Amanda Knox has claimed she is a “victim” who has been unjustly persecuted for her total grownup everyday living, just after an Italian courtroom upheld her conviction for falsely accusing a man of her roommate’s murder.
Knox, 36, originally from Seattle, appeared in court docket in Florence on Wednesday to hear that her slander conviction — for accusing Congolese bar operator Patrick Lumumba, of using part in the killing of Meredith Kercher — and its a few-year jail sentence would stand.
Knox faces no jail time simply because she spent 4 a long time in prison just after she was convicted of Kercher’s murder, before she was exonerated in total. Now she says she will charm the conclusion and keep on the combat to distinct her name.
“I have been unjustly accused for 17 several years. I invested four decades in jail as an innocent [person]. 17 decades — that is my full adult daily life I have been unjustly accused,” she advised Sky Information Italia on Thursday. (Sky Information Italia is owned by Comcast, the mum or dad business of NBC Information.)
“I did not slander Patrick I didn’t kill my good friend. I will arrive back in this article as many periods as I have to struggle towards this injustice,” she said.
She included that she was astonished by the verdict and had thought it was a “very crystal clear make a difference,” arguing that a single of the main files in the scenario clearly claimed she did not know who killed Kercher.
“From the starting I just preferred to do the suitable factor and notify the fact. From time to time I really feel like there is absolutely nothing I can do. I am trying, I will try forever,” she stated.
On the lookout back again on the case, which grew to become a enormous news tale in Italy, the U.S. and in Kercher’s native Britain, Knox claimed she grew to become the “most hated lady accused of murder in the world.” Referring to the nickname presented to her by British tabloid newspapers, she said: “I’m not Cunning Knoxy, I’m Amanda Knox.”
“I’m a victim,” she added.
Knox was 20 when she was sentenced to 26 yrs for Kercher’s murder at the condominium they shared in the central Italian university town of Perugia.
The killing designed headlines all over the earth right after Kercher, 21, was discovered half-bare in a pool of blood with far more than 40 stab wounds on Nov. 1, 2007. Her throat had been slit.
Kercher, a scholar from Britain’s College of Leeds, was embarking on a 12 months of study in Perugia, living in a rented flat with Knox and two Italian roommates. Friends termed her “Mez.” The youngest of 4 small children, she grew up on the outskirts of London.
Knox and her her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, then 25, whom she had been seeing for about a week, ended up charged with Kercher’s murder. Prosecutors alleged it was a situation of tough sex that bought violent.
Immediately after the two ended up convicted in December 2009, Sollecito was sentenced to 25 a long time imprisonment.
Both equally put in 4 years guiding bars as the case meandered via the Italian courtroom method and, right after a collection of flip-flop verdicts, they have been eventually exonerated by the the Supreme Courtroom of Cassation, Italy’s maximum courtroom in March 2015.
Central to Knox’s circumstance was that the proof for her slander conviction comes from when she was in police custody, exactly where she was interviewed without an interpreter or lawful illustration all through 53 several hours of questioning above four days.
The European Courtroom of Human Legal rights in Strasbourg, France, dominated in 2019 that the Italian authorized technique really should pay her $20,000. “Knox experienced been specially vulnerable, being a foreign younger lady, 20 at the time, not getting been in Italy for pretty long and not staying fluent in Italian,” the courtroom famous at the time.
Knox instructed Sky Italia that this working experience had remaining her “psychologically tortured, abused and mistreated.”
On a new episode of her podcast, “Labyrinths,” produced Thursday, Knox explained: “I, in no way, knowingly and willingly accused an innocent male. I was psychologically tortured by the law enforcement.”
She extra that the authorities had “wanted to obtain me guilty of some thing.”
