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April 10 (UPI) -- A retrial on Wednesday got underway in Italy against Amanda Knox over a conviction of slander she received after she had wrongly accused a bar owner of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher. Carlo Dalla Vedova, said Knox, 36, had originally planned to attend the trial in Florence, Italy, but was "busy taking care of her two young children, one of whom was born recently."
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Knox had asked for the slander conviction to be reversed after a 2019 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, which determined Knox's rights had been violated during police questioning.
Italy's supreme court in October ordered the retrial after it changed its code of criminal procedure in 2022, setting the stage for what could be the last of Knox's Italian legal battles.
Knox, who was a 20-year-old student at the time of Kercher's murder had wrongly accused her ex-employer who she worked for in Preguia, Italy -- a Congolese citizen named Patrick Lumumba -- of carrying out the killing.
Knox and Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted in 2008 of Kercher's murder but served only four years of 26-year sentences before their sentences were overturned and Knox was exonerated.
Lumumba spent two weeks in jail only to be released once an alibi had been provided by a witness. Knox's lawyers maintain she had been put under duress without legal assistance or an interpreter when she made the allegation against her former employer, who has since moved out of Italy.
An appeals court reheard the case in 2011 and acquitted the pair after it was established DNA tests were contaminated by police, but in 2013 the Supreme Court dismissed the acquittals, criticizing the lower court for "contradictions and inconsistencies" in its decision.
Rudy Guede -- a native of Ivory Coast in Africa -- was found guilty of Kercher's murder in a separate trial in 2008, and was released from prison in November 2021 after serving 13 of a 16-year jail sentence.
Knox now campaigns for criminal justice reform and is working with Hulu on a mini-series about her experience in Italy's legal system with Monica Lewinsky as the series' executive producer.
"In many ways, though I'm now free, legally vindicated, a woman with a career in the arts (as I'd always dreamed), an advocate for justice (which I never dreamed), a wife with a loving husband, a mother with a joyous child," Knox wrote in 2023 on social media around the time of her one year wedding anniversary.
"I'm still walking that tightrope," she said.
