ROME — (AP) — Amanda Knox has a final shot at clearing her name of the last vestige of criminal wrongdoing when Italy's highest court on Thursday hears her appeal of a slander conviction for falsely accusing a Congolese bar owner in the 2007 murder of her British flatmate.
But the innocent man she accused, Patrick Lumbumba, told reporters outside Italy's Cassation Court that he hopes the conviction stands and “stays with her for the rest of her life.”
The ruling should bring an end to a sensational 17-year legal saga that saw Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in 21-year-old Meredith Kercher's brutal murder, before being exonerated by the highest Cassation Court in 2015.
The slander conviction against Knox remained the last legal stain against her. It survived multiple appeals, and Knox was reconvicted on the charge in June after a European court ruling that Italy had violated her human rights cleared the way for a new trial.
Amanda is watching the verdict at home “confident and respectful of the justice system as she always has been. She is confident that this story will end today,” her defense lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova told reporters.
Knox said recently on her “Labyrinths” podcast that “I hate the fact that I have to live consequences for a crime I did not commit.”
Her defense team says she accused Lumumba, who employed her at a bar in the central Italian university town of Perugia, during a long night of questioning and under pressure from police, who they said fed her false information. The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and provided a translator who acted more as a mediator.
“I’ve been having nightmares about getting a bad verdict and just living the rest of my life with a shadow hanging over me. It’s like a scarlet letter,’’ Knox said on her podcast.
Even if the high court upholds the conviction and three-year sentence, Knox does not risk any more time she jail. She has already served nearly four years during the investigation, initial murder trial and first appeal. Knox said the aim is to clear her name of all criminal wrongdoing.
“Living with a false conviction is horrific, personally, psychologically, emotionally,'' she said on the podcast. “I'm fighting it, and we'll see what happens.”
Knox returned to the United States in 2011, after being freed by an appeals court in Perugia, and has established herself as a global campaigner for the wrongly convicted. She has a podcast with her husband and has a new memoir coming out titled, “Free: My Search for Meaning.”
Knox returned to Italy in June for the verdict in the slander trial, and Dalla Vedova said at the time that she was “very embittered” by the conviction.
Knox was a 20-year-old student in the central Italian university town of Perugia when Kercher was found stabbed to death on Nov. 2, 2007, in her bedroom in the apartment they shared with two Italian women.
The case made global headlines as suspicion quickly fell on Knox and her boyfriend of just days, Rafaelle Sollecito. After eight years of trial, including two appeals to Italy’s highest court, they were fully exonerated in the murder in 2015.
Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede of the Ivory Coast, was convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was freed in 2021, after serving most of his 16-year sentence.
The European court ordered Italy to pay Knox damages for the police failures, noting she was particularly vulnerable as a foreign student not fluent in Italian.
Italy’s high court ordered the new slander trial based on that ruling. It threw out two signed statements drafted by police falsely accusing Lumumba in the murder, and directed the appellate court that the only evidence it could consider was a hand-written letter she later wrote in English attempting to walk back the accusation.
However, the appellate court in its reasoning said that the four-page memo supported a slander finding.
On the basis of Knox's statements, Lumumba was brought in for questioning, despite having an ironclad alibi. His business suffered, and he eventually moved to Poland with his Polish wife.
Arriving at court, he underlined that Knox “has never apologized to me.”
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Barry reported from Milan.
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