Amanda Knox ‘crucified’ for crime she did not commit, lawyer tells court

US student wrongly convicted of murdering Briton Meredith Kercher thanks to flawed evidence, counsel tells judge and jury Amanda Knox has been “crucified, impaled in the piazza” for a crime she never committed, her lawyer told the court hearing her appeal against a 26-year sentence for murdering British student Meredith Kercher. Carlo Dalla Vedova was speaking after another lawyer called the University of Washington student an “enchanting witch” in a case shot through with religious and occult imagery Dalla Vedova said Knox, 24, had spent more than 1,000 days in prison on the basis of “evidence that cannot stand up to other hypotheses”. How many times, he asked rhetorically, had he and other members of her legal team heard her say: “Why won’t they believe me?” The prosecution, and the lawyer for the Kercher family – who have joined themselves to the case – repeatedly emphasised in their final submissions the horror of the crime and the suffering of the victim’s relatives. But that was not the point, said Dalla Vedova. “Be respectful of the pain caused by the death of Meredith Kercher,” he said. “But don’t make the mistake of keeping two innocent people in jail. Pain is not a legal argument.” A verdict is expected on Monday. Knox has been joined in her appeal by her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian jailed for 25 years for his part in what the court decided was a drug-fuelled, sexually-motivated killing. A third defendant, Rudy Guede, was convicted separately. The appeal is based on the argument that Kercher was killed by Guede alone after the Ivory Coast-born drifter broke into the flat she shared with Knox. Dalla Vedova began a point-by-point examination of the case against Knox by looking at her statement, made to police after an all-night interrogation, that she had been at the scene of the crime. She had not been given any legal assistance and, at the time she was no more than a “ragazzina” – a young girl – with scant knowledge of Italian on her first trip abroad, he said. Knox had come to Italy less than a month before that date to study, along with Kercher, at Perugia’s university for foreigners. Much of the prosecution case, claimed Dalla Vedova, was based on “conjecture” and unreliable “low copy number” DNA evidence. He cited by way of example the acquittal in 2007 in Belfast of the Omagh bombing defendant Sean Hoey, who had been indicted on the basis of low copy number DNA testing. Meredith Kercher Amanda Knox Italy Europe United States John Hooper guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 29, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.