FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — An Italian court re-convicted Amanda Knox on libel charges Wednesday, dashing her hopes of erasing the legal stain against her since her acquittal in 2007 in the brutal murder of her British roommate while she was an exchange student in Italy.
The Florence appeals court’s ruling marks the sixth time an Italian court has wrongly found an innocent Congolese man, the owner of the bar where Knox worked part-time, responsible for the murder.
Knox claims that the statements she made to police were coerced during a night of gruelling interrogation, including by bullying, as the then 20-year-old university student relied on the Italian she was learning in extracurricular classes.
However, a two-judge, six-judge inquest panel upheld her four years in Italian custody and the three-year sentence she has already served, pending further investigations and multiple trials. The court’s reasons for the decision will be announced within 60 days.
Knox appeared in Florence on Wednesday to clear her name “once and for all”, her first appearance in an Italian courtroom since her release in 2011. Accompanied by her husband, Christopher Robinson, she showed no emotion as the verdict was read.
But her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said shortly afterwards that “Amanda is extremely upset.”
“We are all very surprised by the outcome,” Dalla Vedova said outside court, adding that Knox had expected an acquittal would bring an end to a legal process that had lasted nearly 17 years.
Another lawyer, Luca Rupaglia Donati, said he planned to appeal to Italy’s highest court.
Knox’s new trial began after a European Court ruling found that Italy had violated her human rights in the days after Kercher’s murder by depriving her of a lawyer and a competent interpreter and conducting overnight interrogations.
Speaking in a soft, sometimes trembling voice, Knox said in court in Florence that she had falsely accused Patrick Lumumba under intense police pressure.
“I deeply regret that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure from the police,” Knox told the jury from the box, reading a prepared statement in Italian. “I did not know who the killer was. I had no way of knowing.”
The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the pretty hilltop town of Perugia made headlines around the world as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who she had been dating for only a week.
The back-and-forth rulings in a legal process that has spanned nearly eight years have divided observers on both sides of the Atlantic. The case was one of the first social media trials.It was still in its early stages then.
All these years later, media interest remains strong, and cameramen swarmed around Knox, her husband, and their defense team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing. According to her lawyer, Ruparia Donati, a cameraman bumped into the defendant’s left temple. Knox’s husband, sitting in the front row of the courtroom, examined a small swelling on her temple.
in spite of Knox’s innocence Despite the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene, suspicions about her role persisted, particularly in Italy, due in large part to the accusations she made against President Lumumba.
Mr Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, told reporters that the allegations had made Mr Lumumba notorious around the world and caused his business ventures in Perugia to fail, after he rebuilt his life in his wife’s native Poland.
“Patrick has always faithfully followed court rulings and to date every court has found Amanda Knox to be a slanderer,” Pacelli said.
Knox, now 36 and the mother of two young children, is an advocate for criminal justice reform and campaigns against wrongful convictions. She was released after four years in prison in October 2011 after the Perugia Court of Appeals overturned the original murder convictions of both Knox and Sollecito.
She remained in the US, despite two further overturns of her conviction, until March 2015, when Italy’s highest court acquitted the pair of murder charges, declaring they had committed no crime.
In the autumn, Italy’s highest court overturned a libel conviction that had endured five trials. Order a new examA 2022 reform of the Italian judicial system makes it possible to reopen cases in which a final verdict has been handed down if human rights violations are found.
The court was now ordered to disregard two damaging statements typed and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. while she was being questioned throughout the night into the early hours of November 6, 2007. In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher scream and pinned the blame for the killing on Lumumba.
A few hours later, around 1 p.m., while still in custody, she was confused and asked for pen and paper, wrote her statement in English, and questioned the version she had signed.
“Regarding this ‘confession’ I made last night, I want to be clear that the veracity of what I said is highly questionable as I made it under pressure of stress, shock and extreme fatigue,” she wrote.
