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MILAN — Amanda Knox faces one other trial for slander this week in Italy in a case that would take away the final authorized stain in opposition to her, eight years after Italy’s highest court docket threw out her conviction for the homicide of her 21-year-old British roommate.
Knox, who was a 20-year-old pupil when she was accused alongside along with her then-boyfriend of murdering Meredith Kercher in 2007, has constructed a life again in the US as an advocate, author, podcaster and producer — with a lot of her work drawing on her expertise.
Now 36 and the mom of two young children, Knox campaigns for felony justice reform and to lift consciousness about compelled confessions. She has recorded a sequence on resilience for a meditation app and has a podcast along with her husband, Christopher Robinson, and an upcoming restricted sequence on her struggles throughout the Italian authorized system for Hulu that has Monica Lewinsky as an govt producer.
Regardless of a definitive ruling by Italy’s Cassation Court docket in 2015 that Knox and then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito didn’t commit the crime, and the conviction of one other man whose DNA was on the scene, doubts persist about Knox’s position with the sufferer’s household and the person she wrongly accused.
That’s largely as a result of slander conviction for wrongly accusing a Congolese bar proprietor within the killing, which was confirmed by the very best court docket in 2015. That conviction was solely thrown out final November, primarily based on a European Court docket of Human Rights ruling that discovered Knox’s rights had been violated in a protracted evening of questioning and not using a lawyer and official translator.
Even now, Knox isn’t positive {that a} not responsible verdict within the new trial, which opens Wednesday in Florence, will persuade her detractors.
“On the one hand, I’m glad I’ve this opportunity to clear my identify, and hopefully that may take away the stigma that I’ve been dwelling with,’’ Knox, who didn’t reply to an interview request, stated on her podcast Labyrinths in December.
“However, I don’t know if it ever will, in the way in which I’m nonetheless traumatized by it,” she stated. “I’m positive folks will nonetheless maintain it in opposition to me as a result of they don’t need to perceive what occurred, and so they don’t need to settle for that an harmless particular person may be gaslit and coerced into what I went via.”
Knox stated on her podcast that she expects to testify, however her lawyer stated she shouldn’t be anticipated in court docket for opening day.
The Kercher household lawyer, Francesco Maresca, stated the excessive court docket’s exoneration did little in his thoughts to dispel doubts following Knox’s conviction by a trial court docket and two appeals courts, the primary confirming her sentence of 26 years and the second elevating it to twenty-eight ½ years.
“This trial by no means ends,’’ Maresca instructed The Related Press, obscuring “the reminiscence of poor Meredith, who’s at all times remembered for these procedural points and never as a pupil and younger lady.”
Amongst his doubts, Maresca cited Knox’s confused retraction of her accusation in opposition to Patrick Lumumba, the proprietor of the bar the place she labored part-time, and the decision in Rudy Guede’s conviction for killing Kercher that maintains that the Ivorian man didn’t act alone.
Now 36, Guede was launched from jail in 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year time period handed down in a fast-track trial. Guede was lately ordered to put on a monitoring bracelet and never depart his house at evening after an ex-girlfriend accused him of bodily and sexual abuse. An investigation is ongoing.
Knox’s new trial will admit only one piece of proof: her four-page handwritten assertion that the court docket will study to see if it accommodates components to assist slander in opposition to Lumumba. Regardless of having an ironclad alibi, he was held in jail for some two weeks earlier than police launched him. Lumumba has since left Italy.
Two earlier statements typed up by police that Knox signed within the early hours of Nov. 7, 2007 that contained the accusation, and had been thought-about essentially the most incriminating, have been dominated inadmissible by Italy’s highest court docket.
The four-page letter, which she wrote in the identical 53-hour span of questioning over 4 days beginning Nov. 6, displays somebody in a state of confusion, attempting to reconcile what police have instructed her along with her personal recollections.
“With regard to this ‘confession’ that I made final evening, I need to clarify that I’m very uncertain of the verity of my statements as a result of they had been made underneath the pressures of stress, shock and excessive exhaustion,’’ Knox wrote.
She referred to police statements that she can be arrested and jailed for 30 years and that Sollecito was turning in opposition to her.
Lauria Baldassare, an Italian lawyer who based the Innocents Venture, stated the subject of wrongful convictions in Italy is beginning to “create social alarm because it assumes necessary dimensions.”
He cited 10 instances of defendants being paid damages for wrongful convictions during the last decade, however stated they confronted problem in escaping the stigma of their preliminary responsible verdict — very like Knox.
“There’s nonetheless a part of the general public opinion that doesn’t settle for the Court docket of Cassation’s determination, and these debates change into a sport,” stated Baldassare, whose group is impartial from the Innocence Venture that Knox works with. ”Italy doesn’t have the maturity to just accept an exoneration, as a result of social prejudices are stronger than the discovering.”
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