In Defense of Murder

As a high-profile criminal attorney in New York, Joseph Tacopina commands $750 an hour to represent clients in high-profile cases. He is the defense lawyer for Dutch teen Joran van der Sloot in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, and he has been part of the defense teams of Michael Jackson, New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik and Diana Bianchi, the young woman at the center of Christie Brinkley's divorce suit. Now Tacopina is acting as an unpaid consultant for Amanda Knox, the Seattle student arrested in Italy after the notorious "extreme sex" murder of Knox's British roommate, Meredith Kercher.

Kercher was found last Nov. 1 with her throat slashed in the bedroom of the Perugia villa she shared with Knox. Also held are Knox's Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede, an immigrant from Ivory Coast said by Italian police to have a record for selling drugs. The suspects can be held up to a year before charges are filed. Tacopina, who practices criminal law in the United States and Italy, sat with Barbie Nadeau in his offices at the Villa Brasini in Rome to discuss the case. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: The Italian press has called you the Perry Mason of the Perugia case. What is your exact role here?
Joseph Tacopina: I am consulting [Knox's family] in an informal way. Her parents have phoned me, and we got to know each other when I spent some time in Perugia. I am not their lawyer, but I formed an opinion based on the bulk of evidence I have seen from both prosecutors and the defense.

How is her state of mind?
She's doing well for someone in her circumstances. She's in jail in a foreign country for a crime she claims she didn't commit. And she's not, I'm sure, having fun. But I think she's trying to adjust and take it day by day and try to get through it. Her parents are there day by day; they rotate.

The press has been given unprecedented access to the investigators and prosecutors in this case. Do you think that has hurt her in any way?
The presumption of innocence does not have the same meaning in Italy as it does in the United States. For instance, there is no scenario in the world where you could be held for up to a year in the United States and not be charged with a crime.

Initially Knox named her boss at a Perugia pub, Congolese Patrick Lumumba, as a suspect. He was arrested and held in jail for six weeks and released for lack of evidence. Why did she name him?
I don't think she named Lumumba in the sense that she said, "I know he was there" or "I know he was guilty." There is a real phenomenon called false confessions. And I think she fell prey to that. But it wasn't even a confession. The investigators, in Italian, aggressively began to tell her she's never getting out of here unless she tells the truth and that they were sure that Lumumba was involved, and if she didn't come clean she was going to be in a lot of trouble. Here's a girl being yelled at and threatened and she's being told that the police know that Lumumba is involved without question. So she breaks eventually. She doesn't say, "I saw him murder her." What she says is very different. She says, "I had a vision" and she starts covering her ears. She says, "I have a vision that he was there and I was with him and he went into the room and then I heard some horrible screaming … and Meredith was struggling and then I put my hands against my ears." But she's relaying a vision. She's literally making up a story she thinks the police want to hear. She didn't make up a false story. She made up a false premonition. There's a big difference.