It was supposed to be a year of growth, learning and exploration. Amanda Knox hoped to experience the world beyond her middle-class West Seattle neighborhood and learn Italian. She also considered her prior sexual experience limited—four guys, all in committed relationships—and wanted to change that.
For the press, from Italy to Britain to America and beyond, it was a story too good to pass up. The Amanda Knox trial reveals problems with the Italian justice system, but it reveals much more than that. It is a fascinating study of how people steeped in one culture can draw mistaken conclusions about the behavior of someone from a different culture. Denied access to her own underclothes, she settled on a pair of red bikini briefs. That too, would arouse the suspicion of investigators.
Once investigators believe someone to be guilty, nearly any behavior out of the ordinary suddenly seems incriminatory. When officer Rita Ficarra showed up in the waiting room to greet Amanda, she was on the floor, legs splayed, in the process of doing a split.
That too would strike investigators as evidence of guilt. My mind was spinning. I felt as if I was going totally blank. Police tactics can be rough. They falsely claimed that Raffaele had confessed that they had left his apartment.
Ficarra, not surprisingly, denied this. To get her attention, Ficarra said. The investigation took its toll. In the afternoon of the same day, Amanda would try to tell a different story, to say that what the signed statements said did not reflect her actual memories. But it was too late. Amanda was arrested. She would spend the next 1, nights in prison. Raffaele Sollecito. The police investigation would continue for a year, but the crux of the case against Knox and Sollecito was based on the four days of questioning after the murder.
Damning if true, but actually the result of contamination. A witness emerged to claim he saw Amanda, Raffaele, and Guede together on Halloween, but his credibility suffered a massive hit when he also said he saw Amanda and Raffaele together in August, two months before they met.
The police were forced to revise their theory of the case on November 10, when none of the fingerprint samples taken in the murder room matched any of the three persons charged with murder. The prints did, however, match those of another man in the Perugia police files, Rudy Guede. Guede had taken a train out of Perugia the night of the murder. In a police-monitored Skype chat, authorities determined that Guede had fled to Germany.
He was arrested in Mainz. One might think the arrest of Rudy Guede would cause authorities to reconsider their theory of the case. But no, authorities essentially decided to simply swap out Guede for Lumumba. The murder now was a result of a sex-game gone bad involving Knox, Sollecito, and Guede. The Kercher murder was a culmination of a recent series of break-ins by Guede and his DNA was everywhere.
His lawyers requested an abbreviated trial, before only a judge with no live witnesses. Under this option provided by the Italian justice system, the maximum sentence is reduced by a third from the maximum available in a jury trial. Guede after arrest. Judge Micheli found Guede guilty and sentenced him to thirty years later reduced to sixteen in prison. He then announced that he found sufficient evidence of guilt for Amanda and Raffaele to be tried for murder.
The murder trial was combined with a civil trial slander brought against Amanda by Patrick Lumumba. The two defendants, sitting with their respective lawyers, appeared a study in contrasts. Raffaele looked anxious and constantly gnawed his fingernails. Amanda, for the most part, seemed her breezy self, dressed in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, and smiling at almost everyone in the courtroom.
With court sessions held only once or twice a week, the prosecution case alone lasted from January until June. Chief Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini called twenty witnesses to testify as to events on or around the night of November 1, An elderly woman testified that she heard a scream about pm and then heard people running from the house.
A homeless person claimed he saw Amanda and Raffaele near his bench on Piazza Grimana, which overlooks the villa, about pm on the murder night. The owner of a grocery store testified she saw Amanda buying cleaning products, presumably used to clean the murder scene, on the morning of November 2.
Amanda Knox during her trial. Not all the witnesses testified there was significant tension between the two roommates.
Filomena told the court that Amanda and Meredith got along just fine. The results of the DNA analysis seemed far from reliable, with contamination an equally likely explanation for the presence of DNA from Amanda or Raffaele.
On June 12 and 13, the defense opened its case with its star witness: Amanda Knox herself. Raffaele Sollecito did not testimony, with his lawyers concluding it was in his best interests to keep most of the focus on Knox. Testimony from defendants, however, is often taken with a grain of salt—especially Italy, where they are not sworn in and generally are believed to be lying. Amanda seemed assured on the stand and avoided falling into traps set by prosecutors.
She did her best to explain her seemingly odd behavior of showering in a blood-spattered bathroom and how she came to make her accusation against Patrick Lumumba. She testified that she was slapped twice during her lengthy interrogation, demonstrating the force of the blow by dropping her head down and opening her mouth wide in surprise.
After a two-month summer break, the trial resumed with a parade of battling forensic experts. The judge denied the motion. In December, Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini gave the first closing argument.
Now you have no choice but to have sex! Rudy was to the left. Knox's parents had lashed out at the verdict, saying jurors had ignored a lack of evidence that put Knox at the murder scene and the lack of a strong motive for her to kill Kercher. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
She implied that the jury was not impartial, and had been negatively influenced by Italian media accounts of the case.
Cantwell said she would take her case to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The appeal process won't begin until March 5 when the trial judge releases his full opinion on the verdict and the sentence in the case. Knox's lawyers could file their appeal in June or July with the first hearing possibly scheduled between September and October. Luciano Ghirga, one of Knox's lawyers, said his research indicated that about one in three cases are reversed on appeal.
Knox's mother Edda Mellas, told ABC News that when Knox returned to prison after her conviction last Saturday, she had been moved from a four-person cell to the new cell she now shares with just one other person, another American. Verini confirmed Knox was sharing a cell with a new American cellmate, named Laura, 53, "but she socializes with everyone in prison," he noted.
Ghirga also rejected insinuations that Knox did not get a fair trial in the Perugia court. Over the course of many hearings "evidence was presented in the course of debate in court. She had a fair trial. Knox's rights were not respected during the investigation, however, Ghirga said, when Knox was questioned without a lawyer in the early days after the murder, and interrogation that led to her confused statement in which she said she had a vision she was at the house when Kercher was killed.
While noting that "we all were influenced by the media" in the course of this case, he ruled out that the media coverage of the case ultimately influenced the jury's decision.
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