The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said yesterday that it has asked Italy to respond to accusations of unfair treatment by Amanda Knox, acquitted last year of her British housemate’s gruesome murder.
The American exchange student served four years in prison after her initial conviction for participating in the 2007 killing of Meredith Kercher, before being released on appeal and then definitively acquitted last year.
Kercher, 21, died after being stabbed 47 times and having her throat slashed.
The ECHR has asked the Italian authorities to respond to a request Knox submitted in November 2013 regarding “the lack of fairness in the criminal procedure”, a spokeswoman told AFP.
Knox’s 2009 conviction of involvement in the murder, described as a drug-fuelled orgy gone terribly wrong, was upheld on appeal in 2014.
Her sentence was stiffened to 28-and-a-half years for murder and three years for slandering her Congolese employer at a bar where she worked part-time, whom she initially accused of the killing.
Now a journalist in her hometown of Seattle, Washington, Knox told the ECHR that she underwent hours of questioning without an interpreter or a lawyer, and that her interrogators slapped her on the head.
The 28-year-old retains a conviction for slandering the bar owner.
She later said that claim had been extracted under duress.
Along with her Italian former lover Raffaele Sollecito, she was definitively acquitted of Kercher’s murder in March 2015 when Italy’s high court ruled there had been “major flaws” in the investigation.
Ivory Coast-born drifter Rudy Guede was jailed for the murder in 2008.