Amanda Knox Returns to Italian Court

American convicted, then cleared of murder, now is fighting a slander count
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 13, 2023 4:20 PM CDT
Amanda Knox Returns to Italian Court
Amanda Knox speaks at a Criminal Justice Festival at the University of Modena, Italy, in June 2019.   (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Amanda Knox, an American woman who spent four years in an Italian prison before her murder conviction in the slaying her roommate was overturned, is back in that country's court system. This time, she's trying to have a slander verdict tossed out in a retrial, the Guardian reports. "I'm on trial in Italy again ... and this is a good thing," Knox posted Friday on X. Prosecutors said Knox had wrongly accused a bar owner of killing Meredith Kercher; she was released on both convictions in 2011 after receiving a three-year sentence on the slander count.

Patrick Lumumba was released from jail after two weeks when a witness attested to an alibi for him. Knox's lawyers have said she made the accusation under police duress, without the help of a lawyer or interpreter. Knox posted that one reason she's fighting the slander conviction is that news media coverage portrays her as "pointing the finger" at another person. "No. The police implicated someone else through me," she wrote, per Yahoo News. The European Court of Human Rights found that her rights were violated at the time, so Italy's Court of Cassation agreed to the retrial. (The man subsequently convicted of killing Kercher was freed two years ago.)

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