U.S. Student Addresses Italian Court

PERUGIA, Italy — A day before a jury is expected to begin deliberating her fate, an American college student charged with murdering her housemate in this picturesque Umbrian hill town addressed the court on Thursday. In Italian nearly perfected by her time in prison, she said that she was “afraid of being branded a murderer.”

In a trembling voice, Amanda Knox, 22, thanked her family and friends, the jurors and even the prosecutors who have accused her. “They are trying to do their work even if they don’t understand,” she said.

In a tale of junior-year-abroad-gone-bad that has drawn intense news media attention, prosecutors allege that Ms. Knox, then a student at the University of Washington, and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 25, killed her housemate, Meredith Kercher, 21, of Surrey, England, after coercing her into a sex game.

They are facing trial together, and prosecutors are seeking life sentences for both, Italy’s stiffest sentence. A third defendant, Rudy Guede, 22, was handed a 30-year sentence for sexual assault and murder, although the judge ruled that he was one of three assailants. All three deny wrongdoing.

Yet more than two years after Ms. Kercher’s body was found semi-naked with her throat slit in the Perugia house she shared with Ms. Knox and two others, and after a barrage of press and hundreds of hours of testimony from forensic experts and character witnesses — no one is any closer to understanding what exactly happened that fateful night.

“It plays like a great crime story, like a television series,” said Gianluca Nicoletti, a cultural commentator for Il Sole 24 Ore radio. “But in the end, years have gone by and what are we talking about? Who killed her? With what? With what motive?”

In their closing arguments, prosecutors argued that Ms. Knox, high on drugs and alcohol and irritated with Ms. Kercher for being “prissy,” corralled Mr. Sollecito and Mr. Guede into group sex that ended with her slitting her housemate’s throat. They claim the murder weapon is a kitchen knife later found scrubbed clean in Mr. Sollecito’s kitchen with Ms. Knox’s DNA on the handle and Ms. Kercher’s on the tip.

Defense lawyers say the DNA was contaminated and is not credible, and that the blade doesn’t match some of Ms. Kercher’s wounds. They also discredit the DNA of Mr. Sollecito that prosecutors say was found on Ms. Kercher’s bra strap.

In the absence of a smoking gun or entirely convincing motive, the telegenic and enigmatic Ms. Knox, who came to the police station as a witness and left as a suspect, has become an object of fascination.

“Who is Amanda?” the playwright John Guare, who has followed the case closely, asked in an interview by e-mail. “Is she Henry James’s ‘Daisy Miller,’ the archetypal American girl in Europe who comes to a disastrous end? Is she Dorothy swept up into an evil Oz?” Ms. Knox, he added, “with no history of violence, is a screen on whom we can project any identity.”

The case is also freighted with race, a still uncomfortable issue in an increasingly diverse Italy. Ms. Kercher’s mother is Indian and father white. Mr. Guede, who has admitted to being at the house the night of the crime and whose DNA was found on Ms. Kercher’s body, is from the Ivory Coast. Ms. Knox first accused Patrick Lumumba, originally of Congo and the owner of a bar where she worked, of the crime; he was jailed and later released and is suing her for defamation. In testimony in June, Ms. Knox said the police pressured her to accuse him.

In the press, Ms. Knox is often portrayed as an innocent girl unwittingly caught up in the Kafkesque Italian justice system. But even one of her lawyers, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said that he believed the trial has been fair. “Yes, of course,” he said, “absolutely.” He added that he “disagreed” with news media coverage that has depicted it otherwise.

But to American eyes, many aspects of the trial can in fact seem baffling, even if they are perfectly normal here.

Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito were held in jail for a year before prosecutors ruled to indict them. Although it began in mid-January, the trial has taken nearly a year — long by American standards but fast by Italian standards — because it has met only two days a week, partly to accommodate a powerful lawyer for Mr. Sollecito, Giulia Bongiorno, who is also a sitting member of Parliament and the head of Parliament’s Justice Committee.

The case the prosecutors have presented is largely circumstantial, though even some American legal experts say it could be strong even in an American courtroom.

Prosecutors have cited records showing that Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito stopped using their cellphones around the same time on the evening of the crime, and began using them again around the same time early the next morning. Forensic experts have testified that evidence with Ms. Knox’s and Ms. Kercher’s commingled DNA was found in a room in the house where prosecutors allege Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito staged a break-in as a cover-up, for which they are also charged.

Ms. Knox has maintained that she spent the night of the murder at Mr. Sollecito’s house, where the two smoked marijuana, watched the French film “Amélie” on his computer and had sex. She said she went home the next morning and found the door to the house open and Ms. Kercher dead.

Mr. Sollecito has said he does not remember whether or not Ms. Knox spent the whole night at his house. Mr. Sollecito’s lawyers chose not to subject him to cross-examination, in part because his story does not entirely corroborate Ms. Knox’s. On Thursday he delivered one of his few declarations in court, saying, “I did not kill Meredith” and appealing to jurors to give him his life back.

Unlike in some American trials, where defendants often turn on each other, Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito’s lawyers have mounted a common defense. Defense lawyers say this is because their clients are innocent. Yet the Italian justice system offers no American-style plea bargain, in which defendants admit some guilt in exchange for a lesser sentence. The closest equivalent is a fast-track trial, which Mr. Guede’s lawyers asked for with the hope of a shorter sentence for him.

The jury of six civilians and two judges is not sequestered and has access to news media coverage of the case. They must convict if they are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. In closing arguments on Thursday, one prosecutor, Manuela Comodi, told jurors that they did not require absolute truth. That, she added, was only known “by God.”