Amanda Knox said to have plane on standby if appeal is upheld
Family of victim Meredith Kercher had difficulty finding air tickets, says lawyer as appeal comes to an end
Amanda Knox was said to have a plane standing by to whisk her out of Italy if her appeal was upheld, whereas the family of her alleged victim, the British student, Meredith Kercher, were having difficulty getting air tickets to be in court for the decision, their lawyer said on Friday.
Francesco Maresca was speaking as the appeal by the 24-year-old Knox and her former Italian boyfriend built towards a much-anticipated climax. In line with Italian court practice, each of the parties to the case was given a last chance to sway the two professional and six lay judges.
According to unconfirmed reports in the Italian media, a US television network has put a private jet at the disposal of the Knox family. "Well now," said Maresca when his turn came to speak. "The Kercher family has problems finding the tickets to come here to hear the outcome on Monday morning."
Money, class and race were all deployed on the penultimate day of an appeal that has also been rich in allusions to sex, religion and even the occult.
According to the prosecution, Kercher died resisting a violent sex game involving the appellants and Rudy Guede from Ivory Coast. The defence's central argument has been that Guede, who has been definitively convicted of the murder, killed Kercher on his own after breaking in to the flat she shared with Knox.
The young American's former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, is the son of a prosperous urologist. The Knoxes are not rich but, said Giuliano Mignini for the prosecution, they had spent $1m on a PR campaign in defence of their daughter's innocence.
Mignini, who oversaw the original investigation, pointedly referred to the appellants as being "of good families", contrasting their fate in the event of an acquittal with that of a "poor black man".
His remark came in a speech in which he claimed, as evidence of the appellants' guilt, thei! r reacti on to gruesome images of the murder scene shown in court. "At the trial, Amanda never looked at them. Never. Raffaele looked every so often with one eye icy, expressionless."
His jibe was described as "truly unfair" by Sollecito's counsel, Donatella Donati. Her client, brought up by his father after his mother's death, was simply "shy about showing his emotions".
It was followed by a defence onslaught on the evidence, with lawyers appearing to hint Knox and Sollecito were framed.But Donati came closer than anyone to making the charge explicit. She recalled that, after her client was arrested, his father had appeared on a show presented by one of Italy's best-known TV journalists.
Having heard of some of the alleged weaknesses in the police case, the presenter had remarked that, if such claims were true, "Someone will have to pay". The following morning, said Donati, the police found at the scene of the crime Kercher's bra clasp, which had lain there, apparently unnoticed, for more than six weeks.
On examination the clasp was found to bear a trace of Sollecito's DNA, though court-appointed experts reported in June that the evidence might have got there by contamination. Donati noted that the clasp also bore the DNA of two other men, and that neither of them was Guede.
"So, who were those other men?", she asked.
Closing her address to the court, Donati said it was the defence that had gone after the truth in this case, even though under the Italian system that was the job of the prosecution.
"Raffaele Sollecito has no fear of the truth", she declared with the clear implication that his prosecutors might.
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