The retrials of Amanda Knox and her one time boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have commenced on Monday in Florence. In 2007 Knox, a student from Seattle, Washington was studying abroad in Italy. The young American girl shared a house with three other women, one of whom was a British student named Meredith Kercher. In 2007 Kercher was discovered murdered in the home she shared with Knox and the other students. Police focused on Amanda Knox and her boyfriend during the investigation, convinced they were the ones that killed Kercher.
After several intense interrogations Knox confessed to killing her roommate but later recanted saying she was so brutally interrogated that she did not understand what the police were asking her. In 2009 Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of murdering Kercher and sentenced to over 20-years in prison. In 2011 Knox and Sollecito won the appeal, which overturned their convictions. Knox went back to Seattle and Sollecito stayed home in Italy. The prosecutors trying the Knox case would not accept the court's decision and requested a new trial.
The prosecutors were granted their request and Knox and Sollecito were put back on trial. Neither defendant needs to be present for the trial and Knox has already stated that she will not be returning to Italy. If she is convicted again it is unlikely the United States government will extradite her back to Italy. Knox can fight an extradition request citing that in the U.S being retried for a crime falls under "Double Jeopardy." Even though the crime took place outside the U.S it seems unlikely given this standard of U.S law the government will extradite one of their own.
"I'm afraid to go back there," Amanda Knox said in an interview with CNN. "I don't want to go back to prison." The prosecutor trying the Knox case claimed Kercher's murder resulted from a sex game gone wrong. The Italian media often portrayed Knox as a sex obsessed woman and used her MySpace handle "Foxy Knoxy" against her. Knox said in her CNN interview that the claims of a sex game were a "bombardment of falsehood and fantasy." Knox will be watching the retrial closely from the safety of her home in Seattle while being represented in court by her lawyers.
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