The following is a statement from local supporters of Amanda Knox. Anne Bremner, a defense attorney and former prosecutor is speaking on their behalf.

Overview
For almost a year, Italian prosecutors have been describing their case against Amanda Knox. We're finally at a point where we will start to see if the evidence really exists, and if it will hold up in court. I am confident it won't hold up.

The prosecution's theory is that these three people -- Amanda, her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede -- collaborated on a murder. This has never made sense. Why would Amanda and Raffaele want to harm Amanda's roommate? No one has been able to come up with a believable motive.

What is even more important is that no one has been able to show that Amanda and Raffaele had any pre-existing relationship with the third suspect, Rudy Guede.

-- Raffaele never heard of him.

-- Amanda says she knew vaguely who he was because he sometimes visited her downstairs neighbors, but that's all.

It's really hard to see how or why all three would get together and commit a murder.

The Albanian Witness
But there is one person who claims to have seen these three together. He is an Albanian immigrant who first contacted police in January, more than two months after the murder. And he was a witness at Friday's hearing, where he made a complete fool of himself.

This man, Hekuran Kokomani, says he can't remember if he encountered the suspects on the night of the murder or the night before. But he remembers clearly that it was raining. This is noteworthy because weather reports show that it did not rain at all on November 1, the night of the murder, and it only rained a little bit on October 31, a night for which the suspects can prove they were elsewhere.

So really, this witness is discredited even before we get into the details of his story, which are ridiculous.

-- He says he saw a dark shape in the middle of the roadway.

-- He approached it in his car and he tapped it with his bumper, at which point it sprang to life and was revealed to be Amanda and Raffaele.

-- They threatened him with knives.

-- In return, he threw olives at them.

-- And then Guede showed up out of nowhere, explaining that the knives were for a birthday party.

People like this Albanian man are not unusual in criminal investigations. For various reasons, such as a desire to be involved in something important, people come forward with bogus information. Normally the authorities see through them quickly, especially when their story is as nutty as the one Kokomani dreamed up.

But in this case the prosecution is desperate, so they presented this guy as a witness. The judge and the defense attorneys tore him to shreds.

To give you an example of how absurd it got, Kokomani said that when Amanda was yelling at him, he noticed a wide gap between her front teeth. So the judge asked Amanda to smile, and she did. There is no gap between her front teeth.

Nor did Raffaele have shoulder-length hair last November, as the Albanian says he did. Nor could Kokomani have had a beer with Amanda and her Italian uncle in July of last year, as he claimed in court, because Amanda was not in Italy at that time and she does not have an Italian uncle.

The guy is an absolute joke.

Incompetence at the crime scene
This whole investigation would be laughable if it weren't for the underlying facts -- a woman has been brutally murdered, and two innocent people and their families have had their lives devastated by a botched investigation.

I have reviewed the crime scene video, which shows how the police went about collecting evidence. The problems are are obvious.

They weren't careful with the way they handled evidence inside the room. For example, when they removed the blanket covering the girl's body, they shook it out, which would allow DNA and other evidence to travel all over the room.

But it gets worse than that. They actively destroyed evidence inside the victim's room.

The media have all seen pictures of one bloody footprint, found near the body. The authorities presented this footprint as a unique specimen, but it was actually one of several.

For some inexplicable reason, one of the officers at the crime scene systematically scrubbed away these footprints until no trace was left. By doing so, they made it nearly impossible for the authorities to establish their source. The prosecution tried to argue that the one footprint that was recorded with photographs belonged to Raffaele Sollecito. Sollecito's attorneys expended great effort proving this was not the case.

At length the matter was resolved when Guede admitted he owned shoes compatible with the footprint and had discarded them when he fled to Germany after the murder. But the question remains -- why would investigators sabotage important evidence?

The computer folly
Another incredible story surrounds the way investigators handled the computer hard drives they took into evidence. These drives were removed from computers belonging to Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito.

Somehow the police hooked all of them up wrong and burned out the circuit boards that control the disks.

That of course made the drives unreadable, so they passed them on to a professor at a technical institute. He tried to revive the hard drives by replacing the circuit boards. But if you look on the Internet, you'll see that this is a big no-no. These circuit boards are specific, not just by model but by factory and production run. Unless you happen to get lucky, replacing them won't work and sometimes makes matters worse.

And that is exactly what happened in this case. Only after these hard drives were thoroughly messed up did the authorities send them to a company that specializes in data recovery and has people who know what they are doing. This company was able to recover the contents of two of the hard drives, but the one from Amanda's computer was scrambled, and the company couldn't recover the data.

That is unfortunate for Amanda, because her defense team wants access to the evidence on her computer. The prosecution is trying to argue that Amanda did not get along with Meredith Kercher, but photographs and videos on Amanda's hard drive would show otherwise.

At this point, it looks as if those photos will never been seen. The only remaining option is to send the drive to Toshiba, the manufacturer. This would cost many thousands of dollars, but Amanda's family is willing to shoulder the cost. Unfortunately, the Italian court has denied their request to do this.

So as of now, the hard drive is in police custody, in a partly dismantled condition, and very likely holding evidence that could help clear Amanda Knox.

The weak case against Amanda
This should not matter, because the evidence against Amanda is so weak. In fact, this evidence has been contrived by putting a negative spin on information that has a completely innocent explanation.

For example, investigators claim to have found traces of blood on some footprints Amanda left in the hallway.

Except they're not sure it's blood. It's possible, because there were traces of blood on the floor of the bathroom where Amanda took a shower. But the footprints only became visible with something called Luminol, which also reacts with other substances, including household cleaners.

So either way, here's what happened:

-- Amanda came home after spending the night at Raffaele's place.

-- She took a shower.

-- She left these footprints after she got out of the shower.

And that fits 100 percent with what she told the police.

The police have also found Amanda's DNA at various places in the bathroom. They have tried to make that sound incriminating, but she lived there and her DNA would have been all over the bathroom. That kind of so-called evidence means nothing.

The "double-DNA" knife
The one, central clue that hangs over this entire case is a kitchen knife recovered from Raffaele's apartment. About two weeks after the murder, the police announced that Amanda's DNA was found on the handle of this knife, and the victim's DNA was found on the blade.

Everyone agrees that Amanda's DNA is on the handle. She prepared meals in Raffaele's kitchen, so that's no surprise.

But the DNA on the blade is not a match as far as anyone has been able to prove. Experts who have examined the lab reports have told Amanda's defense team that the tiny speck of tissue found on the knife blade was too damaged to give a meaningful test result. It doesn't match Meredith Kercher or anyone else.

A new judge is in charge of the pre-trial now under way. He wants to get to the bottom of this matter. At the first pre-trial hearing on September 16, he said the prosecution's forensic report on this knife was inadequate, and he ordered that a new DNA test be performed. So we're going to learn the truth. I think we will learn that the knife evidence is worthless, because if it was any good, the prosecutors would have made that clear in their initial report to the judge.

And if by some chance we learn that the result of the new test is substantially different from previous tests, that will give rise to serious questions as well.

The truth about what happened to Meredith Kercher
What really happened in Perugia last November first?

Once you put aside the wild theories the authorities have spun for the media, this case isn't mysterious at all. The evidence shows it was a sexual homicide like many others. The police have enough evidence against Rudy Guede to convict him in any courtroom in the world.

-- He left a handprint, in the victim's blood, next to the victim's body.

-- His DNA was found inside the victim.

-- He admits he was at the scene of the crime.

-- He admits to having some kind of intimate contact with Meredith but claims it was consensual and stopped short of intercourse.

-- And he says someone else entered the premises and killed Meredith while he was in the bathroom.

This last claim is the standard alibi killers give police when they can't deny being present at the scene of a murder. It's known as the "bushy-haired stranger" story, and it's so common police often refer to the acronym, BHS. One famous case in the U.S. is that of Diane Downs, who claims a BHS shot her children.

Judges and juries almost never believe the BHS story. But Rudy Guede has an advantage over most people in his situation, because the prosecutor is already trying to make the case that two other people were involved in killing Meredith Kercher. Not surprisingly, after Rudy sat in jail for a few months, he modified his story. Now he says the BHS was Raffaele Sollecito. And he also claims Amanda Knox, who he originally said was not at the crime scene, was present after all.

Guede wants to push the blame off on them. It remains to be seen whether he will do so, but the factual evidence is strongly against him.