Amanda Knox arrives at a Florence courtroom in Florence, Italy, with her husband, Christopher Robinson, on Wednesday.
Antonio Calani/AP
Updated June 05, 2024 at 06:46 AM ET
FLORENCE, Italy — An Italian court on Wednesday convicted Amanda Knox again of defamation, while acquitting her of the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate when they were both exchange students in Italy.
The court found that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of a bar where she worked part-time, of murder. But she will not have to go to jail any more, as the three-year sentence counts as time already served.
Knox showed no emotion when the verdict was read.
Earlier on Wednesday, Knox, in a soft and sometimes breaking voice, asked the eight Italian judges and jurors to drop the defamation charge against her that stemmed from the 2007 murder of her British roommate when they were both exchange students in Italy.
Knox told the court that she had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of a bar where she worked part-time, of murder after subjecting him to an intense overnight interrogation without the assistance of a lawyer or competent translator.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to withstand the pressure of the police,” Knox said in a 9-minute prepared statement to the panel seated on the jury bench. She told them: “I had no idea who the killer was. I had no way of knowing.”
The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the hilltop town of Perugia made global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who had been together just a week earlier.
The topsy-turvy verdicts during nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarised trial observers on both sides of the Atlantic, with the case still in its early stages being hotly debated on social media.
The case has been drawing media attention, with photographers crowding around Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson and her legal team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing. Her lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, said one camera hit her left temple. Knox’s husband examined a small lump on her head while sitting in the front row of the courtroom.
Despite Knox being exonerated and the conviction of the Ivorian man’s footprints and DNA found at the scene, doubts about her role remain, especially in Italy. This is mainly due to the accusation made against Patrick Lumumba, which led to his conviction on charges of slander.
Knox, now 36 and the mother of two young children, returned to Italy for only the second time in October 2011 after four years in prison, after the Perugia appeals court overturned the initial guilty verdicts in the murder case against both Knox and Sollecito.
She remained in the United States during two more controversial verdicts, before Italy’s Supreme Court acquitted them both of murder charges in March 2015, categorically stating that they had not committed the crimes.
“I will be going back into the same courtroom where I was convicted of a crime I did not commit, this time to defend myself once and for all,” Knox wrote on social media. “I hope I am free from the false accusations made against me once and for all. Wish me luck.”
Knox’s day in court was set by a European Court of Justice ruling that Italy violated her human rights during several days of interrogation after Kercher’s killing, depriving her of both a lawyer and a competent translator. In the autumn, Italy’s highest Court of Cassation threw out the defamation conviction, which had failed five trials, and ordered a new trial, thanks to a 2022 Italian judicial reform that allows cases that have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are found.
This time, the court has been ordered to ignore two damning statements typed by police and signed by Knox, written at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. while she was being detained for questioning on the night of Nov. 6, 2007. In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher’s screams, and she pointed the finger at Lumumba for the murder.
Several hours later, around 1 a.m., while still in custody, he asked for a pen and paper and wrote a statement in English, in which he questioned the statement he had signed.
