By In a surprising turn of events, an Italian court in Florence has re-convicted Amanda Knox of slander, upholding the only remaining conviction associated with the brutal murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007. The court sentenced Knox to three years for slandering Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, in a written statement following Kercher’s murder.
Knox, who had her 2009 murder conviction overturned in 2011, is not expected to serve the time, as she has already spent approximately four years in prison. The European Court of Human Rights had previously ruled in 2019 that Italian law enforcement violated Knox’s rights during questioning, leading to Italy throwing out her initial slander conviction. However, the country’s supreme court requested the Florence court to begin a new trial to determine whether slander had occurred in the note.
Accompanied by her husband, Christopher Robinson, with whom she shares two children, Knox arrived at the Florence court on Wednesday morning to attend the hearing. Speaking in Italian, with a voice that occasionally trembled, Knox made a 10-minute declaration before the court, explaining why she wrote the note naming Lumumba.
Knox emphasized that she had no intention of hurting Lumumba, whom she considered not only her employer but also a friend who had consoled her following her roommate’s death. She attributed naming him to exhaustion and confusion during an extensive police interrogation.
Prior to the hearing, Knox expressed her hope to clear her name once and for all of the false charges against her. She acknowledged that the hearing was taking place in the same courtroom where she had been previously reconvicted of a crime she didn’t commit.
Knox and her 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 before the country’s highest court definitively acquitted both Knox and Sollecito of murder in 2015. Rudy Hermann Guede, another individual involved in the case, was convicted and served 13 years for the murder before being released in 2021.
On social media, Knox had shared her statement, ending with the Italian idiom “Crepi il lupo!” which roughly translates to “May the wolf die,” a common way of wishing someone good luck.
