UPDATE
Jun 5, 2024 6:20 AM CDT
An Italian court reconvicted Amanda Knox of slander on Wednesday, even after she was exonerated in the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate while the two were exchange students in Italy. The court found Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part time, of the killing, per the AP. But she will not serve any more jail time, given the three-year sentence counts as time already served. Knox's lawyer described her as "very embittered." Knox had told the court she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba under intense police pressure. "I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,'' she said. "I didn't know who the murderer was. I had no way to know."
Jun 5, 2024 3:45 AM CDT
Amanda Knox returned to an Italian courtroom Wednesday for the first time in more than 12½ years to clear herself "once and for all" of a slander charge that stuck even after she was exonerated in the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia, the AP reports. The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito. Flip-flop verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic as the case was vociferously argued on social media, still in its infancy.
An indication of the fervor that continues to surround the case, cameras converged on Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson, and their legal team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing was set to begin. A camera knocked Knox on the left temple, her lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, said. Knox's husband examined a small bump on her head as they sat in the front row of the court. Knox planned to address the court, and a decision is expected later Wednesday, her lawyer said. Whatever the outcome, Knox risks no more jail time. The four years she served before the first acquittal covers the three-year slander sentence.
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Knox, now a 36-year-old mother of two small children, returns to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after four years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court that overturned the initial guilty verdict in the murder case against both Knox and Sollecito. She remained in the United States through two more flip-flop verdicts before Italy's highest court definitively exonerated the pair of the murder in March 2015, stating flatly that they had not committed the crime.
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