Amanda Knox on Wednesday was reconvicted on slander charges in Italy related to the 2007 killing of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher.
Knox was cleared of Kercher’s murder in 2015 after a wrongful conviction. During police interrogation in 2007, Knox had accused her then-boss Patrick Lumumba of killing her roommate, though she later retracted her accusation. On Wednesday, she testified that she made those comments under pressure by police who questioned her in a language she “barely knew.”
“I was a scared girl, deceived by the police and led not to trust her own memories,” she said.
Knox was nevertheless found guilty yet again of slandering Lumumba, marking the sixth time a court has upheld the conviction, The Associated Press reported. Knox was sentenced to three years behind bars, time she has already served.
Her lawyer told NBC News after the verdict that he was “very surprised at the outcome of the decision and Amanda is very upset.” Her lawyers have said they will likely appeal the conviction after the written ruling is released.
Knox, who grew up in Seattle, was studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when she was tried and subsequently found guilty in 2009 of her roommate’s gruesome death. Her case made international headlines, and many Americans believed she was wrongfully convicted.
During interrogation, she wrongly blamed Kercher’s death on Lumumba, a Congolese man who ran a bar where Knox worked. Lumumba was arrested and detained for two weeks before being cleared.
Knox was sentenced to 26 years for Kercher’s murder before she was exonerated by Italy’s highest court. In total, she served four years in prison, beginning in 2007 while awaiting her murder trial.
Rudy Guede, a Perugian resident from the Ivory Coast, was later tried and convicted of Kercher’s murder.
Knox, who now lives in the United States and has two children, had said she hoped an acquittal in the slander case would finally clear her name.
