Italy’s Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the defamation conviction of American Amanda Knox, who was first convicted and later acquitted of murdering her housemate in 2007, accusing an innocent man. did.
The court’s ruling could end a legal saga that has riveted followers in Europe and the United States. The case lasted more than 17 years and passed through various courts at Italian and European level. The court upheld Ms Knox’s three-year prison sentence, but she will not have to serve any more time as she had already spent four years in prison from 2007 to 2011.
Knox, now 37 and living near Seattle, did not attend Thursday’s hearing. One of her lawyers, Carlo Dalla Vedova, spoke to her after the verdict and said he was “very, very sorry.”
“She wanted to close this chapter,” he said.
Knox has been trying to remove the last legal stain from her name 10 years after Italy’s highest court decisively acquitted her of the murder of 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher. Ta.
In November 2007, Italian authorities arrested Ms. Knox, then 20, and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, then 23, for the death of Ms. Karcher, who was found lying in bed with her throat slit. . All three were studying in the beautiful central Italian city of Perugia. The involvement of privileged and attractive young men from multiple countries and what prosecutors described as a sex game gone awry sparked intense international interest in the case.
Knox was originally convicted of murder in 2009, but was acquitted on appeal and returned to the United States in 2011. Her case went through various courts, but in 2015 Italy’s highest court dropped the charges, saying they were tainted by flimsy evidence and evidence. rush to judgement.
Perugia resident Rudy Guede, who had a history of trespassing with police, was tried in a separate case and found guilty of murder. He served 13 years of a 16-year sentence and was released in 2021.
The defamation case involved Diya Lumumba, also known as Patrick, who ran a bar called Le Chic where Knox worked part-time in 2007.
Ms Knox and her lawyer claim they were pressured by police to press charges against Mr Lumumba after she claims she was slapped during an overnight interrogation. Mr. Lumumba was arrested and held in jail for two weeks, but was only released after one of his clients provided an alibi.
Knox was originally convicted of defamation in 2009 and sentenced to three years in prison, a conviction that was upheld in various Italian courts.
In 2019, Europe’s highest human rights court ruled that Ms Knox had been deprived of adequate legal aid during her interrogation and that her right to a fair trial had been violated, and awarded Italy 18,400 in damages. He was ordered to pay euros (approximately $21,000 at the time). , costs and expenses. The court also questioned Ms Knox’s role as an interpreter, saying her statements during the interrogation were “made in an atmosphere of intense psychological pressure”.
Italy’s High Court ordered a new defamation trial based on that ruling, but she was found guilty again in a Florence court last year. Her appeal was rejected Thursday by Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, based in Rome.
During Thursday’s hearing, Dalla Vedova said Lumumba was “not a victim of Ms. Knox, but was with Ms. Knox.”
Another of her lawyers, Luca Luparia Donati, said he would wait to read the court’s arguments before deciding whether to appeal again to the European Court of Human Rights. He said Thursday’s ruling “undermines the judgment handed down by the European Court of Justice” and “we want to know their opinion.”
“I think this is very unfair to Amanda,” he said.
Ms. Knox frequently says on her podcast: labyrinthabout the psychological and emotional toll the conviction took on her. There were also practical implications. She wrote in X this week that she recently had to cancel a trip to Australia because she couldn’t get a visa because of her “criminal history”.
Since returning to the United States, Ms. Knox, now a mother of two, has become an advocate for the unjustly imprisoned and a campaigner for criminal justice reform. She is also co-producing a Hulu series about the case, which is currently being filmed in Italy and Hungary.
The accusations caused Lumumba to lose his business and leave Italy with his family. He now lives in Krakow, Poland, where he runs an import-export business, but told the court on Thursday that he misses life in Perugia.
He, too, said he couldn’t wait to solve the case. The endless trials “always remind me of that morning when they came to arrest me and my days in prison,” he says.
His lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, said Thursday that Knox not only never apologized for falsely accusing his client, but also never offered financial compensation.
In Florence last year, Ms. Knox issued a kind of apology, saying, “I was not strong enough to resist the police pressure, and I am very sorry that he suffered because of it.”
After the ruling, Pacelli said his client could use the ruling to seek damages, but it would create an insurmountable hurdle “because Amanda lives in the United States and it won’t be easy to pursue her.” He said it was possible.
