She spent almost four years incarcerated in Italy after her wrongful conviction in the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student, with whom she shared an apartment in Perugia.

[1] In 2024, an Italian appellate court upheld Amanda Knox's slander conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher.

A guilty verdict at Knox's initial trial and her 26-year sentence caused international controversy, because American forensic experts thought evidence at the crime scene was incompatible with her involvement.

A prolonged legal process, including a successful prosecution appeal against her acquittal at a second-level trial, continued after Knox was freed in 2011.

[23] Knox and Sollecito then went to Via della Pergola 7, and upon getting no answer from Kercher, unsuccessfully tried to break in the bedroom door, leaving it noticeably damaged.

Romanelli arrived and took over, explaining the situation to the police who were informed about Kercher's English phone, which had been handed in as a result of its ringing when Knox called it.

[35][36] During her initial questioning, Knox told authorities that Lumumba had broken into the home she shared with Kercher and other roommates, before sexually assaulting and killing her.

[37][38] Knox said that she had spent the night of 1 November with Sollecito at his flat,[39] smoking marijuana, watching the French film Amélie, and having sex.

[49][50][a] Knox testified that prior to the trial she had spent hours maintaining her original story, that she had been with Sollecito at his flat all night and had no knowledge of the murder, but a group of police[58] would not believe her.

During a November 19, 2007 Skype conversation with his friend Giacomo Benedetti, Guede did not mention Knox or Sollecito as being in the building on the night of the murder.

[89] According to the prosecution's reconstruction, Knox had attacked Kercher in her bedroom, repeatedly banged her head against a wall, forcefully held her face, and tried to strangle her.

[94][95] Knox's lawyers said it would have been impossible to selectively remove her traces, and emphasized that Guede's shoe prints, fingerprints, and DNA were found in Kercher's bedroom.

[97] Guede's DNA, mixed with Kercher's, was on the left sleeve of her bloody sweatshirt and in bloodstains inside her shoulder bag, from which €300 and credit cards had been stolen.

[102][103][104] In Italy, opinion was not generally favorable toward Knox, and an Italian law professor remarked: "This is the simplest and fairest criminal trial one could possibly think of in terms of evidence.

American lawyers expressed concern about pre-trial publicity, and statements excluded from the murder case being allowed for a contemporaneous civil suit heard by the same jury.

According to consultant Greg Hampikian, director of the Idaho Innocence Project, the Italian forensic police could not replicate the key result, claimed to have successfully identified DNA at levels below those an American laboratory would attempt to analyze, and never supplied validation of their methods.

[112][113] The review found the forensic police examination showed evidence of multiple males' DNA fragments on the bra clasp, which had been lost on the floor for 47 days, the court-appointed expert testified the context strongly suggested contamination.

[119] It was emphasized that Knox's first calls raised the alarm and brought the police, which made the prosecution's assertion that she had been trying to delay discovery of the body untenable.

[118][120][121][122] The false accusation conviction in relation to her employer was upheld, and Judge Hellman imposed a three-year sentence, although this did not result in additional incarceration, being less than Knox had already served.

[123][124][125][126] Knox wrote a letter to Corrado Maria Daclon, Secretary General of the Italy–USA Foundation, the day after regaining her freedom: To hold my hand and offer support and respect throughout the obstacles and the controversy, there were Italians.

The Court ruled that the Hellmann acquittals had gone beyond the remit of a corte d'assise d'appello by not ordering new DNA tests and by failing to give weight to circumstantial evidence in context, such as Knox's accusation against the bar owner in the disputed interviews.

[128][129][130] Judge Nencini presided at the retrial, and granted a prosecution request for analysis of a previously unexamined DNA sample found on a kitchen knife of Sollecito's, which the prosecution alleged was the murder weapon based on the forensic police reporting that Kercher's DNA was on it, a conclusion discredited by court-appointed experts at the appeal trial.

[135] In their written explanation, the judges emphasized Guede's fast-track verdict report as a judicial reference point establishing that he had not acted alone.

[137] On March 27, 2015, the ultimate appeal by Knox and Sollecito was heard by the Supreme Court of Cassation; it ruled that the case was without foundation, thereby definitively acquitting them of the murder.

[141] On September 7, 2015, the Court published the report on the acquittal, citing "glaring errors", "investigative amnesia", and "guilty omissions", where a five-judge panel said that the prosecutors who won the original murder conviction failed to prove a "whole truth" to back up the scenario that Knox and Sollecito killed Kercher.

[142] They also stated that there were "sensational failures" (clamorose defaillance) in the investigation, and that the lower court had been guilty of "culpable omissions" (colpevoli omissioni) in ignoring expert testimony that demonstrated contamination of evidence.

[145][146] Based on the ECHR's ruling that she should have been provided with a lawyer and a competent interpreter during the "obsessively long" and implicitly violent police interviews (Knox had been acquitted of defamation for saying she had been struck by policewomen during the interrogation), Knox appealed her conviction for defamation of Patrick Lumumba, since the statement that he was involved was made during those interviews, at the same time that it was claimed that she had implicated herself.

[147] In June 2024, an Italian appellate court upheld Amanda Knox's slander conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher in 2007.

Her family incurred large debts from the years of supporting her in Italy and were left insolvent, the proceeds from Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir having gone to pay legal fees to her Italian lawyers.

[153] In June 2019, Knox returned to Italy as a keynote speaker at a conference on criminal justice, where she was part of a panel titled "Trial by Media".