Lawyers in Italy have now fired their best shots at Amanda Knox, the Seattle exchange student accused of killing her British roommate, explaining the murder of Meredith Kercher in terms of saint vs. sinner. In final arguments, Perugia’s public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini said the American slit her roommate’s throat on the night of Nov. 1, 2007, driven by sexual desire and alpha-female competitiveness. Asking for a life sentence with nine months’ isolation, Mignini said “La Knox” wanted a sex “game” and used her feminine wiles to manipulate two besotted young men — one of whom is already convicted, the other on trial with her — into restraining Kercher while she plunged a kitchen knife into her neck.
“Probably she would have insulted Meredith,” Mignini said, reconstructing the event with representatives of the U.S. embassy seated silently a few feet behind the defense table. “And she probably said, ‘You are always behaving like a little saint. Now we will show you, and now we will make you have sex!'”
Elaborating the saint-sinner theme later, an Italian civil lawyer arguing for millions in damages against the American called Knox a “Luciferina … dirty in her soul,” who is “beautiful in her looks but also sly and intelligent. Is she the good-looking, charming, clean white face we see here today Keep in mind that the girl we see is a girl that has been changed by two years in prison.”
As he spoke, Knox, whose compulsive journal-writing in the early days of her incarceration inadvertently provided authorities and media 300 pages of a “prison diary” to examine for clues to her mentality, scribbled on a legal pad, “In prison, you do not become a beautiful person unless you have an inner light that guides you.” Italian photographers captured her note-to-self.
