Rome - Italy's top court was Friday considering whether to definitively convict Amanda Knox for murder in what could be the final act of an eight-year legal page-turner dripping with blood, sex and intrigue.
The American and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted last year for a second time of taking part in the brutal 2007 killing of Meredith Kercher, a British student with whom the then 20-year-old Knox shared a house in the university town of Perugia.
Lawyers for the pair were due to present final arguments, before the Court of Cassation judges retire to consider whether to confirm once and for all that the Italian judicial system regards the convictions as safe.
If they do, Sollecito could be taken straight back to jail while the absent Knox is likely to become the subject of a wrangle over whether she should be extradited from the United States back to Italy to join him behind bars.
The pair have already spent four years in jail -- two on remand and two after their initial conviction for murder in 2009.
Alternatively, the judges could send the case back to the appeal stage, opening the door to one or both of the defendants being acquitted.
"It's an important day," Sollecito's lawyer Giulia Bongiorno told a scrum of reporters as she arrived for Friday's hearing.
"The defendants were sentenced on the basis of a case riddled with errors and contradictions. I believe that today we will finally have a significant response to that."
Bongiorno depicted the prosecution's case as a jigsaw of unconnected evidence.
"If you chopped a Bible up into tiny pieces you could stick them back together to make it look like pornography," the lawyer said.
AFP
