By NICOLE WINFIELD and COLLEEN BARRY Associated Press
ROME (AP) — Italy’s highest court on Thursday confirmed a slander conviction against U.S. defendant Amanda Knox for accusing an innocent man of murdering her British flatmate 17 years ago in a sensational case that polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Knox had appealed the conviction based on a European Court of Human Rights ruling that said her rights had been violated by police failure to provide a lawyer and adequate translator during a long night of questioning just days after Meredith Kercher’s murder in the university town of Perugia.
Judge Monica Boni read the verdict aloud in a courtroom that was empty except for a few reporters and guards. The lawyers for both Knox and the man she wrongly accused, Patrick Lumumba, had gone home during deliberations.
The ruling seemingly ends a 17-year legal saga that saw Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in 21-year-old Meredith Kercher’s brutal murder, before being exonerated by the highest Cassation Court in 2015.
The slander conviction against Knox had survived multiple appeals, and Knox was reconvicted on the charge in June after the European court ruling cleared the way for a new trial.
Reached by telephone, Lumumba said he was satisfied with the verdict. “Amanda was wrong. This verdict has to accompany her for the rest of her life,” he said.
Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, expressed surprise at the court’s decision. “We are incredulous,” Dalla Vedova told reporters in the courthouse by phone. “This is totally unexpected in our eyes, and totally unjust for Amanda.”
Knox called it a “surreal” day in a post on X.
“I’ve just been found guilty yet again of a crime I didn’t commit,” her post said. “And I was just awarded the Innocence Network Impact Award, ‘created to honor an exonerated person who raises awareness of wrongful convictions, policy issues, or assists others post-release.'”
Speaking recently on her “Labyrinths” podcast, Knox said: “I hate the fact that I have to live with consequences for a crime I did not commit.” She said consequences included difficulties in obtaining visas to some countries because of a criminal conviction.
Her defense team says she accused Lumumba, a Congolese man who employed her at a bar in the central Italian university town of Perugia, during a long night of questioning and under pressure from police, who they said fed her false information. The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and provided a translator who acted more as a mediator.
Knox, now 37, does not risk any more time in jail. She has already served nearly four years during the investigation, initial murder trial and first appeal. But Knox had continued the legal battle with the aim of clearing her name of all criminal wrongdoing.
Knox returned to the United States in 2011, after being freed by an appeals court in Perugia, and has established herself as a global campaigner for the wrongly convicted. She has a podcast with her husband and has a new memoir coming out titled, “Free: My Search for Meaning.”
Knox was a 20-year-old student in Perugia when Kercher was found stabbed to death on Nov. 2, 2007, in her bedroom in the apartment they shared with two Italian women.
The case made global headlines as suspicion quickly fell on Knox and her boyfriend of just days, Raffaele Sollecito. But another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was eventually convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was freed in 2021, after serving most of his 16-year sentence.
The European court ordered Italy to pay Knox damages for the police failures, noting she was particularly vulnerable as a foreign student not fluent in Italian.
Italy’s high court ordered the new slander trial based on that ruling. It threw out two signed statements drafted by police falsely accusing Lumumba in the murder, and directed the appellate court that the only evidence it could consider was a hand-written letter she later wrote in English attempting to walk back the accusation.
However, the appellate court in its reasoning said that the four-page memo supported a slander finding.
On the basis of Knox’s statements, Lumumba was brought in for questioning, despite having an ironclad alibi. His business suffered, and he eventually moved to Poland with his Polish wife.
Arriving at court, he underlined that Knox “has never apologized to me.”
___
Barry reported from Milan.