European human rights court orders Italy to pay damages to Amanda Knox

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Amanda Knox’ rights were violated and that Italy should pay her $21,000 in damages. From Politico Europe:

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The court ruled that Knox had not received sufficient legal assistance — including a professional translator — during questioning following the murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia in November 2007…

The court ordered Italy to pay €10,400 to Knox in damages and another €8,000 for costs and expenses. However, the court said there was not enough evidence to support claims that Knox suffered psychological and physical mistreatment by police.

Knox has claimed that she was pressured into falsely incriminating someone after hours of interrogation which included being hit on the head twice. Still, the ruling about withholding a lawyer is a win for Knox. The court ruled that this alone calls into question the entire case saying the Italian Government, “had not succeeded in showing that the restriction of Ms Knox’s access to a lawyer, at the police interview of 6 November 2007 at 5.45 a.m., had not irreparably undermined the fairness of the proceedings as a whole.”

Knox herself released a lengthy statement in response to the ruling.

In early November 2007, I was studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when a local burglar named Rudy Guede broke into my home and raped and killed my friend and roommate, Meredith Kercher. I was in shock, and I volunteered to help the Perugian police in any way I could. But they weren’t interested in my help. They were determined to break me.

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!”

The police found my text messages to my boss, Patrick Lumumba. He had given me the night off, and I’d written back, “Ci vediamo più tardi,” a literal translation of the English idiom “see you later.” It isn’t an idiom in Italian. The police read that sentence as a literal plan: “We will see each other later.” This small linguistic misunderstanding could have been just that. But the Perugian investigators refused to believe me when I told them I had not met Patrick that night. They painted a story for me, about how I had witnessed Patrick killing Meredith. They told me I was traumatized by the incident and had amnesia. When I told them that wasn’t true, they said I was lying, or confused. They bombarded me with questions and scenarios, over and over again, into the morning.

I trusted these people. They were adults. They were authorities. And they lied to me. They lied to me that there was physical evidence of my presence at the crime scene. They lied to me that Raffaele said I went out that night. They threatened me with thirty years in prison if I didn’t remember what they wanted me to remember. 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. Maybe I did have amnesia. I told them I could see blurred flashes of Patrick, like they said. I told them I could imagine hearing Meredith screaming, like they said. They wrote the statements; I signed them. Then they rushed out to arrest Patrick Lumumba.

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. They locked him up, upending his life. And they didn’t release him until two weeks later, when DNA from the crime scene came back and identified the actual killer: Rudy Guede.

The authorities went on to charge and convict Raffaele and me for Guede’s crime, and further convicted me of slandering Patrick Lumumba. It took eight years, but we were definitively acquitted of Meredith’s murder in 2015. This final verdict, however, upheld my slander conviction…

The Italian Court of Cassation has already acknowledged that the Perugian investigators and prosecutors contaminated, tampered with, and destroyed material evidence. What went unacknowledged was the fact that these same investigators and prosecutors also subjected innocent people, Raffaele and myself, to psychological torture and physical abuse while under interrogation. They contaminated their own investigation by producing false statements behind closed doors. And then they blamed us.

I never should have been charged, much less convicted, of slander. 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.

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To the clear-minded, this is additional proof that Knox’s prosecution was a sham from the start. But there remain an army of Knox obsessives out there who still maintain her guilt despite all the evidence to the contrary. No doubt they will be going over this court decision with a fine-toothed comb and finding some way to proclaim victory.

Back in the real world, the $21,000 is a pittance for the miscarriage of justice Knox suffered in Italy. But at least it’s a sign that, with enough persistence, the truth does come out.

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