FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — An Italian court convicted Amanda Knox again of defamation on Wednesday, ending her hopes of removing a legal stain against her that lingered even after she was acquitted of the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate. The two were exchange students in Italy at the time.
The decision by a panel of the Florence appeals court marks the sixth time an Italian court has found that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of a bar where she worked part-time, of murder.
Knox has argued that her statements to police were coerced during an intense night of questioning, which included threats, as she relied on her then-improvised Italian as a 20-year-old university student.
However, the panel of two judges and six jurors confirmed the three-year sentence she had already served on top of the four years she spent in Italian custody while the investigation and multiple trials were ongoing. The court’s reasoning will be released in 60 days.
Knox made an appearance in Florence on Wednesday to clear her name once and for all. It was the first time she had returned to an Italian court since her release in 2011. Accompanied by her husband, Christopher Robinson, she showed no apparent emotion when the verdict was announced.
But her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said shortly afterward that “Amanda is very angry.”
“We are all very surprised by the outcome of this decision,” Dalla Vedova said outside the courtroom. She said Knox had hoped the acquittal would put an end to nearly 17 years of judicial proceedings.
Another defense lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, said they hoped to appeal to Italy’s highest court.
The new trial against Knox was launched following a European court ruling that Italy had violated her human rights during an overnight interrogation a few days after Kercher’s murder, by denying her a lawyer and a competent translator.
Addressing the Florence court in a soft and at times breaking voice, Knox said she had falsely accused Patrick Lumumba under heavy pressure from police.
Knox addressed the panel from the jury bench, reading a prepared statement in Italian: “I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to withstand the pressure of the police.” 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 polarized trial observers on both sides of the Atlantic, as the case became one of the first lawsuits initiated by social media, which was in its infancy at the time.
Media interest remains strong all these years later, with a crowd of photographers surrounding Knox, her husband and her legal team as they entered the courthouse about an hour before the hearing. Her lawyer, Luparia Donati, said one camera hit her left temple. Knox’s husband, seated in the front row of the courtroom, examined a small bump on her temple.
Despite Knox’s acquittal and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene, doubts about her role remained, particularly in Italy. This was mainly due to the allegations against Lumumba.
Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, told reporters that the accusation had discredited him worldwide and devastated his business in Perugia. He has since re-established himself in his wife’s native Poland.
“Patrick has always been faithful to all court rulings, and to date all courts have confirmed that Amanda Knox was a slanderer,” Pacelli said.
Knox is now a 36-year-old mother of two young children who advocates criminal justice reform and campaigns against wrongful convictions. In October 2011 she was released after spending four years in prison by the Perugia Appeals Court, which 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.
In the autumn, Italy’s highest Court of Cassation annulled the conviction in the defamation case, which had lasted five trials, and ordered a new trial. This is the result of 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 was ordered to ignore two damning statements typed by police and signed by Knox, which were made at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. while Knox was being questioned late on the night of November 6, 2007. In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher scream, and she pointed to Lumumba as the murderer.
Several hours later, around 1 a.m., while still in custody, she asked for a pen and paper and wrote her statement in English, in which she questioned the statement she had signed; she was still in a state of confusion.
“With regard to the ‘confession’ I made last night, I wish to make it clear that I have strong doubts about the veracity of my statements, as they were made under pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” she wrote.
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