Continuation Part 11: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Chris_Halkides]

how the luminol was applied might be a factor

Here is a bit more on overspray (scroll down the link about halfway):

"As noted above, Luminol can in fact react with around 100 other substances and can also appear to give a positive response when it is not reacting with anything -it can “auto- luminesce”. Sometimes the scientist will add some extra spray (what the witness referred to as “overspray”) in order to enhance the quality of the glow so that it will show up in a photograph.
In speaking of a photograph of the dinghy (see above) the scientist said that “this run down here” which appears as the fluorescent streak on the photograph, is just the chemical itself running down towards the back. (651) Like “overspray” the accumulation of the Luminol is “auto-luminescing”.
The witness says, “The glow is very pale to some extent, even though I’m calling it strong and weak.” (651) It is hard to know what this means. The witness explains more about her methods when she says:
Even when it’s strong it’s not particularly bright so, we spray multiple times to enable it to come out in a photograph so that’s why there has been some overspray of the chemical which has then run down towards the back and pooled at the back. (652)
So, the desire to get a good photograph, requires repeated applications of the Luminol, which can then “auto luminesce” as appears to be the case in the above photograph.
However, as explained above, the witness claimed to be able to distinguish between such “false positive” appearances and “true positive” appearances on the basis of her experience and by the sparkle, glow, colour and longevity of the response."

I am not yet convinced that the over application of luminol must have led to auto luminescence and thus to the results seen in this case. However, the over application might still be playing a role in the results, even if it is not the sole reason for them.

EDT

Here is a little bit more on auto luminescence. James O. Pex wrote, "Luminol, once used, will oxidize when dry and cause autoluminesence when the area is re-sprayed at a later date."

 

[LondonJohn]

I think that is what I meant. You do what you need to to survive. The concept that one would fight a man with a knife if cornered is TV fantasy. One complies and then lives with the guilt and shame. Rationally I should have handed over my purse but I had an escape route, but it might have ended badly.

Quite. And what's even more shocking about the courts' "reasoning" on this matter in the Knox/Sollecito trials is that they don't even seem to have entertained the idea that this (forced compliance) might be a reasonable possibility. They have instead pronounced that Kercher must necessarily have fought back with vigour had there only been a sole attacker, and that therefore(!!) since there's no evidence of defensive wounds, there must necessarily have been multiple assailants.

 

[Machiavelli]

I'm so disappointed. I thought you said

So is evidence a logical concept and not an object, or is it logical concepts AND medico-legal (excellent construct, btw, is it your own?) stuff in the murder room?

Is the medico-legal stuff what other people call forensic evidence? Or is it an extension of the logic?

Evidence is a logical concept. It is not "logical concepts". It is itself a logical concept. An activity, not an object.
Which means, it is not an object or a fact or a number of them; it is an inference, it can be from facts or from physical objects, but it is also, always an inference between objects or between facts or between a number of them.

So it's not something that can be restricted in one place.

And anyway, evidence is a demonstration, it is an action, the action to prove something, the human action of drawing inferences, putting findings in relation with others and weighing consequences.

 

[Kaosium]

Let's turn to something more simple. Addition and subtraction. You have an example for where the pro-Knoxes managed get lost on something as simple as that: an expression with a subtraction and a division to calculate Guede's penalty. Like calculating a discount down from the price tag when you by a car from a a salesman on a special offer day. They got it wrong. Kaosium said he surrenders. For how incredible this might be, some people like Kaosium here get lost about this calculaion; but if you get even this calculation wrong I'm not surprised if you don't understand circumstantial evidence.

I was having trouble following your posts which seemed internally inconsistent. Since it isn't a particularly important issue and I didn't care all that much I decided to withdraw without any further acrimony developing over something so esoteric.

If we're gonna have acrimony it's going to be over luminol or TMB, or DNA...not penal codes in languages I don't understand.

 

[anglolawyer]

I don't think I understand the question.

Circumstantial evidence works in combination, right? It is cumulative. Add this piece to that piece to that and you build a picture. But, for the exercise to be valid, you can't arbitrarily ignore items of evidence that don't fit your pet theory. The theory should fit all the relevant evidence. This is what Nencini has done. He has ignored evidence that doesn't fit (namely: negative TMB, no confirmatory tests and other things). As your approach to luminol is similar to his, I thought you could explain the reasoning.

 

[Kaosium]

Here is a bit more on overspray (scroll down the link about halfway):

"As noted above, Luminol can in fact react with around 100 other substances and can also appear to give a positive response when it is not reacting with anything -it can “auto- luminesce”. Sometimes the scientist will add some extra spray (what the witness referred to as “overspray”) in order to enhance the quality of the glow so that it will show up in a photograph.
In speaking of a photograph of the dinghy (see above) the scientist said that “this run down here” which appears as the fluorescent streak on the photograph, is just the chemical itself running down towards the back. (651) Like “overspray” the accumulation of the Luminol is “auto-luminescing”.
The witness says, “The glow is very pale to some extent, even though I’m calling it strong and weak.” (651) It is hard to know what this means. The witness explains more about her methods when she says:
Even when it’s strong it’s not particularly bright so, we spray multiple times to enable it to come out in a photograph so that’s why there has been some overspray of the chemical which has then run down towards the back and pooled at the back. (652)
So, the desire to get a good photograph, requires repeated applications of the Luminol, which can then “auto luminesce” as appears to be the case in the above photograph.
However, as explained above, the witness claimed to be able to distinguish between such “false positive” appearances and “true positive” appearances on the basis of her experience and by the sparkle, glow, colour and longevity of the response."

I am not yet convinced that the over application of luminol must have led to auto luminescence and thus to the results seen in this case. However, the over application might still be playing a role in the results, even if it is not the sole reason for them.

Boy is that ever interesting.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

Addition and subtraction. You have an example for where the pro-Knoxes managed get lost on something as simple as that: an expression with a subtraction and a division to calculate Guede's penalty. Like calculating a discount down from the price tag when you by a car from a a salesman on a special offer day. They got it wrong. Kaosium said he surrenders. For how incredible this might be, some people like Kaosium here get lost about this calculaion; but if you get even this calculation wrong I'm not surprised if you don't understand circumstantial evidence.

Hey,

I will have you know I am in the genius range of IQ. Clearly you don't explain things very well to have so many of us not able to understand that penalty crap.

 

[Machiavelli]

(...)
On the other hand the 'conspiracy' amounts to some police, prosecutors and judges from the most miscarriage-ridden jurisdiction in Europe deciding to continue to support a theory where they don't have to admit they abused the rights of two innocents, mislead the family of the victim and mustered them to publicly campaign against two innocent victims and their families and try to do to them what had been done to them by the man who will be out of prison before proceedings against the innocents being persecuted are final. That's an awfully embarrassing and quite probably criminal fate on their part to want to avoid, an 'appalling vista' of consequences compelling them....

Yes, some... a few of them. They include the Prosecutor General of Umbria, Galati (who was a newcomer at his post) and his staff Costagliola, prosecutors Mignini and Comodi, a series of three pre-trial judges and two Perugian Assize professional judges, Roman forensic institute, another seven professional judges who ruled on Rudy Guede at various stages, the Prosecutor General of Florence and his staff Alessandro Crini, the President of the Appeal's Court of Florence Nencini and his co-working judge, and last but not least, it includes the Prosecutor General of the Supreme Court Riello and the Supreme Court itself. They are all terribly worried about the reputation of a few unknown Perugian police officers, or what?

 

[Kauffer]

Evidence is a logical concept. It is not "logical concepts". It is itself a logical concept. An activity, not an object.
Which means, it is not an object or a fact or a number of them; it is an inference, it can be from facts or from physical objects, but it is also, always an inference between objects or between facts or between a number of them.

So it's not something that can be restricted in one place.

And anyway, evidence is a demonstration, it is an action, the action to prove something, the human action of drawing inferences, putting findings in relation with others and weighing consequences.

So, putting the finding that there is no evidence of Ms Knox in the murder room together with the inferences you have drawn from the evidentiary picture elsewhere, what best prevails? How do the inferences drawn survive the absence of evidence in the room?

Whichever way you look at this, you simply must prove she was in the room. All other evidence for guilt that you cite is predicated on this most important contention.

 

[Kaosium]

Yes, some... a few of them. They include the Prosecutor General of Umbria, Galati (who was a newcomer at his post) and his staff Costagliola, prosecutors Mignini and Comodi, a series of three pre-trial judges and two Perugian Assize professional judges, Roman forensic institute, another seven professional judges who ruled on Rudy Guede at various stages, the Prosecutor General of Florence and his staff Alessandro Crini, the President of the Appeal's Court of Florence Nencini and his co-working judge, and last but not least, it includes the Prosecutor General of the Supreme Court Riello and the Supreme Court itself. They are all terribly worried about the reputation of a few unknown Perugian police officers, or what?

No, those people are worried about their own reputations or that of the Italian judiciary. Some of these clowns belong in prison, Machiavelli, they are a cancer on the posterior of your beautiful nation.

 

[LondonJohn]

Circumstantial evidence works in combination, right? It is cumulative. Add this piece to that piece to that and you build a picture. But, for the exercise to be valid, you can't arbitrarily ignore items of evidence that don't fit your pet theory. The theory should fit all the relevant evidence. This is what Nencini has done. He has ignored evidence that doesn't fit (namely: negative TMB, no confirmatory tests and other things). As your approach to luminol is similar to his, I thought you could explain the reasoning.

And more than this: once can only start to add the cumulative bits of evidence together once each of them, separately, has been shown to be reliable. The "additive" benefit comes from the fact that each individual piece of evidence (assuming it's reliable enough) might have several possible inferences, but where several different pieces of evidence all point towards the same inference (and there's no other shared inference), then the additive effect can be very powerful. An example:

I have a "thing" hidden behind a curtain in front of me, about which I am give several pieces of evidence, and I have to see if I can say beyond reasonable doubt what it is.

The first piece of evidence I'm given is this: It has a collar.

Now, there are obviously several possible reasonable inferences from this single piece of evidence. The "thing" could be a shirt/tshirt etc, it could be a man/woman in a shirt/tshirt etc, it could be a vicar, it could be a dog, it could be a beer bottle.

Now I'm given a second piece of evidence: It has legs.

Obviously there are multiple possible inferences for this piece of evidence too. But let's just focus on the ones that correlate with inferences from the first item of evidence. We can now discount "beer bottle" and "shirt/tshirt/etc"", but there are matching inferences with "man/woman in shirt etc", vicar, and dog.

Now the third piece of evidence: It receives medical treatment at a veterinary clinic.

Any guesses?

Now for the fourth piece of evidence: It barks.

Ahh, so while each of the individual pieces of evidence might have several valid inferences, when you put them together they become self-enhancing since they only share a single common inference: the "thing" is a dog.

But suppose that you'd decided after the third piece of evidence that the "thing" was a dog. Pretty safe guess, huh? Well, imagine if the fourth piece of evidence was not as above, but instead was this:

It purrs and meows.

So it's not actually a dog - it's a cat. And you cannot simply ignore the "It purrs and meows" piece of evidence in favour of your prior conclusion that the "thing" is a dog, since it totally contradicts your conclusion. Instead, you must re-evaluate your conclusion such that it fits reasonable inferences drawn from ALL the evidence. This is somewhat analogous to the subject under discussion here.........

 

[MDDVS]

"Digestion science" is only your self-proclaimed muse, nothing but an invocation from yourself. I taught you instead a little of basic statistics, but just to show the actual context in which digestion statistics science must be applied here (statistic science must be applied to a specific condition), and you seemingly didn't absorb it. You went on claiming - this is what you said more or less literally - even that 10 minutes earlier "must" be considered "much more likely", no matter what's the position of the figure would be on the Gauss curve! Which is pure insanity. The actual statistic picture says that in the applied case if you are ready to accept a 90 minutes delay as "the most likely", this means you are ready to accept a 100 minutes delay as "close to the most likely". You don't unserstand that you imply a mathematical intorno whenever you decide a value, and you don't understand the distribution of values is more varied the more extreme the farther they are located towards the "tails" of the curve (which is where you want to locate it), a percentile where the tolerance and variability becomes huge. Yet, you want to "locate" it there as the most likely value while - at the same time - you want to deny tolerence for its variation; which is pure nonsense.

Again with this nonsense. The curve is not Gaussian, it cannot be Gaussian. It must be truncated. The probability quickly drops to zero.

 

[Annella]

Do you have a link to this?

Yup! https://www.facebook.com/francesco.luna/posts/10205217401855218

 

[Machiavelli]

Circumstantial evidence works in combination, right? It is cumulative. Add this piece to that piece to that and you build a picture. But, for the exercise to be valid, you can't arbitrarily ignore items of evidence that don't fit your pet theory. The theory should fit all the relevant evidence. This is what Nencini has done. He has ignored evidence that doesn't fit (namely: negative TMB, no confirmatory tests and other things). As your approach to luminol is similar to his, I thought you could explain the reasoning.

But actually, it is not true that such elements don't fit. They fit perfectly. I think they are simply irrelevant. They were also irrelevant as trial arguments in the Florence trial, I mean I recall they were barely mentioned. They were mentioned at the Massei trial, and Stefanoni also talked about them, Massei has no problem dismissing them, but I do not recall TMB was discussed at the Florence trial as far as I remember. I recalled Ghirga mentioned the negative TMB test and called it a "specific test for blood" (sic) but did not really draw an inference from this; the whole speech of Ghirga was about doubt.

But anyway, your question seems to point to the fact the Nencini verdict has "holes", it does not mention all elements. I agree, but this is true for all judges reports, also for the Galati-Costagliola recourse, also for the Supreme Court ruling: it is normal that not all small points are discussed. Nencini leaves out some "good" pieces evidence against the defendants as well, for example about the physical evidence of staging.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

luminol autoluminescence

Boy is that ever interesting.

James Pex wrote, "Luminol is subject to degradation and contamination. Autoluminescence may occur if the water utilized in the preparation of the luminol reagent was obtained from a metal faucet or metal pipes within the water delivery system. Corrosive substances such as sodium peroxide may have a metal lid on their containers. Due to its high sensitivity, it does not take much contamination for autoluminescence to begin and render the reagent useless.

Luminol, once used, will oxidize when dry and cause autoluminesence when the area is re-sprayed at a later date."

 

[Machiavelli]

Again with this nonsense. The curve is not Gaussian, it cannot be Gaussian. It must be truncated. The probability quickly drops to zero.

What zero? There are even records of 12-hour mistakes based on the calculation of digestion time.
Sophie and friends locate the dinner at 18:00 - 18:30, which - according to defence consultant Introna - would mean that the alleged "most likely" location (21:00 - 21:10) is actually 160 minutes far from dinner as for our testimony evidence in the best scenario. Even if we strain the information and we try to make violence to the testimony, to disregard them, and we decide to locate the time of dinner where it was not, like at 19:30, still the alleged "most likely" time of s.c. "attack" will be located about 100 minutes far away from the time of dinner.
This means it is absolutely far beyond the area where the probability drops quickly. There is nothing like a quick drop in that segment.

 

[Machiavelli]

No, those people are worried about their own reputations or that of the Italian judiciary. Some of these clowns belong in prison, Machiavelli, they are a cancer on the posterior of your beautiful nation.

So they are all part of a conspiracy, aren't they? Indeed it makes a lot of sense. The Supreme Court annulls Hellmann (who, in your view, would have worked properly and issued the "right" verdict) because they are worried about the "reputation of the judiciary". If they were worried about the "reputation of the judiciary" and they thought Hellmann was sound and good, don't you think it would have been very easy to let it stand?
Is that your theory?

 

[Kaosium]

James Pex wrote, "Luminol is subject to degradation and contamination. Autoluminescence may occur if the water utilized in the preparation of the luminol reagent was obtained from a metal faucet or metal pipes within the water delivery system. Corrosive substances such as sodium peroxide may have a metal lid on their containers. Due to its high sensitivity, it does not take much contamination for autoluminescence to begin and render the reagent useless.

Luminol, once used, will oxidize when dry and cause autoluminesence when the area is re-sprayed at a later date."

Autoluminescence would explain why the luminol 'reacted' to gloves and shoelaces, but not so much why it lit up in the shape of footprints/shoeprints....though considering Garofano's comments it could help explain the brightness of the photographs, along with the photoshopping and overexposure.

 

[Desert Fox]

So they are all part of a conspiracy, aren't they? Indeed it makes a lot of sense. The Supreme Court annulls Hellmann (who, in your view, would have worked properly and issued the "right" verdict) because they are worried about the "reputation of the judiciary". If they were worried about the "reputation of the judiciary" and they thought Hellmann was sound and good, don't you think it would have been very easy to let it stand?
Is that your theory?

I am curious, do you believe that American police or prosecutors ever manufacture evidence against defendants?

 

[Wattson]

But actually, it is not true that such elements don't fit. They fit perfectly. I think they are simply irrelevant. They were also irrelevant as trial arguments in the Florence trial, I mean I recall they were barely mentioned. They were mentioned at the Massei trial, and Stefanoni also talked about them, Massei has no problem dismissing them, but I do not recall TMB was discussed at the Florence trial as far as I remember. I recalled Ghirga mentioned the negative TMB test and called it a "specific test for blood" (sic) but did not really draw an inference from this; the whole speech of Ghirga was about doubt.

But anyway, your question seems to point to the fact the Nencini verdict has "holes", it does not mention all elements. I agree, but this is true for all judges reports, also for the Galati-Costagliola recourse, also for the Supreme Court ruling: it is normal that not all small points are discussed. Nencini leaves out some "good" pieces evidence against the defendants as well, for example about the physical evidence of staging.

Then it should be easy for you to provide a narrative. Why don't you or any other guilter (including the prosecution) ever provide one. Right now would be a great opportunity for you to tell us how the entire evening went down using all of the known facts. The floor is yours Mach.