Lawyers defending American student Amanda Knox over the gory sex murder of her British housemate Meredith Kercher in central Italy took the floor Tuesday with a verdict just days away.
"We have waited patiently for this moment, especially Miss Knox," said Carlo Dalla Vedova.
The 22-year-old Knox, wearing a black turtle neck with her hair pulled back in a single French braid, looked upbeat as she entered the courtroom.
Her co-defendant and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 25, in a white turtleneck and grey trousers, chatted with a lawyer before proceedings began.
Dalla Vedova complained that the sensational media coverage of the trial, which sparked lurid headlines especially in Britain, "took the focus off the tragedy suffered by Meredith's family."
"The protagonists in this trial have all suffered great pain," he said.
Sollecito and Knox have been in custody since a few days after the murder of the 21-year-old exchange student from Coulsdon, south of London, on November 1, 2007.
Kercher was found the next day semi-naked in a pool of blood with her throat cut in the house she shared with Knox in the medieval city of Perugia, a hilltop university town in Umbria, in central Italy.
Prosecutors say Kercher refused to join in a drug-fuelled sex game in which Knox was the driving force, conducting a "crescendo of violence" that led to Kercher's brutal death from multiple stab wounds to the neck.
Sollecito's lawyer Giulia Bongiorno argued Monday that all evidence pointed to a sole killer, Rudy Guede, a day labourer from Ivory Coast convicted separately of the grisly crime.
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