Instagram/Courtesy of Amanda Knox
Vindicated: Italy Owes Amanda Knox $20,000 in Damages, Says European Human Rights Court
Not only has she now been acquitted of any crime, but Amanda Knox also has some money coming her way. The European Human Rights Court ruled in her favor on Thursday, January 24, ordering the country of Italy to pay her $20,000 in damages, legal costs, and other expenses. According to USA Today, the court determined that the Italian police failed to protect her rights and provide her both an attorney and a translator turning a 2007 interrogation. While investing the death of her roommate, murdered British student Meredith Kercher, the authorities questions the American student for days until she alleged that her boss, Patrick Lumumba, was responsible.
Though she tried to retract her statement almost immediately, she was eventually convicted of falsely accusing him of the murder. Now, the European court is overturning that verdict and ruling that she wasn’t at fault. In a statement on her website, Amanda, now 31, shared, “Today, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that my slander conviction was unjust. I am grateful for their wisdom in acknowledging the reality of false confessions, and the need to reform police interrogation methods … [In 2007], 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 … I trusted these people. They were adults. They were authorities. And they lied to me.”
She continued, “Finally, in the delirium they put me through, I didn’t know what to believe. I thought, for a brief moment, maybe they were right [about Patrick] … They wrote the statements; I signed them … Within hours, I retracted those statements. I told them I had not met Patrick that night. They didn’t care. Patrick had a rock-solid alibi. They didn’t care.” She also spoke about how the slander conviction seemed unjust, even at the time. “My statements were deemed inadmissible in court because they were produced during an illegal and unrecorded interrogation [but] I was sentenced to three years, time served.”
“I never should have been charged, much less convicted, of slander,” she wrote. “And Raffaele should never have been refused his due compensation for wrongful imprisonment because he ‘gave contradictory statements’ while under duress. Scapegoating the wrongfully convicted for the mistakes and misconduct of the police prevents us from reforming the system, leading to further miscarriages of justice.”
The decision is part of a long list of Amanda’s recent triumphs. In October 2018, she announced she’d be hosting a new show called The Truth About True Crime. In June 2018, she announced she’d be hosting a Facebook series with Vice called The Scarlet Letter Reports, where she attempted to “re-humanize others who [had] been similarly shamed and vilified” the way she was. And in November 2018, she got engaged to her now-fiancé, Christopher Robinson. We’re glad to see that Amanda is finally getting some of the wins that she deserves.
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