The court made the ruling after a Moscow prosecutor dropped the charges against the woman on November 18.
"The prosecutor dropped the charges and asked to close the case because, in his opinion, Ivannikova acted in self-defense," a source in the court said a week ago.
After the ruling was announced, Ivannikova said she had been waiting for this decision for two years.
"I was hoping for a just ruling. Two years is an enormous period," she said.
A representative for the victim disagreed with the prosecutor's original position, saying the defendant should be held accountable.
According to investigators, in December 2003, Ivannikova waved down a car for a ride home. The driver, Sergei Bagdasaryan, took her to a dead-end street and tried to rape her, but Ivannikova stabbed him with a knife in the thigh. Bagdasaryan died from blood loss.
Prosecutors called the actions of the accused a "deliberate causing of serious harm to health, which resulted in the death of the injured party due to carelessness." Later, prosecutors re-qualified Ivannikova's actions as "murder in the state of temporary insanity."
On June 2, Moscow's Lyublinsky Court found Ivannikova guilty of murder while temporarily insane, resulting from "violence or the immoral conduct of the victim", giving her a two-year suspended sentence and requiring her to pay moral damages to the family of the victim.
On July 4, the Moscow City Court overturned the murder conviction on the grounds that the woman had acted in self-defense against a man who was trying to rape her. The court, however, sided with the dead man's relatives and ordered a retrial.
