Amanda Knox has one last chance to clear her name of slander before Italy’s highest court

ROME (AP) — Amanda Knox has one last chance to clear her name of the last vestige of criminal wrongdoing when Italy’s top court hears her appeal Thursday from a conviction for slander for falsely accusing a Congolese bar owner of his murder in 2007 British roommate.

But the innocent man she accused, Patrick Lumbumba, told reporters outside Italy’s Court of Cassation that he hoped the conviction would stand and “stay with her for the rest of her life.”

The ruling is expected to end a sensational 17-year legal saga that saw Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend convicted and acquitted in volatile verdicts in the brutal murder of Meredith Kercher, 21, before being exempt by the highest Court of Cassation in 2015.

The slander conviction against Knox remained the last legal stain against her. The case survived several appeals and Knox was convicted again on the charge in June after a European Court ruling that Italy had violated his human rights paved the way for a retrial.

Amanda watches the verdict at home, “confident and respectful of the justice system as she always has been.” She is convinced that this story will end today,” her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, told the press.

Knox recently said on his podcast “Labyrinths” that “I hate the fact that I have to suffer the consequences of a crime I didn’t commit.”

Her defense team says she accused Lumumba, who employed her at a bar in the central Italian university town of Perugia, during a long night of interrogation and under pressure from the police. police, who they claimed had provided him with false information. The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and provided her with a translator who instead acted as a mediator.

“I had nightmares about facing a bad verdict and living the rest of my life with a shadow looming over me. It’s like a scarlet letter,” Knox said on his podcast.

Even if the High Court upholds the conviction and three-year sentence, Knox no longer faces prison time. She has already served nearly four years during the investigation, the first murder trial and the first appeal. Knox said the goal was to clear his name of any criminal wrongdoing.

“Living with a false belief is horrible, personally, psychologically and emotionally,” she said on the podcast. “I’m fighting and we’ll see what happens.”

Knox returned to the United States in 2011, after being released by an appeals court in Perugia, and established herself as a global activist on behalf of the wrongly convicted. She has a podcast with her husband and has a new memoir coming out called “Free: My Search for Meaning.”

Knox returned to Italy in June for the verdict in the defamation trial, and Dalla Vedova said at the time that she was “very embittered” by the conviction.

Knox was a 20-year-old student in the central Italian university town of Perugia when Kercher was found stabbed to death on November 2, 2007, in her bedroom of the apartment they shared with two Italian women .

The case made headlines around the world as suspicion quickly fell on Knox and her boyfriend of just a few days, Rafaelle Sollecito. After eight years of trial, including two appeals before Italy’s highest court, they were completely exonerated of the murder committed in 2015.

Another man, Rudy Hermann Guédé from Ivory Coast, was convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was released in 2021, having served most of his 16-year sentence.

The European court ordered Italy to pay damages to Knox for police failings, noting that she was particularly vulnerable as a foreign student not fluent in Italian.

The Italian High Court ordered a new defamation trial based on this ruling. He rejected two signed statements written by police falsely accusing Lumumba of the murder and ordered the appeal court that the only evidence it could consider was a handwritten letter she later wrote in English in an attempt to return to the accusation.

However, the court of appeal, in its reasoning said the four-page memo supported a finding of defamation.

Based on Knox’s statements, Lumumba was questioned, despite an ironclad alibi. His business suffered and he eventually moved to Poland with his Polish wife.

Arriving in court, he stressed that Knox “never apologized to me.”

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Barry reported from Milan.