Word: sollecito
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After a yearlong trial, American student Amanda Knox was found guilty for killing her British roommate while studying abroad in Italy in 2007. Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison, on counts of murder and sexual assault, while avoiding Italy's stiffest life sentence. Her ex-boyfriend Rafaelle Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years. Knox, 22, was accused of killing British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in November...
...third person involved, Rudy Guede, left a mountain of physical evidence including fingerprints, footprints and DNA on Kercher's body, but the material evidence against Knox and boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito consists of just two elements: a microscopic speck of Sollecito's DNA on a bra clasp that was apparently sliced off Kercher's back during the attack and another speck of biological substance compatible with Kercher on a kitchen knife picked by police at random from Sollecito's drawers after his arrest, with Knox's DNA on the handle. Prosecutors say the two college students spent a sleepless night...
...meaningless under prevailing standards in U.S. courts. Kercher's bra clasp, discovered at the scene of the murder six weeks later and revealed to the press the morning after a defense expert demolished other material evidence on a national television show, "cannot reliably be interpreted to show that Sollecito's DNA was on the bra clasp at the time of the murder" and therefore "does not constitute credible evidence," Hampikian wrote...
...woman in charge of the heavily criticized scientific evidence against Knox and Sollecito is Patrizia Stefanoni, a young forensic scientist who has spent many hours at the prosecution desk, twirling strands of long, dark hair in her fingers and scowling at the defense team's scientific experts. Stefanoni is highly regarded within the Italian legal system, having passed a series of stringent state tests to join the national Polizia Scientifica in Rome. One of her chief antagonists is defense expert Sara Gino, a whiz-kid forensic expert from Turin who charges that Stefanoni cherry-picked DNA results to profile...
...highest-profile defense lawyer is highly paid Roman superstar Giulia Bongiorno, retained by Sollecito, the only defendant of the three who could possibly afford her fee. A member of the Italian Senate and a Berlusconi political ally, she made her name defending former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in a Mob-influence trial in the 1990s. With cropped hair, tennis shoes and expensive man suits under her judicial robe, Bongiorno wages attacks on the prosecution case that are sharply focused and often delivered with a withering blizzard of Neapolitan hand gestures and disdain...