Angel Face_ Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox - Barbie Latza Nadeau [36]
Amanda’s insistence on her innocence comes at the end of an eleven-month trial that sometimes feels more like a TV reality show than a legal proceeding—albeit one staged amid fifteenth-century religious art. The aula, or courtroom, for Meredith Kercher’s murder trial is two levels underground in Perugia’s ancient provincial courthouse. A glorified metal ladder and another flight of steep, worn stone steps lead down to the room called the Hall of Frescoes, which has brick walls, giant arches, and incongruous fluorescent chandeliers that look like shiny halos hanging from the ceiling. In this strange netherworld, Judge Giancarlo Massei sits under a huge crucifix facing a painting of a bare-breasted Madonna suckling her child. He is a slight man with a nasal voice that he rarely raises. Instead he gestures like an orchestra conductor to impose order in the court. His nickname among the press is “Woody,” for Woody Allen. He is a serious man with a gentle smile, but he is a tough judge. In the six months before the trial of Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, he has handed down three life sentences.
The trial is procedurally complex, because the criminal charges against Amanda and Raffaele are being tried simultaneously with a civil suit filed by the Kercher family and a defamation action lodged against Amanda by Patrick Lumumba. The forensic duels can be mind-numbing, as when a cell-phone network expert goes into great detail about the vagaries of phone signals in hilly Perugia to dispute evidence from Raf and Amanda’s call logs. Even the prosecutor falls asleep on occasion, and one elderly juror becomes well known for napping after lunch.
Judge Massei sits in the middle of the wide wooden bench, flanked by his co-judge and six jurors in green, white, and red sashes. The red-haired, middle-aged juror on Massei’s far right glares at the prosecutor and smiles at the Knox family. In the beginning, it was the other way around, but she softened when Edda Mellas testified, feeling a mother’s pain. The brunette next to her appears tortured by her duty and cries sporadically; she does not want to believe that these two young people are killers. The man on her left with long, wavy gray hair looks thoughtful and kind. He is divorced and has lost a son; he knows that life is not predictable and that good people can do bad things. Beside him is Beatrice Cristiani, the second judge. She primly takes copious notes and often checks the legal tomes piled between her and Massei.
To Massei’s immediate left is the jury foreman, a criminal lawyer whose office was involved in an early phase of the Kercher murder investigation. Beside him sits my favorite juror—a pretty woman with short red hair who is surely a student of body language. She listens intently to each witness, watching their hands and faces like none of the other jurors. The juror next to her is the elderly man who tends to doze off in the afternoons. The final juror is the first alternate, an ash-blonde woman whose face I will never forget. Throughout the trial, she glares at Amanda and her family with contempt.
Another person who stares at Amanda is Lumumba, attending most hearings because of his civil defamation case. A Congolese refugee, he is a kind soul who managed, against all odds, to build a successful business in Perugia—until Knox accused him of murder. Then, many who had loved him quickly nodded their heads and said, “Well, yes, of course. He is black. Of course he killed her.” His club, closed while he was under investigation, soon failed because of a falloff in business, and Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, lit into Amanda with the self-righteous fury of a Baptist preacher when it was his turn at summation.
“Amanda is a talented and calculated liar who went deliberately out of her way to frame Patrick,