Amanda Knox is due to return to an Italian court this week to defend herself against a defamation conviction she received 16 years ago – a sentence she hopes to have permanently overturned.
Her chance was made possible after a European court ruled that Italy had violated her human rights during lengthy interrogation after the November 2007 murder of her British roommate.
The libel charge, for which she was convicted for accusing a Congolese bar owner of murder, was the only charge against Knox, who endured five verdicts before finally being acquitted of the brutal murder of her 21-year-old roommate, Meredith Kercher, in an apartment in Perugia, a picturesque university city in central Italy.
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The verdict in the libel retrial ordered by Italy’s Supreme Court is due to be handed down on Wednesday, marking Knox’s first appearance in an Italian court in 12-and-a-half years.
The defamation charge is based primarily on two typed police statements which Knox signed in the early hours of the morning of November 6, 2007, after being subjected to lengthy police questioning in Italian without a lawyer or a competent interpreter.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that this situation violated her human rights.
Ms Kercher’s brutal murder attracted worldwide attention as suspicion fell on Ms Knox, who was 20 at the time, and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who she had been dating for about a week.
Knox and Sollecito were convicted at their first trial but, after multiple verdicts, were eventually acquitted by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
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Knox returned to the United States in October 2011 after her initial acquittal.
She is now a mother of two small children and campaigns against wrongful convictions while hosting a podcast with her husband.
But the libel conviction against Knox persists, a legal stain that continues to fuel suspicions, particularly in Italy, about her role in the murder, despite the conviction of Rudy-Herman Guede, an Ivorian from Côte d’Ivoire, whose DNA was found at the crime scene.
Guede was given a 16-year prison sentence after a fast-track trial that would have resulted in a lighter sentence under Italian law, of which he has served 13 years.
Based on a European Court ruling, Italy’s Supreme Court in November overturned Knox’s defamation conviction and ruled that two typed police statements were inadmissible as evidence.
The court ordered a new trial and instructed the Florence court to consider only a handwritten statement, written in English by Knox a few hours later.
“Regarding this ‘confession’ I made last night, I want to be clear that I very much doubt its veracity as what I said was made under pressure of stress, shock and extreme fatigue,” her statement said.
Sal Cashin, a leading researcher into false confessions, said Knox’s signed statement followed a standard format for a false confession.
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“It is an empirical fact that most false confessions contain precise details not yet known to the public, as well as ‘false facts’ that are consistent with a police theory of the crime but that later turn out to be untrue,” Cashin, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, wrote about the case in “Duped,” a book that explores the phenomenon of false confessions.
Cashin said police “tainted” Knox’s confession, which was consistent with police theory at the time.
“It is unreasonable to hold her responsible for statements in which she herself was implicated,” he wrote.
