Amanda Knox sentenced to three years in prison for slander against Patrick Lumumba

The Court of Assizes of Appeal of Florence has convicted Amanda Knox to three years’ imprisonment for slander towards Patrick Lumumbain the context of the legal case for the murder of the English student Meredith Kercher, occurred in Perugia on the evening of 1 November 2007.

The sentence was read today, Wednesday 5 June, by the president of the judging panel, Anna Maria Sacco, in the presence of the accused, who arrived specially from the United States with her husband Christopher Robinson. However, Lumumba, the offended party in the trial, was absent.

Even if the verdict were to become final, after a possible next passage in the Supreme Court, the 36-year-old American citizen he wouldn’t go to prison anyway having already served almost four years before being acquitted on appeal together with Raffaele Sollecito for the Kercher crime.

“Amanda is a lot embittered, thought he’d make a point after all these years. We will read the reasons and then we will appeal the sentence to the Supreme Court“, Knox’s lawyers said at the end of the November 2007 hearing. The 36-year-old left the courtroom through a secondary exit, so as to avoid the cameras.

“The sentence is fair and deserved. I greet the court of Florence with much respect and honor for their professionalism. It’s true, we were friends with Amanda Knox, but you don’t stab friends in the back and Amanda stabbed me. He stabbed me and didn’t apologize,” he said instead Lumumba after the sentence in Florence.

After the sentence came the comment from Raphael reminder: “I have always said and reiterated that our rights were violated during those interrogations and the fact that you accused a third person was resulting from the error and to the attitude of the investigators who did not respect any rules or any of our rights in the slightest. I’m sorry about this epilogue“.

Amanda Knox: “I didn’t want to accuse him, he was my friend”

Knox had arrived this morning by taxi, accompanied by her husband Christopher, and had appeared with bob hair, a pink t-shirt, a blue skirt, a relaxed face and had waited for the start of the hearing on the defense benches speaking with her spouse and her defenders, the lawyers Carlo Dalla Vedova And Luca Luparia Donati.

During the hearing he had also released spontaneous statements. “I would never have testified against Patrick, as the police wanted. I didn’t know who the killer was. Patrick was not only my boss at work, but also my friend. I had no interest in accusing an innocent friend. Patrick taught me to speak Italian, he took care of me. Before the arrest, he consoled me for the loss of my friend. I’m sorry that I wasn’t strong enough to resist police pressure and that he suffered as a result,” the 36-year-old said.

“I was a 20-year-old girl scared, deceived, mistreated by the police. November 5, 2007 was the worst night of my life. A few days earlier my friend Meredith had been killed in the house we shared. I was shocked, it was a moment of existential crisis. The police interrogated me for hours in a language I didn’t know. They refused to believe me liar, but I was just terrified. – added Knox – I didn’t understand why they treated me this way, threatening to give me a 30 year sentence if I didn’t remember every detail. A policeman smacked me on the head and said, ‘Remember.’ I humbly ask the Court to declare myself innocent.”

The 3-year sentence annulled by the Supreme Court and the new trial

The Court was called upon to determine whether or not Knox was responsible for slander against Lumumba, after the Supreme Court had annulled the three year sentence postponing the proceedings to evaluate the configurability of the crime in relation only to the memorial written by the former American student at the police station in Perugia during the phases of her arrest (it was then definitively acquitted for the crime to which she has always proclaimed herself a stranger).

The Florentine judges ruled that at the time Amanda made Lumumba one of the suspects for Meredith’s murder guilty, but to find out the reasons for the sentence you will have to wait 90 days. The young woman called her then employer into question several times in a memorial written on 6 November 2007. Lumumba remained in prison for 14 days and was then acquitted: no traces of him were ever found in the crime house and the testimony of a Swiss professor confirmed that on the evening of the crime he he was at work in his pubwhere Amanda was a waitress.

In the previous hearing on 10 April, the Attorney General Ettore Squillace Greco had requested the confirmation of the three-year sentence, however already served with the almost four years spent in prison before being acquitted on appeal. According to her defenders, Amanda Knox was instead “a victim” of the “violation of her defense rights” and of the “media trial” and therefore should be acquitted.

Patrick Lumumba

During the hearing, audio and video recordings were prohibited, as decided by the president of the Court of Appeal, Alexander Nencini. “No audio or video recordings are permitted of the trial relating to Amanda Knox both inside the hearing room and in the other common parts of the Palace of Justice of Florence, with the sole exception of the area of ​​the central nave of the Palace itself”, he explained in a statement.

“Given the numerous requests for authorization for television filming, having consulted the president of the College, Anna Maria Sacco, the requests cannot be accepted due to the need to do not jeopardize the peaceful conduct of the hearing and the decision“, he added.

The murder of Meredith Kercher

Meredith Kercher and the house where she was killed

On November 1, 2007, 22-year-old Meredith Kercher, an English student in Italy, came found slaughtered in the house where she lived with some roommates (one of whom was Knox), in via della Pergola, a Perugia. Knox, together with Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend at the time, came convicted of the Kercher crime in the first degree in Perugia and acquitted on appeal thus being released from prison.

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in a photo taken immediately after the discovery of Kercher’s body

But the sentence was annulled by the Supreme Court which ordered a new trial celebrated in Florence and ended with a new conviction, which was then definitively annulled without postponement by the Supreme Court which made the acquittal definitive. For the murder of the English student theonly one convicted at 16 years old in competition (with an abbreviated procedure) was Rudy Guede.