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Italy’s top court overturned Amanda Knox’s slander conviction on Friday, ordering a new trial in Florence.
ADVERTISEMENTAmanda Knox is set to be tried again in court for falsely implicating a bar owner in the 2007 murder of her then-flatmate, 21-year-old British student Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy.
On 1 November 2007, Kercher was found dead on the floor of her bedroom with 47 stab wounds.
Knox was initially accused of being involved in her murder together with Kercher’s boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, but the two were eventually acquitted in 2015 after a years-long, messy investigation.
Already in 2011, when she was initially freed on appeal, Knox had returned to her family home in the United States, from where she has since been defending her innocence.
But in 2011, Knox was found guilty of slandering Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese national who owned a nearby bar and whom she had accused of breaking into her home, sexually assaulting Kercher, and killing her. She was sentenced to three years in jail, which she had already served as the murder trial against her was ongoing.
In 2019, Knox appealed this decision on the basis of the European Court of Human Rights’s ruling which ordered Italy to pay her €18,400 for failing to provide her with a lawyer and an interpreter while she was detained.
In a new ruling on Friday, the Court of Cassation in Rome – Italy’s top court – accepted her appeal, overturning her conviction for slander against Lumumba and ordering a new trial in Florence.
Lumumba’s lawyer has explained to Italian media that Knox, if found guilty in the new trial, will not be given another, longer sentence.
An Ivorian man, Rudy Guede, was finally found guilty of murdering Kercher in 2008. He was sentenced to spend 16 years in prison and was freed in November 2021.
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