Knox pleads before Italian jury

PERUGIA, Italy – American student Amanda Knox tried one last time Thursday to convince the Italian court trying her for murder that she is not a killer, urging jurors not to brand her with “the mask of an assassin.”

Knox spoke at the end of a trial that has exposed some of the most intimate details of her life, with prosecutors depicting her as a promiscuous and manipulative she-devil who brutally murdered her British roommate in Perugia, Meredith Kercher.

The trial, in which Knox’s ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito figures as a co-defendant, is wrapping up after almost a year. Thursday’s session was devoted to rebuttals by defense lawyers and the prosecution, and the eight members of the jury are expected to begin deliberations as early as today.

Standing up, her voice breaking as she fought back tears, the 22-year-old American told the court that she feels “vulnerable” and fears losing herself after two years in jail.

“I have written on a piece of paper … that I was afraid of losing myself,” she said, speaking Italian. “I am scared of being branded what I am not,” she said. “I am scared of having the mask of an assassin forced onto me.”

Knox and Sollecito, an Italian, are charged with murder and sexual assault in the 2007 slaying. Prosecutors are seeking life sentences.

Both Knox, a 22-year-old student from Seattle, and Sollecito, 25, have been jailed since shortly after the slaying.

The brutal murder has made headlines worldwide, bringing the lives of the defendants under the spotlight.

During the trial, about a hundred witnesses have taken the stand in the frescoed rooms just steps away from the medieval fountain that is a symbol of the town: relatives of the victim described Kercher’s love of Italy, her friends spoke of the last hours before she died, acquaintances described the relations between the two women.

Knox herself has taken the witness stand, giving a composed testimony months ago during which she called the victim a friend and offered her alibi, saying she spent the night at Sollecito’s house where the two watched a video.

According to the prosecution, Kercher and Knox had different personalities – the victim a serious student; the alleged murderer a promiscuous youth of dubious hygiene – and had grown apart so much that Knox wanted to get back at her for being “smug.”

The prosecutors contend that on the night of the murder, Nov. 1, 2007, Knox and Sollecito met at the apartment where Kercher and Knox lived.

They say a fourth person was there, Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast citizen who has been convicted in the murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Guede, who is appealing his conviction, maintains he was in the house the night of the murder but did not kill Kercher.

The prosecution says that Knox and Kercher started arguing and the three brutally attacked and sexually assaulted the Briton. They were acting, according to the prosecution, under “the fumes of drugs and possibly alcohol.”

Kercher’s body, her throat slit, was found in a pool of blood the next day at the apartment.

Knox says Kercher was a friend whose death shocked her. Defense lawyers have described her as a smart, cheerful woman, at one point even comparing her to film character Amelie, the innocent and dreamy girl in the 2001 French movie of the same title. That is the film Knox and Sollecito say they were watching on his computer the night of the murder.