Amanda Knox Faces a New Court Battle
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Ida Astute/ABC News(ROME) — Amanda Knox faces an all-too-familiar scenario this week, with her fate in the hands of an Italian court.
The Washington state woman and her co-defendant and former boyfriend, Italian Raffaele Sollecito, have endured multiple trials for the 2007 slaying of British student Meredith Kercher.
Italy’s Court of Cassation will decide Wednesday, possibly once and for all, whether Knox’s 2009 conviction should stand, or whether she should face yet another trial on appeal. If convicted, she could face a 28½-year prison sentence.
She discussed the possibility of prison in a January 2014 interview with ABC News Robin Roberts.
“This really has hit me like a train,” Knox said after last year’s appeals court ruling. “I didn’t expect this to happen.”
Knox, 27, was initially convicted in 2009. That conviction was overturned on appeal in 2011, and the acquittal was thrown out in 2013. Her original conviction was upheld by the appeals court last year.
Sollecito, an Italian citizen, was stripped of his travel documents after the 2014 conviction. He is expected to be in court Wednesday. If the conviction is upheld, Sollecito will likely be arrested and taken to prison. He faces a 25-year sentence.
Rudy Guede, a Perugian drifter with a criminal record for burglary, is serving a 16-year sentence for Kercher’s murder. His fingerprints and shoeprints were found in blood at the crime scene and his DNA was inside Kercher. He could be released in the next few years.
Knox has also been ordered to stand trial on a lesser charge, slander, in Italy, for claiming Italian police coerced her during her interrogation.
Knox has tried to move past the legal challenges. She’s newly engaged, working in a bookstore and writing theater reviews for the West Seattle Herald.
But she’s also in therapy, ABC News has learned, still trying to cope with a terrifying past and uncertain future.
Through it all, Knox has maintained that she is innocent.
The biggest unknown is whether Knox will be extradited and returned to an Italian jail if the conviction is upheld.
“I will never go willingly back to the place where I — I’m going to fight this to the very end,” she told ABC News in 2014.
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