Amanda Knox awaits another verdict from Italy court

Amanda Knox remained in Seattle Thursday as she awaited a verdict, the fourth by an Italian court, in the killing of roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia. "Nothing will ever take away the experience of being wrongfully imprisoned," Knox, 26, told the New York Times in a Skype interview, explaining why she exercised her right not to attend any part of the latest trial in a long-running legal saga for her and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. "It remains that I would be putting myself in the hands of people who very clearly want me in prison for something that I didn't do," she said. "And I can't do that. I just can't. No. No way, no how." She also said she'd become such a known figure that her lawyers advised her to stay away. "They said, 'If you go to the court, they're going to be paying attention to you -- they're going to be looking at your face, they're going to be trying to read your gestures, they're not going to be listening, and that is a huge problem,'" Knox told the newspaper. She and Sollecito were convicted in 2009 in Kercher's murder for their role in what prosecutors described as a drug-fueled sex game that spiraled out of control. The two were arrested in the murder two years earlier. The body of Kercher, 21, a foreign exchange student like Knox, was found on her bedroom floor in a pool of blood in the apartment she shared with Knox and others. Kercher had stab wounds to the throat. Knox and Sollecito were convicted of sexual assault and murder in December 2009 and sentenced to 26 and 25 years, respectively. But their convictions were overturned on appeal in October 2011 by a panel of six jurors and two judges. However, the acquittals were overturned in March 2013 by the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court, which ordered a new trial. That trial, in Florence, started in the fall. Another man, Rudy Guede, was convicted in a separate trial and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Guede, who fled Italy after the murder and was later extradited from Germany, has admitted he was in Kercher's room that night but denies he killed her. Defense lawyers argue he was the only one who committed the crime. Prosecutors say the number and type of wounds to Kercher's body could not have been made by just one person. Sollecito has been present for some of the proceedings. His father Francesco told Italian news agency ANSA, "We'll be in the courtroom [Thursday]." "We will be there because, once more, we have faith in the justice system," he said. Prosecutors have asked for Knox to be given a 30-year jail sentence -- four more years than her original sentence. They asked for a 26-year term for Sollecito -- one year more than his first sentence. If the Florence appeals court convicts Knox, she could appeal at least one more time, said her lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, told the Wall Street Journal. If she loses all appeals, Italy could seek her extradition. It was unclear if the United States would agree to send Knox back to Italy. One issue in the decision involves the interpretation of double jeopardy, the U.S. legal principle in which a suspect can't be tried twice for the same crime, legal experts told the Journal.