Amanda Knox exonerated of slander conviction in Meredith Kercher’s murder

Italy’s highest court overturned a slander conviction against Amanda Knox, the American jailed and later acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate, and ordered a new trial.

Ms Knox, now 36, spent nearly four years in an Italian prison after being wrongfully convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher while they were studying abroad in Perugia.

She was sentenced to three years already served in 2011 for falsely implicating Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba in Ms Kercher’s murder.

But on Friday, the Court of Cassation in Rome accepted her appeal in a ruling, overturning the slander conviction and ordering a new trial at the court of appeal in Florence, the AFP reported.

“Though I was exonerated for murder, I remained wrongly convicted of slander,” she wrote, announcing the verdict on X, formerly Twitter.

“Now, sixteen years later,” she began, noting a new judicial instrument provided by a recent reform, “I am no longer a convicted person. And I will fight with my lawyers to prove my innocence once and for all.”

Ms Knox said this ruling has “given me the opportunity to seek my full acquittal from this wrongful accusation of slander.”

She then mentioned the bar owner Patrick Lumumba, who she said was her friend at the time.

Ms Knox had previously pointed the finger at Mr Lumumba during police questioning in which she claimed she was yelled at, slapped and threatened, Barron’s reported citing AFP. Her claims prompted a separate charge in Italy of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.

In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Ms Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation, saying her treatment "compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole".

That court decision was taken into account during Friday’s ruling, Ms Knox said.

“We are both victims of the violation of my human rights during my interrogation, without which I was helpless against the coercive pressure of the police,” she wrote.

“The outcome of that interrogation derailed the investigation into Meredith Kercher’s murder, and led to the wrongful imprisonment of three innocent people. Patrick Lumumba suffered ten days of wrongful imprisonment, and Raffaele and I nearly four years.”

“One day in prison as an innocent person is one day too many,” she added.

Mr Lumumba spent more than a week in jail after being implicated by Ms Knox, before being cleared of any involvement in the crime.

Ms Knox spent nearly four years in an Italian prison after being wrongfully convicted of murdering fellow exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007.

On 1 November 2007, Ms Kercher was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in the apartment they shared.

Rudy Guede was convicted of the sexual assault and murder of Ms Kercher in 2008. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison which was later cut down to 16 years. He was released from prison in November 2021, the BBC reported.

Ms Knox and her Italian boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito, were separately convicted of Ms Kercher’s murder in 2009 and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before their convictions were overturned. Their final acquittal came in March 2015.

Ms Knox married Christopher Robinson in 2020 and the couple had their first baby in 2021. In August of this year, Ms Knox posted a photo of her baby bump on Instagram announcing they were expecting a second baby.