Some time ago on this forum some posters compared the charging and conviction of Amanda Knox for calunnia against Patrick Lumumba with the US federal crime of a violation of 18 USC Section 1001 (Making false statements to US authorities).
It's interesting that a case has just come up today, 1 Dec. 2017, where an individual, a former high-ranking US general and government official, has pleaded guilty to a violation of 18 USC Section 1001.*
And one can readily observe that the circumstances of such a US charge are quite different than the circumstances surrounding the calunnia charge against and subsequent conviction of Amanda Knox.
The elements of the US charge requires that, for there to have been a crime, the individual must "
willfully and knowingly make materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations".* Thus, one could not be charged for making statements that were produced under any kind of coercion.
In the case of Italy, the calunnia law also requires that the statement falsely accusing someone be made knowing that it was false. But the Italian courts have not seriously investigated** whether or not the statement - written out in Italian by the police and signed by Knox - was made under coercion, despite Knox's claims that they were, and her two statements which she herself wrote out in English, after the coercive interrogation, denying the validity of her accusation. Thus, there is no practical equivalence of the calunnia law as interepted by the Italian courts in this case to the US federal false statements law, which only applies to false statements that have been made "willfully and knowingly".
*
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...ackage-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Note that this document is labeled as an "Information" because the individual charged has pleaded guilty.
**The Gemelli CSC panel and the Boninsegna court have indicated that the interrogation was a violation of defense rights. However, the calunnia charge was allowed by the Gemelli CSC panel specifically because Knox wrote a defensive document soon after the interrogation, in which she claimed to have be coerced by the police.