Amanda Knox, the American student, has been found guilty of murdering the British student Meredith Kercher at the flat they shared in the town of Perugia.
Ms Knox, a 22-year-old American student, and her Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 25, were convicted of the murder, following an 11-month trial.
Ms Kercher’s body was found in the bedroom of the cottage on November 2, 2007. She had been stabbed in the throat. Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito had claim they spent the night of the murder at his flat smoking cannabis and watching films.
But a jury decided that the pair, along with the already-convicted Rudy Guede, were guilty.
She was sentenced to 26 years in prison, and he received 25.
(Franco Origlia/Getty Images) Amanda Knox is driven into court at midnight to receive her sentence
The verdict draws to an end a trial which had many aspects that has enthralled observers.
It had a varied cast of characters: Ms Kercher, attractive and bright, with an English father and a mother of Asian origin; Sollecito, Knox’s boyfriend, a bespectacled IT student from a well-to-do family in Bari who she thought looked like Harry Potter but who had a collection of knives and manga comics; Guede, who came to Perugia as a boy with his father from the Ivory Coast but was soon abandoned and taken in by a local family who brought him up only to see him turn later to a life of petty crime.
But it is Knox who became the focus of attention from the moment she appeared on the scene, first as a witness, then as a suspect and now as a convicted murderer. She was, one of her lawyers said, “submerged in a media tsunami”.
In his summing-up, Giuliano Mignini, the chief prosecutor, told the court: “It is Amanda who started the fight, which triggered an unstoppable crescendo of violence, and it is Amanda who plunged the knife into Meredith’s neck.”
She nursed a hatred for her English flatmate and dominated her boyfriend, who did her bidding. “Perhaps there was a discussion, a fight over money or behaviour that got out of control. Or perhaps after smoking hash they decided to include Meredith in an extreme sexual game, and it was the moment for Knox to vindicate herself in a situation that, bit by bit, got more and more violent.”
Knox was mostly composed during the trial, often cheerful, but at this account she wept.
No comments:
Post a Comment