Amanda Knox back in Italian court for slander verdict

FLORENCE, Italy — Amanda Knox will seek to finally clear her name and beat a 16-year-old slander conviction on Wednesday when she appears in an Italian courtroom for the first time in over a decade.

Knox, wearing a pink dress and accompanied by her husband, Christopher Robinson, and her legal team, entered the courtroom in the Italian city of Florence early Wednesday for a retrial of the charge that she accused a Congolese bar owner of taking part in the murder. 

Knox, 36, who made headlines around the world as she was jailed and then cleared of killing her roommate Meredith Kercher, hopes that a not guilty verdict will remove any lingering doubt about her innocence.

While Knox’s murder conviction was overturned, the slander conviction remains on her record. Knox had already served the three-year jail term when she was released in 2011.

Ahead of the hearing the Seattle native said in a post on X that she was going to “walk into the very same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I didn’t commit, this time to defend myself yet again.” 

“I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me,” added Knox, now a mother of two small children. “Wish me luck.”

Knox was 20 when she was sentenced to 26 years for Kercher’s murder at the apartment they shared in the idyllic central Italian university town of Perugia.  

The killing made headlines around the world after Kercher, 21, was found half-naked in a pool of blood with more than 40 stab wounds on Nov. 1, 2007. Her throat had been slit. 

Along with her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, then 25, who she had been seeing for around a week, Knox was charged with her murder.  

Prosecutors alleged it was a case of rough sex that got violent at the trial that was followed intensely in the United States, Italy and the U.K. 

After the couple were convicted in December 2009, Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment.

Both spent four years behind bars as the case meandered through the Italian court system and after a series of flip-flop verdicts they were ultimately exonerated by the the Supreme Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court in March 2015. 

The couple were cleared seven years after the October 2008 conviction of Rudy Hermann Guede, a man from Ivory Coast whose DNA was found at the crime scene. Before his release in November 2021, Guede served 13 years of a 16-year prison sentence handed down after a fast-track trial that foresees lighter sentences under Italian law. 

However, one conviction against Knox remained: She was found to have defamed bar owner Patrick Lumumba by implicating him in Kercher’s murder.

The slander case was largely based on two statements that Knox signed after she was questioned by investigators without a lawyer or a competent translator.  

Knox had recently arrived in Perugia when she endured a long night of questioning about the murder, despite having only rudimentary Italian language skills and she ended up accusing Lumumba of killing Kercher in the statements that were typed up by police.  

Lumumba spent a few weeks in jail, even after his alibi was established.

But in January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, ruled that the interview conditions had violated her human rights and ruled that the Italian legal system should pay her $20,000. 

“Knox had been particularly vulnerable, being a foreign young woman, 20 at the time, not having been in Italy for very long and not being fluent in Italian,” the court noted at the time.

In light of this, and following a constitutional reform, Italy’s highest court ordered a retrial of the slander conviction and it instructed Florence’s appeals court to consider only a handwritten statement that Knox wrote in English hours after she was questioned. 

“On the one hand, I am glad I have this chance to clear my name, and hopefully that will take away the stigma that I have been living with,” Knox who campaigns for better awareness of forced confessions, said on her podcast, Labyrinths, in December.

“On the other hand, I don’t know if it ever will, in the way I am still traumatized by it,” she said.