American Amanda Knox was convicted again Thursday of murdering her roommate in Italy seven years ago, but said authorities will have to pull her “kicking and screaming” back into that country.
Knox was sentenced to 28¹/₂ years in prison, and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to 25 years, by an Italian appeals court, in the latest reversal in the confounding murder case.
Knox, 26, was half a world away in Washington state when the verdict was read in Florence, but had already made clear she wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m definitely not going back to Italy willingly,” Knox told The Guardian. “They’ll have to catch me and pull me back kicking and screaming into a prison that I don’t deserve to be in. I will fight for my innocence.”
Knox said she thought she was in the clear after being freed from an Italian jail in 2011 after an appeal of her 2009 conviction.
“Having been found innocent before, I expected better from the Italian justice system,” she said.
Her lawyer, Luciano Ghirga, said, “It was a real blow.”
It appears unlikely “Foxy Knoxy” will be extradited.
Legal experts believe an extradition request from Italy would be rejected because of American double-jeopardy laws say she cannot be tried twice on the same charges.
The case began in November 2007, when Meredith Kercher was found slain, with her throat cut, in the Perugia, Italy, house she shared with Knox.
Knox, then an exchange student, initially implicated a Perugia club owner, but his alibi held up. Another Knox associate, Rudy Guede, told police he had sex with Kercher the night she was slain but someone else killed her. He was later convicted of murder, and is the only one now serving time for the brutal slaying.
Knox and Sollecito were found guilty and were imprisoned in 2009, but were freed in 2011 after an appeals court determined that DNA and other evidence used to convict them was questionable.
Although very little surfaced after that, Italy’s supreme court last year vacated the 2011 decision and ordered one more trial, citing discrepancies in the first.
Knox’s lawyer said then that she was ready to prove her innocence, but only Sollecito, who had gone to the Dominican Republic after he was freed, returned to Italy for the trial.
Sollecito’s lawyers said they were stunned by the latest verdict and vowed to lodge a new appeal with Italy’s top court.
“There isn’t a shred of proof,” his attorney, Luca Maori, said.