Amanda Knox reconvicted of slander in Italy for accusing innocent man in roommate’s 2007 murder

FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — An Italian court docket reconvicted Amanda Knox of slander Wednesday, quashing her hope of eradicating a authorized stain in opposition to her that has continued after her exoneration within the brutal 2007 homicide of her British roommate whereas the 2 had been alternate college students in Italy.

The choice by a Florence appeals court docket panel marked the sixth time that an Italian court docket discovered Knox had wrongly blamed the killing on an harmless man, the Congolese proprietor of the bar the place she labored half time.

Knox has argued that her statements to police had been compelled throughout an intense evening of questioning that included bullying as she relied on her then-remedial Italian when she was a 20-year-old college pupil.

The panel of two judges and 6 jurors, nonetheless, confirmed the three-year sentence, which she already served throughout 4 years in Italian custody whereas the investigation and a number of trials ensued. The court docket’s reasoning might be launched in 60 days.

Knox’s look Wednesday in Florence, in a bid to clear her identify “as soon as and for all,” was the primary time she had returned to an Italian court docket since she was freed in 2011. Accompanied by her husband, Christopher Robinson, she confirmed no seen emotion as the decision was learn aloud.

However her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, stated shortly afterward that “Amanda could be very embittered.”

“We’re all very shocked on the consequence of the choice,’’ Dalla Vedova stated exterior the courtroom. He added that Knox had anticipated an acquittal would put a cap on practically 17 years of judicial proceedings.

One other protection lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, stated they anticipated to attraction to Italy’s highest court docket.

Knox’s new trial was set in movement after a European court docket ruling that stated Italy violated her human rights throughout in a single day questioning days after Kercher’s homicide, disadvantaged of each a lawyer and a reliable translator.

Addressing the Florence court docket in a delicate and generally breaking voice, Knox stated that she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba below intense police strain.

“I’m very sorry that I used to be not robust sufficient to withstand the strain of police,″ Knox learn in Italian from a ready assertion, addressing the panel from the jury bench. She advised them: “I didn’t know who the assassin was. I had no strategy to know.”

The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher within the idyllic hilltop city of Perugia fueled world headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old alternate pupil from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of only a week, Raffaele Sollecito.

Flip-flop verdicts over practically eight years of authorized proceedings polarized trial watchers on either side of the Atlantic because the case grew to become one of many first trials by social media, then in its infancy.

All these years later, the depth of media curiosity remained, with photographers massing round Knox, her husband and her authorized workforce as they entered the courthouse about an hour earlier than the listening to. A digicam knocked her on the left temple, her lawyer Luparia Donati stated. Knox’s husband examined a small bump on her temple as they sat within the entrance row of the court docket.

Regardless of Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA had been discovered on the scene, doubts about her position continued, significantly in Italy. That’s largely as a result of accusation she made in opposition to Lumumba.

Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, advised reporters that the accusation branded him internationally, and his enterprise in Perugia floundered. He has since re-established himself in his spouse’s native Poland.

“Patrick has at all times been dutiful to all the court docket selections, and all of the courts up till at present have affirmed that Amanda Knox was a slanderer,’’ Pacelli stated.

Knox is now a 36-year-old mom of two babies who advocates for prison justice reform and campaigns in opposition to wrongful convictions. She was freed in October 2011, after 4 years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court docket that overturned the preliminary responsible verdict within the homicide case in opposition to each Knox and Sollecito.

She remained in the USA via two extra flip-flop verdicts earlier than Italy’s highest court docket definitively exonerated the pair of the homicide in March 2015, stating flatly that that they had not dedicated the crime.

Within the fall, Italy’s highest Cassation Courtroom threw out the slander conviction that had withstood 5 trials, ordering a brand new trial, because of a 2022 Italian judicial reform permitting instances which have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are discovered.

This time, the court docket was ordered to ignore two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. as she was held for questioning in a single day into the small hours of Nov. 6, 2007. Within the statements, Knox stated she remembered listening to Kercher scream, and pointed to Lumumba for the killing.

Hours later, nonetheless in custody at about 1 p.m., she requested for pen and paper and wrote her personal assertion in English, questioning the model that she had signed, nonetheless in a state of confusion.

“With regard to this ‘confession’ that I made final evening, I wish to clarify that I’m very uncertain of the verity of my statements as a result of they had been made below the strain of stress, shock and excessive exhaustion,” she wrote.

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