Amanda Knox reconvicted in Italian slander case

Amanda Knox’s 17-year Italian legal odyssey over the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher shows no sign of ending.

Amanda Knox arrives with her husband Christopher Robinson at court in Florence. Picture: AFP.

Amanda Knox’s 17-year Italian legal odyssey over the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher shows no sign of ending, with a Florence court upholding her slander conviction for wrongly accusing a barman of the murder.

The American was convicted and jailed for four years for the stabbing of her flatmate in Perugia in central Italy in 2007, only to be acquitted in 2015 after five trials.

She was back in Italy to fight an outstanding slander conviction for blaming Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese man, for the killing. However, a panel of two judges and six jurors upheld her three-year sentence, which is already covered by the four years she spent in jail, and ordered her to pay compensation and costs to Mr Lumumba.

“Amanda is really disappointed – this is a profound injustice and we will certainly appeal,” her lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, said.

A tearful Ms Knox, 36, was hugged by her husband after the verdict was read out.

Ms Knox had made an impassioned speech appealing for judges to acquit her. She said she had been “tricked” and “slapped” by Italian police after the murder and that they had forced her to accuse Mr Lumumba of the killing during a lengthy night-time interrogation.

“I was forced to submit, I was too confused and exhausted to resist,” she said. “I’m very sorry I was not strong enough to have resisted the police pressure. I was scared, tricked and mistreated. I gave the testimony in a moment of existential crisis.”

Ms Knox, then a 20-year-old student, and her Italian boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, were initially convicted of fatally stabbing Kercher, 21, a student from London, who was found at the cottage she shared with Ms Knox lying in a pool of blood. The case made headlines around the world amid accusations by prosecutors that she had died during a sex game gone wrong.

Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito were acquitted for lack of evidence in 2015, while Rudy Guede, a drifter, was convicted of the crime based on DNA traces. Yet Ms Knox’s slander conviction stuck, adding to social media accusations against her that she could not be trusted.

The slander case was reopened after the European Court of Human Rights criticised Italy for denying Ms Knox a lawyer and official interpreter during her interrogation.

“I was under shock, exhausted, with no home and thousands of kilometres from my family,” Knox told the court on Wednesday.

When police found a message on her phone to Mr Lumumba, her employer at a local pub, telling him on the night of the murder, “See you later”, they believed the pair killed Kercher together.

“The police told me that I must have participated in something so horrible my mind had blocked it. And they threatened me with 30 years in prison if I did not recall every detail,” said Ms Knox, who recanted her confession hours after making it.

Mr Lumumba, who was jailed for two weeks after Ms Knox’s interrogation, before a pub customer was able to provide him with an alibi, said the verdict was “just and deserved”.

THE TIMES