Amanda Knox faces slander retrial in Florence over false accusation against Patrick Lumumba
Amanda Knox stood trial in Florence on Wednesday over a slander charge for falsely accusing Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher. Knox is not expected to appear in person and is being tried in absentia.
Knox back in Italian court over slander charge linked to Kercher murder
Amanda Knox returned to the Italian legal system on Wednesday as a Florence court opened proceedings against her on a charge of slander — the one conviction that survived years of overturned verdicts in the Meredith Kercher murder case, cbsnews.com reports.
Kercher, a British student, was found dead in her bedroom in Perugia in 2007. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed multiple times. Knox, then 20, shared the apartment with Kercher while both were studying abroad in Italy.
Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of the murder and portrayed by prosecutors as having killed Kercher during a sex game gone wrong. After years of legal proceedings and intense global media coverage, both were ultimately exonerated by Italy's highest court in 2015.
The slander conviction, however, remained. Knox was found guilty of falsely naming Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba — her part-time employer in Perugia — as Kercher's killer. It is that charge which is now before the court in Florence.
The accusation against Lumumba came during a gruelling interrogation that stretched across 53 hours, conducted without a lawyer or official translator present. Police transcribed Knox's statements, which she then signed.
Knox moved quickly to retract. Within hours she produced a handwritten, four-page statement in English expressing serious doubt about what she had said. "In regards to this 'confession' that I made last night, I want to make clear that I'm very doubtful of the veritity [sic] of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion," she wrote. "Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn't remember a fact correctly."
She described having "flashes of blurred images" of Lumumba in her mind, but said: "These things seem unreal to me, like a dream," adding that she was left "unsure if they are real things that happened or are just dreams my mind has made to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions I am being asked."
In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Knox's rights had been violated during the interrogation. Italy's highest court subsequently annulled the slander conviction at the request of her lawyers and ordered the retrial now under way. The court also ruled that the police-transcribed testimony would be inadmissible; only Knox's handwritten note may be presented as evidence.
Knox is being tried in absentia. Her attorney Carlo Dalla Vedova told Italian news outlets that she remained in the United States, as "she is busy taking care of her two young children, one of whom was born recently."
Lumumba, who spent two weeks in jail despite having a solid alibi, has since left Italy. The prosecutor asked the court on Wednesday to uphold the slander conviction and impose a three-year sentence. Even a guilty verdict would carry no additional prison time for Knox, as the time she already served in Italy on the since-overturned murder conviction is considered sufficient.
A third defendant in the original case, Rudy Guede — whose footprints and DNA were found throughout the crime scene — was convicted of murdering Kercher in 2008. He served 13 years before being released in 2021.
Source: Google News MT — Crime (en)