Amanda Knox speaks out after Rudy Guede released from prison
Amanda Knox is speaking out after the man convicted in the 2007 assault and rape of Knox's former roommate, British exchange student Meredith Kercher, was set free from prison.
Rudy Guede, 34, the only person still serving a sentence in Kercher's death, was granted permission this month by an Italian court to finish the rest of his sentence with community service.
"I do know that many, many, many people have suffered a great deal because of what he did and I continue to stay to be shocked that he is the forgotten killer," Knox said of Guede in an exclusive interview that aired Monday on "Good Morning America." "The one who was quietly tucked away, convicted of a lesser crime and does not have to live with the burden of being forever associated with Meredith's death."
Knox was a 20-year-old college student studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when she and Raffale Sollecito, her boyfriend at the time, were accused of murdering Kercher in November 2007. They spent close to four years in an Italian jail while the court proceedings unfolded.
After the long judicial ordeal, which involved two appeal court trials and two Supreme Court decisions, Knox and Sollecito were finally acquitted of murder in 2015.
Prosecutors had accused Knox and Sollecito of killing Kercher with the help of Guede, a young man from the Ivory Coast who had grown up in Perugia.
Guede, whose DNA was the only one found at the murder scene, was convicted of Kercher's murder in a separate trial in 2008. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison after a fast-track process resulted in less jail time.
Guede received a partial release in 2017 in order to attend school and has been working at a library in central Italy and as a volunteer for a Catholic charity. His sentence was set to end in 2022.
Knox, now 33 and an advocate for criminal justice reform, said the "burden" of Guede's crime falls on her.
"I am the one who has been condemned to live with his infamy," Knox told "GMA." "And while I can't say that I wish him suffering or imprisonment, I do wish that he had been fully held accountable for what he did and that he acknowledged what he did, and I don't know if that will ever happen."
"The only reason you know I exist is because [of] what he did, and that is a grave injustice," she said.
Last year, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, confirmed an earlier ruling that Knox's defense rights had been violated in 2007 during police questioning about the murder of Kercher.
The earlier ruling had ordered Italy to pay approximately $20,000 in damages and legal costs to Knox for failing to provide her with a lawyer or proper translator during hours of police questioning on Nov. 6, 2007, during the initial stages of the investigation into Kercher's murder.
