Amanda Knox was re-convicted of slander by an Italian court on Wednesday, upholding the only conviction still standing in association with the brutal murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007. Knox was an American student living in Italy at the time of the murder of Kercher. She spent nearly four years in an Italian prison after she and then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were initially convicted of murder in 2009, a ruling that was overturned in 2011. She was again convicted of murder in 2014, after which the country’s highest court definitively acquitted her and Sollecito of murder in 2015. Rudy Hermann Guede was convicted and served 13 years for the murder; he was released in 2021.
Knox was re-convicted in Florence for wrongly accusing Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner she had been working for part-time in Perugia at the time of Kercher’s killing; however, she will not serve more jail time in Italy as her new three-year sentence has already been satisfied by time she served on the reversed murder conviction.
The European Court of Human Rights had ruled in 2019 that Italian law enforcement violated Knox’s rights during questioning, which led to Italy throwing out her slander conviction. The country’s supreme court then asked the Florence court to begin a new trial to decide whether there had been slander in the note.
Knox was accompanied by her husband, Christopher Robinson, with whom she shares two children, in court. The court said Knox would have to pay the legal fees of and damages to Lumumba, the sum of which is said to still to be determined. Knox’s lawyers said she would appeal Wednesday’s ruling, and they have 45 days to file their appeal with Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation in Rome. That court only rules on whether a lower court’s ruling has been reached in line with legal procedures, however, not on the merits of any particular case. The Florence court was to publish the reasoning for its decision within 60 days.
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