Amanda Knox criticised an appeals court in Florence via X for convicting her of calumny for accusing Patrick Lumumba in connection with the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia.
Knox stated, “I was unequivocally not at home when Meredith was killed, I was not involved, and I don’t know anything more than what the evidence shows.” Following the court’s release of the sentence’s motivation, she expressed her intention to appeal the conviction to Italy’s Supreme Court, vowing, “Don’t worry: I will be back” to “fight this thing.”
In June, the appeals court upheld Knox’s conviction in the calumny case. The court’s reasoning was that Knox “unjustly” accused Lumumba, who was innocent, of Kercher’s murder to “extricate herself from a difficult situation.” The judges noted that Knox’s accusation was made “spontaneously and freely,” as confirmed by her own statements.
The court further asserted that Knox “was inside the house when the murder occurred and knew well” that Lumumba “wasn’t there.” They referenced Meredith Kercher’s “harrowing scream” at the time of her murder, stating that it was a “real fact” and accurately described in Knox’s account, which they deemed “true.” The court reiterated that Knox “was fully aware of Lumumba’s innocence” because she “was present in the house during the murder.”
Identification of Lumumba as Kercher’s assailant
This case involves a three-year sentence that Knox has already served for falsely accusing Lumumba. Initially, Knox identified Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, in connection with Kercher’s murder on November 1, 2007, in Perugia. Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were initially convicted of the crime, serving nearly four years in prison before their convictions were overturned.
Now 36 and a writer, Knox has filed an appeal to annul the calumny conviction, citing a European Court of Human Rights ruling that her defence rights were violated during the initial investigation. The Supreme Court overturned the previous conviction last October, ordering a retrial.
Knox and Sollecito were arrested five days after the murder and were convicted by a lower court. However, this conviction was overturned, and after a series of appeals, they were re-convicted in 2014 before being definitively acquitted by the Supreme Court in 2015. Rudy Guede, an Ivorian national, was convicted and sentenced to 16 years for the murder and was released from prison in November 2021 after serving 13 years.
