Italy’s top court overturned Amanda Knox’s slander conviction on Friday. A new trial will take place in Florence.
Amanda Knox is set to be tried again in court for falsely implicating a bar owner in the 2007 murder of her then-flatmate, 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher, in Perugia.
On 1 November 2007, Kercher was found dead on the floor of her bedroom with 47 stab wounds. Knox was initially convicted of being involved in her murder together with her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. The two were eventually acquitted in 2015 after a years-long, messy investigation. Both Kercher and Sollecito spent four years in jail for the murder before being acquitted.
In 2011, when she was initially freed on appeal, Knox had returned to her family home in the United States. Also in 2011, Knox was found guilty of slandering Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese national who owned a nearby bar. She accused him of breaking into her home, sexually assaulting Kercher, and killing her.
In 2019, Knox appealed this decision on the basis of the European Court of Human Rights’s ruling which ordered Italy to pay her €18,400 for failing to provide her with a lawyer and an interpreter while she was detained.
An Ivorian man, Rudy Guede, was finally found guilty of murdering Kercher in 2008. He was sentenced to spend 16 years in prison and freed in November 2021, after serving 13 years of his sentence.
New ruling
In a new ruling on Friday, the Court of Cassation in Rome – Italy’s top court – accepted her appeal, overturning her conviction for slander against Lumumba and ordering a new trial in Florence.
Amanda Knox is pleased with this turn of events as she commented on Twitter. “I’m on trial in Italy again…and this is a good thing
“As everyone knows on March 2017 2015, the Court of Cassation definiteively acquitted me and Raffaele Sollecito of the murder of Meredith kercher, per non aver commesso il fatto – for not having committed the act.”
Knox also messaged on X (formerly Twitter), “One reason I’m still fighting to fully clear my name is that the media still refers to the brutal coercive interrogation I was put through as me “pointing the finger” at someone else. No. The police implicated someone else through me.” This was referring to an article by the UK’s Independent newspaper.
Carlo Pacelli, Lumumba’s lawyer has explained to Italian media that Knox, if found guilty in the new trial, will not be given another, longer sentence. He also stated his client had not been contacted at any point in the legal process that led to the cassation court’s decision on Friday. “So there will be another trial but nobody has notified him,” said Pacelli.