Amanda Knox Back Home: Any Parallels with Casey Anthony?

Amanda Knox finally returned home to Seattle Tuesday, a day after she was acquitted in Italy of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher.

Within two hours after the verdict was read Monday night, Knox, 24, left the prison where she had been held for four years.

Knox was taken from Perugia to Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, and boarded a flight to London Tuesday morning. From there she took a flight to the United States.

Knox was seen smiling and hugging an unidentified person in Rome before boarding the flight for the United States. At 5:09 p.m. Pacific Time Tuesday the flight carrying Knox landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Wearing a sweater and black pants, Knox said in a news conference that, they're reminding me to speak in English, because I'm having problems with that. She spent nearly four years in an Italian prison.

I'm really overwhelmed right now. I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn't real.

Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested in 2007 on charges of killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher, then 21 years old, during a study-abroad program in Perugia.

Knox and Sollecito were sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively, in 2009 but they maintained their innocence and appealed.

The Italian court Monday overturned the December 2009 convictions.

Despite many differences, some compared Knox with Casey Anthony, the accused child-killer was cleared despite a body of evidence against her.

Nancy Grace, a news pundit and Dancing With the Stars competitor, told The Hollywood Gossip: “Knox's conviction is being overturned? I think that it was a miscarriage of justice.”

I only hope Ms. Knox makes something of her life because she's certainly been given a second chance. Very few people are given the chance she has been given.

In July, a Florida jury acquitted Anthony, 25, of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, who went missing in June, 2008.

The defense team lacked physical evidence, but the prosecutor claimed that Anthony murdered Caylee by applying chloroform first, sealing her mouth with duct tape, and dumping the body in the woods near her parents' home.

According to The Independent report in 2009, Knox was found guilty because of the irregularity in her defense, and also because her DNA was found on the supposed murder weapon.

Kercher's family was disappointed by the court’s verdict. They issued a statement through a representative saying that while they respected the decision of the judges, they did not understand how the decision of the first trial could be so radically overturned.

We still trust the Italian judicial system and hope that the truth will eventually emerge, they said.

But after years of trial and investigation and physical evidence against Knox, the defendant walked away freely.