Continuation Part 11: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Chris_Halkides]

a hypothetical statement with respect to the clasp

Well most of the time we enter a room we don't leave our DNA there. Maybe we won't do that not even if we stab someone in the room.
(besides the fact that one expert of Sollecito's defence did attribute some alleles of the bra clasp to Amanda Knox, but that doesn't matter).

This is a distortion of a news report about Vinci's testimony that may itself not even have been accurate. Even if Vinci said what one paper attributed to him, it was couched as a hypothetical. It was something along the lines of, "Even if Amanda's DNA were found, it would not be significant, because the clasp was contaminated. Your remark is lame; we have been through this before. Besides, Vinci is not even a DNA specialist.

 

[Numbers]

I answered this 6 months ago here.

Dan O.,
Thanks!!!!
I remembered something about this, but not the details or where I had read it.

Patrick Lumumba did NOT have a different phone after the murder. The Italian postal police, the Italian "experts" in thing telephonic, misunderstood that their own phone equipment was misreporting his phone number.

For convenience, below is a copy of Dan O.'s earlier post {highlighting added}:

If you had been following the eariy developments of the case, one of the controversies that came up was the fact that Patrick swapped phones after the murder. This was presented in Matteini complete with the IMEI numbers. Thus the documented fact that the europian phone systems were recording the IMEI number as part of the call detail records back in 2007.


But thanks to your [acbytesla's] post revisiting this issue I have discovered something new.

Patrick phone had been using the number 354548014227987 but after the murder they found he was using the number 354548014227980. What I hadn't known until just now when I read about it on Wikipedia is that the last digit in this number is a Luhn checksum. It means that there was always only one phone, there was no phone swap, there was no sim swap, there was only an incompetent postal police that didn't recognize that their own equipment was dropping the check digit. Ah, that's Italian!

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Conspiracy theory? I think not

But it's not accurate. Those whom you define "pro-innocence" are in fact either supporting a person, or supporting a conspiracy theory...

The data pointing toward DNA contamination in this case is strong, butt it is no stronger than the data pointing to contamination in the Gary Leiterman case, about which I have recently posted on my blog. The evidence pointing to Ms. Knox's having made a coerced, false statement is strong, but no stronger than the evidence that Frank Esponsito (the stable arson case) did. The conspiracy alleged by the Perugian authorities between Knox and Sollecito on the one hand and Guede on the other is no more ridiculous than the conspiracy alleged by the authorities between Billy Wayne Cope and the true killer.

One definition of conspiracy theories is that they posit unique events. Nothing about the present case was unique, at least not until the 2013 ISC ruling (and even that is debatable). Your post is among the most risible i have seen in some time here, and that is no mean feat.

 

[Numbers]

Dan O.,
Thanks!!!!
I remembered something about this, but not the details or where I had read it.

Patrick Lumumba did NOT have a different phone after the murder. The Italian postal police, the Italian "experts" in thing telephonic, misunderstood that their own phone equipment was misreporting his phone number.

For convenience, below is a copy of Dan O.'s earlier post {highlighting added}:

If you had been following the eariy developments of the case, one of the controversies that came up was the fact that Patrick swapped phones after the murder. This was presented in Matteini complete with the IMEI numbers. Thus the documented fact that the europian phone systems were recording the IMEI number as part of the call detail records back in 2007.


But thanks to your [acbytesla's] post revisiting this issue I have discovered something new.

Patrick phone had been using the number 354548014227987 but after the murder they found he was using the number 354548014227980. What I hadn't known until just now when I read about it on Wikipedia is that the last digit in this number is a Luhn checksum. It means that there was always only one phone, there was no phone swap, there was no sim swap, there was only an incompetent postal police that didn't recognize that their own equipment was dropping the check digit. Ah, that's Italian!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm

The Luhn algorithm or Luhn formula, also known as the "modulus 10" or "mod 10" algorithm, is a simple checksum formula used to validate a variety of identification numbers, such as credit card numbers, IMEI numbers, National Provider Identifier numbers in US and Canadian Social Insurance Numbers. It was created by IBM scientist Hans Peter Luhn and described in U.S. Patent No. 2,950,048, filed on January 6, 1954, and granted on August 23, 1960.

The algorithm is in the public domain and is in wide use today. It is specified in ISO/IEC 7812-1.[1] It is not intended to be a cryptographically secure hash function; it was designed to protect against accidental errors, not malicious attacks. Most credit cards and many government identification numbers use the algorithm as a simple method of distinguishing valid numbers from mistyped or otherwise incorrect numbers.

 

[carbonjam72]

Were acquitted by a court in the most egregious violation of laws and procedure that many had ever seen in a long time, by a court that should have been impeached as they opened their mouth for the first time to commit a violation of procedure. That court was unable to properly conduct a trial and appeared obviously incompetent, messy, sloppy and chaotic even on normal procedure decisions. The verdict was a mass of illogical crap and a collection of offences to the law and to human intelligence, to the point that nobody believed that even an idiotic judge would produce such a mass of hogwash in good faith without being bribed.
The verdict was so rotten that people familiar with the law found its annulment was easily predictable.

Mach, to validate your point, could you identify any part of the Hellman motivation you believe is poorly reasoned, and then lets compare it to Nencini, or the ISC reversing Hellman, or Massei, or even Michelli?

I've read Hellman, and I thought his motivation report was great. Extremely logical, well reasoned, thorough and fair. If anything, he was too easy on the prosecutor and the police.

Anyway, simply asking you to identify one or more issues you feel Hellman got wrong, I think is a very reasonable request.

 

[Dan O.]

...
But if you have cuts on your hands and you wash your hands in the sink leaving visible blood traces, not leaving your DNA there becomes rather unlikely

And here we see Machiavelli out of his depth as far as logic goes but clearly showing his propagandist metal. AmyStrange doesn't have cuts on her hands and AmyStrange didn't wash her hands in the sink. So even if the statement itself is valid, the conclusion is not established as fact.

 

[AmyStrange]

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And here we see Machiavelli out of his depth as far as logic goes but clearly showing his propagandist metal. AmyStrange doesn't have cuts on her hands and AmyStrange didn't wash her hands in the sink. So even if the statement itself is valid, the conclusion is not established as fact.

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I understood where Mach was coming from and what s/he meant. S/he wasn't being literal, but I'm sure you already knew that,

d

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[Desert Fox]

I understood where Mach was coming from and what s/he meant. S/he wasn't being literal, but I'm sure you already knew that,

At the risk of this post being condemned to post hell, I have to argue that I often don't understand Machiavelli's posts. Often they seem to have this complete disconnect from reality.

 

[AmyStrange]

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At the risk of this post being condemned to post hell, I have to argue that I often don't understand Machiavelli's posts. Often they seem to have this complete disconnect from reality.

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Sometimes I have to read them a couple (two, three) times before I get what s/he's talking about, and sometimes they do seem really out there, but in the post Dan O is referring to, s/he's not talkiing about me specifically, but if Rudy did cut himself and washed his hands in the sink in the bathroom, you would think they would find his DNA there, which is an interesting question because it also alludes to the fact that Amanda's DNA was not found in Meredith's room.

I guess you have to be open minded enough to see this as a valid probably guilty question, observation, and arguement, but it's also only an alternative to the probably innocent explanation that she just wasn't there. This explanation is more probable, in my opinion, simply because I don't want to believe that you could convict anyone with just that kind of speculative arguement,

In short, no one has to prove someone was at the crime scene at the time of the crime to prove they're a murderer.

Maybe it's just me, but I would need more than just that, wouldn't you if you were accused of murder?

I believe it's a better arguement for those who believe Raffaele and Amanda are probably guilty if they did find her DNA in the room, or even better, under Meredith's fingernails. That would strongly influence my probabilities.

d

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[Numbers]

Here's part of the conclusion of Hellmann's motivation. It is understandable and in agreement with the concept that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal case. The alternative, that guilt can be shown by some probability, perhaps even a low probability, of unreliable evidence, or is merely to be presumed, is the guiding principle of both provisionally convicting motivatons, from the Massei and Nencini courts.
ETA: "pleonastic" means "redundant" {I had to look it up.}

https://hellmannreport.wordpress.com/contents/reasons-for-the-decision/conclusion/

The term “probable” occurs a number of times even in the Public Minister’s closing argument, where this Court is expressly warned not to give too much weight to the expression “beyond all reasonable doubt”, insofar as this is supposedly — as the Public Minister argues — only a pleonastic [re]affirmation of principle, in which the legislator had simply recognized [recepito] concepts already elaborated by jurisprudence, without therefore requiring any quid pluris [Latin: “something more”] with respect to previous law in order to arrive at a conviction [condanna, i.e. guilty verdict].

The Public Minister’s argument can be accepted only in part. It is indeed true that, even before the legal affirmation of the principle in question, conviction could be declared only when the evidence against [the defendant] was such as to overcome the presumption of innocence, which informs all of [the relevant] law (Article 27, 2nd paragraph of the Constitution, but for example also the last part of C.P.P. Article 527, 3rd paragraph), so that, even in the presence of evidence against the defendant [that was, however,] not wholly sufficient, or contradictory, the verdict had to be one of acquittal. But to assert that the reformulation of C.P.P. Article 533 via the insertion of the principle in question, effected by Article 5 of the law of February 20, 2006, no. 46, was an operation of “mere aesthetic surgery”, so to speak, seems to debase the profound significance of this principle, which, instead, the legislator wished to reaffirm.

Moreover, examination of the legislative history [lavori parlamentari] leading to the adoption [deliberazione] of the law of February 20, 2006, no. 46 reveals that this is a principle of legal culture [civiltà giuridica] widely accepted not only by (obviously) those who voted in favor of the law, but also by those who displayed their opposition, since they did not oppose it due to disagreement with the substance of the principle, but only due to opinions about legal methodology [valutazioni di tecnica normativa], believing that coordination problems between the new text of C.P.P. Article 533 and [the existing] C.P.P. Article 530 could arise.

The condition required by this law to arrive at a verdict of guilty does not, therefore, allow one to formulate a belief in terms of probability: that is, to issue a guilty verdict, it is not sufficient for the probability of the prosecution hypothesis to be greater than that of the defense hypothesis, even when the former is significantly larger [notevolmente più numerose]; but [rather] it is necessary that every explanation other than the prosecution hypothesis not be plausible at all, according to a criterion of reasonability. In any other case, acquittal of the defendant is required.

 

[Dan O.]

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I understood where Mach was coming from and what s/he meant. S/he wasn't being literal, but I'm sure you already knew that,

d

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I only used you as a convienient example. But the result is the same for anyone. Unless they use that sink they are unlikely to leave their own DNA behind.

Finding dilute blood drips from the rim down to the drain of the wash basin is to the contrary evidence that the basin was not used that evening. Try to imagin that you are washing your bloody hands in that basin (Don't worry, I won't pull an ILE and have you arrested for murder). Imagin the point where the blood on your hands has mixed with the water from the tap and this diluted blood drips from your hand onto the rim of the basin and down into the drain thus producing the condemning evidence. But then, your hands are still covered with this diluted blood so you aren't finished washing. By the time you have washed the blood off of your hands, the drip by the drain has washed away. In order to leave the diluted drop in the basin. Diluted blood must drip into that basin at a time after it was last used.

I could even possibly go further and state that the basin could not even have been recently used because if the bowl is even wet it will change the character of the drip. But I would need detailed photographs of that drip to make such a determination.

 

[Desert Fox]

I believe it's a better arguement for those who believe Raffaele and Amanda are probably guilty if they did find her DNA in the room, or even better, under Meredith's fingernails. That would strongly influence my probabilities.

I would be cautious about that actually. . . .Like to see tests of DNA samples found under fingernails and what the relationships are. For example, if one often finds friend's DNA under other friend's fingernails, not really useful evidence. One cannot otherwise just speculate.

While reasonably new to this forum, I was a skeptic before I became interested in this case.

 

[AmyStrange]

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I would be cautious about that actually. . . .Like to see tests of DNA samples found under fingernails and what the relationships are. For example, if one often finds friend's DNA under other friend's fingernails, not really useful evidence. One cannot otherwise just speculate.

While reasonably new to this forum, I was a skeptic before I became interested in this case.

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I don't know, skin cells under Meredith's fingernails and a scratch on Amanda's neck would definitely make the probably guilty arguement a lot more probable, in my opinion.

I thought they were guilty at the beginning,

d

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[AmyStrange]

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I only used you as a convienient example. But the result is the same for anyone. Unless they use that sink they are unlikely to leave their own DNA behind.

Finding dilute blood drips from the rim down to the drain of the wash basin is to the contrary evidence that the basin was not used that evening. Try to imagin that you are washing your bloody hands in that basin (Don't worry, I won't pull an ILE and have you arrested for murder). Imagin the point where the blood on your hands has mixed with the water from the tap and this diluted blood drips from your hand onto the rim of the basin and down into the drain thus producing the condemning evidence. But then, your hands are still covered with this diluted blood so you aren't finished washing. By the time you have washed the blood off of your hands, the drip by the drain has washed away. In order to leave the diluted drop in the basin. Diluted blood must drip into that basin at a time after it was last used.

I could even possibly go further and state that the basin could not even have been recently used because if the bowl is even wet it will change the character of the drip. But I would need detailed photographs of that drip to make such a determination.

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I thought so, but I have to say I'm much too tired to understand what you're writing about, sorry,

d

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[Desert Fox]

I don't know, skin cells under Meredith's fingernails and a scratch on Amanda's neck would definitely make the probably guilty arguement a lot more probable, in my opinion.

How often do you carefully examine yourself for small cuts and bruises? Much of the time, I will have one or more cuts and bruises while forgetting where I got them from.

To be blunt, I would expect that Amanda would have left evidence of herself likely in blood at the crime scene (meaning the bedroom). I don't think you think there was any cleanup?

 

[Planigale]

Well, his blood is on the pillow, the wall, the door, the purse, and in her vagina. Probably in the bathroom, too, just not where they tested.

There are technical problems with testing for Guede's DNA in this situation. You are looking for a small amount of his DNA amongst copious amounts of the victim's. The latter will actually suppress the amplification of the former. The way round this is to look for the Y chromosome alleles, as there will be none from the victim and the primers are Y specific. At some point Stephanoni was asked why she did not do this and I think responded that it was financial. Although pro guilt posters will not admit this the scene was not well processed.

 

[LondonJohn]

So I find this odd. On 3rd November, the police were aware of the 8:18 and 8:42 text messages, but may not have known that they were connections with Lumumba's number. But it's the murder night, so they're on it in a shot. I'm no expert on telecoms, but isn't it more likely than not that within 48 hours they would have got this information? Or could Lumumba's sim have been an anonymous, non contract card (he had got this number recently hadn't he?)?

Well that's where it gets difficult to know. In Italy in 2007, the grey/black market was awash with unregistered SIMs, and many outlets sols pre-paid SIMs without any identification requirement (I believe Italian legislators have at least now caught up with a rather obvious understanding that easy access to untraceable SIMs is quite useful for organised criminals.....).

So it's perfectly possible that Lumumba's SIM - the one he used to send and receive the texts from Knox on the night of the murder - was not registered to him. If so, it would have been practically impossible for the police to link it to him. The best they could have done would have been to study location racords for that SIM to place it in the general vicinity of Lumumba's bar and home - and even then, GSM location tracking isn't accurate enough to enable a narrowing-down to particular buildings or even city blocks, especially within dense urban areas.

If that's the case, then the only methods the police could reasonably have used to identify the user of that SIM would be either a) to ask Knox; b) to look at call/text patterns from that SIM (e.g. there might be lots of calls from that SIM to a phone registered to Lumumba's wife), or c) to actually call that number themselves and see who answered.

Secondly, why didn't the police simply ask to see Ms Knox's phone to check her contacts list at anytime between the 3rd and the evening of the 5th as part of a "normal", "routine" inspection? She would have gladly shown them!

They might very well have done just this. I don't recall any testimony or recollection (e.g. in Knox's book) to this effect, but that's not to say it didn't happen.

I'm leaning towards a hypothesis that the cops "knew" Lumumba was involved before the 5th, "knew" Ms Knox was involved and pursued a confirmatory strategy in four stages. 1) Get Mr Sollecito to withdraw his alibi for Ms Knox 2) Get Ms Knox to name Lumumba 3) Arrest Lumumba 4) Work out the details later.

Well I believe this is a clear possibility. But even if the police didn't know Lumumba's identity before the 5/6 Nov interrogation, I believe they had in any case formed the opinion that the user of that SIM - whoever (s)he was (and I think they decided he must be male) - was involved in the murder, simply on the basis that they thought Knox was deliberately trying to hide that text exchange from them.

 

[Kauffer]

Dan O.,
Thanks!!!!
I remembered something about this, but not the details or where I had read it.

Patrick Lumumba did NOT have a different phone after the murder. The Italian postal police, the Italian "experts" in thing telephonic, misunderstood that their own phone equipment was misreporting his phone number.

For convenience, below is a copy of Dan O.'s earlier post {highlighting added}:

If you had been following the eariy developments of the case, one of the controversies that came up was the fact that Patrick swapped phones after the murder. This was presented in Matteini complete with the IMEI numbers. Thus the documented fact that the europian phone systems were recording the IMEI number as part of the call detail records back in 2007.


But thanks to your [acbytesla's] post revisiting this issue I have discovered something new.

Patrick phone had been using the number 354548014227987 but after the murder they found he was using the number 354548014227980. What I hadn't known until just now when I read about it on Wikipedia is that the last digit in this number is a Luhn checksum. It means that there was always only one phone, there was no phone swap, there was no sim swap, there was only an incompetent postal police that didn't recognize that their own equipment was dropping the check digit. Ah, that's Italian!

The number quoted by Dan must be the IMEI number not his phone number.
Lumumba's phone number was 3387195723.

Part of the confusion about this (which I shared) could be that a second phone is mentioned in Lumumba's testimony:

Question: Did you have a cell phone?

Answer: I only had one cell phone that I used, yes.

Question: Was it taken?

Answer: Yes. Even my old one was taken that I had there and didn’t use any more, it was blocked.

Question: But where? When you were at home or was the cell phone taken when you were in the Police station?

Answer: At home.

Question: Immediately?

Answer: Yes yes.

My question would be this: From what is known of the data and with regard to the technical capabilities at the time, is it likely that the police had identified Lumumba as the sender and recipient of the 8:18/8:35 text messages prior to the interrogations of the 5th/6th, given their access to Ms Knox's records? LJ has speculated that a physical examination of Ms Knox's handset may have been required to determine the content of the messages - perhaps Dan might comment about that - but there appears to be a quantity of circumstantial evidence pointing to the police already "knowing" that Lumumba was involved in the murder before they questioned Ms Knox on the evening of the 5th.

 

[RWVBWL]

Gotta luv Irrelevant Details...

And the fact that Knox had a scratch on her neck (not a hickey)

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Didn't you say Amanda had a scratch on her neck? Where did this scratch come from? It's reasonable to infer this scratch came from Meredith which would mean she should have some of Amanda's DNA under her nails, don't you think?

Here ya go,
seen in full view of the public, that is some scratch!
And look, she is not even hiding it!

Did you folks know that this scratch was apparently not even noticed by the crack Perugia Flying Squad?!?
Are these guys and gals pro's, or what!

Have a read from Perugia Shock,
it seems that Laura, Amanda's flatmate, made mention of it 8 months later.

Monday, Feb. 16, 2009
Queen of Smiles
Laura's testimony and the scratch

But the queen of smiles has been Amanda's housemate Laura Mezzetti, another almost-lawyer, who looked liked showing all her happiness for being once again in front of her favorite prosecutor and virtually legal mentor. Many smiles but no clues of guiltiness for her, though.
Laura confirmed Filomena's version about the relationship between Meredith and Amanda, just some discussion about cleaning. Same for the conversation on the money. She was particularly struck by Raffaele's affection for Amanda, defined as obsessive and annoying.

But we knew a new element was awaited from her since she's the one who remembered that Amanda had a scratch on her neck on November 2 she didn't have on the previous day.

The almost-lawyer would keep this detail reserved during 10 months of intense relations with the Pm and his soldiers. Her illumination occurred in September 2008 on the road not to Damascus but to Montefiascone, that's when she revealed the detail to Stefano Bonassi and his girlfriend, explaining that you can see it online, on a photographer picture outside the house.

But she would still consider the detail irrelevant and did not bother to report it to the police. A few weeks later Bonassi, transferred by the police to testify for the pre -trial, would ask them about the scratch. The Police, always very attentive to such yummy clues against the suspects, would refer to the Pm, who welcomed the detail as an important clue of guiltiness.
Mezzetti justified the secret so jealously kept with the fact she thought they would have noticed. After her description of the scratch, in the hearing, she was shown the photograph that she knew so well and she recognized the scratch as the one she saw, even if actually the description she had just provided --of a long scrape along the jugular-- was different from the mark, more round and set in a central position. Coroner pictures after Amanda's arrest were also shown in the hearing revealing that in 4 days the mark had almost disappeared. In short, it seems nothing important since the mark looks more like a hickey and, for position and nature, doesn't look like a fight wound at all. The dearest housemate should have another illumination on the road of internet and find another picture of Amanda's neck in the day before without a mark. That could at least dignify this element a little bit.

* * *


Hey Machiavelli,

That photograph from above was shot as Amanda + Raff hung outside, the same day that Raff was makin' out, oppps, I mean consoling Amanda outside her flat where her friend Meredith lay dead inside her bedroom, right next to Amanda's own room.

Don'tcha think it odd that no one in Italy ever noticed the scratch for all those months?

It's a friggin' hickey, everyone, well except for the guilters, can see that.

Why didn't Raff give Amanda the scarf to wear and cover it?
Did he have a scratch too?

Weird to read, years later,
that it was Laura who had to help ILE and bring up this irrelevant detail 10 months later, tell Stefano, which then got PM Mignini, and you too apparently excited about it.
A scratch. Right.
Too funny...

 

[Numbers]

The number quoted by Dan must be the IMEI number not his phone number.
Lumumba's phone number was 3387195723.

Part of the confusion about this (which I shared) could be that a second phone is mentioned in Lumumba's testimony:

Question: Did you have a cell phone?

Answer: I only had one cell phone that I used, yes.

Question: Was it taken?

Answer: Yes. Even my old one was taken that I had there and didn’t use any more, it was blocked.

Question: But where? When you were at home or was the cell phone taken when you were in the Police station?

Answer: At home.

Question: Immediately?

Answer: Yes yes.

My question would be this: From what is known of the data and with regard to the technical capabilities at the time, is it likely that the police had identified Lumumba as the sender and recipient of the 8:18/8:35 text messages prior to the interrogations of the 5th/6th, given their access to Ms Knox's records? LJ has speculated that a physical examination of Ms Knox's handset may have been required to determine the content of the messages - perhaps Dan might comment about that - but there appears to be a quantity of circumstantial evidence pointing to the police already "knowing" that Lumumba was involved in the murder before they questioned Ms Knox on the evening of the 5th.

The checksum works on the IMEI number (based on Wikipedia article on Luhn's checksum). What information do the police obtain when they look at phone company records of someone's mobile phone? Do both phone number and IMEI show up, as well as connect duration and connect antenna locations? And could text message content be stored for some time and be accessible?