As the summer comes to a close....
Amanda Knox trial to resume with defense experts attacking evidence
please read about the case so far
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/409964_knox10.htmlPERUGIA, Italy -- After a nearly two-month summer court recess, Amanda Knox returns to the courtroom next week as her murder trial resumes with additional defense witnesses.
And though the Mediterranean's stifling summer temperatures have ebbed as Italians return grudgingly to work from their seaside holidays, defense attorneys are planning to turn up the heat as they return to court.
Monday's session is expected to kick off with testimony by esteemed professor Adriano Tagliabracci, director of the Forensic Institute of Ancona and president of the Italian Association of Forensic Genetics.
"His findings are explosive," said Francesco Vinci, director of the Forensics Ballistics Center of the University of Bari and professor at the university's forensics medicine department. He is also a consultant to Knox's co-defendant and former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
"There will be decisive progress in the investigation," he added, noting he was prohibited from disclosing more details until after giving testimony.
A campaign for the defendants
In mid-August, Vinci sent an e-mail to Seattle-area media offering his photos and availability for interviews once he has testified.
This outreach from Bari to Seattle is just one small example of how the family, friends, defenders and supporters of Knox, a former University of Washington student and West Seattle resident, and Sollecito are increasingly networking and combining resources across the Atlantic.
Prosecutors maintain that Knox, Sollecito (the Italian engineering student she was dating) and a third man, Ivory Coast immigrant Rudy Guede, were all active participants in the slaying and sexual assault of Knox's British roommate Meredith Kercher.
Her battered and bloodied body was found lying nude under a duvet in the flat she and Knox shared on Nov. 2, 2007. Knox was in Italy as part of a study-abroad program at the UW.
A Congolese pub owner whom Knox originally blamed, Patrick Lumumba, was unjustly jailed for two weeks, then freed and absolved of any connection to the crime. For that, Knox faces defamation charges and a civil slander suit.
Guede was tried and convicted during a fast-track (and closed-door) trial last fall for his part and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Since their arrest Nov. 6, 2007, Knox and Sollecito have been jailed in separate prisons in Umbria awaiting the outcome of their trial, which has attracted worldwide media attention.
The two co-defendants' current alibis -- that they were at Sollecito's flat at the time of the killing -- naturally link the defense teams.
But what was once two distinct efforts by two separate families in two separate countries lobbying for the pair's innocence appears to be morphing increasingly into a single Italo-American cause.
The debate online
It is a campaign connected through cyberspace and aided by bilingual go-betweens, some of whose personal motives reach into other, unrelated criminal cases, such as the "Monster of Florence" serial murder case in Tuscany.
Over the summer, the Friends of Amanda Web site was translated in its entirety and made available in Italian. Other languages are expected to follow. Another new site, Knox/Sollecito Forensic Review , which is penned by Seattle-area businessman Mark C. Waterbury, has also been translated into Italian at another site.
From Italy, Vinci forwarded the URL for the Italian version of the site to the seattlepi.com
Social networking sites have made it easier to bolster grassroots support for global issues -- the Free Amanda Knox cause site on Facebook includes members of both the Knox-Mellas and Sollecito families, for example, as well as supporters and friends in both countries.
At times, case-related blogs have provided useful forums for debating the case's finer points. But at their worst, they are a cybergutter of rumor-mongering and name-calling on both sides.
Information presented often contains both truth and spin. Take the Free Amanda Facebook site's first and second points, for example. Point No. 1 is true: "Amanda Knox has no criminal background or history of violence. She comes from a loving family and has many loyal friends."
But Point No. 2 is false: "A local criminal with a history of armed breaking and entering, Rudy Guede, has already been convicted of the murder. Amanda did NOT know him."
Actually Guede had a clean police record in Italy before the Kercher case, and Knox, in her first day on the stand this June, said she had met Guede on at least two social occasions.
The two sites that question Knox's and Sollecito's innocence are Perugia Murder File, moderated by a Seattle translator who filed a harassment complaint with local police in March over negative attention she received for administering the site, and New Jersey based True Justice for Meredith Kercher.
Taking sides in a high-profile trial
The vastly differing information on the pro-Meredith and pro-Amanda blogs, and at times even within the mainstream media, reflects the growing divisiveness of one of the most high-profile international criminal trials this decade.
From Seattle to London, New York to Milan, novelists, lawyers, conspiracy theorists, TV personalities and armchair detectives are pinning their reputations on the innocence or guilt of Knox and Sollecito.
Public opinion in Italy and the U.S. has split into two camps, the "Innocentisti and the Colpevolisti" (Innocents and the Guilties). On the one side, there are the vocal and media-savvy friends and supporters of Knox, genuinely and passionately convinced of her innocence and that of her former boyfriend.
They say the case is weak, plagued by shoddy police work and a controversial prosecutor.
They rail against what they say are irrelevant character questions and unfair media and police portrayals of Knox as an American-gone-wild party girl with questionable morals.
The other side maintains that plenty of hard evidence points to Knox's involvement in Kercher's death and that the real injustice is not Knox's incarceration, but the unsavory public relations effort to portray her as the victim.
There is some truth to both arguments, but divisions over the details have created irreparable rifts.
Over the summer, case-related differences ruptured the professional bond between the two Perugian lawyers representing Sollecito, Luca Maori and Marco Brusco. Brusco left their shared office and opened a studio of his own. Maori will continue to represent Sollecito in court, alongside Giulia Bongiorno.
A U.K.-based documentary film crew that filmed earlier this year in Seattle for weeks at the home of Knox's father and the home of her mother and stepfather met a similar fate.
When the three producers could not agree on how to approach the documentary, one walked away to write a book for Simon and Schuster with one of Europe's leading forensics experts, and the team fell apart.
But one of the biggest battles playing out behind the scenes is the longstanding feud between prosecutor Giuliano Mignini and Italian journalist Mario Spezi. Spezi and American thriller novelist Douglas Preston penned a contested account of the "Monster of Florence" serial killings, elements of which are still being tried in Italy's courts.
Some other American crime novelists (like Preston, none have attended the proceedings in Italy) have since joined in harshly criticizing Mignini, who believes the smears are being orchestrated as payback for having investigated Spezi and Preston.
Mignini does face court proceedings later this fall on an administrative matter related to his investigation into the "Monster of Florence" case.
A court must review whether his use of public funds to analyze a taped conversation between an investigator and his superior about whether or not to pursue certain leads in that case was proper.
If a court finds him guilty of any judicial misstep, even in an unrelated case, it will likely create further problems for what is already a highly contested investigation into Kercher's death.
Witnesses for the defense
Since the defense began its case in June with Knox's testimony, forensic experts have raised concerns over the reliability of some of the DNA evidence; specifically, whether or not the minuscule sample of DNA from the victim on the alleged murder weapon may have been the result of contamination.
According to Knox's lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, upcoming defense witnesses include Professor Walter Patumi (who will address the other traces of Knox's DNA found at the flat) and Professor Carlo Caltagirone, who will testify about Knox's mental state during her interrogation and while writing her Nov. 6 and 7 voluntary statements.
Knox initially told authorities during her late-night Nov. 5-6 interrogation that she had been present when Kercher was killed, cowering in the kitchen with her ears covered and had confused memories of Lumumba as perpetrator.
She asked for pen and paper the morning after and gave a handwritten statement reaffirming her story, noting her confusion, but naming Lumumba. Again on Nov. 7, she wrote that she "didn't lie" in her previous claims.
But three days later she told her mother in a bugged conversation that she felt bad about naming Lumumba. On the stand Knox said her initial statements were confused and made under the duress of police pressure, which she said included threats of jail and a policewoman's two cuffs on the back of the head, which, she testified, didn't hurt, but scared her.
It is still unclear how long the trial will drag on or when a verdict might come. Much depends on whether the court calls for a third-party independent review of the scientific evidence. Two events add pressure to finish by November -- the two-year anniversary of Kercher's homicide (and the defendants' incarceration) and Guede's appeal, scheduled to begin Nov. 18.
Guede refused to testify at Knox's trial, choosing instead to wait to give his testimony at his own appeal. In taped statements to authorities and reviewed by seattlepi.com, Guede said he heard Knox's voice and saw a woman running from the scene.
But the judge who convicted him has questioned Guede's credibility, since his version of some events didn't match what several friends told police. Guede's attorney, Walter Biscotti, has hired detectives from the Ponzi Investigative Agency to do some digging into whether those witnesses were entirely forthcoming. The Ponzi group is headquartered in Rome, but has eight other offices in Italy and operates worldwide.
"We have assumed private investigators, some of the best in Italy, to search for a few very concrete elements that will confirm his account, and we've already found a few things," Biscotti said.
In the meantime, Guede, Sollecito and Knox may all be breathing a sigh of relief that at least the worst of summer's heat is behind them. Last month at Capanne, the heat and crowded conditions raised the ire of several inmates, who started a fire out of protest. There is no air conditioning in the prison, which bakes under the summer sun and is in an open field about 10 miles outside Perugia.
"It was very hot, " Ghirga, Knox's lawyer, said. "But she is lucid and calm, as always, awaiting the outcome with confidence."
From his top-floor Century Square office with an enviable view of the Seattle skyline and Puget Sound, family spokesman David Marriott regularly reviews Knox's prison visitation reports.
Despite having picked up an additional cellmate this summer, Marriott said the most recent bulletin noted she was in good spirits and "really enjoyed seeing some of the friends who visited," Marriott said. "She stays pretty focused on her studies as that's about the only way she can pass the time in a productive manner."
