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Amanda Marie Knox is an American author, activist, and journalist. She spent almost four years incarcerated in Italy after her wrongful conviction in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student, with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation. In 2024, an Italian appellate court upheld Amanda Knox’s slander conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher.
Knox, aged 20 at the time of the murder, called the police after returning to her and Kercher’s apartment after a night spent with her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and finding Kercher’s bedroom door locked and blood in the bathroom. During the police interrogations that followed, the conduct of which is a matter of dispute, Knox allegedly implicated herself and her employer, Patrick Lumumba, in the murder.
Initially, Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were all arrested for Kercher’s murder, but Lumumba was soon released because he had a strong alibi. A known burglar, Rudy Guede, was soon arrested, after his bloody fingerprints were found on Kercher’s possessions. He was convicted of murder in a fast-track trial and was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment, later reduced to 16 years. In December 2020, an Italian court ruled that Guede could complete his term by doing community service.
In their initial trial, in 2009, Knox and Sollecito were convicted and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. Pre-trial publicity in Italian media, which was repeated by other media worldwide, portrayed Knox in a negative light, leading to complaints that the prosecution was using character assassination. A guilty verdict at Knox’s initial trial and her 26-year sentence caused international controversy, because American forensic experts thought evidence at the crime scene was incompatible with her involvement. A prolonged legal process, including a successful prosecution appeal against her acquittal at a second-level trial, continued after Knox was freed in 2011.
On March 27, 2015, Italy’s highest court definitively exonerated Knox and Sollecito. However, Knox’s conviction for committing defamation against Lumumba was upheld by all courts. On January 14, 2016, Knox was acquitted of defamation for saying she had been struck by policewomen during the interrogation.
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