Amanda Knox wasn’t coerced but ‘freely’ accused a bar owner in roommate’s murder, Italian court says

MILAN (AP) — Amanda Knox’s hand-written memo on the heart of her newest retrial for falsely accusing a Congolese bar proprietor within the 2007 homicide of her British housemate contained sufficient parts for her to be reconvicted of slander in June, an Italian appeals court docket stated Friday.

The slander conviction is the one one remaining towards her lengthy after Knox was definitively exonerated of the homicide, and he or she traveled to Florence in June hoping to take away the final authorized stain towards her — solely to be convicted once more.

Knox’s hand-written doc was the one piece of proof the Florence appellate court docket was to look at after Italy’s supreme court docket threw out two signed statements falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher within the Italian college city of Perugia.

The very best court docket’s ruling adopted a discovering by a European court docket that Knox’s rights had been violated throughout a protracted night time of questioning.

“The manuscript was written spontaneously and freely, because the accused confirmed in the middle of her examination,″ the Florence appellate court docket stated in a 35-page doc that gave its reasonings for the June conviction. The court docket stated that the memo contained “the target particulars of the crime of slander.”

Knox’s hand-written doc was an try and stroll again the accusations towards Lumumba.

“I’m very uncertain of the verity of the statements as a result of they have been made beneath the stress of stress, shock and excessive exhaustion,” Knox wrote.

She wrote that she had been stress and instructed she confronted 30 years in jail whereas being questioned in a single day and went on to repeat parts of her accusation towards Lumumba, underlining, “these items appear unreal to me, like a dream, and I’m uncertain if they’re actual issues that occurred, or are simply desires my thoughts has made to attempt to reply the questions in my head and the questions I’m being requested.”

The European Court docket of Human Rights in 2019 ordered Italy to pay Knox damages for failing to supply a lawyer or an impartial interpreter throughout the prolonged night time of questioning throughout which she signed the 2 statements fingering Lumumba.

Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, confirmed that Knox would enchantment the ruling to Italy’s highest court docket, saying the enchantment court docket’s reasonings “are geared toward lowering the burden of the European Court docket of Human Rights, for which Italy paid damages for the confirmed hurt to Amanda Knox.”

Kercher’s brutal stabbing demise within the idyllic Perugia fueled international headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old trade pupil from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of only a week, Raffaele Sollecito.

Flip-flop verdicts over almost eight years of authorized proceedings polarized trial watchers on either side of the Atlantic. The pair have been absolutely exonerated by Italy’s highest court docket in 2015.

Rudy Hermann Guede, a person from Ivory Coast whose DNA was discovered on the crime scene, has been definitively convicted in Kercher’s homicide. He was launched from jail in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year time period.