Amanda Knox Trial Resumes With New Evidence

ROME, Italy Sept. 11, 2009— -- When Amanda Knox's Italian murder trial resumes next week, defense lawyers will be armed with the full details of the DNA evidence they claimed prosecutors had withheld and are hinting that they have important new analysis to present.

Luca Maori, a lawyer for Knox's ex-boyfriend and co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, told the Italian daily La Nazione this week that they "will be bringing very big news."

When Knox returns to the Perugia courtroom Monday, she will have already sat through 100 witnesses and seven months of hearings, not counting the two-month summer break that the Italian court took.

The trial is expected to pick up where it left off – with a forensic expert for Sollecito. The testimony of Adriano Tagliabracci, an authoritative forensic geneticist, was suspended on July 18 when defense lawyers objected that not all biological evidence analyzed by the forensic police had been made available to defense lawyers.

Knox, now 22, has been in prison in Italy awaiting judgment since she was arrested on Nov. 6, 2007. The Seattle, Wash., student is accused, along with Sollecito, 25, her former Italian boyfriend, of brutally strangling, stabbing and sexually assaulting Knox's roommate Meredith Kercher, 21.

Kercher, who was from Great Britain, was found dead in her room in the house she shared with Knox and two Italian women on Nov. 2, 2007.

A third man, Rudy Guede, 21, a young immigrant from the Ivory Coast who grew up in Perugia, was found guilty in October 2008 in a separate trial.

Prosecutors believe the trio killed Kercher when she resisted participating in a drug-enhanced sexual encounter. All three defendants maintain their innocence. Guede has admitted to being in the house when Kercher was killed, but says he did not kill her.

As the trial prepares to resume, and the sought-after DNA evidence was produced and defense lawyers for both Knox and Sollecito have been hinting that important new evidence in favor of the defendants will be revealed.

Tagliabracci is expected to continue to discuss the traces of DNA belonging toSollecito that forensic police say they found on the victim's bra clasp. In July he argued that the evidence could be contaminated because it was "not properly bagged" and had been missing for 47 days. In fact, Kercher's bloody bra, which was found lying near her body, was taken into evidence immediately, but investigators overlooked a small fragment of the bra – the part with the clasp – and only took it into evidence weeks later.