Amanda Knox Returns To Italian Court Over Slander Charge | EUROtoday

FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — In a comfortable and typically breaking voice, Amanda Knox requested eight Italian judges and jury members Wednesday to clear her of a slander cost that caught even after she was exonerated within the brutal 2007 homicide of her British roommate whereas the 2 have been alternate college students in Italy.

Knox instructed the courtroom that she wrongly accused an harmless man, the Congolese proprietor of the bar the place she labored half time, of the killing underneath intense police stress in in a single day questioning with out the advantage of a lawyer or competent translator.

“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,″ Knox told the panel in a 9-minute prepared statement, sitting alongside them on the jury bench. She told them: ”I didn’t know who the assassin was. I had no approach to know.”

The panel recessed to deliberate, and a choice shouldn’t be anticipated earlier than noon Wednesday.

The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher within the idyllic hilltop city of Perugia fueled international headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old alternate pupil from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of only a week, Raffaele Sollecito.

Flip-flop verdicts over practically eight years of authorized proceedings polarized trial watchers on either side of the Atlantic because the case was vociferously argued on social media, nonetheless in its infancy.

The case continues to attract intense media consideration, with photographers massing round Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson and their authorized crew as they entered the courtroom about an hour earlier than the listening to. A digital camera knocked her on the left temple, her lawyer Luca Luparia Donati stated. Knox’s husband examined a small bump on her head as they sat within the entrance row of the courtroom.

Despite Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA have been discovered on the scene, doubts about her function persist, notably in Italy. That is essentially as a result of accusation she made in opposition to Patrick Lumumba, an accusation that led to the slander conviction.

Knox, now a 36-year-old mom of two babies, returned to Italy for under the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after 4 years in jail, by a Perugia appeals courtroom that overturned the preliminary responsible verdict within the homicide case in opposition to each Knox and Sollecito.

She remained within the United States by means of two extra flip-flop verdicts earlier than Italy’s highest courtroom definitively exonerated the pair of the homicide in March 2015, stating flatly that they’d not dedicated the crime.

“I will walk into the very same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I didn’t commit, this time to defend myself yet again,” Knox wrote on social media. “I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”

Knox’s day in courtroom was set by a European courtroom ruling that Italy violated her human rights throughout a protracted evening of questioning days after Kercher’s homicide, disadvantaged of each a lawyer and a reliable translator. In the autumn, Italy’s highest Cassation Court threw out the slander conviction that had withstood 5 trials, ordering a brand new trial, due to a 2022 Italian judicial reform permitting instances which have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are discovered.

This time, the courtroom has been ordered to ignore two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. as she was held for questioning in a single day into the small hours of Nov. 6, 2007. In the statements, Knox stated she remembered listening to Kercher scream, and pointed to Lumumba for the killing.

Hours later, nonetheless in custody at about 1 p.m., she requested for pen and paper and wrote her personal assertion in English, questioning the model that she had signed.

“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” she wrote.

Whatever the result, Knox dangers no extra jail time. The 4 years she served earlier than the primary acquittal covers the three-year slander sentence.