An Italian court yesterday found 22-year-old American Amanda Knox guilty of the 2007 murder of her British housemate Meredith Kercher. She was jailed for 26 years while Raffaele Sollecito who was also found guilty, received a prison sentence of 25 years.
Ms Knox and co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, the Italian engineering student she fell in love with just a week before the grisly sex murder of Meredith Kercher, had been on trial in the central Italian university town of Perugia since January.
On a day of impassioned sparring between defence and prosecution Thursday, both youths made 11th-hour appeals to the six-member jury and two judges who are to decide their fate. "I'm afraid of being labelled as someone that I'm not, as doing things I didn't do and having the killer's mask forced on me," Ms Knox said in Italian, her voice trembling.
Mr Sollecito, 25, said more explicitly, "I didn't kill Meredith," adding: "Give me my life back." Ms Kercher, an exchange student who wanted to be a teacher, was 21 when she died of knife wounds to the neck on the night of November 1, 2007.
Prosecutors say irrefutable DNA and other forensic evidence incriminate Ms Knox, Mr Sollecito and a third person, Rudy Guede of Ivory Coast, who was convicted separately after opting for a "fast-track" trial in exchange for clemency.
Mr Guede, now 22, is appealing his 30-year sentence. The prosecution alleges that the three youths were high on drugs when they tried to engage Ms Kercher in a sex game that turned violent. The defence insists that Mr Guede, described as a drifter who was taken in by a Perugia family who have since broken ties with him, was the sole killer.
They say the prosecution has only circumstantial evidence against Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito, describing them as "lovebirds" in the flush of early romance in this centuries-old university town nestled in the Umbrian hills. Ms Knox has been portrayed as "acqua e sapone" (water and soap) - an Italian idiom for squeaky clean, or wholesome - by her defenders, and a cold, duplicitous "she-devil" by her accusers.
Prosecutors say Mr Sollecito, the son of a prominent urologist who completed his engineering degree while in custody, was in Mr Knox's thrall and they are seeking the maximum sentence of life imprisonment for the pair.