In a message to her supporters, Amanda Knox, 26, again protested her innocence and said she was going through a "terribly difficult and bewildering time" but that she had developed "a store of inner fortitude." Knox, along with her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, was re-convicted last week for the murder of Meredith Kercher.
"It's a feeling of steadiness despite the storm, kind of like earning your sea-legs," she said in a post on her blog. "I hold on to that steadiness, but that doesn't mean I know what to do. I'm still in shock. I don't know what the future has in store for me, what I will and will not be able to do.
"It's hard to even know what I'm up against, what could be motivating this verdict that's so clearly wrong and unfounded."
In an interview Monday with La Stampa newspaper, Sollecito said when he first met Knox, about a week before the murder happened, she had been "sunny and warm, like Alice in Wonderland," but that after four years in an Italian jail she had changed markedly.
Lawyers for Sollecito will make a formal complaint against the judge in the retrial after he was accused of impropriety for giving interviews about the case.
Alessandro Nencini, the presiding judge in the retrial, suggested at the weekend that Sollecito's decision not to testify may have worked against him, depriving the court the chance to cross-examine him.
The judge said the fact that Sollecito had not given evidence was his right, but that it "deprived him of a voice" and that the outcome of the retrial could have been different had he done so.
The latest twist in the legal saga, which has now gone on for more than six years, came as Knox thanked her supporters, saying that she was "still in shock" over last week's decision by the court in Florence to reinstate her original guilty verdict and sentence her in absentia to 28 years and six months in jail. Sollecito, 29, who was given a jail sentence of 25 years, said he would have willingly given evidence had the request been made.
Giulia Bongiorno and Luca Maori, his lawyers, said they would refer the judge's remarks to the Italian justice ministry and the judiciary's governing body, which could impose disciplinary measures.
In a statement, they said: "We ask ourselves whether his comments on Raffaele Sollecito not being cross-examined mean that, if Sollecito had decided to blame Amanda Knox [for the murder], he would have been acquitted."
Mr Nencini's remarks had "discredited the entire judiciary. Giving an interview right after a sentence is simply inadmissible," the lawyers said.
The row over the media interviews could strengthen the appeals that lawyers for Knox and Sollecito intend to lodge.
Sollecito and Knox remain at liberty until the appeals are heard by the supreme court in Rome, with a final decision in the case expected next spring.
Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found dead in the student house she shared with Knox in Perugia in November 2007. The Daily Telegraph
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