Amanda Knox fails to overturn slander conviction in Italy | World News

Amanda Knox lost her bid to overturn a defamation conviction in Italy.

The American woman was finally acquitted of the brutal 2007 murder of her roommate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, in the apartment they shared in the Italian university town of Perugia.

But she was not released until 2011, after four years in prison in Italy.

The defamation conviction for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner of murder during an interrogation was the only charge against knox who withstood five court rulings that finally exonerated her.

What does the court ruling mean for Knox?

Knox and her husband were surrounded by photographers as they and their legal team entered the courtroom before the hearing. The 36-year-old is now the mother of two young children.

The Italian court found Knox guilty of defamation and handed him a three-year sentence.

She had been sentenced to three years for wrongly accusing bar owner Patrick Lumumba of Ms Kercher’s murder in a previous case. Knox had worked part-time for Lumumba at the time of the murder.

He will not serve any more jail time as the sentence counts as the time he has already served in prison.

Knox cried and hugged her husband after the verdict was read in court.

Her lawyer said: “Amanda is very upset, she was hoping to finally clear her name.”

‘I was a scared girl’

Knox had argued in a Florence court this week that his defamation conviction should be overturned because of the treatment he received by police.

“I have been wrongfully convicted,” Knox previously told the court in an emotional voice.

He said the night of the murder “was my worst night.” And he added: “The house where I lived became a crime scene and my friend became a victim of terrible violence. I was shocked.”

Knox said she was interrogated “for hours into the night in a language she barely knew”, adding: “When I couldn’t remember the details, one of the officers gave me a little blow on the head and yelled ‘remember, remember’ and Then I put together a jumble of memories and the police made me sign a statement that they forced me to submit.

And she added: “I regret that I was not strong and could not resist the pressure of the police… I was a scared girl, deceived by the police and led not to trust her own memories. Humbly “Ask the court to declare me innocent “.

Along with her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, Knox was convicted of the murder of Ms Kercher in 2007. They were both acquitted of crime in 2011 and then completely exonerated in 2015.

She has since established herself in the US as an advocate, writer, podcaster and producer, and much of her work is based on her experience in the Italian legal system.

Written statement under ‘shock, stress and extreme exhaustion’

While Knox and Sollecito were definitively acquitted of murder by Italy’s highest court in 2015, their defamation conviction against Lumumba was not overturned.

A year later, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that a long night of interrogations, days after Kercher’s murder, violated Knox’s rights because she was interrogated without a lawyer or official translator.

In light of this, Italy’s Supreme Court overturned the defamation conviction last year and ordered a new trial.

The new trial, which began last April, focused on a single piece of evidence: Knox’s four-page handwritten statement that the court examined to see if it contained elements supporting defamation against Lumumba.

He was jailed for two weeks after Kercher’s death before police released him and has since left Italy.

The letter, which Knox wrote during a 53-hour interrogation over four days beginning Nov. 6, 2007, reflects a state of confusion.

“Regarding this ‘confession’ I made last night, I want to make it clear that I highly doubt the truth. [sic] of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” Knox wrote.

“It is possible that there is still a culprit at large”

Rudy Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was convicted in 2008 of the sexual assault and murder of Ms Kercher. His DNA was found at the scene. Guede released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year term.

He was recently ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet and not leave his house at night after an ex-girlfriend accused him of physical and sexual abuse. An investigation is ongoing.

Former Perugia prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who led the investigation into Kercher’s murder, told Sky News during the initial hearing that “there may still be a culprit who participated in the murder and who has not yet been discovered.”