Amanda Knox pauses emotionally while speaking during a news conference at Sea-Tac International Airport, Washington after landing there on a flight from Italy, in this October 4, 2011, file photo. 
 
 NEW YORK The possibility that American Amanda Knox could be convicted of murder and extradited to Italy for punishment could force U.S. courts to enter legal territory that is largely uncharted, legal experts said. 
 
 Italy's top court on Tuesday ordered the retrial of Knox, 25, for the 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher. 
 
 The move potentially pits a U.S. constitutional ban on double jeopardy, or being tried twice for the same offense after an acquittal, against international extradition agreements, experts said. 
 
 The issue hinges on whether a lower court decision overturning her conviction amounted to an acquittal, they said. 
 
 If Knox is retried after she was acquitted, that would violate her constitutional rights, said Christopher Blakesley, a law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who specializes in international criminal law. On the other hand, the United States entered into an extradition treaty and, in doing so, accepted Italy's criminal justice system, he added. 
 
 "If Knox is found guilty, there's still a whole lot of room for battle before she would ever be extradited," Blakesley said. 
 
 Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were accused of killing 21-year-old Meredith Kercher during a drug-fuelled sexual encounter in Perugia, Italy. The two were found guilty in 2009 and sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively. 
 
 In 2011, an appeals court, comprised of a panel of judges and lay jurors, overturned the convictions of Knox and Sollecito after forensic experts challenged evidence from the original trial. Knox and Sollecito were released after four years in prison, and Knox returned to her family home near Seattle. 
 
 Prosecutors and Kercher family lawyers appealed to Italy's high court, the Court of Cassation, calling the prior ruling "contradictory and illogical." 
 
 On Tuesday, the Court of Cassation agreed to overturn the appeals court's acquittals. The high court has not yet provided a full reasoning for its decision, and a date has not yet been set for the new trial, which will be held before a different court of appeals in Florence. 
 
 Knox's Italian lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said via email that the new trial would likely occur in late 2013 or early 2014. Knox does not intend to return to Italy for the proceeding, he said, and the court of appeals can retry the case in absentia. 
 
 The Italian government could ask for extradition once the Italian courts have reached a final decision, Dalla Vedova said. If it does, the U.S. Department of State would then have to decide whether to act on the request. If the State Department chooses to comply, it would then deploy the U.S. Attorney's Office to a U.S. court to seek Knox's extradition. 
 
 What is unpredictable is how such a case would play out in front of a U.S. judge who would have to weigh the U.S. constitutional protection against double jeopardy with the 1984 bilateral extradition treaty between the United States and Italy. The treaty contains a provision that attempts to protect against double jeopardy, but it is not clear whether that provision would bar extradition in Knox's case. 
 
 The legal question would be whether Knox was acquitted, as U.S. courts would define the term, or whether the case was merely reversed and still open for further appeal, said criminal lawyer and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. 
 
 "It's very complicated, and there's no clear answer. It's in the range of unpredictable," Dershowitz said. 
 
 Much of the complication stems from the differences between the Italian and U.S. legal systems. In the United States, if a defendant is acquitted, the case cannot be retried. 
 
 In Italy, prosecutors and lawyers for interested parties, such as Kercher's family, can file an appeal. Unlike American courts of appeal, which only consider legal errors in the courts below, Italian courts of appeal, which are comprised of both judges and jurors, can reconsider the facts of a case. 
 
 Depending on the Italian high court's reason for overturning Knox's acquittal, it is possible that the court of appeals could consider new evidence that's introduced, said Dalla Vedova. As a result, a defendant can effectively be retried in the course of one case in Italy. 
 
 Dalla Vedova said the high court's decision does not raise a double jeopardy problem because the retrial would not be a new case but rather a continuation of the same case on appeal. 
 
 Other defendants who have been acquitted in other countries and then convicted on appeal have attempted to raise the double jeopardy principle to avoid extradition, without much success, said Mary Fan, a law professor at the University of Washington who specializes in cross-border criminal law. 
 
 The text of the treaty prevents extradition if the person has already been convicted or acquitted of the same offense by the "requested" country, which would be the United States in Knox's case because Italy would be requesting extradition from the United States. Because Knox was never prosecuted or acquitted for homicide in the United States, the treaty's double-jeopardy provision would not prevent Knox's extradition, said Fan. 
 
 While the issue is rare in the United States, several courts have rejected the double jeopardy argument in similar cases. In 2010, a federal court in California found that a man who was acquitted of murder in Mexico and later convicted after prosecutors appealed the acquittal, could not claim double jeopardy to avoid extradition to Mexico. That court cited a 1974 decision from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, that reached the same conclusion with respect to Canadian law, which also allows the government to appeal an acquittal. 
 
 When asked about the potential extradition of Knox at a press briefing on Tuesday, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department said the question was hypothetical and declined to comment. 
 
 (Reporting By Terry Baynes; Editing by Sandra Maler) ||||| American says she will not return to Italy if appeal court upholds conviction for murder of Meredith Kercher 
 
 Amanda Knox says she will be fugitive from justice if court decides she is guilty 
 
 Amanda Knox, the American accused of killing her British flatmate Meredith Kercher, has said she will become a fugitive from justice if an Italian court decides to uphold her murder conviction later this month. 
 
 Knox, 26, is facing the possible reinstatement of a hefty sentence for her alleged part in the death of the 21-year-old Leeds University student in Perugia in 2007. She and her co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, are in the final stretches of a second appeal against convictions handed down in 2009. 
 
 On Thursday the 29-year-old Italian sat in court as his defence lawyer argued that he was the innocent victim of a deeply flawed prosecution and should be allowed to walk free. 
 
 But the Seattle-based student, as is her right under Italian law, has not returned to Italy for the new proceedings at the Florence appeals court, saying she fears being found guilty and sent back to jail. 
 
 In an interview on Thursday, she appeared to confirm that she has no intention of returning to Italy if the verdict goes against her. Asked by the daily newspaper La Repubblica what she would do if her conviction were upheld, she was quoted as saying: "In that case I will be – how do you put it? – a fugitive." 
 
 If the court, which is expected to rule on 30 January, upholds the guilty verdicts its judgment will still have to be validated by Italy's supreme court. If that happens, Italy could request Knox's extradition from the US, a move her lawyers would challenge, at least in part on the US legal principle of double jeopardy – the premise that someone cannot be tried for a crime of which they have been acquitted. 
 
 Legal experts, however, say the picture is by no means clear cut as the 2011 appeal verdict that quashed Knox and Sollecito's convictions was not confirmed by the supreme court, which ruled last year that the decision to acquit was flawed. 
 
 On Thursday, Sollecito's defence lawyer Giulia Bongiorno wrapped up her argument for why he should again be cleared of the 2007 murder, insisting that police and prosecutors overlooked signs of his innocence because they were keen to avoid public fright over "a monster" on the loose. "For some investigators, the first suspects are like first loves: never forgotten," she said, Reuters reported. Both defendants insist they are innocent. 
 
 In her interview Knox said that although she was reasonably optimistic about the verdict, she was also approaching it with trepidation as "every time that I've thought my innocence would be acknowledged I have been convicted". 
 
 She said she badly wanted to talk directly to Kercher's family, but was aware that such a move would not be welcome. 
 
 "I still want to talk with them, tell them directly that I had nothing to do with Meredith's death, that I cared about her and that we were friends," she was quoted as saying. "But I know that they see me as their daughter's murderer [and] are convinced that it was me who killed her, and so it is still not the moment to speak with them. But that day will come." 
 
 The comments were not welcomed by Francesco Maresca, the Kercher family's lawyer, who told the Ansa news agency: "Amanda must act like a defendant … she should stop making these statements." 
 
 Another man, Rudy Guede, from Ivory Coast, is serving a 16-year sentence, cut from 30 years on appeal, for Kercher's killing. But tThe Italian supreme court, in the reasoning for its decision last year, said the Florence court should re-examine the possibility that Guede did not act alone.
– Amanda Knox has once again been found guilty of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, but will she be sent back to Italy to serve a 28-year sentence? Legal experts say any attempts to extradite the Seattle resident are unlikely to begin until the appeals process has finished, and since she was retried after being found innocent of the same offense, the American ban on "double jeopardy" convictions could help keep her out of an Italian prison. If Italy does decide to extradite her, they will have to make a formal request to the State Department, where officials will consider it. But if they choose to reject the request, there could be diplomatic consequences, a lawyer specializing in extradition tells ABC. "The US often wants Italy to extradite all kinds of people, so if the US refuses to even process the case, especially a case involving violence, that could have some adverse consequences for bilateral relations," he says. The American review of any extradition request could, however, be quite limited in scope and will focus mainly on paperwork, another expert tells the Seattle Times. "It’s not a retrial of the case, and it’s not a retrial of another country’s justice system." Knox, who has said she won't return to Italy willingly, slammed the fresh guilty verdict and said it would not be a consolation to the Kercher family, CNN reports. "This has gotten out of hand. Most troubling is that it was entirely preventable," she said in a statement. "I beseech those with the knowledge and authority to address and remediate the problems that worked to pervert the course of justice and waste the valuable resources of the system," she said. Knox's co-accused, ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, was also found guilty again and sentenced to 25 years. After the verdict, police found him at a hotel near Italy's borders with Slovenia and Austria, the AP reports. He was taken to a police station, where a stamp was put in his passport stating that he cannot leave the country.