When Italy’s highest court docket exonerated Amanda Knox of homicide in 2015, the majority of her grownup life had been consumed by a authorized saga that started throughout her time as a research overseas scholar in Perugia, Italy. That odyssey quietly continued, nonetheless, for one more decade, culminating this week in that very same court docket upholding her conviction—not for homicide, however for slander.
In 2007, Italian authorities accused Knox, a 20-year-old from Seattle, Washington, of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor mentioned was a weird intercourse sport gone awry. The proof invoked in opposition to her, which included mishandled DNA, was spurious from the outset. Most significantly, it included a extremely coerced confession, throughout which she implicated her boss on the time—one thing that may come to canine her not solely throughout her trial however for years after.
Following Kercher’s homicide, legislation enforcement took little time zeroing in on Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s boyfriend of 1 week, regardless of that the DNA proof went on to overwhelmingly implicate Rudy Guede, who in the end served 13 years. Throughout her 53-hour interrogation, Knox was slapped, screamed at over the course of a number of days in a language she didn’t communicate fluently, and was not permitted to go to the restroom when she obtained her interval. She was made to imagine, she says, that she had repressed recollections of the homicide, which she wanted to unearth if she needed to assist police and see her household once more.
“Lots of people prefer to suppose that, in the event that they have been in my footwear, nothing in need of being crushed with a rubber hose or dangled out a window would get them to implicate themselves or others in against the law that they knew they have been harmless of,” she advised me late final 12 months on The Purpose Interview. “Clearly, the analysis speaks in any other case. However talking from private expertise, I can let you know that I’ve by no means been put ready of doubting my very own sanity like I used to be within the arms of these law enforcement officials.”
After legislation enforcement continued demanding she furnish a narrative, she finally named somebody: Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a bar she labored at part-time, who was arrested and spent two weeks behind bars earlier than an alibi set him free. Although Knox’s 2009 homicide conviction was overturned in 2011 and thrown out for good in 2015, she was reconvicted of slandering Lumumba in June of final 12 months, which the Rome-based Court docket of Cassation has now allowed to face. The European Court docket of Human Rights had beforehand dominated in Knox’s favor, saying police violated her rights by declining to offer her a lawyer and using an insufficient translator.
Slander underneath Italian legislation is just not utterly analogous to the U.S. “After I signed these statements, and it turned out that my boss clearly was utterly harmless and had nothing to do with this crime, even after I retracted these statements, I used to be accused of getting maliciously and deliberately slandered him with a purpose to divert the course of justice,” Knox, who spent 4 years in jail after her 2007 arrest, advised me. “I used to be discovered responsible of that crime, and I used to be sentenced to 3 years in jail for that crime. And technically, in Italy, they are saying that I served rightfully three years in jail for the end result of that interrogation.” In different phrases, legislation enforcement officers obtained what they’d insisted on on the expense of the reality—a confession. After which they efficiently prosecuted her for giving it to them.
Coerced confessions are a leading cause of exonerations, one thing youthful persons are disproportionately weak to, and which Knox has made a focus of her advocacy post-release. The results can comply with a defendant for all times—the rationale why she says preventing this explicit cost mattered to her.
However Knox now not feels the necessity to place that very same burden on herself when exterior of the courtroom. “I’ve given myself the grace to not really feel the burden of getting to clarify myself to each single particular person on the market,” she says. “That is largely on account of having met different wrongly convicted individuals. Earlier than I did, I felt this horrendous impediment of, ‘If I’ll belong to humanity once more, I’ve to clarify myself to each single particular person,’ and I’ve given up on that horrific, unattainable process. I don’t really feel compelled to do this.”
