Rome — Amanda Knox, the American girl who spent practically 4 years in an Italian jail after being convicted in 2007 of murdering her school roommate Meredith Kercher as they each studied overseas, was again on trial in Italy on Wednesday.
Kercher, a British scholar, was discovered useless in her bed room within the condo she shared with Knox within the Italian metropolis of Perugia. She had been sexually assaulted and had a number of stab wounds.
Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have been convicted of the homicide and depicted by prosecutors through the trial as sexual miscreants who’d killed Kercher in a intercourse recreation that went awry. However after flip-flop verdicts and with worldwide media consideration, the 2 have been finally exonerated by a better courtroom in 2015.
One conviction in opposition to Knox nonetheless stands, nonetheless. She was discovered responsible of slander for falsely accusing Congolese bar proprietor Patrick Lumumba of killing Kercher. Knox labored part-time in Lumumba’s bar in Perugia. It’s that cost of slander that Knox is dealing with within the trial that opened Wednesday in Florence.
Shortly after Kercher’s homicide, Knox, then 20, was subjected to 53 hours of interrogation — with out a lawyer or official translator. Ultimately, throughout that course of, she accused Lumumba of killing Kercher. Police typed up the statements, which she signed.
Very quickly after, nonetheless, she wrote a hand-written, four-page assertion in English casting severe doubt on her testimony to the police.
“With regard to this ‘confession’ that I made final night time, I wish to clarify that I am very uncertain of the veritity [sic] of my statements as a result of they have been made beneath the pressures of stress, shock and excessive exhaustion. Not solely was I instructed I’d be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, however I used to be additionally hit within the head once I did not keep in mind a truth accurately,” she mentioned within the assertion. “It was beneath this strain and after many hours of confusion that my thoughts got here up with these solutions.”
She mentioned she had “flashes of blurred photographs” of Lumumba in her thoughts, however added: “This stuff appear unreal to me, like a dream,” and she or he was left “uncertain if they’re actual issues that occurred or are simply goals my thoughts has made to attempt to reply the questions in my head and the questions I’m being requested.”
In 2016, the European Court docket of Human Rights declared that Knox’s rights had been violated through the interrogation. On the request of Knox’s attorneys, Italy’s highest courtroom then annulled the slander conviction and ordered a retrial.
The courtroom additionally dominated then that the preliminary testimony typed up by the police can be inadmissible as proof within the retrial. Solely Knox’s handwritten word will be admitted as proof within the proceedings that opened Wednesday.
Knox is being tried in absentia and isn’t anticipated to look in particular person for the trial. Her lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova instructed Italian information shops that his consumer remained within the U.S., as “she is busy taking good care of her two younger youngsters, certainly one of whom was born just lately.”
After being accused by Knox, Lumumba spent two weeks in jail, regardless of having a stable alibi. He has since moved out of Italy.
The prosecutor requested the courtroom on Wednesday to substantiate the slander conviction and impose a penalty of three years, however even when she is convicted, Knox has already served enough time behind bars in Italy on the since-overturned homicide conviction to keep away from one other custodial sentence.
One other man, Rudy Guede — whose footprints and DNA have been discovered all around the crime scene — was convicted of murdering Kercher in 2008 and served 13 years in jail earlier than being launched in 2021.
Amanda Knox Homicide Case
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