On Wednesday, an Italian court re-convicted Amanda Knox for slander, the only charge which was still standing after she was previously exonerated in the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher while the pair were on exchange in Italy.
The court upheld the previous verdict that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part time, of the killing.
Knox had been sentenced in an earlier case to three years for wrongly accusing Patrick Lumumba.
However, she will not have to serve any more jail time, given the three-year sentence counts as time already served.
This retrial was approved after a European court ruled that Italy violated her human rights during an extensive night of questioning following the murder of her British roommate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, in November 2007 while the two were studying abroad in Perugia, Italy.
The slander charge was mainly based on two statements typed by police that Knox signed during the early hours of Nov. 6, 2007, following an extended period of questioning in Italian from police, without a lawyer or competent translator being present.
This one conviction has continued to raise doubts about her innocence, most prominently in Italy, despite Rudy Hermann Guede, a man from Ivory Coast whose DNA was detected at the crime scene, being found guilty of killing Kercher. Guede served 13 years of a 16-year prison sentence handed down after a fast-track trial that, under Italian law, may result in a lighter sentence.
Knox showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud.
Her lawyer, Carlo della Vedova, said shortly afterward that “Amanda is very embittered.”
She had spent four years in jail for the killing but that conviction was annulled in 2015.
About her previous trial for slander, Knox told the judge and jury ,”I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police.”
“I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know,” she added.
