MILAN—Amanda Knox’s hand-written memo at the center of her latest retrial for falsely accusing a Congolese bar owner in the 2007 murder of her British housemate contained enough elements for her to be reconvicted of slander in June, an Italian appeals court said Friday.
The slander conviction is the only one remaining against her long after Knox was definitively exonerated of the murder, and she traveled to Florence in June hoping to remove the last legal stain against her—only to be convicted again.
Knox’s hand-written document was the only piece of evidence the Florence appellate court was to examine after Italy’s supreme court threw out two signed statements falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher in the Italian university town of Perugia.
The highest court’s ruling followed a finding by a European court that Knox’s rights had been violated during a long night of questioning.
“The manuscript was written spontaneously and freely, as the accused confirmed in the course of her examination,″ the Florence appellate court said in a 35-page document that gave its reasonings for the June conviction. The court said that the memo contained “the objective details of the crime of slander.”
Knox’s hand-written document was an attempt to walk back the accusations against Lumumba.
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“I’m very doubtful of the verity of the statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” Knox wrote.
She wrote that she had been pressured and told she faced 30 years in prison while being questioned overnight and went on to repeat elements of her accusation against Lumumba, underlining, “these things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened, or are just dreams my mind has made to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions I am being asked.”
The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 ordered Italy to pay Knox damages for failing to provide a lawyer or an independent interpreter during the extended night of questioning during which she signed the two statements fingering Lumumba.
Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, confirmed that Knox would appeal the ruling to Italy’s highest court, saying the appeal court’s reasonings “are aimed at reducing the weight of the European Court of Human Rights, for which Italy paid damages for the proven harm to Amanda Knox.”
Kercher’s brutal stabbing death in the idyllic 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.
Flip-flop verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic. The pair were fully exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
Rudy Hermann Guede, a man from Ivory Coast whose DNA was found at the crime scene, has been definitively convicted in Kercher’s murder. He was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year term.
By Colleen Barry