Florence, Italy — An Italian court on Wednesday re-convicted Amanda Knox of slander, a charge that had stood even after she had been exonerated of the brutal murder of her British roommate in 2007, when both were exchange students in Italy.
The court ruled that Knox wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of a bar where he worked part-time, of murder. But he will not go to prison since the three-year sentence is validated with the time he already spent behind bars.
Knox, who returned to Italy for the second time since being released in October 2011 to participate in the trial, showed no visible emotion during the reading of the verdict.
But one of her lawyers, Carlo della Vedova, said shortly afterward that “Amanda is very resentful.”
Before the hearing, Knox wrote on social media that he hoped to “clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”
The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the idyllic mountain town of Perugia made headlines around the world when suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her long-term Italian boyfriend. just a week, Raffaele Sollecito.
The contradictory verdicts throughout the almost eight years of the judicial process polarized those who followed it from both sides of the Atlantic, while the case was discussed on the then nascent social networks.
Knox’s retrial was made possible by a European court ruling that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of interrogations days after Kercher’s murder, during which she was neither assisted by a lawyer nor had a competent translator. .
During his speech at Wednesday’s hearing, Knox asked the eight judges and jurors to acquit him of the slander charge.
In a soft and sometimes broken voice, he stated that he accused Patrick Lumumba due to intense pressure from the police.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of the police,” Knox said in a nine-minute prepared statement. “I didn’t know who the killer was. I had no way of knowing.”
In an indication of the fervor that continues to surround the case, photographers swarmed around Knox, her husband, Christopher Robinson, and their legal team as they arrived at the courthouse about an hour before the hearing was scheduled to begin. A camera hit her on her left temple, according to her lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati. Knox’s husband examined the small lump on her head while they sat in the front row of the courtroom.
After all these years, and despite his exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian whose fingerprints and DNA were found at the crime scene, doubts about Knox’s role persist, especially in Italy. This is partly due to her accusation against Lumumba, which led to her being found guilty of defamation.
Knox, now 36 and the mother of two young children, is returning to Italy for the second time since she was freed in October 2011 after four years in prison, after an appeals court in Perugia overturned an initial guilty verdict. in the murder case against Knox and Sollecito.
He stayed in the United States for two more verdicts, before the Italian high court finally acquitted the couple of the murder in March 2015, stating flatly that they had not committed the crime.
In autumn, the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation annulled the conviction for slander that had stood for five trials and ordered a repeat trial thanks to a judicial reform carried out in the country in 2022 that allows cases to be reopened in which a verdict has been issued final if violations of human rights are found.
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