An Italian court on Wednesday opened a retrial of the slander conviction against US citizen Amanda Knox, who was famously imprisoned and later acquitted in the murder of her roommate in Italy almost 17 years ago.
In 2007, Knox and her then-boyfriend were arrested a few days after the body of her roommate Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student, was found in their flat in the central Italian town of Perugia.
After her arrest, Knox, then a 20-year-old student, was given a three-year prison sentence after she wrongly accused a bar owner of having killed Kercher.
Knox was initially sentenced to a long prison term for the murder of Kercher but was ultimately acquitted after spending four years in prison in 2015. The defamation conviction initially remained in place, but was then also overturned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 2019.
Knox is now seeking a complete acquittal including for the defamation case, and an appeals court in Perugia started proceedings on Wednesday over the question of whether her conviction for defamation was justified.
At the time, Knox was found guilty of incriminating a friend who was a barman in a nearby bar during a police interrogation, even though she knew he was innocent.
Knox has justified her false testimony by claiming that she had been in shock after her roommate's body was found and that she had been beaten by the police.
Knox, who is now aged 36, lives in the US and did not attend the start of the new trial.