Italy’s Supreme Court upholds Amanda Knox’s conviction for falsely accusing an innocent man of murder

ROME (AP) – Italy’s highest court on Thursday upheld a slander conviction against the American defendant Amanda Knox to accuse one innocent man for murdering his British flatmate 17 years ago in a sensational case that polarized legal proceedings on both sides of the Atlantic.

Knox had appealed the sentence based on a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that said her rights had been violated by the failure of the police to provide a lawyer and a suitable translator during a long night of questioning just days after the murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the university town of Perugia.

Judge Monica Boni read out the verdict in a courtroom that was empty except for a few reporters and guards. The lawyers for both Knox and the man she falsely accused, Patrick Lumumba, had gone home during the deliberations.

The ruling apparently ends a 17-year legal saga where Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend were convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in Kercher’s brutal murder before being acquitted by the Supreme Court of Cassation in 2015.

The defamation conviction against Knox had survived several appeals and Knox was re-sentenced on the charge in June after the European Court ruling cleared the way for a new trial.

Reached by phone, Lumumba said he was satisfied with the verdict. “Amanda was wrong. This sentence will follow her for the rest of her life,” he said.

Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, expressed surprise at the court’s decision. “We are in disbelief,” Dalla Vedova told reporters at the courthouse by phone. “This is completely unexpected in our eyes and totally unfair to Amanda.”

Knox called it a “surreal” day in a post on X.

“I have just been found guilty yet again of a crime I did not commit,” her post said. “And I’ve just been awarded the Innocence Network Impact Award, ‘created to honor an exonerated person who raises awareness of wrongful convictions, political issues or helps others after release’.”

Speaking recently on his “Labyrinths” podcast, Knox said: “I hate the fact that I have to live with the consequences of a crime I didn’t commit.” She said the consequences included difficulty getting 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 city 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, faces no further prison time. She has already served almost four years during the investigation, the initial homicide case and the first appeal. But Knox had continued the legal battle aimed at clearing her name of any criminal wrongdoing.

Knox returned to the United States in 2011, after being released by an appeals court in Perugia, and has established himself as a global champion of the wrongly convicted. She has a podcast with her husband and has a new memoir titled “Free: My Search for Meaning.”

Knox was a 20-year-old student in Perugia when Kercher was found stabbed to death on November 2, 2007, in her bedroom in the flat they shared with two Italian women.

The case made global headlines as suspicion quickly fell on Knox and her boyfriend of only a few days, Raffaele Sollecito. But another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, from the Ivory Coastwas eventually convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was released in 2021, having served most of his 16-year sentence.

The European Court ordered Italy to pay Knox compensation for police misconduct, noting that she was particularly vulnerable as a foreign student who does not speak fluent Italian.

Italy’s Supreme Court ordered the new defamation case based on this verdict. It threw out two signed statements prepared by police that falsely accused Lumumba of the murder, and told the appeals court that the only evidence it could consider was a handwritten letter she later wrote in English in an attempt to backtrack on the charge .

However the Court of Appeal in its reasoning said the four-page memo supported a finding of defamation.

On the basis of Knox’s statements, Lumumba was summoned for questioning, despite the fact that he had an iron-clad alibi. His business suffered and he eventually moved to Poland with his Polish wife.

Arriving in court, he emphasized that Knox “has never apologized to me.”

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Barry reported from Milan.