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In a speech delivered in near-perfect Italian, Knox asks judges to clear her and Raffaele Sollecito of Meredith Kercher’s murder Her voice choked with emotion – at times, to the point she was unable to continue until she had caught her breath – Amanda Knox has pleaded with the judges who will decide whether to clear her and her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, of the murder of Meredith Kercher. “I want to go home to my life,” she told the court. “I don’t want to be deprived of my life, my future, for something I have not done.” At the end of an intensely emotional plea, delivered entirely without notes and in near-perfect Italian, she said very quietly: “Do justice.” Though she almost broke down completely at the start, and her delivery was even more charged with tension than at her trial, Knox’s words were clearer and simpler than then. Crucially, she flatly denied the key prosecution accusation: that she killed Kercher, her British flatmate. Standing in a packed but hushed courtroom, her hands raised with her fingertips touching, almost as if in prayer, the 24-year-old said: “I am not what they say [I am]. And I did not do the things they said I did. I didn’t kill. I didn’t rape. I didn’t rob.” Knox’s sister, Deanna, wept – as did one of the young American’s lawyers, Maria del Grosso. Dressed in a green shirt, black hooded jacket, black trousers and boots, the University of Washington student – who is serving a 26-year sentence for the murder – said she had good relations with all her three flatmates, even if she was a bit untidy and inattentive. “I lived my life above all with Meredith. She was my friend. She was always kind to me,” she said. Kercher’s death had made her frightened and disbelieving, she said; the person “who had the bedroom next to me was killed. And if I had been there that evening, I would be dead. Like her. The only difference is that I was not there. I was with Raffaele.” Her appeal took a dramatic turn in June when two independent, court-appointed experts dismissed the key forensic evidence against the appellants. Quite the most damaging remaining evidence is a statement Knox gave to police on the morning of 6 November 2007, at the end of an all-night interrogation, in which she put herself in the house at the time of the murder. In the statement, which she subsequently retracted, she also claimed the murderer was Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, her employer at a local bar, who was later shown to be innocent. Knox entreated the two professional and six lay judges to take into account the way she was at the time: “I had never suffered. I did not know tragedy. I didn’t know how to deal with it.” Her only experience of tragedy was through the television, she said. Her mistake had been to put her faith in the police. “I trusted them blindly, and when I made myself available, to the point of exhaustion in those days, I was betrayed,” Knox said. “On the night of 5-6 November, I wasn’t just stressed and pressurised, I was manipulated.” Earlier, her former boyfriend had made a stumbling, but nevertheless moving, appeal for his own freedom. “I’ve never done anyone any harm. Never. In my whole life,” Sollecito told the court. He said he had thought the accusation would somehow evaporate. “Instead of which, it’s not been like that. I’ve had to put up with, go on in, a nightmare,” he said. He had spent more than 1,400 days in prison during which, like Knox, he had been confined “for almost 20 hours [a day] in a space measuring two-and-a-half metres by three”. He ended by asking to give the judges a bracelet, inscribed with the words “Free Amanda and Raffaele”, which he said he had not taken off since the day it was given to him, and which had yellowed with age in the meantime. It was, he said, “a concentrate of various emotions: desire for justice, and the effort, the path we have followed in this dark tunnel towards a light that seemed ever further away”. Amanda Knox Meredith Kercher Italy Europe United States John Hooper Tom Kington guardian.co.uk