The eight Italians who will decide the fate of Amanda Knox, the American college student who is appealing a 2009 conviction of the murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, won’t officially consider a review of the DNA evidence for more than another month. But they’re unlikely to have missed the news, leaked to an Italian news agency earlier this week, and picked up by newspapers and television, that the investigators had been unable to find enough genetic material on the knife that Knox and her Italian co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito are alleged to have used to stab Kercher in a sex game gone wrong. Nor are the judges and jurors likely to have missed the jousting by lawyers for and against the accused, as both sides rushed to explain what the insufficient DNA evidence might mean for the case.
“If it’s true, it would be positive for the kids,” says Luciano Ghirga, one of Knox’s lawyers, who said he learned of the leak from news accounts. “Then you’d have to look at the analysis that was done during the first trial, which we’ve always sustained was not done properly.” Kercher’s bra clasp, another crucial piece of evidence, was also judged to be too rusty to be re-examined.
In the Italian justice system, it pays to play the press. Most trials are presided over by professional magistrates, but some — like Knox’s — also include a panel of jurors known as “citizen judges.” Unlike in the United States, where those deciding the case are carefully screened for bias and sequestered during the proceedings, Italian jurors are not only free to hold preconceived opinions, they’re at liberty to follow the news of the trial as it unfolds, leaving them vulnerable to swings in popular sentiment. Leaks like the one that broke this week open the possibility that by the time the evidence is officially presented on May 21 the minds of the jurors will already have been made up. “This is a way to play with public opinion,” says Francesco Maresca, a lawyer representing the murdered woman’s family. “Obviously, somebody put it in circulation to cause confusion.”
During the original trial, the DNA analysis was the most contested aspect of the case against Knox and her co-defendant, and much of her appeal was expected to turn on a re-examination of that same evidence. Lawyers for the defendants criticized the investigator for relying on too small of an amount of genetic material on the knife’s handle, which linked Knox to the alleged murder weapon. The bra-clasp, they added, may have borne Sollecito’s DNA, but it had been kicked around the apartment for weeks before being discovered by the police and was thus subject to contamination.
