FLORENCE, Italy — Amanda Knox returns to an Italian courtroom Wednesday for the primary time in additional than 12½ years to clear herself “as soon as and for all” of a slander cost that caught even after she was exonerated within the brutal 2007 homicide of her British roommate within the idyllic hilltop city of Perugia.
The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher fueled international headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old alternate scholar from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of only a week, Raffaele Sollecito. Flip-flop verdicts over practically eight years of authorized proceedings polarized trial watchers on either side of the Atlantic because the case was vociferously argued on social media, nonetheless in its infancy.
All these years later, regardless of Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA had been discovered on the scene, doubts about her position persist, significantly in Italy. That’s largely because of the accusation she made towards a Congolese bar proprietor who employed her half time, a declare that led to her being discovered responsible of slander.
Knox, now a 36-year-old mom of two babies, returns to Italy for less than the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after 4 years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court docket that overturned the preliminary responsible verdict within the homicide case towards each Knox and Sollecito.
She remained in america by way of two extra flip-flop verdicts earlier than Italy’s highest court docket definitively exonerated the pair of the homicide in March 2015, stating flatly that that they had not dedicated the crime.
“I’ll stroll into the exact same courtroom the place I used to be reconvicted of against the law I didn’t commit, this time to defend myself but once more,” Knox wrote on social media. “I hope to clear my title as soon as and for the entire false prices towards me. Want me luck.”
Knox’s day in court docket was set by a European court docket ruling that Italy violated her human rights throughout a protracted evening of questioning days after Kercher’s homicide, disadvantaged of each a lawyer and a reliable translator. Within the fall, Italy’s highest Cassation Court docket threw out the slander conviction that had withstood 5 trials, ordering a brand new trial, due to a 2022 Italian judicial reform permitting circumstances which have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are discovered.
This time, the court docket has been ordered to ignore two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. as she was held for questioning in a single day into the wee hours of Nov. 6, 2007. Within the statements, Knox mentioned she remembered listening to Kercher scream, and pointed to Patrick Lumumba, the proprietor of a bar the place she labored, for the killing.
Hours later, nonetheless in custody at about 1 p.m., she requested for pen and paper and wrote her personal assertion in English, questioning the model that she had signed.
“With regard to this ‘confession’ that I made final evening, I wish to clarify that I’m very uncertain of the verity of my statements as a result of they had been made beneath the stress of stress, shock and excessive exhaustion,” she wrote.
Regardless of the end result, Knox dangers no extra jail time. The 4 years she served earlier than the primary acquittal covers the three-year slander sentence.
