MILAN — Amanda Knox told Italian television on Thursday that she was surprised by a Florence appeals court’s decision to find her. guilty of slander in light of a European court ruling that the police who took his confession had violated his human rights.
“I will fight for the truth,” Knox told Sky TG24 in his first public comments since Wednesday’s guilty verdict. “It has been 17 years that I have been wrongfully accused.”
Knox was a 20 year old exchange student in the university town of Perugia when she and her then-Italian boyfriend were accused of murdering her housemate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, who was found dead in the apartment they shared on November 2, 2007.
After years of uncompromising testing, they were exonerated in 2015, but the libel conviction stood against Knox for wrongfully accusing an innocent man, the Congolese bar owner who employed her part-time. She served four years in prison before being released following a previous acquittal in 2011, which covered her three-year sentence for defamation.
Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede of Ivory Coast, was convicted of Kercher’s murder and served 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
Knox was present in the Florence court on Wednesday when she was convicted again of defaming Patrick Lumumba, who was detained for two weeks on suspicion of murder before police released him with a solid alibi.
Italy’s highest court ordered a new trial after a European Court of Human Rights ruled that his human rights had been violated during a long night of interrogation without a lawyer or a competent translator, when he accused Lumumba in two typed statements by the police that she signed.
The high court stipulated that the Florence appeals panel could not consider the two signed documents, but only four pages handwritten by Knox the following afternoon in an attempt to retract the statements.
“There is a document in question that we can all read and the message of that document is: ‘I don’t know who killed Meredith.’ I thought I was extremely clear,” Knox said in fluent Italian.
Knox insists he named Lumumba under extreme police pressure.
“That night the police psychologically abused, mistreated and tortured the police,” Knox said in the television interview. “It was the worst experience of my life. It was worse than being convicted, to tell the truth, because they made me think that he was crazy, that I couldn’t trust myself.”
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