and serious as she entered the Hall of Frescoes, the courtroom where her trial took place last year in Perugia, Italy.

There are six new jurors, five women and one man and two new judges, president Claudio Patillo Hellmann and an assisting judge.

The Seattle college student, who was 20 at the time, was arrested by Italian police on Nov. 6, 2007 and charged with murdering Kercher.

Denied the option of house arrest, Knox, now 23, has not left prison since except to attend the murder trial that ended with her conviction and 26 year prison sentence.

Knox was convicted last December along with her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 25, of sexually assaulting Kercher and then killing her by slashing her throat.

Sollecito, who is also appealing his case, was sentenced to 25years in prison. A third person convicted of taking part in the murder was Ivory Coast native Rudy Guede. He was convicted in a separate trial and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but that term was reduced to 16 years on appeal.

Knox has spent the last three years in a 129 square foot prison cell in the outskirts of Perugia, Italy.

"The long pre-emptive custody has broken down the young woman," Knox's lawyers said in a motion filed earlier this month as part of their appeal. Ghirga described Knox as "worried, tense" ahead of the appeal, and "exhausted by three years in prison."

"Amanda says prison is like not living because nothing changes. She says everything is the same incessantly," her stepfather Chris Mellas told ABC News earlier this