Almost ten years after her acquittal in a notorious murder trial, the US-American Amanda Knox is back in court in Italy.
The now 36-year-old appeared before an appeals court in Florence on Wednesday because she wants to obtain another acquittal in connection with the murder of a British exchange student in 2007. Knox now lives in the US.
The murder of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the central Italian city of Perugia made headlines around the world in 2007. One of her flatmates, an American woman a year younger than her, quickly came under suspicion.
Amanda Knox was initially convicted and sentenced to a long prison term. She spent four years in prison before being acquitted of the murder charge in 2015.
However, another judgement still hangs over her. After her arrest, Knox initially accused a friend of hers, an obviously innocent barman, of the crime. She was sentenced to three years in prison for defamation.
That judgement was also later overturned by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 2019. With the new trial she has initiated, Knox now hopes to achieve a complete acquittal of the defamation charge.
It has still not been established who murdered the young British woman.
A 20-year-old man whose fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime was convicted of accessory to murder. He has since been released. The Amanda Knox case was later the basis for several books, films, and a TV series.
