American former exchange student Amanda Knox’s hopes of fully clearing her legal record in Italy suffered a blow on Wednesday after an appeals court in Florence reconfirmed her slander conviction for wrongfully accusing a man of her British roommate’s 2007 murder.
The panel of judges and jury upheld Knox’s three-year sentence, which she already served during four years in Italian custody while the high-profile case wound through multiple trials over nearly 17 years.
The ruling marked the sixth time an Italian court has found Knox slandered Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese man who owned a bar where she worked part-time in the university town of Perugia.
Knox has argued her statements were made under intense police pressure and language barrier during an overnight interrogation shortly after her roommate’s brutal killing.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,” the now-36-year-old Knox told the Florence court in Italian, stating she “had no way to know” who actually murdered 21-year-old Meredith Kercher.
Knox’s legal team vowed to appeal the ruling to Italy’s highest court, with her lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova saying “Amanda is very embittered” by the outcome after hoping for a full exoneration that would “put a cap” on the long-running legal saga.
The slander conviction stems from Knox’s interrogation in November 2007, when she issued statements saying she believed Lumumba was behind Kercher’s killing. While Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were initially convicted of the murder, they were ultimately exonerated by Italy’s top court in 2015 which ruled they did not commit the crime.
A migrant, Ivory Coast citizen Rudy Guede, was ultimately convicted based on DNA evidence tying him to the crime scene.
Wednesday’s ruling means that, despite Knox’s overall exoneration in the murder case itself, Italy’s judicial system believes she slandered an innocent man with her accusations – even if they were made under duress when she was just 20 years old and relying on minimal Italian language skills.
Now a mother of two advocating for criminal justice reforms, Knox had hoped the new European court-mandated trial reviewing her human rights would result in legal vindication she has long sought since regaining her freedom in 2011.