PERUGIA – American student Amanda Knox was a naive young woman publicly “crucified” and “impaled” to justify wrongly imprisoning her for murder, her lawyer told an Italian court yesterday.
Knox is appealing a 2009 verdict that found her guilty of murdering her British room-mate Meredith Kercher during a drug-fuelled sex assault. Ms Kercher’s half-naked body was found in 2007 in a pool of blood in the apartment the two shared.
The Seattle student was sentenced to 26 years in jail, and a decision in her appeals trial is expected on Monday. Her Italian boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, and an Ivorian drifter were also jailed for their roles in the murder.
Much of the focus in the case has been on the fresh-faced Knox, who prosecutors allege led the sexual assault and held the knife that slit Ms Kercher’s throat.
Wrapping up the defence case, Knox’s lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova pointed to errors in the police investigation and urged a panel of lay and professional judges to look beyond the image of a sex-crazed wild girl created by the media and prosecutors. “She was crucified, impaled in a public square,” Dalla Vedova told the court, saying she had been unjustly held in prison for more than 1,000 days.
“Who, if not her, has been run over by a media tsunami?” Being respectful of the pain caused by Ms Kercher’s death did not mean wrongly jailing two innocent youths, he argued.
“She was a girl who was quite different from how she has been depicted,” he told the court. “How many times have we heard Amanda Knox saying ‘Why don’t they believe me?’” The 24-year-old student, wearing a silver-grey top yesterday, has visibly lost weight since her last trial and has appeared frail in her latest appearances in court.
She listened with her hands clasped as her lawyers made an impassioned plea for her freedom, but at one point burst into giggles as her lawyer poked fun at the prosecution case.
Mixing outrage with mockery, lawyer Luciano Ghirga attacked a police inquiry as riddled with errors and cited inconsistencies in the version of events presented by prosecutors, who he said created the case around the suspects rather than evidence.
Knox hugged and thanked him after his arguments, he said.
Knox’s defence has been helped by a forensics review that cast doubt on traces of DNA found on a kitchen knife and Ms Kercher’s bra clasp – evidence used to convict her – and attacked police for sloppy handling of crime scene material.
But prosecutors have since tried to wrest back momentum in the case by focusing on other evidence pointing to Knox and targeting her personality, painting her as a man-eater who resented her room-mate and enjoyed flirting with danger.
Knox is expected to address the jury before they decide her fate on Monday.
Her family is optimistic their daughter will walk free from an Umbrian prison that has been her home for nearly four years. – (Reuters)