Amanda Knox, “should be sentenced to 3 years”. The prosecutor’s request on the slander trial –

“He was aware of the innocence of Patrick Lumumba”, his employer in a pub in Perugia, and was “aware of giving the investigators the name of a person who had nothing to do with the murder” of the 21-year-old English student Meredith Kercher: for this reason the three-year prison sentence for Amanda Knox must be confirmed. This is the request formulated by the Attorney General Ettore Squillace Greco during the new trial for slander at the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Florence, ordered by the Court of Cassation last 12 October. The sentence is scheduled for June 5th.

The accused was not present in the courtroom today during the indictment. Knox, has already been definitively acquitted, together with Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend at the time, for the murder of the student which occurred in Perugia on 1 November 2007. For the murder of the student the only one sentenced to 16 years of Rudy Guede, who obtained semi-freedom in 2019, was sentenced to short-term prison. Lumumba, however, was definitively exonerated after spending 14 days in prison. Of the long legal case in Perugia, only the strand of the crime of alleged slander against Lumumba remains standing: he was indicated as Meredith’s possible murderer in the memorial that Amanda wrote on 6 November 2007 before being transferred to prison because she was accused of time of the murder. Knox’s defense obtained from the Supreme Court the annulment of the previous sentence and a referral to the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Florence for alleged violations ascertained by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that Amanda suffered of her right to have adequate defensive and linguistic assistance in drafting the memorial.

«Amanda is a very intelligent girl, always aware of herself and actually, in my opinion, the motive for the slander lies in the fact that she felt pressured by the investigators and to deflect the investigations she resorted to a classic of these situations: she named of a false culprit, spent the name of an innocent person knowing he was innocent”, said the lawyer Carlo Pacelli, Lumumba’s defender. “That the slander was perpetrated has been recognized by all the sentences.” The version of the defendant’s lawyers during their oral arguments was different. “What must be recognized today is the very serious judicial error that was made against Amanda Knox: her defense doesn’t say it, the European Court of Human Rights says it,” said the lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova. «In this trial – added the lawyer Luca Luparia Donati – there are victims: Meredith, the main victim; then today’s civil party, Lumumba; but also Amanda Knox who is innocent and has undergone years of trial and media trials.” Lawyer Dalla Vedova recalled that «Lumumba had brought 12 witnesses who said that on the evening of the crime he was at the cash register of his pub», and «therefore he could have been freed immediately, but he was the victim of the same mistake that was made with Amanda ». The lawyers defending the American have therefore asked that Amanda be acquitted of the charge of slander.