," he said.
For his own part, he could only say, "it's not very reliable evidence".
The jury took just an hour and a half to return a verdict of not guilty of the sole count of murder.
When the verdict was read out, Ms Sacco stood up, threw her hands in the air and said "Yes!" She hugged and kissed her mother and father and other tearful relatives and friends who gathered around her for several minutes.
There were emotional scenes also from the mother of the deceased, Ms Anna Sacco, who had travelled with her husband, Pasquale, from Italy for the trial. She was quickly led from the court by her daughter, Ms Marie Antoinette, and other relatives, after banging the glass partition at the back of the courtroom with her hands.
Outside Ms Anna Maria Sacco expressed "joy". Her first words to a media scrum awaiting her departure were "I want to go home to Francesca", her 18-month-old baby.
Ms Sacco (22), of Ravensdale Park, Kimmage, had denied that she murdered her husband and second cousin, Franco Sacco (29), at their home in Coolamber Park, Templeogue, on March 20th, 1997.
After a three-week trial of the same charge last May, a jury was discharged on failing to reach a verdict.
The trial which ended with her acquittal yesterday lasted 15 days, eight of which were taken up with legal argument.
At the end of the legal argument statements by Ms Sacco while in Garda custody were ruled out by the judge, who said her detention was unlawful at the time the statements were made.
The teenage girl who killed Mr Sacco in 1997 was a minor at the time and, having pleaded guilty, was sentenced by Mr Justice Carney last June to seven years' detention.
However, a place could not be found for her detention, and her sentence was suspended by the Court of Criminal Appeal in July. The suspension was subject to the girl entering a bond to keep the peace and be of good behaviour and to obey a probationary regime set up for her. She is now living at home.
She walked into Rathfarnham Garda station on the night of the murder and told gardai on duty at the public office hatch: "I shot Franco."Gardai found Mr Sacco wrapped "in mummy fashion" on the floor of his bedroom. The State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, said he had died from a single shotgun wound to his head. On the night of the murder, Ms Sacco told gardai that the teenage girl who lived and worked with the couple had overheard an assault on her by her husband a week before.
Ms Sacco said her husband had "forced himself" on her and hit her "full force" on the arm with a belt. He had then threatened to kill her if she went to the police, she said.
The morning after the girl, whom she described as her "best friend", told her: "Anna Maria, if you only knew the half of it."
In the witness box, the girl confirmed that she was aware of Mr Sacco's violence towards his wife. She said on the night of the assault: "I felt annoyed because there was nothing I could do, like, I couldn't go in and help her or anything like that."
But she denied the contents of a statement in which she told gardai Mr Sacco had molested her on a number of occasions.
The statement, in which she also confessed to his murder, alleged that since October 1996 Mr Sacco had been abusing her.
Her statement went on to allege a serious sexual assault on another occasion in the chip shop and being raped in her bedroom at the Coolamber Park house at another time.
The teenager told the jury those allegations were made up, but Mr Barry White SC, defending, drew the jury's attention to the girl's demeanour in the witness box, and asked why if the statement was "a pack of lies", she had broken down crying when its graphic detail was read back to her, when she had shown no remorse on giving an account of the actual killing of Mr Sacco.
Mr Justice Smith reminded the jury yesterday that those allegations of sexual assault were repeated by the girl when she spoke to doctors at the Sexual Assault Unit in the Rotunda Hospital.
"She was never told to make such allegations to members of the medical profession," he pointed out.