PERUGIA, Italy?? A tearful Amanda Knox told an Italian appeals court Monday that she did not kill her British roommate, pleading for the court to free her so she can return to the United States after four years behind bars. The court began deliberations moments later.
-
Only on msnbc.com
- Older jobless workers face age bias
- Kabul rocks... with music
- Flood of food imported, just 2 percent inspected
- MTP: Is Chris Christie in or out?
- George Clooney makes 'March' to White House
- Updated 33 minutes ago 10/3/2011 4:33:04 PM +00:00 Unanswered questions remain in Knox trial?
- Jets quarterback goes the extra yard
Knox frequently paused for breath and fought back tears as she spoke in Italian to the eight members of the jury in a packed courtroom, but managed to maintain her composure during the 10-minute address.
"I'm not a promiscuous vamp. I'm not violent ... I have not killed, I have not raped. I was not there. I was not present," the 24-year-old American told a packed courtroom in Perugia.
"I want to go home, I want to go back to my life, I do not want to be punished and to have my life taken away from me for something I have not done, because I am innocent."
The eight-member jury will decide later on Monday if Knox and co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito's 2009 convictions and prison sentences ? 26 years for Knox, 25 years for Sollecito ? should stand, be dismissed or altered. The case has made Knox an unwilling celebrity and placed Italy's justice system under scrutiny.
Presiding Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann said the jury would not emerge before 2 p.m. ET at the earliest and Knox, who was returned to her jail cell, was said to be calm and trying to relax.
"She was playing guitar and singing in the chapel," Rocco Girlanda, an Italian lawmaker who has met Knox regularly and wrote a book about their meetings, told NBC News after seeing her following her plea.
"That?s how she relaxes. What I found incredible is that she has never looked so serene," he said, calling it a sign that she is confident the jury will listen to her plea and drop all charges against her.
Prison chaplain Sauro Scarabatti also met with Knox, telling NBC News that she looked "composed and collected, showing a remarkable self-control."
That strength, he added, might have worked against her over the years. "Some people might mistake that with a cold character," he said.
'Paying with my life'
Knox, who has spent the last four years in prison, looked tense as she entered the courthouse where she and Sollecito made their final case for their freedom.
"I lost a friend, in the most brutal and inexplicable way possible," Knox told the court in Italian. "My absolute faith in the police authorities was betrayed, I've had to face absolutely unfair ... and baseless accusations. I am paying with my life for things I did not commit."
One of the female jurors appeared to be in tears as Knox spoke, NBC's Lester Holt reported from the courtroom.
Minutes before, an anxious Sollecito also addressed the court to proclaim his innocence and plead for his release from prison.
Story: Slain Kercher forgotten during Knox trial, family says"Every day I have been in prison I have felt dead," Sollecito told the court. "I never hurt anyone, never in my life. I have been in this nightmare and never, ever woken from it."
The weekend in 2007 when Meredith Kercher was murdered was the first the pair planned to spend together "in tenderness and cuddles," he said.
At the end of his speech, he took off a bracelet that he said read "Free Amanda and Raffaele," saying that he would like "this bracelet and its history to belong to the past."
Video: Knox?s family, friends await verdict in US (on this page)Kercher's family speaks
Later on Monday, Kercher's family, who have largely stayed out of the limelight, said the horror of the crime had been lost in a media circus and focus on Knox.
"Meredith has been hugely forgotten in all of this," her sister Stephanie Kercher told reporters during a press conference in Italy. "There is not a lot about what happened in the beginning and it is very hard to keep her memory alive."
For the Kercher family, Monday's verdict is a chance at justice for the 21-year-old student, who was living with Knox. Her body was found with more than 40 wounds and her throat had been slashed.
Stephanie Kercher and her mother Arline said they were satisfied with the original verdict and trusted the Italian legal system.
"What is good is in the previous trial the judge actually issued a 400 page-document which detailed how he got to that result," Arline Kercher said. "It is a case of finding out what happened to Meredith and get some justice for her."
WorldBlog: Unanswered questions remain in Knox trial?'A little bit frightened'
The trial has captivated audiences worldwide: Knox, the angel-faced American, and Sollecito, the bespectacled Italian who was once her boyfriend, were convicted of murdering fellow student Kercher in what the lower court said had begun as a drug-fueled sexual assault.
Knox and her family hope she will be set free after spending four life-changing years behind bars as an innocent caught up in what they say is a monumental judicial mistake. Prosecutors, who have depicted Knox as a manipulative liar, are seeking to increase her sentence to life in prison.
"She is confident, she is jittery, she is waiting and a little bit frightened by the wait," Knox's lawyer Maria Del Grosso told reporters earlier. "She is not scared of the truth. She worries for a decision over her life. But she is positive."
A decision could take several hours ? jurors are not allowed to leave the deliberation room until they agree on a verdict.
Video: Perugia takes the world stage (on this page)The case has spurred countless articles, books and even movies, and brought the Italian judicial system under a harsh spotlight in the U.S., where many believe the Seattle native was wrongly convicted. At the time of the original verdict, there were suggestions of anti-Americanism that even dragged in U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
With huge media interest in the case, the verdict by the jury ? which is made up of the presiding judge, a side judge and six jurors, five of them women ? will be broadcast live.
The jury has several options as they go into deliberations: They can acquit both defendants and set them free. They can uphold the conviction and confirm the sentence, reduce it or increase it. They can theoretically decide to split the fate of Knox and Sollecito, convicting one and acquitting the other.
Brutal crime
Kercher's body was found in her own bedroom in the Perugia apartment she shared with Knox on Nov. 2, 2007. Photos of the crime scene shown to the court in the final days of the appeal showed her chest bared, her face and neck covered in blood ? a powerful reminder of the brutal nature of the crime.
Four days after her body was found, prosecutors arrested Knox and Sollecito, as well as a Congolese man implicated by Knox during police questioning and later cleared. That false accusation against Diya "Patrick" Lumumba remains one of the most powerful arguments in the prosecution's case against Knox, though the American maintains she acted under police pressure during an interrogation where she had neither a lawyer nor a proper interpreter present.
Defense lawyers accused prosecutors of acting too hastily.
"An uninhibited young American ? she was the perfect culprit," Giulia Bongiorno, a defense lawyer for Sollecito, told the court in her final arguments. "When you want to solve a crime in four days, it's haste."
Knox and Sollecito were convicted and sentenced after the court deliberated for 13 hours. They have always denied wrongdoing.
Kitchen knife
Over the course of the appeals trial their positions significantly improved, mainly because a court-ordered independent review cast serious doubts over the main DNA evidence linking the two to the crime.
Prosecutors maintain 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 mix of evidence that also included the victim's genetic profile.
Slideshow: A murder in Italy (on this page)But the independent review ? ordered at the request of the defense, which had always disputed those findings ? reached a different conclusion.
The two experts found that police conducting the investigation had made glaring errors in evidence-collecting and that below-standard testing and possible contamination raised doubts over the attribution of DNA traces, both on the blade and on the bra clasp, which was collected from the crime scene 46 days after the murder.
The review was crucial in the case because no motive has emerged and witness testimony was contradictory and, in some cases, flat-out unreliable. It was a huge victory for the Knox camp and a potentially fatal blow for the prosecution.
Sensing danger, prosecutors spent several hearings and a significant portion of their closing arguments to refute the review, attacking the experts as unqualified, standing by their original conclusions and defending the work of forensic police. They challenged the experts to show exactly how the alleged contamination took place and said there is no scholarly consensus of the minimum amount of DNA required in order for a test to be admissible.
They also pointed to what a prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, called "gigantic, rock-solid circumstantial evidence" that contributed to the original convictions:
- There was a staged burglary in the apartment, used to sidetrack the investigation.
- Knox made contradictory statements early on, saying she was home and had to cover her ears to block out Kercher's screams while Lumumba killed her. Lumumba, who owned a pub where Knox occasionally worked, was jailed for two weeks as a result of that claim.
- On Nov. 2, 2007, Knox called her mother three times, including one call that took place before Kercher's body was found and when it was the middle of the night in Seattle.
- There was no activity on Sollecito's computer that night, even though he maintained he used it during the hours in which Kercher was killed.
The prosecutors do acknowledge the lack of motive, but said many murders that aren't premeditated often happen without a motive.
"They killed for nothing but they did kill; they are young but so was Meredith," Comodi told the court as she wrapped up the case. "They deserve the harshest penalty, which luckily in Italy is not the death penalty."
A third person was convicted in the case ? Rudy Hermann Guede, a small-time drug dealer and drifter who spent most of his life in Italy after arriving here from his native Ivory Coast. Guede used to play basketball near the crime scene and was a passing acquaintance of Knox.
Bruises
The courts that convicted him say Guede took part in the assault, leaving traces of DNA on the victim and at the crime scene. Guede was convicted in a separate fast-track procedure and saw his sentence cut to 16 years in his final appeal.
Defense lawyers maintain that Guede was the sole killer, while prosecutors say that bruises and a lack of defensive wounds on Kercher's body prove that there was more than one aggressor holding her into submission.
Story: Amanda Knox prepares to 'plead for her life'Guede says he is innocent, though he admits being in the house the night of the murder. Taking the stand during the appeals trial, he said he believes Knox and Sollecito are guilty.
The pair insist they were at Sollecito's house the night of the murder, watching the French movie "Amelie" on Sollecito's computer, having sex and smoking pot.
Their defense maintains that a perverse sexual game is an implausible scenario for two people who had been dating for just six days and were infatuated with each other. They point to the lack of their traces in the crime scene, saying that the defendants could not possibly have cleaned up their traces but left Guede's. Knox's defense notes she could have left the country in the aftermath of the killing, but said she decided to stay to help out investigators. They also say the kitchen knife, found at Sollecito's house, is not the murder weapon.
What gives the defense hope is the DNA review, which took most of the appeals trial and is a formidable argument for their side. "Today there's very little left. A clue is not enough," Knox's lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said.
Over the course of the 10-month appeal, Knox has slimmed down, dressed more conservatively and appeared more somber than during the original trial. She would sometimes take notes, sometimes exchange words with her lawyers or glances with Sollecito. A snapshot caught her winking at Sollecito, but at other times she appeared tried by what was going on around her.
NBC's Claudio Lavanga, The Associated Press, Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44752948/ns/world_news-europe/
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.