Prosecutors request 30 years for Knox, 26 for ex
(By Denis Greenan).
(ANSA) – Florence, November 26 – An Italian prosecutor on Tuesday asked a Florence court to sentence American student Amanda Knox to 30 years in prison and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to 26 years for the 2007 murder in Perugia of British exchange student Meredith Kercher.
Prosecutor Alessandro Crini requested 26 years for both on the murder count and a further four years for Knox for allegedly slandering Perugia bar owner Patrick Lumumba, whom she initially implicated during tough police questioning before later retracting, saying she had been confused. In 2009 Knox and Sollecito were sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively for the murder of Leeds University student Kercher, from Coulsdon, Surrey. They were acquitted on appeal in 2011.
Italy’s supreme court in March quashed the acquittals and sent the case back to the appeals stage.
Referring to initial DNA findings and dismissing recent ones, Crini said traces of Kercher’s DNA were found on the blade of a knife he said was used in her murder.
“It is a clear trace, clean,” Crini said.
This contradicted recent new tests, carried out specifically for the appeals trial, which showed that no reliable trace of the victim’s DNA had been found on the knife police seized from Sollecito’s home.
Sollecito and Knox have said Knox’s DNA was on the knife because the couple cooked together in his kitchen.
Crini also repeated accusations from the original trial that a third person, Rudy Guede, held Kercher down while he sexually assaulted her and at the same time, Knox and Sollecito repeatedly stabbed her in a drug-fuelled rage.
“She (Kercher) was gripped around the throat and over the mouth, held still as if she was an animal,” Crini said.
The victim managed to scream, after which there was “a progression (which is) understandable from the criminological standpoint…it came down to having to get rid of someone who had been assaulted”.
The prosecutor also reiterated an earlier finding, since contradicted, that traces of Sollecito’s DNA were on Kercher’s severed bra-clasp.
Sollecito allegedly cut the bra “to raise the temperature of the affair,” Crini argued.
He said the murder was sparked by the latest in a series of arguments over the cleanliness of the apartment, after Guede left the toilet dirty.
Kercher, 21, was found dead on the floor of an apartment she shared with Knox on November 2, 2007.
Guede’s DNA was found inside Kercher, on her clothes, and elsewhere in the apartment.
No DNA traces of Knox or Sollecito were found in the house.
Guede was convicted in a fast-track trial and is serving a 16-year sentence for the sexual assault and murder of Kercher, but the Cassation Court found it unlikely he acted alone.
The new trial opened in Florence in September, and a decision is expected on January 10.
Reacting to the sentence request, Knox told one of her lawyers: “I was not in that house”.
The lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, said his client was “disappointed”.
He said she had asked him to rebut the prosecutor’s reconstruction “radically, as you have always done”. Sollecito’s father Francesco said he was “left speechless” by the prosecutor’s requests.
Sollecito’s defence lawyer Luca Maori said Crini’s arguments “completely ignored” the latest DNA evidence.
On Monday, at the start of his 11-hour summing-up, Crini said “the reasoning behind the decision to acquit was razed to the ground” by the Cassation Court in its March 25 ruling.
The supreme court ruled that the initial forensic evidence had been wrongly dismissed in the acquittal and a prosecution theory about a sex game that went wrong should be re-examined.
Crini argued that testimony from homeless witness Antonio Curatolo, who said he saw Knox and Sollecito in the vicinity of the apartment the night of the murder, was “trustworthy”.
The prosecutor also argued to uphold testimony from Marco Quintavalle, a shopkeeper who said he saw Knox in front of his store the morning after the murder.
Knox and Sollecito have both testified they were at his apartment the night of the murder and the morning after.
Crini also pointed to what he said were contradictions in Knox’s account of the morning following the murder.
Knox said she returned to the flat to take a shower after spending the night at Sollecito’s house, but failed to notice Kercher’s room had been broken into and was a mess.
This part of her testimony is “not convincing”, Crini maintained.
Sollecito, now 29 and looking for a job in IT in Italy or America, attended the hearing but Knox, now 26 and studying creative writing at the University of Washington, has opted to stay in the US.
The Kercher family have welcomed the new appeals trial and consistently stated they want to know who committed the crime along with Guede, since the supreme court said he could not have acted alone.
In an emotional appeal to the court earlier this month, Sollecito said he had been “persecuted” and was not “the ruthless killer” the prosecution was trying to depict.
He said the trial had been a “nightmare” for him and he “wanted his life back”.
Knox, in umpteen statements including in a best-selling book about her experience in the Italian justice system, has said the prosecutor who “invented” a picture of her as a sex-and-drug-crazed “she-devil” had no evidence for his theory.