Amanda Knox will return to an Italian courtroom this week to defend herself against a 16-year-old defamation conviction that she seeks to overturn once and for all.
A European court ruling that Italy violated Knox’s human rights during a long night of questioning following the murder of her British roommate in November 2007 opened up this possibility for Knox, who turns 37 next month.
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Knox’s slander conviction for accusing a Congolese bar owner of murder is the only charge against her that has survived five court rulings that ultimately cleared her in the brutal slaying of her roommate, 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, in the idyllic central Italian university town of Perugia.
The ruling in the defamation case retrial ordered by Italy’s top court is due on Wednesday. Knox will appear in an Italian court for the first time in over 12½ years.
“I will walk into the same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I did not commit, this time to defend myself once more,” Knox posted on social media. “I wish to clear my name once and for all from the baseless charge leveled against me. “Wish me luck.”
The slander prosecution was largely based on two police-typed statements that Knox signed in the early hours of November 6, 2007, while being questioned in Italian by police without a lawyer or a competent interpreter. The European Court of Human Rights determined that the conditions breached her human rights.
Kercher’s murder drew international attention as suspicion fell on Knox, then 20, and her then-Italian lover, Raffaele Sollecito, with whom she had been associated for only about a week.
After a series of disputed decisions, Italy’s highest court exonerated Knox and Sollecito in 2015. Knox returned to the United States in October 2011, following her initial acquittal. She is now a mother of two little children, co-hosts a podcast with her husband, and campaigns against wrongful conviction.
However, Knox’s slander conviction remained, a legal stain that fueled doubts about her complicity in the murder, particularly in Italy — and despite the conviction of Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast man whose DNA was discovered at the site.
Guede served 13 years of a 16-year jail term imposed following a fast-track trial that anticipated reduced sentences under Italian law.
Based on the European Court’s decision, Italy’s top court overturned Knox’s defamation conviction in November, ruling that the two remarks typed by police were inadmissible. It ordered a new trial, instructing the Florence court to accept only Knox’s handwritten declaration, written in English hours later.
“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make it clear that I’m very doubtful of the veracity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion,” her statement read.
Sal Kassin, a pioneer in the study of false confessions, claims Knox’s signed statements follow a pattern of false confessions.
“It is an empirical fact that most false confessions contain accurate details not yet known to the public and ‘false-fed facts’ that are consistent with the police theory of the crime but that later prove to be untrue,” Kassin, a psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, wrote about the case in his book “Duped,” which examines the phenomenon of false confessions.
Kassin stated that police “contaminated” Knox’s confession, which was consistent with what police thought at the time.
“To hold her accountable for a statement in which she also implicated herself is absurd,” he stated.
