Some aspects of one of the most high-profile murder cases in recent years are still being resolved in the courts in Italy. Amanda Knox has once again set foot in a court in this country; and on this occasion she has been sentenced to three years in prison for slander after it was proven that she falsely accused an innocent man of the brutal murder of her roommate, the British Meredith Kercher, on the night of November 1, 2007. The woman has already She was sentenced to the same penalty in a first trial for defamation, but the ruling was annulled.
Knox, an American citizen who at that time was a 20-year-old exchange student in the Italian city of Perugia, like the victim, was accused of being one of the perpetrators of the crime, along with the Italian Raffaele Sollecito, who at the time It was her boyfriend. Both spent four years in prison and were acquitted in the appeal trial that took place in 2011. In 2015, the Supreme Court definitively declared them innocent.
This Wednesday’s slander sentence will not have any practical impact on Knox, who will not have to go to prison because the Italian justice system allows the new three-year sentence to be validated with the time she already spent behind bars before being tried and then acquitted. .
The accusations against Knox for slander arose as a result of the statements she gave in the early phases of the investigation in 2007. The American involved Patrick Lumumba, who was the owner of the bar where she worked and who spent 14 days in preventive detention. as the alleged perpetrator of the crime after the woman’s accusations, and was later released without charge.
“I never wanted to defame Patrick. “He was my friend, he took care of me and consoled me for the loss of my friend,” Amanda Knox declared to the media before entering the room where the sentence was read, where she attended with her lawyers and her husband. , adding that she hoped to “clear” her name “once and for all of false charges” against her. She has also added: “I am sorry that I could not resist the pressure and that he suffered,” and she has acknowledged that she accused him because she was “scared and deceived.”
Return to Italy 17 years later
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The young woman, who returned to the United States when she was released in 2011, has returned to Italy 17 years after the crime and has been received in court by a crowd of journalists and photographers.
Knox had already been sentenced to three years in prison for the same crime of slander in the past, but the Supreme Court accepted her appeal and annulled that sentence, with the order that the appeal court review the process.
In the new trial, whose sentence can still be appealed, the American asked to testify voluntarily before the judge. “Many people think that the worst thing in my life was when I was sentenced to 26 years for a crime I did not commit. But the worst night of my life was November 5, 2007,” she said, about the moment she was interrogated. “She had just discovered that the small house she lived in had become a horrible crime scene. She was in a state of shock, exhausted, homeless, thousands of miles from my family. The police questioned me for hours in a language I barely knew. “They didn’t accept my answer, which was that I was at Raffaele’s house and that I didn’t know who had killed Meredith,” she continued. And he explained that the agents found a message from Patrick Lumumba on his cell phone that said “see you later” in English (see you later), which in Italian was translated as “see you later.” “The police thought I had made an appointment with Patrick and that he was lying. “They refused to believe me,” Knox said at the trial to defend his innocence.
Before pleading not guilty, Knox insisted: “Several times they called me a liar. When an agent told me that he was not with Raffaele, I became destabilized. I didn’t understand why they treated me like that. The police told me that he must have been a witness, they threatened me with 30 years in prison if I didn’t remember all the details. They slapped me on the head, they yelled at me ‘remember, remember1’. I gathered a jumble of memories from different days. They forced me to submit. My rights were violated. I was stunned. “I tried to make the police see that what I had said was confusing, but they wanted to close the case quickly.”
Lumumba appeared at the trial as a private prosecutor and his lawyer charged in the courtroom against Knox: “Amanda is a liar. She felt pressured because she did not want to be implicated in the murder, and so she set up a distraction, accusing an innocent man. She does and undoes, she says and doesn’t say. “It sowed an ingeniously constructed doubt.”
A controversial and mediatized case
Knox denounced pressure and even aggression from the agents investigating the murder of Meredith Kercher and alleged that the investigators forced her to say that she had been in the house where the crime was committed along with Lumumba. For those statements she was also accused of slandering some police officers, although in that case she was acquitted.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2019 that Italy violated Knox’s rights during that long night of interrogations days after Kercher’s murder, during which she was not assisted by a lawyer or provided with a competent translator.
Knox’s case, which attracted widespread press attention on both sides of the Atlantic and was heavily marred by sensationalism, was also controversial in court. The judicial process was particularly turbulent and long, due to the numerous resources of the Prosecutor’s Office and the accused, and was marked by police errors in the investigation phase and by numerous contradictory verdicts. The judges who exonerated Knox and Sollecito due to lack of evidence went so far as to cite “the growing media attention that caused the frantic search for culprits.”
The only person convicted of the murder and rape of the British student was Rudy Guede, who was 20 years old at the time of the crime. He was released from prison in 2021, after serving his sentence, and has always defended his innocence. The Italian justice considers that he had accomplices who helped him in the homicide, but recognizes that he does not know his identity.
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