Some thoughts....
1. The alleged unfairness of the conviction by the court presided over by judge Claudio Hellmann.
The Hellmann court motivation report providing the rationale for the conviction was contradictory. It provided a description of the many conditions that made Amanda Knox vulnerable to coercion and pyschological manipulation, and states that she was under considerable pressure to name a murderer.
This is the translated text of the Hellman court motivation report detailing in regards to the interrogation the vulnerabilities of, and pressures on, Amanda Knox:
The obsessive length of the interrogations, carried out during [both] day and night, by more than one person, on a young and foreign girl who at the time did not speak Italian at all well, was unaware of her own rights, did not have the assistance of an attorney (which she should have been entitled to, being at this point suspected of very serious crimes), and was moreover being assisted by an interpreter who — as shown by Ms. Bongiorno [defense attorney] — did not limit herself to translating, but induced her to force herself to remember, explaining that she [Amanda] was confused in her memories, perhaps because of the trauma she experienced, makes it wholly understandable that she was in a situation of considerable psychological pressure (to call it stress seems an understatement [appare riduttivo]), enough to raise doubts about the actual spontaneity of her statements; a spontaneity which would have strangely [singolarmente] arisen in the middle of the night, after hours and hours of interrogation: the so-called spontaneous statements were made at 1:45 am (middle of the night) on 11-6-2007 (the day after the interrogation had started) and again at 5:45 am afterward, and the note was written a few hours later.
….Amanda Knox, who at the beginning had no reason to be afraid, went into a state of oppression and stress precisely as a result of her interrogation and the way it was conducted.
... it is understandable that Amanda Knox, yielding to pressure and fatigue, would have hoped to put an end to that situation by giving her interrogators that which, in the end, they wanted to hear: a name, a murderer.
The reasoning finding guilt includes the arbitrary opinion that even the aim of escaping from a particularly oppressive personal situation of considerable psychological pressure and stress does not exclude a condition of not intending or wishing, so that there is responsibility for the crime. The crime of calunnia requires that the person making the accusation must know it was false. Therefore, another set of reasons was adopted to demonstrate that Amanda Knox should have known Patrick Lumumba totally innocent: 1) the police put forth her text message to Patrick Lumumba as a suggestion of Lumumba's name, and 2) Lumumba did not have a connection with Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox should he was clearly innocent. However, neither of these reasons is logically sufficient to show that Lumumba was indeed innocent. Amanda Knox had no actual knowledge of his activities or location with the possible exception of his earler text message to her, and in fact Lumumba had met Meredith, but there is no logical reason to consider the murder to have been committed by someone either known or unknown to Meredith. Thus the reasoning finding guilt is arbitrary.
This is the translated text of the Hellman court motivation report detailing the reasoning for the finding that Amanda is guilty of calunnia in naming Patrick Lumumba:
However, this Court does not find that there is any significant objective evidence that, when she made her spontaneous statements and wrote her note, Amanda Knox was in not only a situation of considerable psychological pressure and stress but also even in a condition of not intending or wishing; so that, having accused of such a serious crime a person whom she knew to be innocent, she must in any case be held responsible for the crime of calumny, the constitution of which does not require any specific purpose from a psychological point of view, such as shifting the blame off of oneself [conseguire la propria impunità] (an aggravating circumstance alleged [here]). Generic criminal intent [il dolo generico] is sufficient, thus including the aim of escaping from a particularly oppressive personal situation.
...the circumstances under which Lumumba’s name emerged in the course of the police interrogation (a message directed to him taken from the cellular phone of Amanda Knox), and the lack of evidence of a connection between Lumumba and Meredith Kercher [should have] allowed Amanda Knox, even if actually innocent herself and far from the house on Via Della Pergola at the time of the crime, to be aware of Lumumba’s total innocence, and thus of the calumny that she was committing by pointing to him as the perpetrator of the murder.
Another issue with the Hellmann court motivation report is that it does not at all address the defense argument relating to false memory syndrome, the report of the defense expert Carlo Caltagirone. The failure to address this important argument of the defense makes the motivation report arbitrary and manifestly unreasoned in respect to the naming of Patrick Lumumba.
Therefore, because of the contradiction between the motivation report detailing the vulnerability of Amanda Knox to coercion and psychological manipulation during the interrogation but, however, providing an arbitrary reasoning and and no reasonable explanation for why she would know Patrick Lumumba was indeed innocent of the crimes against Meredith Kercher the ECHR would find the conviction for calunnia unfair, a violation of Convention Article 6.1. The failure to evaluate an important defense argument in the motivation report, the expert opinion relating to false memory, indicates a defect in the adversarial nature of the trial and a manifestly unreasonable judgment, a further violation of Convention Article 6.1.
Case-law supporting the above analysis includes: 1) for arbitrary reasoning in a judgment as a violation of Convention Article 6.1, Bochan v. Ukraine (No. 2) [GC] 22251/08 §61; Khamidov v. Russia 72118/01 §170; 2) for the unreasonable failure to take into account an expert opinion from the defense, Matytsina v. Russia 58428/10 §207.
