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The court heard Wednesday that Knox wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part-time, of the murder. But she will not serve any more time in prison, given that the three-year sentence is considered time already served.
Knox, who returned to Italy for only the second time since she was released in 2011 to take part in the trial, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud.
But her lawyer, Carlo della Vedova, said shortly afterwards that “Amanda is very bitter”.
Knox had written on social media before the hearing that she hoped to “clear her name once and for all of the false accusations against me. Wish me luck.”
The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Solecito.
Failed verdicts in nearly eight years of legal proceedings divided trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic, while the case was hotly debated on social media, then in its infancy.
Knox’s retrial was determined by a European court ruling that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of interrogation days after Kercher’s murder, deprived of both a lawyer and a competent interpreter.
Earlier in the hearing, Knox asked the eight Italian judges and a civil jury to acquit her of the defamation charge.
In a soft and sometimes testy voice, Knox had told the court that she had wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba under heavy police pressure.
“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to withstand the pressure of the police,” Knox told the panel in a nine-minute prepared statement, sitting next to them on the jury bench.
“I didn’t know who the killer was. I had no way of knowing.”
The case continues to attract intense media attention, with photographers swarming around Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson and their legal team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing.
A camera hit her on the left temple, her lawyer Luca Luparia Donati said. Knox’s husband examined a small bump on her head as they sat courtside.
Despite Knox’s acquittal and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose fingerprints and DNA were found at the crime scene, doubts about her role persist, particularly in Italy. This was largely due to the accusation she made against Lumumba.
Knox is now a 36-year-old mother of two young children. She returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after four years in prison, by an appeals court in Perugia that overturned the original guilty verdict in the murder case against Knox and Solecito.
She remained in the United States through two more false convictions before Italy’s highest court finally acquitted the couple of the murder in March 2015, saying categorically that they did not commit the crime.
In the fall, Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation threw out a five-trial defamation conviction, ordering a new trial, thanks to a 2022 Italian judicial reform that allows cases that have reached a final verdict to be re-examined if found human rights violations.
This time the court was ordered to disregard two damaging statements written by police and signed by Knox at 1.45am and 5.45am while she was being held for questioning overnight in the early hours of November 6, 2007.
In the depositions, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher yelling and implicated Lumumba in the killing.
Hours later, still in custody around 1 p.m., she asked for pen and paper and wrote her own statement in English, casting doubt on the version she had signed.
“Regarding this ‘confession’ I made last night, I want to make it clear that I am very doubtful of the truth of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” she wrote.
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