Anamika Dey, Editor
Florence, Italy— An Italian court reconvicted Amanda Knox of defamation for accusing an innocent man of her roommate’s 2007 murder on Wednesday.
Knox cried following the verdict in an Italian courtroom for the first time in over a decade. Three years in prison will count as time served; thus, she will not serve anymore.
Knox’s lawyer told NBC News outside Florence’s courthouse that he was “very surprised at the outcome of the decision, and Amanda is very upset.”
Knox, 36, was arrested and acquitted of killing her flatmate, Meredith Kercher, making headlines worldwide.
Knox’s murder conviction was overturned, but her slander conviction remained. She hoped a not-guilty decision would clear her name, but the court found that she had wrongfully accused Congolese pub owner Patrick Lumumba of murder.
Knox signed two statements after being questioned by police without a lawyer or translator, which shaped the case.
Knox, who had just arrived in Perugia, was questioned all night about the murder despite her limited Italian language abilities. In police testimonies, Knox accused Lumumba of killing Kercher.
Knox entered the courthouse early on Wednesday for the retrial with her husband, Christopher Robinson, and legal team in a pink top and blue skirt.
Knox testified in fluent Italian before eight Italian judges and jurors with her arms on the bench in a quiet, occasionally breaking voice.
She called police interrogation her “worst nightmare.” She said she was tested in a language she “barely knew.”
Knox claimed, “When I couldn’t remember the details, one of the officers gave me a little smack on the head and shouted, ‘remember, remember,’” “The police made me sign a statement after I jumbled my memories. I had to comply. It violated my rights.”
She said, “I was a scared girl who believed the police to be lying, which at my age made me doubt my memories.”
Knox received a 26-year sentence for Kercher’s murder in their Perugia flat at age 20.
Kercher, 21, was found half-naked in a pool of blood with over 40 stab wounds On Nov. 1, 2007, the killing grabbed headlines worldwide. Her throat was cut.
Knox, two Italian roommates, and Leeds University student Kercher were living in a rented flat in Perugia for a year. Friends called her “Mez.” She was raised on London’s outskirts as the youngest of four.
Knox and her Italian lover, Raffaele Sollecito, 25, whom she had been dating for a week, were accused with Kercher’s murder.
At the trial, which was closely watched in the US, Italy, and the UK, prosecutors claimed rough intercourse turned violent.
Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years in jail in December 2009 after their conviction.
After four years in prison, Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation exonerated them in March 2015 after a series of flip-flop convictions.
Seven years after the October 2008 conviction of Ivory Coast citizen Rudy Hermann Guede, whose DNA was recovered at the crime scene, the two were cleared. After a fast-track trial that reduced Italian jail sentences, Guede served 13 years of a 16-year sentence before his release in November 2021.
Knox was convicted of slander against Lumumba, who spent a few weeks in jail after coming up with an alibi that proved he did not kill Kercher.
In January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, decided that Knox’s questioning conditions breached her human rights and ordered Italy to pay her $20,000.
Knox was vulnerable because she was a foreign young woman, 20, had not been in Italy for long, and did not speak Italian, the court noted.
After a constitutional reform, Italy’s top court ordered a retrial of the defamation conviction and directed Florence’s appeals court to consider only Knox’s scribbled testimony in English hours after she was questioned.
“On the one hand, I am glad I have this chance to clear my name, and hopefully that will take away the stigma that I have been living with,” Knox, who promotes forced confession awareness, said on her podcast, Labyrinths, in December.
On the other hand, she said, “Given how traumatized I am still from it, I don’t know if it ever will.”
Source : CNBC News
