PERUGIA, Italy – An Italian appeals court Monday overturned American student Amanda Knox's conviction in the murder and rape of a fellow student, freeing her from prison and allowing her to the United States.
Knox collapsed in tears after the verdict was read. Her co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, also was cleared of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in 2007.
The court, however, upheld Knox's slander conviction for accusing bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba of carrying out the killing. The sentence was set at three years, or time served, since Knox has been in prison since Nov. 6, 2007.
The Kercher family looked on grimly as the verdict was read after 11 hours of deliberations by the eight-member jury. Outside the courthouse, some of the hundreds of observers shouted, "Shame, shame!"
Yet inside the frescoed courtroom, Knox's parents, who have regularly traveled from their home in Seattle to Perugia to visit the 24-year-old over the past four years, hugged their lawyers and cried with joy.
"We've been waiting for this for four years," said one of Sollecito's lawyers, Giulia Bongiorno.
Hours later, Knox again was a free woman.
Corrado Maria Daclon, the secretary general of a foundation that has championed Knox's cause, said Knox told him as she left prison that she just "wanted to go home, reconnect with her family, take possession of her life and win back her happiness."
Daclon was in the car with Knox as she left Perugia's Campanne. Italian lawmaker Rocco Girlanda, who is close to the American, says she and her family will leave Italy on Tuesday aboard a commercial flight from Rome.
Prosecutors can appeal the acquittal to Italy's highest court. There was no word late Monday if they planned to do so.
Earlier Monday, Knox delivered a tearful 10-minute address in Italian to the packed courtroom asking them to allow her to return to the U.S. and saying she did not kill her British roommate.
"I did not kill. I did not rape. I did not steal. I wasn't there," Knox said.
"I've lost a friend in the worst, most brutal, most inexplicable way possible," she said of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old Briton who shared an apartment with Knox when they were both students in Perugia. "I'm paying with my life for things that I didn't do."
Knox and Sollecito, Knox's former boyfriend from Italy, were convicted in 2009 of sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher, who was stabbed to death in her bedroom. Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison, Sollecito to 25. They both deny wrongdoing.
"I never hurt anyone, never in my life," Sollecito said Monday in his own speech to the jury.
Hundreds of eager observers gathered outside the courthouse ahead of the highly anticipated announcement, joining television vans that have been camped out for more than a week. One hundred reporters were being allowed into the subterranean courtroom.
Observers lined the street leading to the courthouse, taking pictures as the two vans carrying Knox and Sollecito from the prison to the court passed by.
Kercher's mother, sister and a brother traveled to Perugia for the verdict. They had expressed worry over the possibility of an acquittal but told reporters as deliberations were under way that they hoped the jury would do the right thing and not be influenced by the media's focus on the case.
"As long as they decide today based purely on the information available to them and they don't look into the media hype, I think justice will be found," the victim's sister, Stephanie Kercher, told reporters. She said the family was satisfied with the original verdicts.
She lamented that Meredith had been "most forgotten" in the media circus surrounding the case, with news photos more frequently showing Knox and Sollecito than "Mez" -- the victim's nickname. "It's very difficult to keep her memory alive in all of this," she said.
The family, however, said it could understand the Knox family's media campaign.
"They fully believe in her innocence. You can't blame them for that," said Lyle Kercher, the victim's brother. "But it's obviously hard for us."
As the verdict was broadcast live, hundreds of reporters and camera crews filled the underground, frescoed courtroom before Knox's address, while police outside cordoned off the entrance to the tribunal.
The trial has captivated audiences worldwide: Knox and Sollecito had been convicted of murdering Meredith in what the lower court said had begun as a drug-fueled sexual assault.
Also convicted in separate proceedings was Rudy Hermann Guede, a small-time drug dealer and drifter who spent most of his life in Italy after arriving here from his native Ivory Coast. Guede was convicted in a separate fast-track procedure and saw his sentence cut to 16 years in his final appeal.
Lawyers for Knox and Sollecito believe Guede was the sole killer, but the prosecution and a lawyer for the Kercher family say that bruises and a lack of defensive wounds on Kercher's body prove that there was more than one aggressor holding her into submission.
Knox said she had nothing more than a passing acquaintance with Guede, who played basketball at a court near the house, and didn't even know his name. Sollecito, who addressed the court before Knox, told jurors that he did not know Guede at all.
Sollecito was anxious as he addressed the court, shifting as he spoke and stopping to sip water. He said prior to the Nov. 1, 2007 murder was a happy time for him, he was close to defending his thesis to graduate from university and had just met Knox.
The weekend Kercher was murdered was the first the pair planned to spend together "in tenderness and cuddles," he said.
At the end of his 17-minute address, Sollecito took off a white rubber bracelet emblazoned with "Free Amanda and Raffaele" that he said he has been wearing for four years.
"I have never taken it off. Many emotions are concentrated in this bracelet," he said. "Now I want to pay homage to the court. The moment to take it off has arrived."
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