The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ordered Italy to pay Amanda Knox €18,400 (£15,970) for damages because of way police dealt with her following her 2007 arrest on suspicion of the murder of Meredith Kercher.
Because as well as being convicted, then released, then convicted, then fully exonerated of murder and sexual assault of her 21-year-old flatmate in Perugia in 2007, Knox had been found guilty of slander.
Writing in her blog, Knox stated that her allegation that a local bar manager had killed Meredith, made shortly after her arrest, was something she had ‘spent years wracked with guilt over’.
The reason she signed them was because, she says: ‘I was interrogated for 53 hours over five days, without a lawyer, in a language I understood maybe as well as a ten-year-old. When I told the police I had no idea who had killed Meredith, I was slapped in the back of the head and told to ‘Remember!”’
‘I never should have been charged, much less convicted, of slander,' she added, reports The New York Times
The court case she’s just won found that, though there was no evidence to back up her claims that Italian police had mistreated her while in custody, there was proof that Italy failed to provide her with a lawyer and an appropriate interpreter, as is the legal requirement. The interpreter, who said she saw herself as having had ‘adopted a motherly attitude towards Ms Knox,’ apparently.
Knox, who is American, hadn’t long been studying in Perugia when her housemate Mereditch, a 21-year-old from south-west London, was found killed in her room.
Knox and then-boyfriend Raffaela Sollecito were both arrested. Later, Rudy Guede, who lived locally, was arrested. In separate trials, Knox and Sollecito were found guilty of Meredith’s murder and sexual assault, and were jailed, respectively, for 26 and 25 years each. Knox was also convicted of blaming a local bar manager for the murder.
Knox and Sollecito always said they were innocent, and were freed in 2011 after an appeal. But then they were retried and convicted again. Without turning up to the trial, Knox was sentenced to 28 and a half years, while Sollecito was sentenced, again, to 25 years. Once again, this result was appealed, and by 2015, Knox and Sollecito were exonerated.
Guede, who was tried separately, was already serving a 16-year-sentence for murder by this point.
Fast-forward to 2019, and Knox has begun a career as a journalist, and wanted to clear her name.
Though it perhaps seems like the whole saga, in which both Meredith and Knox were shamed and unnecessarily sexualised by harsh elements of the press, is close to being over, the suffering of Meredith’s family continues. And of course, Italy can still appeal the EHRC’s decision to exonerate Knox and pay compensation.