Amanda Knox to return court to defend herself against slander charge (2024)

Amanda Knox is set to return to a familiar Italian courtroom this week for the first time in over 12 years to defend herself against a 16-year-old slander conviction.

Knox, 36, will return to court on Wednesday for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar owner,Patrick Lumumba, of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in November 2007, while the young women were exchange students in Italy.

'On June 5th, I will walk into the very same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I didn't commit, this time to defend myself yet again,' she wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday.

'I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.'

Knox is able to attempt to defend herself against the slander charge asa European court ruled that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of questioning after the murder of Kercher.

The slander conviction for accusing Lumumba in the murder is the only charge against Knox that withstood five court rulings that ultimately cleared her in the brutal murder of her roommate, Kercher, 21, in the apartment they shared in the idyllic central Italian university town of Perugia.

Kercher's body was found with her throat slit on November 2, 2007, in her locked bedroom in an apartment she shared with Knox and two other roommates.

A verdict in the slander case retrial ordered by Italy's highest court is expected on Wednesday, with Knox appearing in an Italian court for the first time in more than 12-and-a-half years.

Knox's 2007 accusation against Lumumba appeared in two statements typed by police that she signed during the early hours of November 6.

But these have now been ruled inadmissible in the new trial by Italy's highest court as it was found Knox had undergone extended questioning in Italian from police without a lawyer or a competent translator.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the conditions violated her human rights.

She recanted the accusation in a four-page handwritten note in English penned the following afternoon - the only evidence the court is able to rule on.

'In regards to this `confession´ that I made last night, I want to make it clear that I'm very doubtful of the verity of my statements, because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,' Knox said in a statement.

A pioneer of the study of false confessions, Sal Kassin, says Knox's signed statements follow a playbook of false confessions.

'It is empirical fact that most false confessions contain accurate details not yet known to the public and `false-fed facts´ that are consistent with the police theory of the crime, but that later prove to be untrue,' Kassin, a psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, wrote about the case in his book 'Duped,' which examines the phenomenon of false confessions.

Kassin said police 'contaminated' Knox´s confession, which aligned with police theory at the time.

'To hold her accountable for a statement in which she also implicated herself is absurd,' he wrote.

But despite Knox's attempts at walking back the accusation, Lumumba was picked up for questioning and held in jail for almost two weeks after she said she had 'covered her ears' while he slit the throat of her flat mate.

Lumumba was only released after a Swiss university professor came forward with a till receipt proving the father-of-two was at work and not involved in the crime.

Speaking to Italian media last year, Patrick, who now lives in Krawkow, Poland, with his partner and children, stormed: 'My life has literally been turned upside down.

'Amanda knew very well that I was innocent, but those few words that she said to the police on the morning of November 6, 2007, '... he killed her', destroyed me in a flash, eliminating the reputation I enjoyed in Perugia'.

Kercher's brutal murder grabbed worldwide attention as suspicion fell on Knox, then 20, and her then-Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, with whom she had been involved for just about a week.

Knox and Sollecito were convicted in their first trial, but after a series of flip-flop verdicts, they were ultimately exonerated by Italy´s highest court in 2015.

Knox returned to the United States in October 2011, after her first acquittal.

She is now the mother of two small children, and has a podcast with her husband while campaigning against wrongful convictions.

However, the slander conviction against Knox endured, a legal stain that continued to fuel doubts about her role in the killing, particularly in Italy - despite the conviction of Rudy Hermann Guede in 2008, a man from Ivory Coast whose DNA and footprints were found at the crime scene.

The burglar was convicted of murdering Kercher and he was sentenced to 30 years behind bars.

Guede's DNA was discovered on Kercher's body despite his claims that he was in the bathroom listening to music when she was killed.

Her body was found in her bedroom, partially undressed, with 47 stab wounds.

Now 36, Guede was released from prison in 2021after serving 13 years of a 16-year term handed down in a fast-track trialthat foresees lighter sentences under Italian law.

Guede wasrecently orderedto wear a monitoring bracelet and not leave his home at night after an ex-girlfriend accused him of physical and sexual abuse - an investigation is ongoing.