Italian court overturns Amanda Knox’s slander conviction after she was sentenced to three years for falsely implicating bar owner in the murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher
- Knox was sentenced to three years already served in 2011 for falsely implicating Patrick Lumumba in Meredith Kercher’s murder
Italy’s highest court today overturned a slander conviction against Amanda Knox, the American jailed and later acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate, and ordered a new trial.
Knox, now 36, was sentenced to three years already served in 2011 for falsely implicating Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba in Meredith Kercher’s murder.
But the Court of Cassation in Rome accepted her appeal in a ruling published today, overturning the slander conviction and ordering a new trial at the court of appeal in Florence.
Knox welcomed the verdict on X, formerly Twitter.
‘Though I was exonerated for murder, I remained wrongly convicted of slander,’ she wrote.
The Court of Cassation in Rome accepted Amanda Knox’s appeal in a ruling published today, overturning the slander conviction and ordering a new trial at the court of appeal in Florence (File Photo)
Knox, now 36, was sentenced to three years already served in 2011 for falsely implicating Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba (pictured) in Meredith Kercher’s murder
Knox spent four years in an Italian prison for killing Kercher (pictured), a fellow student, in the apartment they shared in Perugia
Now, ‘I am no longer a convicted person. And I will fight with my lawyers to prove my innocence once and for all’.
She added that at the time of Kercher’s murder, ‘Lumumba was my friend’.
‘We are both victims of the violation of my human rights during my interrogation, without which I was helpless against the coercive pressure of the police.’
Knox had pointed the finger at Lumumba during police questioning in which she claimed she was yelled at, slapped and threatened.
Her claims prompted a separate charge in Italy of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.
Then in 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation, saying her treatment ‘compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole’.
The ruling today took the European court decision into account, Knox said.
Knox welcomed the verdict on X, formerly Twitter (File Photo)
Knox had pointed the finger at Lumumba during police questioning in which she claimed she was yelled at, slapped and threatened. Italy’s highest court today overturned a slander conviction against Knox (File Photo)
Kercher, then 21, had been found half-naked and stabbed 47 times. Police also found signs of sexual assault (File Photo)
Lumumba is accompanied by Italian police investigating the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia on November 6, 2007
Following the court’s decision to overturn the slander conviction, Knox wrote on X, formerly Twitter: ‘Though I was exonerated for murder, I remained wrongly convicted of slander’ (File Photo)
Knox said that now, ‘I am no longer a convicted person. And I will fight with my lawyers to prove my innocence once and for all’. She added that at the time of Kercher’s murder, ‘Lumumba was my friend’. Pictured: Patrick Lumumba
Knox spent four years in an Italian prison for killing Kercher, a fellow student, in the apartment they shared in Perugia.
She was freed on appeal in 2011, when she returned to the United States, only to be convicted again in her absence in 2014.
Finally in 2015, Italy’s top court quashed her conviction and that of her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito.
Kercher, then 21, had been found half-naked and stabbed 47 times. Police also found signs of sexual assault.
Lumumba, the bar owner, spent more than a week in jail after being implicated by Knox, before being cleared of any involvement in the crime.
An Ivorian drifter, Rudy Guede, who was linked to the murder scene by DNA evidence, was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later cut to 16 years.
He was released early in November 2021.
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