What to know about the latest trial involving Amanda Knox
FLORENCE, Italy — Seventeen years after she was accused of killing her British roommate, Amanda Knox was back in an Italian court Wednesday, this time to hear the outcome of a slander charge that has stuck long after she was exonerated of the murder.
Knox, now a mother of two, was reconvicted of slander Wednesday for wrongly accusing an innocent man of the 2007 murder of Briton Meredith Kercher when the two were exchange students in Italy.
She had hoped to remove the last legal stain against her as she travelled to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in 2011 after spending four years in prison for Kercher’s slaying.
Despite a murder conviction against a man whose DNA and footprints were found at the scene, and a 2015 high court verdict definitively clearing Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, doubt about her role has persisted. That is especially true in Italy, among members of Kercher’s family and for the innocent man she accused, Patrick Lumumba.
Here is a glance at the key details in the case:
WHO IS AMANDA KNOX?
Knox was a 20-year-old student who had recently arrived in the university town of Perugia to study when her British roommate, Kercher, was found dead in her bedroom in the apartment they shared with two Italian roommates on Nov. 2, 2007. The murder grabbed worldwide attention as suspicion fell on Knox and Sollecito, with whom she had been involved for just about a week. Headlines dubbing her “Foxy Knoxy” circled the globe, fueled by sensational images of her and Sollecito in a tender moment outside the murder scene and in a store buying undergarments for Knox, whose apartment had become a crime scene. Knox and Sollecito were convicted in their first trial but after another round of flip-flop verdicts, they were ultimately exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.
WHAT IS THE SLANDER CASE?
Knox was accused of slandering Lumumba, the Congolese bar owner who employed her part-time, based on two statements typed by police that she signed during a long night of questioning just days after the killing. She tried to walk back her story in a four-page handwritten note the next afternoon, but the memo showe…
