Posts Tagged ‘Amanda Knox: Meredith Kercher Forgotten And Foxy Knoxy Drives The Media Wild’
Amanda Knox: Meredith Kercher Forgotten And Foxy Knoxy Drives The Media Wild
AMANDA Knox is back in the news. She’s in a Perugia court to appeal her 2009 conviction for the sexual assault and murder of British student Meredith Kercher. The victim’s body was found on November 2, 2007 in her bedroom at a residence place she shared with Amanda Knox in Perugia. Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison. She has always maintained her innocence. And she is an American. And that makes it a big deal.
The papers round-up:
That Was Then
Also on trial is Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian who was Knox’s boyfriend at the time of the murder and has been convicted of the same charges and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In the first trial, Knox mostly appeared confident and collected. She would nod and smile to the court upon entering the room and talk to her lawyers during breaks. On a Valentine’s Day hearing, she sported a bright T-shirt with “All You Need Is Love” scrawled in large pink letters. Now, her lawyers describe her as worn out. Business Week
The Media Trial
After more than three years in prison, Knox, 23, looked wan and tense as guards ushered her in. Her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 26, was impassive, staring directly at the cameras as he was led into the room.
“We have to get used to the idea that this is going to be a media trial,” Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann told the jury of five women and one man. Star Tribune
Kerching!
In the past year, half a dozen books in English have been published on the case (as well as several in Italian), and two films — one for television — are in production. NYTimes
And The Book
There have also been a handful of books written in Italian, the most recent by an Italian MP who visited Knox in jail on several occasions. In “Take Me With You: Talks with Amanda Knox in Prison”, Rocco Girlanda, 44, wrote that Knox’s face was “beautiful like a porcelain doll” and that he pictured her in his dreams.
Tasteful stuff.
The Case
Yet there is no forensic evidence directly linking Knox to the crime scene. Traces of Sollecito’s DNA was found on Kercher’s bra clip. But it was not found by police until long after the killing, and the defence claims it was contaminated.
A pre-appeal submission accuses the trial judges of “serious non-compliance and misapplication of assessment criteria” when dealing with the scientific evidence. The defence will argue, for example, that a knife from Sollecito’s kitchen, which the prosecution identified as the murder weapon, is too long to have produced the wounds from which Kercher died. – Guardian
A Three-Pronged Defence
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