Amanda Knox Was Falsely Charged With Murder. Italy Calls Her Coerced Confession 'Slander.'
"I can tell you that I have never been put in a position of doubting my own sanity like I was in the hands of those police officers," Knox tells Reason.
When Italy's highest court exonerated Amanda Knox of murder in 2015, the bulk of her adult life had been consumed by a legal saga that began during her time as a study abroad student in Perugia, Italy. That odyssey quietly continued, however, for yet another decade, culminating this week in that same court upholding her conviction—not for murder, but for slander.
In 2007, Italian authorities accused Knox, a 20-year-old from Seattle, Washington, of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor said was a bizarre sex game gone awry. The evidence invoked against her, which included mishandled DNA, was spurious from the outset. Most importantly, it included a highly coerced confession, during which she implicated her boss at the time—something that would come to dog her not only during her trial but for years after.
Following Kercher's murder, law enforcement took little time zeroing in on Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, Knox's boyfriend of one week, despite that the DNA evidence went on to overwhelmingly implicate Rudy Guede, who ultimately served 13 years. During her 53-hour interrogation, Knox was slapped, screamed at over the course of multiple days in a language she did not speak fluently, and was not permitted to go to the restroom when she got her period. She was made to believe, she says, that she had repressed memories of the murder, which she needed to unearth if she wanted to help police and see her family again.
"A lot of people like to think that, if they were in my shoes, nothing short of being beaten with a rubber hose or dangled out a window would get them to implicate themselves or others in a crime that they knew they were innocent of," she told me late last year on The Reason Interview. "Obviously, the research speaks otherwise. But speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that I have never been put in a position of doubting my own sanity like I was in the hands of those police officers."
After law enforcement continued demanding she furnish a story, she eventually named someone: Patrick Lumumba, her boss at a bar she worked at part-time, who was arrested and spent two weeks behind bars before an alibi set him free. Though Knox's 2009 murder conviction was overturned in 2011 and thrown out for good in 2015, she was reconvicted of slandering Lumumba in June of last year, which the Rome-based Court of Cassation has now allowed to stand. The European Court of Human Rights had previously ruled in Knox's favor, saying police violated her rights by declining to give her a lawyer and employing an inadequate translator.
Slander under Italian law is not completely analogous to the U.S. "After I signed those statements, and it turned out that my boss obviously was completely innocent and had nothing to do with this crime, even after I retracted those statements, I was accused of having maliciously and intentionally slandered him in order to divert the course of justice," Knox, who spent four years in prison after her 2007 arrest, told me. "I was found guilty of that crime, and I was sentenced to three years in prison for that crime. And technically, in Italy, they say that I served rightfully three years in prison for the outcome of that interrogation." In other words, law enforcement officers got what they had insisted on at the expense of the truth—a confession. And then they successfully prosecuted her for giving it to them.
Coerced confessions are a leading cause of exonerations, something younger people are disproportionately vulnerable to, and which Knox has made a focal point of her advocacy post-release. The effects can follow a defendant for life—the reason why she says fighting this particular charge mattered to her.
But Knox no longer feels the need to place that same burden on herself when outside of the courtroom. "I have given myself the grace to not feel the burden of having to explain myself to every single person out there," she says. "That's in large part due to having met other wrongly convicted people. Before I did, I felt this horrendous obstacle of, 'If I'm going to belong to humanity again, I have to explain myself to every single person,' and I have given up on that horrific, impossible task. I do not feel compelled to do that."
