Author: Sasha Ingber / Source: NPR.org
A top European court has found faults in how Italian police initially questioned Amanda Knox, an American who was imprisoned for nearly four years in Italy after her roommate was killed, and ordered Italy to pay her damages.
“Ms Knox had been particularly vulnerable, being a foreign young woman, 20 at the time, not having been in Italy for very long and not being fluent in Italian,” the European Court of Human Rights said in a statement Thursday.
The decision examines what happened on Nov. 6, 2007, when police questioned Knox at 5:45 a.m. about the death of Meredith Kercher, a British student studying in Perugia who had been found days earlier with her throat slashed in the apartment she shared with Knox.
A court later convicted Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, of sexual assault and murder.
The case dominated international headlines with every lewd and gruesome allegation. In 2015, Italy’s highest court overturned Knox’s conviction. But she also had been convicted of maliciously accusing a bar manager of Kercher’s murder during the initial police questioning on Nov. 6, 2007 — and that was not reversed.
On Thursday, the court said that Knox’s accusation “had been taken in an atmosphere of intense psychological pressure.”
It said authorities had failed to assess the conduct of Knox’s interpreter, “who had seen herself as a mediator and had adopted a motherly attitude” toward Knox.
Authorities also denied Knox her right to a lawyer, the court concluded, and did not prove…
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