In Florence, Italy, an Italian court has reconvicted Amanda Knox of slander, dashing her hopes of removing a legal stain that has persisted since her exoneration in the 2007 murder of her British roommate while they were exchange students in Italy.

This decision by a Florence appeals court panel marks the sixth time an Italian court has found Knox guilty of wrongly blaming the killing on an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part-time.

Knox has argued that her statements to police were coerced during an intense night of questioning that included bullying, as she relied on her then-limited Italian when she was a 20-year-old university student.

The panel of two judges and six jurors confirmed the three-year sentence, which she had already served during four years in Italian custody while the investigation and multiple trials took place.

The court’s reasoning will be released in 60 days.

Knox’s appearance in Florence on Wednesday, in a bid to clear her name “once and for all,” was the first time she had returned to an Italian court since she was freed in 2011.

Accompanied by her husband, Christopher Robinson, she showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud.

“We are all very surprised at the outcome of the decision,” Dalla Vedova said outside the courtroom.

He added that Knox had expected an acquittal, which would have put an end to nearly 17 years of judicial proceedings.

Another defense lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, said they expected to appeal to Italy’s highest court.

Knox’s new trial was set in motion after a European court ruling that said Italy violated her human rights during overnight questioning days after Kercher’s murder, depriving her of both a lawyer and a competent translator.

Addressing the Florence court in a soft and sometimes breaking voice, Knox said 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 read in Italian from a prepared statement, addressing the panel from the jury bench.

She told them, “I didn’t know who the murderer was.

I had no way to know.

”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.

All these years later, the intensity of media interest remained, with photographers massing around Knox, her husband, and her legal team as they entered the courthouse about an hour before the hearing.

A camera knocked her on the left temple, her lawyer Luparia Donati said.

Knox’s husband examined a small bump on her temple as they sat in the front row of the court.

Despite the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene, doubts about her role persisted, particularly in Italy.

This is largely due to the accusation she made against Lumumba.

Lumumba’s lawyer, Carlo Pacelli, told reporters that the accusation branded him across the world, and his business in Perugia floundered.

He has since re-established himself in his wife’s native Poland.

“Patrick has always been dutiful to all of the court decisions, and all the courts up until today have affirmed that Amanda Knox was a slanderer,” Pacelli said.

Knox is now a 36-year-old mother of two small children who advocates for criminal justice reform and campaigns against wrongful convictions.

She was freed in October 2011, after four years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court that overturned the initial guilty verdict in the murder case against both Knox and Sollecito.

She remained in the United States through two more flip-flop verdicts before Italy’s highest court definitively exonerated the pair of the murder in March 2015, stating flatly that they had not committed the crime.

In the fall, Italy’s highest Cassation Court threw out the slander conviction that had withstood five trials, thanks to a 2022 Italian judicial reform allowing cases that have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are found.

This time, the court was ordered to disregard two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.

m.

and 5:45 a.

m.

as she was held for questioning overnight into the early hours of Nov.

6, 2007.

In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher scream and pointed to Lumumba for the killing.

Hours later, still in custody at about 1 p.

m.

, she asked for pen and paper and wrote her own statement in English, questioning the version she had signed, still in a state of confusion.

“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion,” she wrote.