CNN
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Italy’s high court has upheld the remainder of the sentence against American Amanda Knox, who was jailed and later acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Crutcher.
Knox was convicted of defamation by falsely accusing his former boss Patrick Lumumba of Kircher’s murder. Knox, then 20, signed two statements prepared by the police regarding his accusation against Lumumba. He later wrote a handwritten note questioning her false accusation.
Lumumba was arrested after Knox’s accusation and spent two weeks in jail until police released him due to a lack of forensic evidence. He blamed the arrest for losing his club Le Chic, which closed shortly after.
In a lengthy legal saga, Knox and her then-boyfriend Rafael Sollecito were convicted of Kircher’s murder after her body was found in the student apartment she shared with Knox in Puglia. . Both were acquitted, then convicted again before being definitively acquitted in 2015.
However, the slander conviction remained. Knox appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in 2023 that her rights had been violated during the 2007 investigation that led to her false accusation against Lumumba.
In June 2024, a court in Florence upheld the slander conviction, leading to a hearing at the High Court on Thursday.
Knox, who attended the June 2024 hearing but did not attend Thursday’s high court session, posted a lengthy thread on X outlining his side of the story, including that How the police were “never held accountable for the crimes committed against me behind closed doors.”
That too wrote“I will have to say more about this tomorrow and Friday, when I will process what happens, whether I am eventually acquitted or whether Italy continues to accuse me of abuse by the Perugia police. Stay tuned.”
Lumumba, who attended Thursday’s hearing, told reporters as he entered court that Knox “never apologized to me.”
Speaking outside court after the verdict, Lumumba said he was “very satisfied” with the verdict, according to Reuters. “Amanda did wrong, this sentence should live with her for the rest of her life. I had a good feeling about it since the afternoon. I welcome Italian justice with great honor,” he said.
During the June hearing, Knox told the two-judge six-jury panel that he regretted not having sought to withdraw the charges against Lumumba sooner, but insisted that he had not tried to withdraw the charges against him when he accused him. So she was “a teenager in an existential crisis.” “I didn’t know who the killer was,” she told the court.
Knox faces no additional prison time.
