Amanda Knox, an American who spent four years in an Italian jail before she was acquitted in the 2007 murder of her roommate, has been re-convicted of slander for casting suspicion on a bartender some 16 years ago.
An Italian court on Wednesday agreed to re-convict Knox, concluding she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba in the slaying of Meredith Kercher. Their decision came after Knox testified that she only pointed the finger at Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she’d worked part time, under intense police pressure.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,’’ Knox told the panel in a 9-minute prepared statement. “I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know.”
Ahead of the hearing, she wrote on social media that she hoped to “clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”
Knox, a Seattle native, was studying abroad in the Italian city of Perugia when she and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were accused of killing Kercher.
On Nov. 1, 2007, Kercher was found naked under a blanket with her throat slit on the floor of the bedroom she shared with Knox in the Hilltop University dorms. Italian authorities quickly honed in on Knox as a suspect in the case, which garnered international interest and spawned sensational news headlines worldwide. Throughout the legal proceedings, resulting in two convictions and two appeals before she was finally acquitted of murder in 2015, the media dubbed the young student “Foxy Knoxy,” further fueling both her fame and notoriety.
The court did however, uphold her 2011 conviction for slandering Lumumba. She was sentenced to three years already served for falsely implicating the Congolese bar owner, but she later appealed 2019. Her legal team specifically cited a ruling from the same year by the European Court of Human Rights, which concluded Knox’s rights to a lawyer and an interpreter were violated during her initial interrogations with Italian authorities.
In October, an Italian court agreed to grant Knox a new trial. This time, they were ordered to disregard two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox in the early hours of Nov. 6, 2007. In them, she claimed to have heard Kercher scream and she also blamed Lumumba for the killing.
He was behind bars for two weeks before someone backed up his alibi.
Rudy Guede, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast, was eventually convicted and sentenced in 2008 to 16 years behind bars for Kercher’s killing. In December 2020, an Italian court ruled that Guede could complete his term with community service. He was released from prison in November 2021.
With News Wire Services
