EVEN before Amanda Knox stands in the dock this week accused of sexually abusing and murdering her British housemate Meredith Kercher, the American student has clashed from her prison cell with the victim’s family over how she should be tried.

For 14 months the blue-eyed Knox, 21, once a gifted scholar in her home city of Seattle, has languished in jail outside the medieval hilltop town of Perugia, Umbria, where in a small whitewashed house in November 2007 Kercher’s body was found half-naked with stab wounds to the throat.

This Friday Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, an Italian computer studies graduate, will arrive at court for the start of a trial which is expected to see 200 witnesses, investigators and experts testify over nine months. The two are accused of murdering Kercher in her bedroom after she refused to take part in what prosecutors call “a perverse game of group sex”.

On the eve of the trial, Knox’s lawyers are trying to defeat an attempt by Kercher’s family to ensure that it is held behind closed doors to preserve the dignity of the murdered Leeds exchange student, one of thousands who come from abroad to study at Perugia’s university for foreigners.

Francesco Maresca, the lawyer for Kercher’s family, said justice would also be best served by a closed trial. “During the committal hearings, media pressure influenced the testimony of witnesses who had to be marched past television cameras or who were interviewed before they testified,” he said.

Kercher’s family reacted with indignation last year when an Italian channel broadcast footage of the crime scene and of her body.

Knox’s supporters, however, argue that an open trial would counter the “vilification” of her character. Nicknamed Foxy Knoxy, she has been portrayed as a man-eating, cold-blooded killer who had written a gruesome short story about rape and who had cuddled and kissed Sollecito rather than shed tears after the murder.

Curt Knox, her father, denounced the investigators for leaking “biased” evidence. “They’ve just horribly trashed her entire character and it’s not who she is,” he said. Knox’s parents have said she wrote the short story as a university assignment. After the murder, they say, she was in shock and sought comfort from Sollecito.

Only full disclosure of the evidence would help to prove her innocence, according to Curt Knox, 48, a Seattle department store manager who is divorced from her mother.

“When [people] look at the evidence – not what they are being told but the true evidence – she’s free and we are done with this,” he told Seattle’s King-TV station last week.

Knox can count on the backing of Sollecito who, like her, is pleading not guilty.

“An open trial means justice for everyone, because if the doors are closed one of the lawyers will come out at the end of the day and just give his own version of what happened. And then public opinion is misinformed,” said Luca Maori, Sollecito’s lawyer.

A court official said Giancarlo Massei, the trial’s presiding judge, would decide on Friday whether it will be open or closed. Legal sources believe he will rule in Knox’s favour but may ban the media when sensitive photographs or film of the crime scene are shown.

Knox and Sollecito are expected to adopt a united front during courtroom battles which will focus on their accounts of what happened on the night of the murder and on the forensic evidence. Their lawyers will argue that only one person killed Kercher: Rudy Guede, 21, the Ivory Coast drifter who has been sentenced to 30 years in jail after a fast-track trial.

According to prosecutors, Knox admitted five days after the murder that she was in the house at the time, holding her hands over her ears in the kitchen as Kercher screamed. “She was just flat scared to be alone [after the murder] so she went down to the police station with [Sollecito] and they put them in two rooms and started going at them both with physical and mental abuse for 14 hours,” Curt Knox said. “No food, no water, no official interpreter.”

He said the police had told his daughter: “You’re never going to see your family again. You’re going to jail for 30 years. You need to come up with something for us. You are a liar. Envision something, just throw something out there.” Italy’s Supreme Court has dismissed Knox’s statement that she was at the house because no lawyer was present when she made it.

The prosecution and the defence will also clash over the alleged presence of DNA from both Knox and Kercher on the handle of an 8in kitchen knife belonging to Sollecito. Knox’s lawyers argue that she used the knife while cooking and that the DNA said to be Kercher’s is such a poor match that it could belong to half the people in Italy. In any case, they say, this particular knife could not have caused Kercher’s wounds as the prosecution claims.

As she awaits trial, Knox spends most of her days studying languages, including Italian and Chinese. At Christmas she attended mass in prison and took part in a singing and dancing celebration organised by nuns.

“Knox has tried to make the most of the various facilities on offer at the jail. She attends courses on playing the guitar, does gymnastics and has also taken part in a theatrical workshop,” a prison official said.

During visits by Luciano Ghirga, her lawyer, Knox questioned him at length about how the trial would proceed.

“Amanda has understood the rules which will govern the trial. She insists she is innocent and she is awaiting the trial with anxiety,” Ghirga said.

Her mother Edda Mellas, 46, a teacher, said: “I still wake up and sometimes go: has this been a nightmare? Am I waking up now from this nightmare? But it’s been a year and the nightmare continues. We have to keep hoping.”

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