Italian court upholds Amanda Knox slander conviction over the 2007 murder case

An Italian court in Florence has upheld a slander conviction against Amanda Knox for wrongly accusing bar owner Patrick Lumumba of murdering the British student Meredith Kercher in 2007, giving her a three-year sentence.

“I didn't know who the murderer was,” Knox declared to the Court of Appeal, claiming that she was pressured by police to name him. "I never wanted to slander Patrick. He was my friend, he took care of me and consoled me for the loss of my friend. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to resist the pressure and that he suffered," Knox said, according to Rai News.

Knox, who along with her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito spent four years in prison after being convicted over Kercher’s murder in 2007, had asked for the slander conviction to be dropped on the basis of a ruling by the European court of human rights in 2019 that found her defence rights had been violated during police questioning in 2007.

Both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were definitively acquitted in 2015. The only person sentenced to 16 years in an abbreviated sentence, for the crime that took place in the student house in the Italian town of Perugia, was Rudy Guede, released in 2023, after 13 years of imprisonment.

The final acquittal for Knox and Sollecito (pictured) arrived on March 28, 2015, 7 years after the night in which Meredith Kercher was killed with a stab in the throat. With the new sentence, the Court of Cassation annulled the convictions of both Sollecito and Knox when they found they had not committed the crime.

The definitive acquittal in 2015 came after years of trials and sentences in which truth and dubious evidence often alternated, leaving a deep suspicion as to what really happened that tragic night in Perugia, Italy.

The ones who discovered Meredith's lifeless body, bloodied and without clothes, were the victim’s roommate, Knox, then  twenty years old, and Raffaele Sollecito, who was engaged to Knox at the time. The day after the killing, they called the police after finding two of Meredith's cell phones in a neighbor's garden.

Both their behavior, too casual after the events that had just happened, and some findings by the forensic police contributed to raising suspicions about the young couple: among these a window of the house broken from the inside as if to throw off the investigation. In their depositions the two declared themselves innocent, denying having been at the house that evening.

After days of interrogations, Amanda Knox accused Patrick Lumumba (pictured), owner of a bar, who was arrested and freed 15 days later because he was recognized as having nothing to do with the affair.

On the same day as Lumumba's release, another suspect emerged, Rudy Guede, a twenty-one-year-old Ivorian. The young man was arrested following the discovery of a bloody handprint on the bed where Meredith had been found, as well as several traces of DNA scattered around the house.

According to Guede, a sexual relationship had just begun between him and Meredith when he felt ill and had to go to the bathroom. He stated that he came out of the bathroom after hearing a scream and found her lifeless and bloody, deciding to run away without calling for help.

To date, Guede is the only protagonist of this legal case to have been convicted of Meredith's murder. In the meantime, the story of the Perugia crime has experienced great controversy, mainly because the murder weapon has never been identified with certainty.

During the investigations, initial traces of DNA from Knox and the victim were found on a kitchen knife found and seized from Sollecito's house. But the results of the tests were later denied by the investigators according to which there were only traces of Knox's DNA on the knife.

Another piece of evidence that seemed to be able to frame Sollecito was the discovery, 46 days after the tragedy, of the victim's bra clasp, on which traces of his DNA had been found. But even in this case, the technical assessment was considered "unreliable", due to "contamination" of the evidence, touched by too many hands.

However, Knox and Sollecito were sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively two years after the incident, in 2009. According to the first instance sentence, the two had killed Meredith driven by an "erotic, sexual, violent motive", as stated in the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

In 2011, in the second degree trial, despite the prosecutor having asked for a life sentence, they were both acquitted: "for not having committed the crime”. The building blocks on which the conviction was based were no longer there" and were thus released from prison.

However, that acquittal was overturned by Italy’s supreme court in 2013.

A Florentine appellate court then convicted the pair again in 2014. Knox was by then back in US and did not attend that trial.

On March 28, 2015 the final sentence concluded in both being definitely acquitted for not having committed the crime.

From the first moment, Meredith's murder turned into an incredible media circus that divided public opinion. In the United States the press has always supported Knox, while, in Italy, the doubt about her innocence has never been completely silenced.

Knox, over the years, has become a viral character, so much so that in 2016 Netflix dedicated an Emmy-nominated documentary to her, "Amanda Knox". 17 years after Meredith's killing, her name is still at the center of one of the most discussed and controversial legal cases in recent history.

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