Over 15 years have passed since Amanda Knox’s wrongful conviction in the murder of her roommate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, but her legal battles are still far from over. On Wednesday, Knox — who was exonerated of murder charges nine years ago — was re-convicted on slander charges in Florence, Italy, where a court maintains that she unjustly accused an innocent man of killing Kercher during a 2007 police interrogation.
Knox and Kercher were college students and housemates studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when Kercher was found dead in their shared apartment in November of 2007.Italian police determined that Kercher, who was discovered with a slit throat and multiple stab wounds, had also been sexually assaulted. The case — along with salacious suspicions that Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had been involved — drew international attention. The duo was arrested and named prime suspects in the murder, along with Perugia resident and alleged burglar Rudy Guede. During Knox and Sollecito’s 2009 murder trial, Italian prosecutors argued that the trio killed Kercher for refusing to join them in a drug-fueled sex game. Knox and Sollecito were convicted and sentenced to a respective 26 and 25 years in prison, while Guede was tried separately and sentenced to 30. Years of legal volleyball ensued: Knox and Sollecito, who both maintained their innocence after the verdict, were acquitted after appealing their convictions, only to be convicted again before they were ultimately exonerated by Italy’s highest court. (Guede was released from prison in 2021, after serving 13 years of a reduced 16-year-sentence.)
How do the slander charges fit into all of this? During her initial conviction, Knox was also found guilty of falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba, a bar owner she worked for part-time, of murdering Kercher during a lengthy night of police questioning. That conviction, which was upheld by numerous Italian courts, was based on typed statements from the Italian police that were signed by Knox, who retracted her accusations in a handwritten note after her interrogation and argued that she only made them under intense police coercion. Lumumba was nevertheless arrested and held as a murder suspect. He was released from custody two weeks later after a client provided him with an alibi and sued Knox for slander. She was sentenced to three years for slander, which she served during her four-year stint in an Italian prison.
But the slander conviction has remained contentious: In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Italy to pay Knox nearly $20,000 in damages for failing to provide her with an independent interpreter and legal assistance the night of the 2007 interrogation. (Denouncing the the conviction as unjust, Knox wrote on her blog at the time: “I should never have been charged, much less convicted, of slander.”)
Italy threw out the slander conviction in November 2023, ruling the 2007 police statements inadmissible and ordering a new trial. Prosecutors in that trial argued that Knox knowingly accused Lumumba in order to derail the investigation and divert attention from herself. They also claimed that she failed to pay damages to Lumumba, who reportedly left Italy because of the false accusation and now lives with family in Poland. Appearing in a Florence court on Wednesday, Knox described feeling “under shock and exhausted” in the days after Kercher’s murder and reiterated that police bullied her into accusing Lumumba. Calling the night of the interrogation “the worst night” of her life, Knox told the courtroom she didn’t understand why the police pressured her to make a false admission or sign a document she described as “a mix of incoherent memories,” per the New York Times.
The court’s rationale behind the reconviction will be released in 60 days, at which point Knox’s legal team says it plans to appeal. “Amanda is very embittered,” one of her lawyers said in a statement following the proceedings. “We are all very surprised at the outcome of the decision.”
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Bindu Bansinath , 2024-06-05 21:33:10
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