PERUGIA, ITALY – OCTOBER 03: Amanda Knox enters Perugia’s Court of Appeal to learn that she won her appeal against her murder conviction on October 3, 2011 in Perugia, Italy. American student Amanda Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have won their appeal against their conviction in 2009 of killing their British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy in 2007. The pair had served nearly four years in jail after initially being sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
OAN’s Abril Elfi
1:42 PM – Tuesday, April 9, 2024
Amanda Knox is now facing a new trial in Italy regarding a prior conviction that was thrown out in relation to the murder of her previous roommate.
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In 2007, at the time of the murder, Knox was 20-years-old and was accused, along with her then-boyfriend, of killing her roommate Meredith Kechner, who was 21-years-old at the time.
Now, at 36-years-old, Knox is back in the United States where she has been campaigning for criminal justice reform and to raise awareness about forced confessions.
Despite the conviction of a man whose DNA was found at the scene, and the conclusive ruling by Italy’s Cassation Court in 2015 that decided Knox and her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito did not commit the crime, questions remain regarding Knox’s involvement, particularly in Italy.
That conviction was thrown out last November, due to a European Court of Human Rights ruling that found Knox’s rights had been violated in a long night of questioning without providing her a lawyer or an official translator.
“On the one hand, I am glad I have this chance to clear my name, and hopefully that will take away the stigma that I have been living with,’’ Knox said on her podcast Labyrinths in December. “On the other hand, I don’t know if it ever will, in the way I am still traumatized by it. I am sure people will still hold it against me because they don’t want to understand what happened, and they don’t want to accept that an innocent person can be gaslit and coerced into what I went through.”
She also stated that she expects to testify, but she is not expected in court for opening day.
Francesco Maresca, the attorney for the Kercher family, stated that, in his opinion, the high court’s acquittal did not significantly allay concerns in the wake of Knox’s conviction by a trial court and two appeals courts, which upheld her 26-year sentence and increased it to 28 ½ years.
Maresca listed his doubts, and among them listed Knox’s ambiguous retractions of her charges against Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar in the Congo, and the ruling in Rudy Guede’s murder conviction, which holds that the Ivorian man was not acting alone.
Guede, who is currently 36-years-old, was given a 16-year sentence that he served 13 years of before being released from prison in 2021, following a fast-track trial. After his ex-girlfriend accused him of abusing her physically and sexually, Guede was then ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet and stay inside his house at night. That investigation is still ongoing.
Only one piece of evidence will be admitted in Knox’s new trial: a four-page handwritten statement that she wrote. The court will review the statement to determine whether it contains “any evidence of Lumumba’s slander.”
Guede was detained for two weeks before being released.
The highest court in Italy has declared that two previous police-typed statements that Knox signed early on November 7th, 2007, which contained the accusation, were inadmissible.
The four-page letter exemplifies a “confused person” who was attempting to make sense of what the police had told her regarding her own memories, she claimed.
“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make 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 wrote.
Knox continued, referring to police statements that claimed she would be arrested and jailed for 30 years and that Sollecito was turning against her.
An Italian lawyer who founded the “Innocents Project,” Lauria Baldassare, said that the topic of wrongful convictions in Italy is starting to “create social alarm as it assumes important dimensions.” He continued by citing 10 cases of defendants who were paid damages for wrongful convictions over the last decade. Baldassare also mentioned how they faced difficulty in escaping the stigma of their initial guilty verdict.
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