Amanda Knox’s slander conviction upheld in case related to Meredith Kercher’s murder

An Italian court has upheld Amanda Knox’s final remaining conviction stemming from the murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007.

An Italian court has upheld Amanda Knox’s final remaining conviction stemming from the murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007. Knox was convicted in 2009 of slander for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Kercher in the Italian city of Perugia. An appellate court in Florence upheld that conviction on Wednesday. Knox was previously cleared of Kercher’s murder by the Italian supreme court in 2015. The two-judge, six-jury panel, with two alternates, reached their decision after an emotional Knox told the court that she was “sorry” she did not try harder to retract the accusation and that she was a young person in an existential crisis when she accused him. “I did not know who the assassin was,” she told the court. The retrial never threatened to result in any more jail time for Knox. She had already served the length of the original slander sentence when she spent four years in detention following her wrongful imprisonment for Kercher’s murder. In 2007 during an interrogation, Knox, then 20, accused her then-boss Patrick Lumumba of the murder, which led to his arrest and two-week incarceration.