Italy’s highest court on Thursday upheld a slander conviction against US defendant Amanda Knox for accusing an innocent man in her British flatmate’s 2007 murder.
Ms Knox had appealed against the conviction based on a European Court of Human Rights ruling that said her rights had been violated by the police’s failure to provide a lawyer and adequate translator during a long night of questioning just days after Meredith Kercher’s murder.
Judge Monica Boni read the verdict aloud in a courtroom that was empty except for a few reporters and guards.
The lawyers for both Ms Knox and the man she wrongly accused, Patrick Lumumba, had gone home.
Reached by telephone, Mr Lumumba said he was satisfied with the verdict.
“Amanda was wrong. This verdict has to accompany her for the rest of her life,” he said.
Ms Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, expressed surprise at the court’s decision.
“We are incredulous,” Ms Dalla Vedova told reporters in the courthouse by phone. “This is totally unexpected in our eyes, and totally unjust for Amanda.”
The ruling should bring an end to a sensational 17-year legal saga that saw Ms Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in 21-year-old Ms Kercher’s brutal murder, before being exonerated by the highest Cassation Court in 2015.
The slander conviction against Ms Knox remained the last legal stain against her. It survived multiple appeals, and Ms Knox was reconvicted on the charge in June after a European court ruling that Italy had violated her human rights cleared the way for a new trial.
Speaking recently on her Labyrinths podcast, Ms Knox said: “I hate the fact that I have to live consequences for a crime I did not commit.”
Her defence team says she accused Mr Lumumba, who employed her at a bar in the central Italian university town of Perugia, during a long night of questioning and under pressure from police, who they said fed her false information.
The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and provided a translator who acted more as a mediator.
“I’ve been having nightmares about getting a bad verdict and just living the rest of my life with a shadow hanging over me. It’s like a scarlet letter,” Ms Knox said on her podcast.
She does not risk any more time in jail, having already served nearly four years during the investigation, initial murder trial and first appeal. Ms Knox said the aim was to clear her name of all criminal wrongdoing.
“Living with a false conviction is horrific, personally, psychologically, emotionally,” she said on the podcast. “I’m fighting it, and we’ll see what happens.”
Ms Knox returned to the United States in 2011, after being freed by an appeals court in Perugia, and has established herself as a global campaigner for the wrongly convicted. She has a new memoir coming out titled Free: My Search For Meaning.
Ms Knox returned to Italy in June for the verdict in the slander trial.
Ms Knox was a 20-year-old student in the central Italian university town of Perugia when Ms Kercher was found stabbed to death on November 2 2007, in her bedroom in the apartment they shared with two Italian women.
The case made global headlines as suspicion quickly fell on Ms Knox and her boyfriend of just days, Mr Sollecito. After eight years of trial, including two appeals to Italy’s highest court, they were fully exonerated of the murder in 2015.
Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was freed in 2021, after serving most of his 16-year sentence.
The European court ordered Italy to pay Ms Knox damages for the police failures, noting she was particularly vulnerable as a foreign student not fluent in Italian.
Italy’s high court ordered the new slander trial based on that ruling. It threw out two signed statements drafted by police falsely accusing Mr Lumumba in the murder, and directed the appellate court that the only evidence it could consider was a hand-written letter she later wrote in English attempting to walk back on the accusation.
However, the appellate court in its reasoning said that the four-page memo supported a slander finding.
On the basis of Ms Knox’s statements, Mr Lumumba was brought in for questioning, despite having an ironclad alibi. His business suffered, and he eventually moved to Poland with his Polish wife.
He said that Ms Knox “has never apologised to me”.
