Amanda Knox re-convicted of slander for accusing innocent man of murder

FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — An Italian court reconvicted Amanda Knox of slander on Wednesday, even after she was exonerated in the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate while the two were exchange students in Italy.

The court found that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part time, of the killing. But she will not serve any more jail time, given the three-year sentence counts as time already served.

Knox, who had returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in 2011 to participate in the trial, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud.

But her lawyer, Carlo della Vedova, said shortly afterward that “Amanda is very embittered.”

Knox had written on social media ahead of the hearing that she hoped to “clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”

The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito.

Flip-flop verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic as the case was vociferously argued on social media, then in its infancy.

Knox’s retrial was set by a European court ruling that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of questioning days after Kercher’s murder, deprived of both a lawyer and a competent translator.

Earlier in the hearing, Knox had asked the eight Italian judges and civil jury members to clear her of the slander charge.

In a soft and sometimes breaking voice, Knox had told the court that she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba under intense police pressure.

“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,’' Knox told the panel in a 9-minute prepared statement, sitting alongside them on the jury bench. She told them: ”I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know.”

The case continues to draw intense media attention, with photographers massing around Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson and their legal team as they entered the