STORY: :: June 5, 2024

An Italian court found American Amanda Knox guilty of slander on Wednesday and handed her a three-year jail sentence in a case related to the murder of her British flatmate in 2007.

The sentence will have no practical impact as it is covered by the time Knox spent in jail before her conviction.

One of her lawyers Luca Luparia Donati, said Knox felt “very bitter” about the decision.

‘’Amanda is very disappointed, of course, we did not expect this kind of judicial response, and I am not saying that it seemed to us a foregone conclusion, but nevertheless a decision that should go towards innocence. Even her statements today confirmed that the crime was unsubstantiated, but we will read the motivations with the utmost respect for this court.‘’

Knox, who was in court for the verdict, had been sentenced to three years for wrongly accusing Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba of the killing of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in an earlier case.

:: September 30, 2013

She said she named him while under duress when she was being questioned by police.

Lumumba was held for two weeks in 2007 before he was freed.

Knox was convicted for the murder of Kercher and spent four years in jail.

:: File

In 2015, Italy’s top court annulled Knox’s conviction, ending nearly a decade of courtroom drama.

Then, in 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that there had been procedural errors during her questioning.

Last year, Italy’s highest court ordered another trial in the slander case.

Rudy Guede, originally from the Ivory Coast, was sentenced to 16 years in jail for the killing of Kercher.

He said he acted with unnamed other culprits and was granted early release in 2021.