Amanda Knox was found guilty again in Italy of defamation after she named an innocent man as her roommate’s killer in 2007.

 

Italy’s Florence (AP) — Amanda Knox’s hopes of clearing her name of a persistent legal stain following her exoneration in the 2007 horrific murder of her British flatmate when the two were exchange students in Italy were dashed on Wednesday when an Italian court reconvicted her of defamation.

The ruling by a Florence appeals court panel was the sixth instance in which an Italian court determined that Knox had mistakenly placed the responsibility for the murder on the Congolese proprietor of the pub where she had a part-time job.

Knox, a 20-year-old university student, has maintained that her statements to the police were coerced after a demanding night of questioning that included bullying because she was dependent on her then-remedial Italian.

Nonetheless, the three-year sentence—which she had already completed during her four years in Italian detention while the investigation and several trials were ongoing—was upheld by the panel of two judges and six jurors. Within sixty days, the court’s reasoning will be made public.

In an attempt to clear her name “once and for all,” Knox appeared in Florence on Wednesday. This was her first court appearance back in Italy since her release in 2011. She was accompanied by her spouse, Christopher Robinson, and remained expressionless during the reading of the verdict.

However, Carlo Dalla Vedova, her attorney, declared shortly after that “Amanda is very embittered.”

“The decision’s outcome has caught us all off guard,” Dalla Vedova remarked outside the courtroom. He continued by saying that Knox had anticipated that the roughly 17 years of legal proceedings would end with an acquittal.

Luca Luparia Donati, another defence attorney, stated that they planned to file an appeal with Italy’s top court.

A European court verdict, which claimed that Italy had violated Knox’s human rights by depriving her of both a lawyer and a qualified interpreter during nighttime questioning days after Kercher’s death, set the stage for Knox’s fresh trial.

Speaking softly and occasionally sobbing, Knox told the Florence court that she had falsely accused Patrick Lumumba while under tremendous police pressure.

As he addressed the panel from the jury bench, Knox said in Italian from a prepared statement, “I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police.” “I didn’t know who the murderer was,” she said to them. I was unable to find out.

The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the picturesque hilltop town of Perugia made headlines throughout the world as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old Seattle exchange student, and Raffaele Sollecito, her new Italian lover who had only been dating for a week.

Flip-flop decisions over the course of nearly eight years in court divided trial viewers on both sides of the Atlantic, making this one of the first trials to be followed closely by social media at the time.

Photographers gathered around Knox, her husband, and her legal team as they entered the courtroom around one hour prior to the hearing, demonstrating the continued high level of media attention even after all these years. According to Luparia Donati, her attorney, she was struck by a camera in the left temple. Knox and her husband were seated in the front row of the court while he looked at a little bump on her temple.

There were still questions regarding Knox’s involvement, especially in Italy, even after she was cleared and an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were discovered at the location was found guilty. That’s mostly because of what she said about Lumumba.

Carlo Pacelli, Lumumba’s attorney, told reporters that the charge damaged his reputation globally and caused his Perugia firm to fail. Since then, he has made a new life for himself in his wife’s country Poland.

“Patrick has consistently complied with court orders, and all courts have up until now confirmed that Amanda Knox was a liar,” Pacelli added.

Now 36 years old and a mother of two young children, Knox fights against wrongful convictions and supports criminal justice reform. After serving four years in prison, she was released in October 2011 following the overturning of the first guilty conviction in the murder case involving both Knox and Sollecito by an appeals court in Perugia.

She continued to live in the United States despite two more contradictory rulings until March 2015, when Italy’s top court unequivocally declared that the two were not the murderers.

A 2022 Italian judicial reform that permits cases that have reached a definitive conclusion to be reopened if human rights breaches are discovered led to the fall dismissal of the slander conviction that had withstood five trials and the ordering of a fresh trial by Italy’s highest Cassation Court.

This time, while Knox was being kept for questioning overnight into the early hours of November 6, 2007, the court was directed to ignore two damaging statements typed by police and signed by her at 1:45 and 5:45 in the morning. Knox said in the statements that she had heard Kercher cry and that Lumumba was responsible for the murder.

She was still confused and, hours later, at around 1 p.m., while she was still being held in jail, begged for a pen and paper so she could write her own English statement challenging the one she had signed.

“With regard to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to be clear that, given the circumstances—stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion—I am highly sceptical of the veracity of what I said,” the woman wrote.