Italian court hears 24-year-old is a 'double soul' as she appeals against conviction for murdering British student Meredith Kercher
Amanda Knox is an "enchanting witch", a woman with a "double soul" ? part angel, part devil ? her appeal hearing has been told by a lawyer representing the man Knox first accused of murdering Meredith Kercher.
"Who is Amanda Knox?" Carlo Pacelli asked the judges and jury in a final address before the verdict, which is expected early next week. "Is she the mild, sweet young woman with no makeup you see before you today? Or is she, in fact, the one I have described and who emerges from the court papers on the basis of eyewitness portraits, given over to lust, narcotic substances and the consumption of alcohol?"
The 24-year-old Knox, Pacelli said, was "the one and the other. In her, there is a double soul: the good, angelic, compassionate one ... tender and ingenuous, and the Lucifer-like, demonic, satanic, diabolic one that at times wanted to live out borderline, extreme actions and dissolute behaviour." The latter, he said, was the Amanda of the night in 2007 on which the British student Kercher was murdered in the hilltop city of Perugia.
Pacelli was speaking on behalf of a Congolese barman, Patrick Lumumba, named by Knox as the killer in a controversial statement she made to police four days after Kercher's body was discovered. Lumumba made himself a party to the case, as is permitted under Italian law, and his presence at the trial and appeal has had an important bearing on both.
Knox subsequently withdrew the statement, which was signed at the end of an all-night interrogation without the presence of a lawyer or consular representative. She also later claimed she was repeatedly slapped by police during the questioning. The claim has earned her and her family, who repeated it, an action for slander by the Perugia force.
At the request of Knox's lawyers, Italy's highest appeals court ruled the statement inadmissible. But it featured at the trial, and has been referred to repeatedly during her appeal because of Lumumba's involvement.
Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, are appealing against their sentences, of 26 and 25 years respectively. On Saturday, the prosecution asked that, on the contrary, their jail terms should be increased to life on the grounds that they had no motive for the killing. A lower court found that Kercher died resisting involvement in a drug-fuelled sex session.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/26/amanda-knox-enchanting-witch
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