Amanda Marie Knox was re-convicted of defamation by an Italian court on Wednesday, putting an end to her hopes of eliminating a legal stain against her that has remained even after she was exonerated in the gruesome 2007 murder of her British roommate when the two were exchange students in Italy.
The ruling by a Florence appeals court panel marked the sixth time an Italian court ruled Knox had wrongfully accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part-time, of murder.
Knox has claimed that her statements to police were coerced during an intensive night of interrogation, and that she relied on her then-remedial Italian as a 20-year-old university student.
However, a panel of two judges and six jurors affirmed the three-year sentence, which she had previously spent for four years in Italian detention while the investigation and various flip-flop cases were ongoing. The court’s reasoning will be available in 60 days.
Knox’s appearance in Florence on Wednesday, in an attempt to clear her reputation “once and for all,” was her first trip to an Italian court since her release in 2011. She did not show any emotion as the verdict was read aloud. She was joined by her husband, Christopher Robinson.
However, her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said soon thereafter that “Amanda is very embittered.”
“We are all very surprised by the outcome of the decision,” Dalla Vedova said outside the courtroom. He also said that Knox had anticipated an acquittal to conclude almost 17 years of court processes.
Another defense lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, said that they planned to appeal to Italy’s highest court.
Knox’s case was put in motion after a European court verdict found that Italy violated her human rights during a lengthy night of interrogation days after Kercher’s murder, depriving her of both a lawyer and a qualified interpreter.
Knox told the Florence court, in a quiet and often cracking voice, that she falsely implicated Patrick Lumumba under strong police pressure.
Knox apologized for failing to resist police pressure in an Italian-language speech to an 8-member jury panel. She informed them, “I had no idea who the killer was. “I had no way of knowing.”
The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the beautiful hilltop town of Perugia fuelled worldwide headlines, with suspicion falling on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian lover of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito.
Flip-flop rulings during almost eight years of judicial processes split trial spectators on both sides of the Atlantic, as the case was fiercely debated on social media, which was still in its infancy.
All these years later, the level of media attention remained high, with cameras crowding around Knox, her husband, and her legal team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing. According to her lawyer Luparia Donati, a camera smacked her in the left temple. Knox’s husband checked a little lump on her temple as they sat in the front row of the court.
Despite Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were discovered at the site, suspicions about her involvement lingered, notably in Italy. This is primarily due to the accusations she leveled against Lumumba.
Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, told reporters that the charge tarnished his reputation throughout the globe and caused his Perugia firm to fail. He has subsequently reestablished himself in his wife’s country Poland.
“Patrick has always been dutiful to all court decisions, and all courts up to this day have affirmed that Amanda Knox was a slanderer,” Pacelli added.
Knox is now a 36-year-old mother of two young children who pushes for criminal justice reform and fights unjust convictions. A Perugia appeals court reversed the first guilty decision in Knox and Sollecito’s murder case in October 2011, releasing her after four years in prison.
She stayed in the United States through two more reversal judgments until Italy’s highest court fully exonerated the couple of the murder in March 2015, pronouncing unequivocally that they had not committed the crime.
In the autumn, Italy’s highest Cassation Court overturned a slander conviction that had survived five trials, ordering a fresh trial as part of a 2022 Italian judicial reform that allows cases with decisive verdicts to be reopened if human rights abuses are discovered.
This time, the court was directed to overlook two damning statements written by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. when she was detained for interrogation overnight into the early hours of November 6, 2007. In her testimonies, Knox said that she recalled hearing Kercher cry and blamed Lumumba for the murder.
Hours later, still in jail at 1 p.m., she requested a pen and paper and penned her own statement in English, doubting the one she had signed while still confused.
“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” she said in her post.