The seemingly endless saga of Amanda Knox Italy’s murder case was in the spotlight again on Wednesday as she failed in her bid to clear her name from her latest conviction.
This week, Knox returned to the European country to overturn her 2009 defamation conviction after naming the wrong man as an accomplice to her roommate’s murder, Meredith Kercher.
But her efforts backfired as she was convicted again of slander in a court in Florence, Italy.
After the verdict was read, Knox burst into tears as the judge gave him a 3-year prison sentence, time already served. In other words, Knox can go home to the good old United States of America.
But her lawyer told NBC News she was “very surprised by the outcome of the decision and Amanda is very upset.”
You may remember 2007… Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecitowere initially charged with the fatal stabbing and sexual assault of Kercher in an apartment in Perugia, about 100 miles north of Rome.
Prosecutors speculated that the couple had butchered Kercher and slit her throat during violent sex, creating lurid international headlines.
Knox and Sollecito were ultimately convicted and each was sentenced to more than 20 years in Italian prisons.
Both men spent the next 4 years behind bars, while the courts continued to flip-flop on their convictions. They were finally exonerated in 2015 by the country’s highest court, the Supreme Court of Cassation.
Yet Knox faced a separate conviction for defamation after falsely accusing a local bar owner, Patrick Lumumba, of participation in the homicide of Kercher. During police interrogation, Knox made the accusation against Lumumba without a lawyer present and without a full understanding of the Italian language.
Meanwhile, in 2008, another suspect, Rudy Hermann Guédé, was linked to Kercher’s murder through DNA and convicted of this heinous crime. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison, but served 13 and was released in 2021.