Amanda Knox's slander conviction upheld by Italy's top court

Italy's top court upheld the conviction of US citizen Amanda Knox for slander on Thursday, in a case that dates back nearly two decades.

Knox was convicted last year of slandering local bar owner Patrick Lumumba by implicating him in the 2007 murder of her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher.

But another man, Rudy Guede, was eventually convicted of Kercher's murder after DNA evidence linked him to the scene. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison and released early in 2021.

What was the reaction to the verdict?

Knox, who was not in Italy for Thursday's verdict, described it as "surreal."
"I've just been found guilty yet again of a crime I didn't commit," she said on the social media platform X.

Her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, also expressed surprise at the decision.

"We are incredulous," Dalla Vedova told reporters by phone from the courthouse. "This is totally unexpected in our eyes and totally unjust for Amanda."

Lumumba, meanwhile, welcomed the court's decision, saying he was satisfied with it.

"Amanda was wrong. This verdict has to accompany her for the rest of her life," he said.

Who is Amanda Knox?

Knox was a 20-year-old exchange student in Perugia when her British roommate, Kercher, was found dead in her bedroom on November 2, 2007.

She and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were initially convicted of the killing in a 2009 trial, which was overturned in 2011. Knox then returned to the US, but she was found guilty again in a 2014 retrial before finally being cleared by Italy's highest court in 2015. 

However, the slander conviction remained.

During police questioning, Knox implicated Lumumba in the murder. This led to the local bar owner being jailed for two weeks before he was released without charge.

Knox later claimed that Italian police threatened her with 30 years in prison and used violence to pressure her into naming the Congolese barman as the killer.

The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ruled that Knox had not been given adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her police interrogation.

Knox had appealed the conviction based on that ruling but lost her bid last year when a court in Florence handed her a three-year sentence. That sentence was upheld on Thursday but it has no practical impact as it was covered by the time Knox spent in prison for the murder charge.

rmt/lo (AFP, AP, Reuters)