Italy: Amanda Knox reconvicted of slander in case linked to roommate’s 2007 murder. Who is she?

Amanda Knox was reconvicted by an Italian court on Wednesday (June 5) for slander charges of accusing an innocent man of her roommate’s murder in 2007.

Knox wept after the verdict was delivered, as she appeared in an Italian courtroom for the first time in over a decade. She was sentenced to three years imprisonment, but will not serve any more jail time as it counts as time already served.

Speaking after the verdict outside the courthouse in Florence, Knox’s lawyer said that he was “very surprised at the outcome of the decision and Amanda is very upset.”

Add WION as a Preferred Source

Who is Amanda Knox?

In 2007, Knox was a 20-year-old student who had then recently arrived in the university town of Perugia, Italy when her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, was found dead half-naked with 40 stab wounds in her bedroom in the apartment they shared with two Italian roommates on November 2 that year.

The killing fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, an exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.

Knox and Sollecito were convicted in their first trial and jailed for four years but after rounds of flip-flop verdicts, they were ultimately cleared of Kercher’s murder by the Italian Supreme Court in 2015.

While Knox was exonerated and an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene was convicted, the slander conviction remained on her record.

What is the Amanda Knox slander conviction?

Knox was earlier convicted in 2009 of slander for falsely accusing the Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who employed her part-time, of murdering Kercher. Due to her slander, Lumumba had to spend a few weeks in jail even after he established an alibi that proved he could not have killed Kercher.

An appellate court in Florence upheld that conviction on Wednesday.

The slander conviction against Knox was based on two statements, accusing Lumumba of murder, typed by police that she signed during a long night of questioning just days after the killing, but later wrote a handwritten note to cast doubt on her accusation.

However, the European Court of Human Rights in January 2019 ruled that Knox’s rights had been violated as she had been questioned without a lawyer or qualified translator.

In light of this, Italy’s highest court ordered a retrial of the slander conviction and it instructed Florence’s appeals court to consider only a handwritten statement that Knox wrote in English hours after she was questioned.

In a soft and sometimes breaking voice, Knox had told the Italian court on Wednesday that she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba under intense police pressure.

“When I couldn’t remember the details, one of the officers gave me a little smack on the head and shouted, ‘remember, remember,’” Knox said. “And then I put together a jumble of memories and the police made me sign a statement. I was forced to submit. It had been a violation of my rights.”

“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,’' Knox told the panel. “It was a statement made by a young woman in an existential crisis,” she said.

(With inputs from agencies)