ROME >> Italy’s highest court Thursday confirmed a slander conviction against U.S. defendant Amanda Knox for accusing an innocent man of murdering her British flatmate 17 years ago in a sensational case that polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Knox had appealed the conviction based on a European Court of Human Rights ruling that said her rights had been violated by police failure to provide a lawyer and adequate translator during a long night of questioning just days after Meredith Kercher’s murder in the university town of Perugia.

Judge Monica Boni read the verdict aloud in a courtroom that was empty except for a few reporters and guards. The lawyers for both Knox and the man she wrongly accused, Patrick Lumumba, had gone home during deliberations.

Reached by telephone, Lumumba said he was satisfied with the verdict. “Amanda was wrong. This verdict has to accompany her for the rest of her life,” he said.

Knox’s lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, expressed surprise at the court’s decision. “We are incredulous,” Dalla Vedova told reporters in the courthouse by phone. “This is totally unexpected in our eyes, and totally unjust for Amanda.”

The ruling seemingly ends a 17-year legal saga that saw Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in 21-year-old Kercher’s brutal murder, before being exonerated by the highest Cassation Court in 2015.

The slander conviction against Knox had survived multiple appeals, and Knox was reconvicted on the charge in June after the European court ruling cleared the way for a new trial.

Speaking recently on her “Labyrinths” podcast, Knox said: “I hate the fact that I have to live with consequences for a crime I did not commit.” She said consequences included difficulties in obtaining visas to some countries because of a criminal conviction.

Her defense team says she accused Lumumba, a Congolese man who employed her at a bar in the central Italian university town of Perugia, during a long night of questioning and under pressure from police, who they said fed her false information. The European Court of Human Rights found that the police deprived her of a lawyer and provided a translator who acted more as a mediator.

Knox, now 37, does not risk any more time in jail. She has already served nearly four years during the investigation, initial murder trial and first appeal. But Knox had continued the legal battle with the aim of clearing her name of all criminal wrongdoing.

Knox returned to the United States in 2011, after being freed by an appeals court in Perugia, and has established herself as a global campaigner for the wrongly convicted. She has a podcast with her husband and has a new memoir coming out, “Free: My Search for Meaning.”

Knox was a 20-year-old student in Perugia when Kercher was found stabbed to death Nov. 2, 2007, in her bedroom in the apartment they shared with two Italian women.

The case made global headlines as suspicion quickly fell on Knox and her boyfriend of just days, Raffaele Sollecito. But another man, Rudy Hermann Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was eventually convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was freed in 2021, after serving most of his 16-year sentence.