Continuation Part 14: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Bill Williams]

Gosh. The Olympics were in London, then in Russia!

I gotta get outta mom's basement more often!

 

[yimyammer]

Another one: Can anyone think of a murder case, ever, where there was a group of people that were "anti-victim"? Does this even make any sense?

Mussolini?

 

[davefoc]

Related to this: Maresca said today that his time defending the Kerchers is formally over. Case closed.
...

Amazing, didn't he talk to Machiavelli before this? Machiavelli says that opportunities for civil suits against AK and RS by the Kerchers weren't ended by the SC decision. Would Maresca have caved if only he had known what Machiavelli knows?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

thoughts on the clasp

To me this suggests either an unlikely accidental contamination before or during the collection, accidental contamination after the collection or intentional contamination. Despite the fact that people were (reasonably enough) critical up the kazoo about the collection techniques it seems unlikely that contamination with Sollecito DNA happened then. What was the percentage of Sollecito DNA to non-Sollecito DNA in the room where the clasp was collected? My gut feel is that the fraction would be measured in parts per million. A similar argument could be made about some of the other contamination theories including the washing machine theory.

Davefoc,

Briefly, I think that Sollecito, his male relatives, and an unknown number of unrelated males are not excluded on the basis of the Y-chromosomal tests. The autosomal results are complex, but I think the Dr. Balding (who was not a prosecution witness) got this one right, up to a point. However, there are several ways this might have happened. Meredith and Raffaele hug, then Meredith touches the clasp (secondary). Raffaele washes his hands in the small bathroom, wipes his hands on a towel. Guede brings the towel in, and it directly or indirectly comes into contact with the clasp (secondary or tertiary transfer). Raffaele deposits DNA on the door (this is almost certainly true--he left fingerprints there); the forensic police touch the door then collect the clasp (tertiary transfer). The forensic police should have done the equivalent of substrate controls and sampled the area near the clasp for DNA. I don't think that tampering is ruled out; the later destruction of the clasp increased the odds of this in my mind.

As others have pointed out, the attempted quantitation of DNA at the time the clasp was run produced some very strange results. I am not sure that anything can be said about the total amount of DNA in that sample. The relative amount of Raffaele's putative DNA to Meredith's was about 1:8 or so. Also without negative controls that everyone can see, it is not really a result. It is more like half of a result. MOO.

 

[Grinder]

Interesting food for thought:

Is it possible (or impossible) to be a believer in the non-guilt/innocence of Knox and Sollecito in this case, and at the same time to be "pro-victim" (i.e. in favour of justice for the victim in this case, Meredith Kercher)?

If not, why not? If one holds the belief that neither Knox nor Sollecito participated in this murder (and that there's certainly no credible, reliable evidence that they did), then does this automatically imply that one has no regard for the victim (or her family)?

Or would it be nothing more than a lazy, deliberately-inflammatory, artificial distinction made in order to try to confer moral legitimacy on those who campaign for Knox's/Sollecito's conviction, and at the same time try to confer moral degeneracy on those who campaign for Knox's/Sollecito's non-guilt/innocence?

And if so, what would it say about the intellectual honesty and underlying motivations of those making that incorrect distinction?

While this and another two of your posts today have been spot on I'd like to add a wrinkle to this one. Because of the demonizing of Amanda from the beginning and the cantonizing of Meredith after a short period just saying the two were similar was and is judged as being anti victim. As I've mentioned before in the first week Meredith was referred to as a "party girl" in a british tab headline. It is my belief that John Kercher weighed in with his tabloid colleagues and they corrected the coverage to college girl. The police/prosecutors made a point to say that Meredith had no responsibility for her death (which is perfectly clear) because of their early description of a sex game gone wrong.

I believe that this rewriting (not revisionist) of her character to be saintly is partly why people even here refuse to acknowledge the forensics tests that showed she had the equivalent of one or two drinks in her system at death.

Personally I've been pro truth and justice and not an advocate for any of those involved except Hellmann

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

Nice, nice, very nice.

The Fifty-third Calypso [ 2 ]
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.

I was 100% sure the ISC would end this case but was off by 180 degrees on how.

I, as with most on both sides, await the motivations. Will digestion or dead cats be mentioned?

I continue to be entertained by the PGP's hypocrisy. While only being there for Meredith they compare Amanda to OJ and Casey Anthony not the killers of (positive adjective) Caylee or Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman - guess they aren't worth remembering.

Now that someone has posted pictures and names of PGP posters (trolls) I see the leader of the PMF pack of jackals whining about it, apparently forgetting their starting the practice, even naming people's place of employment so fellow jackals could contact their employers requesting job terminations.

Good news is that they will keep the site active for at least 3 more years. I join with those here that would like to see A & R take legal action in order to expose some of the more odious posters.

I also would like to see some more of the PGP here but perhaps it would be best after the motivations. They are saying that it wasn't an innocent verdict just not guilty. To those of them reading here it would still be great if they would come up with a timeline rather than the tired lies, staging and blood in the bathroom memes.

I'm looking for some help here in Seattle in building and setting up a dunking stool near Salties in West Seattle. There are a three PMF women I would like to take the test and I'm betting all of them would survive the plunge.

Grinder!!!

I am really happy to "see" you around!

 

[Kauffer]

Daveofc,

Briefly, I think that Sollecito, his male relatives, and an unknown number of unrelated males are not excluded on the basis of the Y-chromosomal tests. The autosomal results are complex, but I think the Dr. Balding (who was not a prosecution witness) got this one right, up to a point. However, there are several ways this might have happened. Meredith and Raffaele hug, then Meredith touches the clasp (secondary). Raffaele washes his hands in the small bathroom, wipes his hands on a towel. Guede brings the towel in, and it directly or indirectly comes into contact with the clasp (secondary or tertiary transfer). Raffaele deposits DNA on the door (this is almost certainly true--he left fingerprints there); the forensic police touch the door then collect the clasp (tertiary transfer). The forensic police should have done the equivalent of substrate controls and sampled the area near the clasp for DNA. I don't think that tampering is ruled out; the later destruction of the clasp increased the odds of this in my mind.

As others have pointed out, the attempted quantitation of DNA at the time the clasp was run produced some very strange results. I am not sure that anything can be said about the total amount of DNA in that sample. The relative amount of Raffaele's putative DNA to Meredith's was about 1:8 or so. Also without negative controls that everyone can see, it is not really a result. It is more like half of a result. MOO.

What I could not understand about Dr Balding's work on this case given the discussions that took place here and elsewhere was that in one interview segment, he appeared not to understand that there was any raw data to consider (he did not simply dispute the value of it) and that the electropherogram he analysed was the only thing that was relevant and normally available to analyse.

Also, whereas it was apparent in interview with you that he was not making an assertion about how the DNA got on to the clasp, IIRC, in his appearance in Vogt's BBC documentary, he was portrayed (or portrayed himself) as being rather closer to an activity level interpretation of the clasp evidence than he had previously argued.

Is that fair?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

What I could not understand about Dr Balding's work on this case given the discussions that took place here and elsewhere was that in one interview segment, he appeared not to understand that there was any raw data to consider (he did not simply dispute the value of it) and that the electropherogram he analysed was the only thing that was relevant and normally available to analyse.

Also, whereas it was apparent in interview with you that he was not making an assertion about how the DNA got on to the clasp, IIRC, in his appearance in Vogt's BBC documentary, he was portrayed (or portrayed himself) as being rather closer to an activity level interpretation of the clasp evidence than he had previously argued.

Is that fair?

I think you have it about right, but I would like to listen to the BBC program again with your point in mind. He seemed to be more cautious in his interpretations in his PNAS article and in the interview I did with him, but more expansive when the BBC interviewed him. If you read Thoughtful's interview with him, he seems to think that an electropherogram is as raw as the data get, which is not true:
9) This is actually my favorite one: it's about the EDF's, or "electronic data files", also known as "raw data files" -- those records of raw data produced by the machine that Halkides and others have made a great fuss over, saying that Stefanoni kept them secret and refused to hand them over to Conti and Vecchiotti, giving them only electropherograms labeled with peak heights and areas (with which they declared themselves satisfied, let it be mentioned in passing). I asked him (another of MisterPink's questions) whether they could contain information that could change his mind regarding the attribution of Sollecito's DNA on the bra clasp, Meredith's on the knife, or any other. His answer: "What are these electronic data files? What is raw data? I thought that the raw data was just the electropherograms labeled with those numbers."

As I have said many times, a proper case review must include the raw data, including the raw data associated with negative controls.

 

[LondonJohn]

I think you have it about right, but I would like to listen to the BBC program again with your point in mind. He seemed to be more cautious in his interpretations in his PNAS article and in the interview I did with him, but more expansive when the BBC interviewed him. If you read Thoughtful's interview with him, he seems to think that an electropherogram is as raw as the data get, which is not true:
9) This is actually my favorite one: it's about the EDF's, or "electronic data files", also known as "raw data files" -- those records of raw data produced by the machine that Halkides and others have made a great fuss over, saying that Stefanoni kept them secret and refused to hand them over to Conti and Vecchiotti, giving them only electropherograms labeled with peak heights and areas (with which they declared themselves satisfied, let it be mentioned in passing). I asked him (another of MisterPink's questions) whether they could contain information that could change his mind regarding the attribution of Sollecito's DNA on the bra clasp, Meredith's on the knife, or any other. His answer: "What are these electronic data files? What is raw data? I thought that the raw data was just the electropherograms labeled with those numbers."
As I have said many times, a proper case review must include the raw data, including the raw data associated with negative controls.

Woahhhhhh. If Balding said that about EDFs, that implies he has an incredibly worrying lack of understanding of the whole process of generating DNA data, then filtering and interpreting those data to try to get meaningful outputs.

This raises a massive red flag for me over Balding's credibility.

 

[Kauffer]

Woahhhhhh. If Balding said that about EDFs, that implies he has an incredibly worrying lack of understanding of the whole process of generating DNA data, then filtering and interpreting those data to try to get meaningful outputs.

This raises a massive red flag for me over Balding's credibility.

For me too, but in his defence, he has always stated that he is not a lab based forensic scientist - he is a computer, maths and statistics guy.

 

[Kauffer]

David Balding's academic history is here:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ugi/research/davidbalding

Click the 'biography' tab

He also says this about his research work:

"In forensic genetics, my principal contribution has been to develop methods to allow for coancestry effects in the interpretation of DNA profiles. Match probability formulae incorporating coancestry coefficients are often called the "Balding-Nichols formulae" following our 1994 paper. More recently I have developed methods for the interpretation of low template DNA profile evidence, initially in collaboration with John Buckleton of ESR New Zealand (2009 paper)."

 

[Desert Fox]

David Balding's academic history is here:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ugi/research/davidbalding

Click the 'biography' tab

He also says this about his research work:

"In forensic genetics, my principal contribution has been to develop methods to allow for coancestry effects in the interpretation of DNA profiles. Match probability formulae incorporating coancestry coefficients are often called the "Balding-Nichols formulae" following our 1994 paper. More recently I have developed methods for the interpretation of low template DNA profile evidence, initially in collaboration with John Buckleton of ESR New Zealand (2009 paper)."

If you know anything about James Randi's history, he had dealt often with scientists being tricked by psychics and the likes. Professor Balding seems to be one of those types that expects everything dealt from the top of the deck.

 

[andreajo]

Knox didn't tell the police that Lumumba was the murderer; the police told her.

According to Knox's testimony, Knox's interrogators told her the person on the other end of the texts is the murderer, prompting her surprised and fearful response "It's him. It's him." As they walked her through a fantasy murder scenario, the interrogators asked where she would have been during the murder (in her room, replied Knox) and what she would have heard. Her reply was she would not have heard anything. Pressed why not, she replied "because I would have covered my ears".

This was an interrogator-created false confession, a manipulation of an honest and vulnerable 20 year old American in an Italian police interrogation. Done in a microphone-equipped interrogation room at 1 am, with Inspector Giobbi and Police Chief de Felice in the control room down the hall listening to her screaming. No wonder the recording has never seen the light of day!

It is easy to understand why people are skeptical about the idea that Amanda's statement was a implanted by police. It is uncomfortable to think about how easy it actually is to implant a memory. Naturally it would never happen to me...

In this study, in 3 friendly 40 minute interviews, about 70% of participants were convinced they had participated in a crime in their teen years. I heard one of the study authors in a radio interview. She said it was quite easy to implant a memory. I find that kind of scary.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/people-can-be-convinced-they-committed-a-crime-they-dont-remember.html

 

[andreajo]

Another one: Can anyone think of a murder case, ever, where there was a group of people that were "anti-victim"? Does this even make any sense?

Jodi Arias claims self-defence in the killing of ex-lover Travis Alexander. She shot him in the face, inflicted over 25 knife wounds, including slitting his throat. She claimed self-defence.

The main thrust of her defence was to claim that Travis Alexander was a pedophile, porn addict, and a physical abuser. There was some evidence on his computer that he had likely looked at porn at some point, but all the other evidence of bad character was single-sourced from Jodi and one other witness who did not appear in person and whose affidavit contained several easily falsifiable assertions.

Her small group of followers continue to refer to Mr Alexander as abusive, and a pedo. One site posted a picture of his body bag captioned "Justice is served". I suppose that blaming him for his own murder is the only way to rationalize support for 'poor Jodi'.

 

[LondonJohn]

For me too, but in his defence, he has always stated that he is not a lab based forensic scientist - he is a computer, maths and statistics guy.

Yes, but if he doesn't even understand the fundamentals underpinning the numbers he's working with - including the absolutely critical point that those numbers have already undergone a subjective filtering exercise from the source data - then that's a humungous flaw in his whole credibility.

Example (deliberately simplistic for illustration): Suppose I had a number generating machine that output a string of numbers between 0 and 9 - using a definite algorithm that I was trying to figure out. Suppose that I ran the machine and got the following source data output:

7 2 4 4 4 4 4 4 8 2 7 1 7 2 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 9 2 7 4 4 4 4 1 0 2 7

Suppose I subjectively decided that those strings of 4s were some sort of "rogue data" from the machine, and I decided to exclude them on that basis of filtering. So my filtered number sequence would now be:

7 2 8 2 7 1 7 2 9 2 7 1 0 2 7

Suppose I now gave this filtered sequence to a statistician and asked him to try to figure out the algorithm. If that statistician didn't even realise that the numbers he was being given didn't necessarily correspond to the numbers that had actually come out of the machine, let alone know what type of filters I'd applied to the source numbers and why, then clearly he would be in no position to give a meaningful or valid answer to the underlying question.

 

[RoseMontague]

Related to this: Maresca said today that his time defending the Kerchers is formally over. Case closed.

But "defending"!? At most he was **advancing** their interests at trial! To the point of his shameful display of Meredith's lifeless body in court.

I translate this as the bill is in the mail.

 

[RoseMontague]

The best thing we can do at this point - to honor the memory of an innocent girl who was murdered, and to support Amanda and Raffaele - is to ignore bitterness and inane provocation.

Good advice.

 

[Grinder]

It is easy to understand why people are skeptical about the idea that Amanda's statement was a implanted by police. It is uncomfortable to think about how easy it actually is to implant a memory. Naturally it would never happen to me...

In this study, in 3 friendly 40 minute interviews, about 70% of participants were convinced they had participated in a crime in their teen years. I heard one of the study authors in a radio interview. She said it was quite easy to implant a memory. I find that kind of scary.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/people-can-be-convinced-they-committed-a-crime-they-dont-remember.html

It was the "confession" that made me doubt totally what was going on in Perugia. As soon as I read that the police questioned until she told them what they knew to be correct I was suspicious. When what they knew to be true turned out to be false, well, I was convinced the rot was not in Denmark but Italy.

I will never understand how the PGP have no issue with it or other things like Curatolo, Quintavalle and Nara.

 

[HumanityBlues]

As its open season on the pro victim sites I thought I’d have a go.





I didn’t understand this argument at the time but it seems you can predict the future.
There is a holocaust denier posting on one of the PMF sites today although he claims he isn’t one. Maybe he is playing one of those April fool pranks, possibly as he seems to be a noob.

In any case the political axiom seems applicable ‘If you're explaining, you're losing’

This thread has it all - retrocausality & now precognition.

It's pretty funny watching the "pro victim" sites right now. Never enjoyed it more. I wouldn't say the "pro victim" sites have actually ever done anything positive for Meredith Kercher, lest one believes sharing stupid ideas and dog pictures is beneficial. It's already getting to the point where the people on the "pro victim" sites are realizing there's nothing really left to talk about.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

Sorry to gum up the works with such a large post.
I will take it down if anyone objects.

Is this a Google translate?