Seven years after the Cara Rintala case was first featured on NBC’s “Dateline,” the popular investigation and interview series returns Friday night with an updated episode, 2½ months after a jury found Rintala guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the 2010 slaying of her wife, Annamarie Cochrane Rintala, at their Granby home.

The one-hour show, “Down the Basement Stairs,” will air at 10 p.m. Eastern and will feature interviews with First Assistant District Attorney Steven Gagne, defense attorneys Rosemary Scapicchio and Chauncey Wood and others. It is being reported by Dennis Murphy.

“Dateline” describes the episode like this: “When young mother and paramedic Annamarie Cochrane Rintala is found dead at the bottom of her basement stairs, it takes four trials and 13 years before justice is served. In Friday’s ‘Dateline,’ insiders close to the investigation speak out in new interviews about the final verdict.”

Rintala went on trial this fall for the fourth time in the case, with the first two ending in hung juries. She was convicted of murder at her third trial in 2016 and sentenced to life in prison.

The verdict was appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled in September 2021 that the commonwealth’s paint expert “lacked the necessary expertise” and that his testimony — that Cara Rintala had poured paint over the crime scene within four hours of the time emergency responders took photos — “likely swayed the jury’s verdict.”

The SJC overturned the guilty verdict and sent the case back to Superior Court for a fourth trial.

As jurors did at Rintala’s third trial in 2016, the jury this year had the option of finding her not guilty or guilty of first- or second-degree murder or manslaughter. They found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter in a trial after 16 hours of deliberations over three days.

Voluntary manslaughter is considered a lesser-included offense of first-degree murder. The essential difference between the two charges is that first-degree murder requires a specific intent to kill with either deliberate premeditation or extreme atrocity or cruelty, whereas voluntary manslaughter is an unplanned killing that takes place in the heat of passion or during sudden combat.

Rintala was sentenced to 12 to 14 years in prison and will have 4½ to 6½ years to serve, having already spent 7½ years incarcerated since she was first indicted on a charge of murder in 2011.