Florence, Italy (News Nation) — Amanda Knox Re-convicted Defamation She gave evidence in an Italian court on Wednesday after being acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate while she was an exchange student in Italy.
The court found that she was wrongly accused of murdering an innocent man, and that she will not serve any further time in prison as the three-year sentence will count as time already served.
Amanda Knox’s father, Kurt Knox, is scheduled to appear on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Report” Wednesday night to discuss the sentence. How to watch here.
The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the picturesque hilltop town of Perugia made headlines around the world as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her Italian boyfriend of only a week. Raffaele Sollecito.
‘I’m so sorry’: Amanda Knox
Knox, who returned to Italy for the first time since 2011 for the trial, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read, The Associated Press reported.
Knox, in a soft, sometimes husky voice, told the court she came under intense pressure from police and falsely accused Patrick Lumumba, the owner of the bar where she was working part-time.
“I deeply regret that I was not strong enough to resist the police pressure,” Knox said in a nine-minute prepared statement, sitting next to the jury in the jury box. She told the defense: “I didn’t know who the killer was. I had no way of knowing.”
Amanda Knox’s trial
Knox and Sollecito were originally convicted of Ms Kercher’s murder and spent four years in prison before being acquitted by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
Rudi Hermann Guede, a drifter who lived in Perugia, was later convicted of Kercher’s murder in an expedited trial that likely resulted in a lighter sentence. Guede was sentenced to 16 years in prison, including a ruling that he was not the only perpetrator, but was released in 2021 after serving 13 years. Recently, Guede was accused by a former girlfriend of physical and sexual abuse, and was ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet and not leave the house at night.
Defamation
Based on police interviews of Knox, Lumumba was arrested and detained as a suspect in Kercher’s murder. Lumumba has since left Italy and is living with his family in Eastern Europe, according to the Associated Press, but is currently involved in a civil lawsuit.
The defamation conviction was the only one of the charges against Knox to withstand five sentences. It was based on two police-typed statements that Knox signed after a lengthy interrogation in Italian without a lawyer or a competent interpreter.
During her first trial on defamation charges, Knox said she had accused an innocent man because of police pressure. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the conditions under which she was interrogated violated her human rights.
As a result, Italy’s Supreme Court set aside the libel conviction, ruled the two police statements inadmissible, and ordered a new trial, where the court could only consider Knox’s handwritten statement to find evidence supporting the libel allegations.
NewsNation correspondent Brooke Shaffer and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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