ROSE: An American woman who was found guilty and therefore exonerated of killing her contestant while they were pursuing a degree in Italy lost a second trial on slander charges in a court in Italy on Wednesday. Knox was found guilty by a jury in Florence on claims that she had unfairly accused a man who owned a table where she worked of killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher, 21 years old, in 2007. The judge sentenced Knox to three years in prison, which she has already served.
Knox was first found innocent of slandering the gentleman, Diya Lumumba, also known as Patrick, in 2009, a judgment that was upheld by various European courts. Lumumba owned a club called Le Chic at the time of the murder, where Knox had a part-time job.
After the decision on Wednesday, Knox declined to speak with reporters. Her defense group stated that they would most likely file an appeal with Italy’s highest court.
Knox, who was speaking in front of a court full of journalists before, said she had been bullied by the authorities into accusing an honest man of murder and described her remarks about Lumumba in 2007. She claimed in an interview with the judge that she had been a terrified 20-year-old who had been duped and was “psychologically destabilized,” speaking in Italian and occasionally with her voice cracking.
The hearing on Wednesday marks the most recent chapter in a legal battle whose repercussions are still felt almost 17 years after Kercher, a European student, was killed. In 2007, Knox and her partner, Raffaele Sollecito, 23, were detained for the death of Kercher during what the prosecution called a” intercourse game gone wrong. All three were enrolled in Perugia, a lovely city in central Italy. An Italian prosecutor found Knox guilty of the murder in 2009, but Knox was found innocent on elegance. She and Sollecito were found not guilty by Italy’s highest judge in 2015, but she and Sollecito were freed in 2011.
Knox said that Kercher had been the “victim of terrible murder” when she addressed the jury and recalled the events that led her to criticise Lumumba. In the days after Kercher’s death, Knox said she had been” under shock and exhausted” and had never felt” so vulnerable in my life”. It was at that place, she said, during a nightlong investigation, that the officers pressured her into naming Lumumba, with whom she had exchanged some writings that day. She claimed that a police officer had slapped her.
Lumumba, who now lives in Krakow, Poland, did not attend Wednesday’s receiving and has not commented. Knox refuted her accusations against Lumumba, but he was detained, imprisoned for two weeks, and released after one of his consumers gave an argument. Knox was found guilty and given a three-year jail sentence after filing a complaint about defamation against Lumumba.
