FLORENCE, Italy (NewsNation) — Amanda Knox was reconvicted of slander in an Italian courtroom Wednesday, even after she was exonerated in the 2007 killing of her British roommate while the two were exchange students in Italy.
The court found she wrongfully accused an innocent man of the killing. She will not serve any more jail time, given the three-year sentence counts as time already served.
Amanda Knox’s father, Curt Knox, will join NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” Wednesday night to discuss the verdict. Here’s how you can watch.
The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito.
‘I am very sorry’: Amanda Knox
Knox, was back in Italy for the first time since 2011 for the trial, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud, the Associated Press reported.
In a soft and sometimes breaking voice, Knox told the court that she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba, the bar owner who employed Knox part time, under intense police pressure.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,” Knox told the panel in a nine-minute prepared statement, sitting alongside them on the jury bench. She told them: “I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know.”
Amanda Knox’s trials
Knox and Sollecito spent four years in prison after initially being convicted of Kercher’s murder before being exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
Rudy Hermann Guede, a drifter who was living in Perugia, was later convicted of Kercher’s murder in a fast-track trial that foresees a lesser sentence. Although he was given a 16-year prison term that included a ruling he did not act alone, Guede was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years. Recently, he was ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet and not to leave his house at night after being accused by an ex-girlfriend of physical and sexual abuse.
The slander charge
Lumumba was arrested and held as a suspect in Kercher’s murder, based on Knox’s interrogation by the police. Lumumba has since left Italy and is living in Eastern Europe with family, according to the Associated Press, though he has joined the current prosecution as a civil party.
The slander conviction was the only charge against Knox that was able to withstand five court rulings. It is based on two statements, typed by police, that Knox signed after extended questioning in Italian without a lawyer or competent interpreter.
At her first slander trial, Knox said police pressure had caused her to accuse an innocent man. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the conditions of Knox’s interrogation violated her human rights.
Because of this, Italy’s highest court threw out the slander conviction, ruled the two police statements were not admissible and ordered a new trial. This time, the court was only able to examine Knox’s handwritten statements for elements to support slander.
NewsNation correspondent Brooke Shafer and The Associated Press contributed to this report.