Monday, November 30, 2009

The Summations: Sollecito’s Lawyer Says Knox Was Not The Sort To Commit Murder

Posted by Peter Quennell


TGCom’s headline that Sollecitos lawyer claimed Knox was framing Sollecito is not born out by this longer report from Richard Own in The Times.

A lawyer for the defence today told the judge and jury Ms Knox was not “Amanda the Ripper” but more like Amelie, the wide-eyed innocent played by Audrey Tautou in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 hit film of the same name.

Giulia Bongiorno, defending Mr Sollecito, said “Throughout this trial I have heard Amanda described as someone who nursed a hatred, someone who was a maneater and someone who was a diabolical witch. But she is not Amanda the Ripper. She is a fragile and weak girl.”

She said Ms Knox, 22, was like “a little girl who looks at people and the world with child-like eyes, full of energy, spontaneous and imprudent ... If anything, she is similar to the character Amelie, the French girl in the film of the same name she was watching with Raffaele the night of the murder.”

Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito claim they spent the night of the murder at his flat, smoking cannabis. However Mr Sollecito has testified that he cannot remember if Ms Knox was with him all the time….

Ms Bongiorno, an incisive front-rank Italian lawyer, said that Mr Sollecito, 25, an information technology student, could not have taken part in the murder and sexual assault of Ms Kercher since it was he who had “raised the alarm and waited for the investigators on the doorstep of the house of the crime. Would a killer do that?’‘...

In an impassioned address Ms Bongiorno said that Mr Sollecito barely knew Ms Kercher, and did not know Guede at all. The prosecution had “failed to establish any link” between Mr Sollecito and Guede. “In this trial there are many doubts, but one certainty, that the two did not know each other at the time of the crime,’’ she said. “The only link between them is the charge sheet.’’ The prosecution reconstruction of the crime was “incomplete, with the essential part missing”.

Ms Bongiorno, who successfully defended Giulio Andreotti, the former Italian Prime Minister, against charges that he was linked to the Mafia, said a bloody footprint at the cottage was not Mr Sollecito’s, as the prosecution had claimed, but came from a shoe belonging to Guede.

She used quotations from Socrates to the late Italian singer-songwriter Sergio Endrigo to support her case that the prosecution had failed to prove Mr Sollecito’s guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”. She said that the prosecution had also failed to establish a motive for the crime….

On Saturday Mr Sollecito told the court that Ms Knox was “not manipulative or violent or diabolical, as she is made out to be. She does not have a dark side, she is a girl like many others”. Luca Maori, another lawyer defending Mr Sollecito, said that Guede’s DNA was “on Meredith’s sweatshirt, it’s on her handbag, it’s on her bra. Only one person carried out this crime and it was Guede.”

He said that the bespectacled Mr Sollecito, who comes from a well to do family at Bari in southern Italy, was “a calm, quiet and reserved young man” who when he met Ms Knox in Perugia as a 23-year-old student had had “little sexual experience”.


Comments

Am I reading this correctly? Did she just throw Amanda under the bus?

Posted by tigger34 on 11/30/09 at 04:24 PM | #

Hi tigger34. Yes you read it correctly. TGCom’s story said Bongiorno’s language was pretty extreme, so it perhaps could even engender some sympathy for Amanda - that seemed the reaction to the religious imagery of Lumumba’s lawyer last week.

Sollecito, the guy with the knife fetish and violence fantasies, seems to have remained a cold fish throughout, whereas Knox seems at times to have struggled with her memories. And there is still a mountain of evidence pointing to Sollecito being there on the night.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 11/30/09 at 04:41 PM | #

Pretty desperate stuff from Bongiorno; no a killer would not call the police and wait for their arrival. But she is careful not to mention that the postal police had already arrived. The defence has failed to disprove this. Instead of calling the carabinieri, he and AK made a flurry of calls away from the postal police and other witnesses. He called his sister first, she her mother. The police last.

If poor naiive RS has been framed by a calculating AK then he would hardly have exchanged endearments and chocolates with her in the courtroom and birthday greetings in prison and a touching enquiry whether they could remain a couple afer the current unpleasantness is over. If he was innocent and framed he would be screaming from the rooftops just how. Why does his own alibi not stand up? His computer, his phone, his multiple stories and his own admission that he lied to the police do not point to an innocent dupe. Instead he has kept his mouth shut and trusted that there was not enough evidence against him. He failed to take the stand to reiterate his story that AK went out that evening and that she was lying in her alibi placing her with him. Too late in the day to drop the alliance unless he is going to give an account of what really happened and the extent of his involvement.

AK’ statements must be reconsidered because she doesn’t express herself well in Italian? Does naming Patrick Lumumba in Italian translate into ‘‘I have no idea who did it because I wasn’t there’’ in English?  Contrary to spin she had the service of an interpreter.

The possibility of dna contamination must be accepted but never explained HOW in Bongiorno’s view. That will not do. Unless you can come up with a believable alternative scenario in how it got there, then it was put there by RS himself Ms Bongiorno.

Not knowing a motive is not the same as there not being one. Unfortunately there are many vile crimes committed for trivial reasons or perverted ones such as the ‘thrill’. This may very well be one of them.

Posted by Faustus on 11/30/09 at 05:19 PM | #

Hi Peter. Thanks. While I see Raffaele as rather cold, I am also leaning towards the thinking that his lawyers know his true infatuation with AK and have refused to put him on the stand due to his unreliability and the fact he would probably make a poor witness. We know he has a story to tell but, I don’t believe he is man enough to ever tell it. Instead, he is going to let Ms. Knox take away whatever he has left. I truly believe he thought that his father’s money and connections could make everything right. Very sad state of upbringing for that young man.
Faustus, I agree with you and I know that most here do as well.

Posted by tigger34 on 11/30/09 at 05:32 PM | #

Hi Faustus. Yes regardless of whether she tried for some separation from Knox, the points she did make were not at all in line with the voluminous evidence to the contrary.

In recent weeks she has been in court for only a small fraction of the time and it reads like she just doesn’t know the prosecution’s case.

Not in the details ayway. And the devil is in the details!

Posted by Peter Quennell on 11/30/09 at 05:32 PM | #

“Pretty desperate stuff from Bongiorno; no a killer would not call the police and wait for their arrival. But she is careful not to mention that the postal police had already arrived. The defence has failed to disprove this. Instead of calling the carabinieri, he and AK made a flurry of calls away from the postal police and other witnesses. He called his sister first, she her mother. The police last.”

Yes, Faustus, exactly. The point is, the alarum had already been raised. The body was about to be discovered. Raffaele calling the Carabinieri at that point had about as much meaning as the pyromanicac calling the fire department after hearing the sirens. It is blatant sophistry to assert otherwise.

Posted by Earthling on 11/30/09 at 07:00 PM | #

Ciao,

Empirically there is many cases where it is the murder who calls the police and waits for them to show up (a.o. numerous cases where the husband murders the wife) so Sollecitos actions the 2. November 2007 is hardly an argument for/against anything. Especially in relation to the staged break-in, which - like calling the police - were ment to distract the police from looking into the close environment of Meredith’s housemates.

As Pete suggests, Ms. Buongiorno is a lawyer with a reputation for managing a sharp (ideological) rhetoric, rather than one putting the nitty-gritty technical details (like DNA) under scrutiny. One could argue (hope?) that her competence is of greater value in high profiled political cases (like Andreotti’s case) than it would be in a murder case in a local court in Perugia, where jury members as well as judges are selected from a different perspecive.

Best, Fiori

Posted by Fiori on 11/30/09 at 07:15 PM | #

Ah, so we ignore the physical evidence (the bloody footprint on the rug, the dna on the bra strap, the murder weapon in his kitchen), we ignore the winess placing all three together that night, we ignore the timing on the Carabinieri call in the morning, we ignore the lack of an alibi, we ignore the lies.

We realize he is a nice boy, and Amanda is a frail child (odd, that, for a former soccer star), we realize there was no sane reason for this demented crime.  So they should be acquitted.

Desperate times for the defense, I’d say.

Posted by lauowolf on 11/30/09 at 10:13 PM | #

I believe that comparing Amanda to Amelie Poulain is a bit too much. I do not recall Amelie Poulain doing drugs, having sex here and there, nor having a rabid rabbit in her bathroom.

This is so ridiculous!

Can’t she find something better? Of course she has to defend her, but this, nobody can believe that Amanda is the Seattle’s Amelie Poulain!

Posted by Patou on 12/01/09 at 04:32 PM | #

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