MILAN (AP) — Amanda Knox told Italian television Thursday that she was surprised by the Florence appeals court’s decision to find her. guilty of slander In light of a European Court ruling that the police who took his confession had violated his human rights.
“I will fight for the truth,” Knox told Sky TG24 in his first public comments since the guilty verdict on Wednesday. “I have been unjustly accused for 17 years.”
Knox was a 20 year old exchange student in the university town of Perugia when she and her Italian boyfriend at the time were accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, 21, who was found dead in the apartment they shared on November 1, 2017. 2, 2007.
After years of trying to turn around, they were exonerated in 2015, but the slander conviction was handed down against Knox for falsely accusing an innocent man, the owner of the Congolese bar who employed him part-time. She served four years in prison before being released following an earlier acquittal in 2011, covering the three-year sentence for slander.
Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, from Ivory Coast, was convicted of Kercher’s murder and served 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
Knox was in court in Florence on Wednesday when she was found guilty again of defaming Patrick Lumumba, who was detained for two weeks on suspicion of murder before police released him with a strong alibi.
Italy’s highest court ordered a retrial after a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that her human rights were violated during a long night of interrogation without a lawyer or competent translator, when she accused Lumumba in two statements typed by police and signed by her.
The high court ruled that the Florence appeals board could not review the two signed documents, but only four handwritten pages written by Knox the following afternoon in an effort to reverse the statements.
“There is a document in question, which we can all read, and the message of that document is: ‘I don’t know who killed Meredith.’ I thought I was extremely clear,” Knox said in fluent Italian.
Knox insists she nominated Lumumba under extreme police pressure.
“I was mistreated, abused and psychologically tortured by the police that night,” Knox said in the television interview. “It was the worst experience of my life. It was worse than being condemned, to tell the truth, because they made me believe that I was crazy, that I couldn’t trust myself.