MILAN (AP) — Amanda Knox’s handwritten memo at the center of her latest review process The Italian appeals court ruled Friday that a Congolese bar owner’s conviction for falsely accusing her of murdering her British housemate in 2007 contained sufficient evidence to warrant a new defamation conviction in June.
The libel conviction is the only one left against her, long after Knox was convicted. finally acquitted of the murderand in June she traveled to Florence hoping to have the last legal stain removed from her reputation, but she was again convicted.
Knox’s handwritten document was the only piece of evidence the appeals court in Florence wanted to examine after Italy’s Supreme Court rejected two signed statements wrongly accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher in the Italian university town of Perugia.
The high court’s ruling followed a European court ruling that Knox’s rights had been violated during a long night of questioning.
“The manuscript was written spontaneously and freely, as the defendant confirmed during her interrogation,” the Florence appeals court said in a 35-page document setting out the grounds for the charges. June convictionThe court said the memo contained “the objective details of the offence of defamation”.
Knox’s handwritten document was an attempt to overturn the charges against Lumumba.
“I have serious doubts about the veracity of the statements, as they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” Knox wrote.
She wrote that she had been pressured and faced 30 years in prison while being interrogated all night. She then repeated elements of her accusation against Lumumba, underlining: “These things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am not sure if they are real things that have happened, or if they are just dreams that my mind has created to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions that are being asked of me.”
The European Court of Human Rights In 2019, Italy was ordered to pay damages to Knox for failing to provide a lawyer or independent interpreter during the long night of interrogation during which she signed the two statements identifying Lumumba.
Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, confirmed that Knox… appeal the ruling to Italy’s highest courtand said the appeals court’s reasoning “aims to diminish the weight of the European Court of Human Rights, to which Italy paid compensation for proven damage to Amanda Knox.”
Kercher’s brutal stabbing in idyllic Perugia made headlines around the world as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito.
Varying verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarized observers on both sides of the Atlantic. The pair were fully acquitted by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivorian man whose DNA was found at the crime scene, has been definitively convicted of Kercher’s murder. He was released from prison in 2021 after serving 13 years for a term of 16 years.
