ROME (AP) – Italy’s Supreme Court heard Amanda Knox’s appeal on Thursday, offering her last chance to clear the last vestiges of her criminal wrongdoing. conviction for defamation He was accused of being falsely accused in the 2007 murder of a Congolese bar owner. british flatmate.
But her innocent accuser, Patrick Lumbumba, told reporters outside Italy’s Court of Cassation that he hoped he would be found guilty and “spend the rest of his life with her”.
Both sides presented their case in a two-hour hearing, and the high court is expected to begin deliberations later Thursday, but it is unclear when a decision will be announced.
The verdict ends a sensational 17-year legal saga in which Knox and her Italian ex-girlfriend were found guilty and acquitted of the brutal murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher. It should be. was exonerated by the Supreme Court of Cassation in 2015.
The libel conviction against Knox was the final legal stain on her. The case survived multiple appeals and Knox was re-convicted in June, paving the way for a new trial after the European Court of Justice ruled that Italy had violated her human rights.
“As always, I have confidence and respect for the justice system,” said Knox, who was watching the verdict from home. She is confident that this story will end today,” her lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova told reporters.
“I hate the fact that I have to live with the consequences of a crime I didn’t commit,” Knox recently said on the Labyrinth podcast.
Her lawyers have accused Lumumba, who hired her at a bar in Perugia, a university city in central Italy, of giving her false information during a long night interrogation and under pressure from police. he claimed. The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and instead provided her with an interpreter to act as an intermediary.
“I’ve had nightmares about getting a bad sentence and living with a shadow for the rest of my life. It’s like a scarlet letter,” Knox said on the podcast.
Even if the High Court upholds the conviction and three-year sentence, Ms. Knox will not risk further imprisonment. She had already served nearly four years in prison for the investigation, her first murder trial, and her first appeals trial. Ms Knox said the aim was to clear the name of all criminal activity.
“Living with false beliefs is personally, psychologically and emotionally terrifying,” she said on the podcast. “I’m fighting it and we’ll see what happens.”
Mr. Knox returned to the United States in 2011 after being released by the Perugia Court of Appeals and established himself as a global campaigner for the wrongfully convicted. She has a podcast with her husband and has a new memoir coming out titled “Free: My Search for Meaning.”
Ms Knox returned to Italy in June for the verdict in her defamation case, and Ms Dalla Vedova said at the time that she was “very upset” by the conviction.
Knox was a 20-year-old student in Perugia, a university city in central Italy, when Karcher was found stabbed to death in the bedroom of the apartment he shared with two Italian women on November 2, 2007.
The incident made global headlines and immediately drew suspicions to Knox’s boyfriend, Rafael Sollecito. After an eight-year trial that included two appeals to Italy’s highest court, he was completely acquitted of the murder charge in 2015.
The other man is Rudy Hermann GuedeThe Ivory Coast native was convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was released in 2021 after serving most of his 16-year sentence.
The European Court of Justice ordered Italy to pay Ms Knox damages for police mismanagement, saying she was particularly vulnerable as an international student who was not fluent in Italian.
The Italian High Court ordered a new defamation trial based on that decision. The court threw out two signed statements drafted by the police who falsely accused Ms Lumumba of murder, telling the Court of Appeal that the only evidence it could consider was the statement she later made in English when she tried to withdraw the charges. It was a handwritten letter.
However, the Court of Appeals inference He said the four-page memo supports the defamation case.
Based on Knox’s statement, Lumumba was taken in for questioning, even though he had an ironclad alibi. His business suffered and he eventually moved to Poland with his Polish wife.
Arriving in court, he stressed that Knox had “never apologized to me.”
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Barry reported from Milan.
