Rome — Amanda Knoxthe American who spent nearly four years in an Italian prison after being convicted in 2007 of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher while they were both studying abroad, was on trial again in Italy on Wednesday.
Kercher, a British student, was found dead in her bedroom of the apartment she shared with Knox in the Italian city of Perugia. She was sexually assaulted and stabbed several times.
Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted of the murder and described by prosecutors during the trial as sexual miscreants who had killed Kercher in a sex game gone wrong. But after reversed verdicts and under worldwide media attention, both men were finally exonerated by a higher court in 2015.
A conviction against Knox, however, still stands. She was convicted of slander for falsely accusing Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba of killing Kercher. Knox worked part-time at the Lumumba bar in Perugia. It is this accusation of slander that weighs on Knox in the trial which opened Wednesday in Florence.
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Shortly after Kercher’s murder, Knox, then 20, was subjected to 53 hours of interrogation – without a lawyer or an official translator. Eventually, during this process, she accused Lumumba of killing Kercher. The police typed up the statements which she signed.
However, very soon after, she wrote a four-page handwritten statement in English, casting serious doubt on her police testimony.
“Regarding this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I would like to clarify that I very much doubt the veracity (sic) of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and “Extreme exhaustion. No, I was only told that I was going to be arrested and put in prison for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly,” said she declared in the press release. “It was under this pressure and after many hours of confusion that my mind came to these answers.”
She said she had “flashes of blurry images” of Lumumba in her mind, but added: “These things seem unreal to me, like a dream,” and she didn’t know if they were real things happening. are produced or if they are just dreams, my God. that I decided to try to answer the questions that I ask myself and the questions that people ask me.”
In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Knox’s rights had been violated during his interrogation. At the request of Knox’s lawyers, Italy’s highest court later overturned the defamation conviction and ordered a new trial.
The court also ruled that the initial testimony typed by police would not be admissible as evidence at the retrial. Only Knox’s handwritten note can be admitted as evidence in the proceedings which opened on Wednesday.
Knox is being tried in absentia and is not expected to appear in person at the trial. Her lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova told Italian media that his client remained in the United States because “she is busy taking care of her two young children, one of whom was born recently.”
After being accused by Knox, Lumumba spent two weeks in prison, despite a strong alibi. He has since left Italy.
The prosecutor asked the court Wednesday to uphold the defamation conviction and impose a three-year sentence, but even if convicted, Knox has already served enough time behind bars in Italy to avoid another prison term .
Another man, Rudy Guede – whose fingerprints and DNA were found all over the crime scene – was convicted of Kercher’s murder in 2008 and served 13 years in prison before being released in 2021.
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