Continuation Part 14: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[HumanityBlues]

With regard to the DNA evidence, she insists that contamination is not a realistic possibility, and she seems to think she can prove this with math.

When she advanced this line of thinking on IIP, she ran up against two scientists who have hands-on experience with PCR analysis of DNA samples. They told her contamination happens all the time. The knife is almost certainly residual contamination from the lab, and the bra clasp was contaminated before it ever got to the lab, so C&V got it right: both these test results are junk.

She didn't want to hear it. The more she argued with them, the more clear it became that she doesn't have even a layman's knowledge of PCR analysis. Hence she does not grasp the need for precision. She regarded Stefanoni's sloppy work as the maverick path of an innovator who is unfettered by conventional thinking.

I can't remember when this was, but I think it was probably 2012, and you might be able to find it in the archives over there. It is worth reading if you are interested.

My guess is because math is her specialty, she needed to find a way to incorporate the subject into this case in order to.... I don't know... keep from getting bored. I read her chapter in her book on Amanda Knox, and it really just seemed to me she was really stretching to find a way to use her expertise in some way just to talk about the case.

I also think she's a crazy lunatic.

 

[Strozzi]

And don't forget good old misogyny. Nothing fires the imagination quite like a female killer.

Meredith gossipped about Amanda to Meredith's British girl clique. That set a tone and made her their fair game. And the British girls had to have heard that Amanda found an Italian boyfriend who actually cared for her, unlike Glaucoma who couldn't recognize Meredith when he and his roommates walked past her on the street.

 

[lonepinealex]

I do think this is an issue that is worth delving into a bit.

Gman Steve Moore wrote a blog entry just before the verdict titled, 'The Big Bad Wolf". The point of it was, that Amanda got trapped in large part by her own naiveté.

She thought she was "helping" the police, and they took advantage of her, but more to the point, they were able to take advantage of her, because she was an innocent.

If Amanda had been a mean person, I think she would have recognized it in others, like the police. None of the other housemates went near the police without a lawyer or responsible adult. That was prudent. Only Amanda and Raf allowed them selves to be vulnerable in this way.

They got framed by the police, targeted and intentionally framed by Mignini, because they were/are unusually gentle and compassionate people.

On the other side, is Mignini, who kidnapped two people from the scene whom he knew to be innocent, just because he needed to fill out his cast for an imagined satanic orgy, to prop up his career and defend himself from criminal charges for having made the identical claims in his Narducci trail cases. He borrowed their lives for 7 years. Mignini ought to answer for that. He really should spend some time in the same jail cell he sent them to.

But I do think its the stark contrast between the compassion and cruelty in the defendants and the prosecutor, that has hooked so many people. Mignini was so bad and so wrong, and even so literally crazy. (In his own criminal trial, he was described "as having fallen prey to a kind of delirium").The images in court were just bewilderingly out of place. The juxtaposition is what made it so compelling.

I wrote it better earlier on when I first joined this board. I said something like, 'let's leave the talk of angels and devils to the mad prosecutor of Perugia. In in the meantime, lets do what we can to reverse this injustice".

It came out right.

Hmm maybe. I think Steve Moore is as prone to beatify Amanda as the guilters are with Meredith.

Honestly I think Amanda talking to the police was mostly out of a willingness to help but partly also a bit of an ego trip at being at the centre of a crisis. Certainly she was naive and uncynical.

 

[LondonJohn]

My guess is because math is her specialty, she needed to find a way to incorporate the subject into this case in order to.... I don't know... keep from getting bored. I read her chapter in her book on Amanda Knox, and it really just seemed to me she was really stretching to find a way to use her expertise in some way just to talk about the case.

I also think she's a crazy lunatic.

Unfortunately I viewed pretty much that whole book with the same sort of thoughts about Schneps' and Colmez's motivations/aims for writing it:

"We're mathematicians, and we're good ones with good reputations. We want to write books that bring our maths talents (and our writing abilities) to a wider audience. We can see an angle for discussing the role of maths in criminal trials. We know that a large proportion of the general public has some interest in criminal trials - especially the more well-known and/or notorious ones. Can we therefore find a way to show how maths could have made a difference in those trials? If we can, then that would make for an eye-catching book. It might sell many copies, and bring us and our maths talents to a wider community. We might get better recognition, both within and outside the maths community. And we might make some money from sales of the book."

And then I think they set about trying to identify well-known or notorious cases - especially those that were fresher in the public consciousness - and started looking for ways to insert maths thinking into those cases, in a way that might have affected the outcome of the cases. In other words, I think they probably took on the problem from the wrong angle, for the wrong reasons.

And I'd also suggest that they pretty much had to keep their maths-based arguments fairly simple, otherwise the book would have been unreadable and incomprehensible - and given that one of their obvious (and stated) aims was to awaken the public and the judiciary to the role maths could/should be playing in criminal trials, they obviously wouldn't have been keen to lose their target audience in huge, byzantine mathematical equations.

 

[Grinder]

My guess is because math is her specialty, she needed to find a way to incorporate the subject into this case in order to.... I don't know... keep from getting bored. I read her chapter in her book on Amanda Knox, and it really just seemed to me she was really stretching to find a way to use her expertise in some way just to talk about the case.

I also think she's a crazy lunatic.

I think she simply used the case to attract attention to her book.

 

[Grinder]

Hmm maybe. I think Steve Moore is as prone to beatify Amanda as the guilters are with Meredith.

Honestly I think Amanda talking to the police was mostly out of a willingness to help but partly also a bit of an ego trip at being at the centre of a crisis. Certainly she was naive and uncynical.

Good call

 

[katy_did]

Not at all. Jurors (and judges in their motivation reports) are only required to reason why they arrived at a certain verdict. And that happens by assessing and weighing the totality of the evidence/testimony. And within that there are a whole bunch of individual - but linked - assessments about the reliability and relative value of each piece of evidence/testimony.

Within all that, there are literally thousands of intangible reasoning processes going on in a complex interactive dance. Let's take just one element from the Knox/Sollecito case. Was the break-in real or was it staged by Knox/Sollecito? The Massei court reasoned that it was staged. They based that reasoning on a huge number of incredibly complex factors, including their opinions on why (or why not) Guede acting alone would have staged a break-in; why only Knox and Sollecito would have had the proper motivation to stage a break-in; whether the glass pattern and rock position in the room supports a rock being thrown in from outside the room or whether it supports someone breaking the glass from inside and placing the rock in the position in which it was discovered; whether the marks on the window shutters were consistent with a rock being thrown from the outside or whether they were consistent with a rock being used from inside in a staging; whether it was reasonable to suppose that if it were not a staging, Guede would have made repeated ascents of the wall to open the exterior shutters then throw the rock then climb up and in; whether the pattern of Romanelli's clothing in the room is consistent with someone who broke in with the intention of burgling the cottage. And so on and so on - this is only a small proportion of the factors that were considered.

And I'd defy you to construct any sort of non-enormous Bayesian model that could replicate the types of reasoning required to answer all of the above questions, just for starters.............

I couldn't as I'm not at all a mathematician, but I'm fairly sure Komponisto could.

On the points in your first paragraph, you say that jurors are "only required to reason why they arrived at a certain verdict", as if that means they wouldn't need to discuss all the issues you list in your second paragraph. Obviously that isn't true: in explaining why they reached their verdict, a jury would need to explain their reasoning processes on all those issues; they'd need to put their reasoning into words.

So what you're saying, I think, is that there are things you can explain in language that you can't explain in figures - not that there are intangible reasoning processes that can't be communicated? I don't know enough about Bayesian theory to counter that, but what I suspect is that you probably can communicate those things in figures as well as you can in words. The reasoning that goes into calculating those figures is exactly the same type of reasoning that allows something to be explained through language.

 

[HumanityBlues]

Unfortunately I viewed pretty much that whole book with the same sort of thoughts about Schneps' and Colmez's motivations/aims for writing it:

"We're mathematicians, and we're good ones with good reputations. We want to write books that bring our maths talents (and our writing abilities) to a wider audience. We can see an angle for discussing the role of maths in criminal trials. We know that a large proportion of the general public has some interest in criminal trials - especially the more well-known and/or notorious ones. Can we therefore find a way to show how maths could have made a difference in those trials? If we can, then that would make for an eye-catching book. It might sell many copies, and bring us and our maths talents to a wider community. We might get better recognition, both within and outside the maths community. And we might make some money from sales of the book."

And then I think they set about trying to identify well-known or notorious cases - especially those that were fresher in the public consciousness - and started looking for ways to insert maths thinking into those cases, in a way that might have affected the outcome of the cases. In other words, I think they probably took on the problem from the wrong angle, for the wrong reasons.

And I'd also suggest that they pretty much had to keep their maths-based arguments fairly simple, otherwise the book would have been unreadable and incomprehensible - and given that one of their obvious (and stated) aims was to awaken the public and the judiciary to the role maths could/should be playing in criminal trials, they obviously wouldn't have been keen to lose their target audience in huge, byzantine mathematical equations.

I may have to reassess my last post a little bit, because I think Leila Schneps is pretty crazy so it might be clouding my judgment. I also forgot about the Less is Wrong post which I thought was spot on, so it's a little bit of a double standard.

I will say, no juror is actually precluded from using a Bayesian analysis. I think there is an obvious practical problem in most cases as well given that in criminal cases, the important facts are always contested. For example, I think Ms. Schneps used a partial hand print example. Knowing that this partial handprint is a very material fact in the case, you would have expert witnesses from both sides saying the facts about this hand print are actually this or that. Then do you do a Bayesian analysis of the credibility of the expert witness? Do you have to do a Bayesian analysis of each assertion the expert witness made to form their opinion as to a certain fact? I'm not sure such analysis is practical in most cases.

 

[Kauffer]

Unfortunately I viewed pretty much that whole book with the same sort of thoughts about Schneps' and Colmez's motivations/aims for writing it:

"We're mathematicians, and we're good ones with good reputations. We want to write books that bring our maths talents (and our writing abilities) to a wider audience. We can see an angle for discussing the role of maths in criminal trials. We know that a large proportion of the general public has some interest in criminal trials - especially the more well-known and/or notorious ones. Can we therefore find a way to show how maths could have made a difference in those trials? If we can, then that would make for an eye-catching book. It might sell many copies, and bring us and our maths talents to a wider community. We might get better recognition, both within and outside the maths community. And we might make some money from sales of the book."

And then I think they set about trying to identify well-known or notorious cases - especially those that were fresher in the public consciousness - and started looking for ways to insert maths thinking into those cases, in a way that might have affected the outcome of the cases. In other words, I think they probably took on the problem from the wrong angle, for the wrong reasons.

And I'd also suggest that they pretty much had to keep their maths-based arguments fairly simple, otherwise the book would have been unreadable and incomprehensible - and given that one of their obvious (and stated) aims was to awaken the public and the judiciary to the role maths could/should be playing in criminal trials, they obviously wouldn't have been keen to lose their target audience in huge, byzantine mathematical equations.

At the risk of raising your blood pressure, I've found an interview with Coralie Colmez talking about the Knife DNA in connection with her book. I wonder what you will think.

Perhaps Chris Halkides and others will find it interesting too.

Case discussion starts from approximately 5:40 - it shocked me a bit.

Earlier, she talks about Bayesian analysis.

http://youtu.be/53xciJzQJOk

 

[katy_did]

Is experience always expressible in words or figures? There was a conservative philosopher called Oakeshot who used to go on about experience and how there were things that could not be learned from a book but could only be acquired through experience, like making shoes or something.

Sometimes the task in front of a jury is incredibly simple: do they believe the defendant? They are entitled not to and not to have reasons that would not satisfy a Bayesian - 'I just didn't believe him', 'he came across as lying'. Every other shoplifting case is decided on this basis. The jury's collective life experience is what it brings to the party, not unlike this forum where we exchange our knowledge and incommunicable experience. 'Incommunicable' in the sense that my telling you mine does not equip you with it and vice versa. 'Untransferable' might be better.

So if the judge said of Curatolo, "I just believed him", you'd be OK with that?

 

[Desert Fox]

Meredith gossipped about Amanda to Meredith's British girl clique. That set a tone and made her their fair game. And the British girls had to have heard that Amanda found an Italian boyfriend who actually cared for her, unlike Glaucoma who couldn't recognize Meredith when he and his roommates walked past her on the street.

And apparently after all that has gone on, they are still friends. One could not blame him for hating her.

 

[carbonjam72]

Unfortunately I viewed pretty much that whole book with the same sort of thoughts about Schneps' and Colmez's motivations/aims for writing it:

"We're mathematicians, and we're good ones with good reputations. We want to write books that bring our maths talents (and our writing abilities) to a wider audience. We can see an angle for discussing the role of maths in criminal trials. We know that a large proportion of the general public has some interest in criminal trials - especially the more well-known and/or notorious ones. Can we therefore find a way to show how maths could have made a difference in those trials? If we can, then that would make for an eye-catching book. It might sell many copies, and bring us and our maths talents to a wider community. We might get better recognition, both within and outside the maths community. And we might make some money from sales of the book."

And then I think they set about trying to identify well-known or notorious cases - especially those that were fresher in the public consciousness - and started looking for ways to insert maths thinking into those cases, in a way that might have affected the outcome of the cases. In other words, I think they probably took on the problem from the wrong angle, for the wrong reasons.

And I'd also suggest that they pretty much had to keep their maths-based arguments fairly simple, otherwise the book would have been unreadable and incomprehensible - and given that one of their obvious (and stated) aims was to awaken the public and the judiciary to the role maths could/should be playing in criminal trials, they obviously wouldn't have been keen to lose their target audience in huge, byzantine mathematical equations.

The more I hear of Schneps description of what she's doing, the more it looks to be exactly what you've described.

Another author wrote something about feminism, while suggesting "we'll never really know what happened to Meredith". A lawyer did the same thing, to talk about comparative legal systems - rather missing the point that it isn't about comparative systems when they are functioning properly, but understanding how the system failed in this case.

They use the case to talk about their main field, because they are well aware that there is little broad interest in their fields otherwise. They aren't naturally compelling communicators, and they know it.

I think Shneps has been grossly irresponsible in this regard. Her professional stature, and correspondingly outsized influence on public debate, ought to make her subject to professional censure at the least.

What I find amazing about Shcneps, is that there are safety controls in place for forensic DNA analysis, determined by practicing professionals, and she is willing to set aside international standards because she wants to elbow her way into a discussion that effects other people's lives. It's really a kind of pseudo-science. Her theories should be tested in court, or before a professional body able to evaluate her claims.

I think Leila is a dunce. In private life she's entitled to remain so. But its wrong for her to spew her misguided pseudo science and toy with people's lives. imo -

 

[HumanityBlues]

Someone should ask Ms. Schneps what Bayesian theory says about the chances that the ISC ruling was the result of a conspiracy of masons.

 

[LondonJohn]

I couldn't as I'm not at all a mathematician, but I'm fairly sure Komponisto could.

On the points in your first paragraph, you say that jurors are "only required to reason why they arrived at a certain verdict", as if that means they wouldn't need to discuss all the issues you list in your second paragraph. Obviously that isn't true: in explaining why they reached their verdict, a jury would need to explain their reasoning processes on all those issues; they'd need to put their reasoning into words.

No no, I didn't mean that at all. I meant that they need to assess things from these granular bottom levels upwards, in order to arrive at an ultimate overall reasoning as to whether the accused is guilty or not guilty of the charge. Just as the Massei motivation report, for example, did. It addressed all of these questions and provided its answers, and used those answers in its overall assessment of guilt.

So what you're saying, I think, is that there are things you can explain in language that you can't explain in figures - not that there are intangible reasoning processes that can't be communicated? I don't know enough about Bayesian theory to counter that, but what I suspect is that you probably can communicate those things in figures as well as you can in words. The reasoning that goes into calculating those figures is exactly the same type of reasoning that allows something to be explained through language.

Not really. I'm saying that there are things that are incredibly difficult to explain in quantitative terms, in figures. I'm not at all saying it's impossible. I'm saying it can be astonishingly difficult to model even a seemingly "simple" piece of human reasoning using numbers.

Take just one element in the list I suggested earlier in respect of the staged break-in issue: if Guede had broken in (rather than this being a staged break-in), then would he reasonably have risked making at least two ascents of the wall in the process?

Do you know how unbelievably difficult it would be to construct a mathematical model to address and answer just this one question? The number of factors - each carrying different implied weights - which would have weighed in a human's mind in trying to decide whether the answer to just that one question should be "yes" or "no". The Massei court decided "no". They used their human experience, their intuition, their weighing of that against their understanding of the mechanics of ascending the wall, their qualitative assessment of how much someone in Guede's position might have feared being seen in that process (and thus how much of a deterrent that would have provided), their qualitative assessment of actually how likely it might be that Guede might have been seen in that process. And so on.

As Anglo also pointed out sagely, how do you begin to mathematically model whether a witness or defendant is believed?? And after all, sometimes guilt or non-guilt can entirely rest on such an assessment. It may be possible to construct a mathematical model to replicate whether one human believes another, but I assure you beyond question that it is astonishingly difficult.

 

[Kauffer]

Giulia Bongiorno

A post acquittal interview with Giulia Bongiorno for the Italian speakers here, on Italian TV.

http://youtu.be/4EqF_bY6cro

 

[LondonJohn]

Someone should ask Ms. Schneps what Bayesian theory says about the chances that the ISC ruling was the result of a conspiracy of masons.

 

[LondonJohn]

So if the judge said of Curatolo, "I just believed him", you'd be OK with that?

You'd have to. You'd have no choice. You cannot question that someone believes someone else. You can question their judgement in doing so, but that's all.

Remember Massei's stunning "reasoning" on Nara Capezzali, regarding the veracity of her claims of hearing the "scream of death"? Here it is, in its glory:

If there had not been such a scream, and if Mrs. Capezzali had not actually heard it, then the Court can see no reason why she would have spoken about it.

Try modelling that piece of human reasoning in mathematical terms..................

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Youtube interview

At the risk of raising your blood pressure, I've found an interview with Coralie Colmez talking about the Knife DNA in connection with her book. I wonder what you will think.

Perhaps Chris Halkides and others will find it interesting too.

Case discussion starts from approximately 5:40 - it shocked me a bit.

Earlier, she talks about Bayesian analysis.

http://youtu.be/53xciJzQJOk

The problems with the DNA in sample 36B are not such that improved DNA technology can solve them (or that a retest can solve them). One, it is still sub-source DNA. Two, the facility was not dedicated to low template work. Besides, I do not recall anyone on the PG side of things specifying exactly what the improvements in DNA profiling between 2007 and 2011 actually were. Maybe you were interested in another aspect of the interview, or was that it?

 

[katy_did]

No no, I didn't mean that at all. I meant that they need to assess things from these granular bottom levels upwards, in order to arrive at an ultimate overall reasoning as to whether the accused is guilty or not guilty of the charge. Just as the Massei motivation report, for example, did. It addressed all of these questions and provided its answers, and used those answers in its overall assessment of guilt.

Not really. I'm saying that there are things that are incredibly difficult to explain in quantitative terms, in figures. I'm not at all saying it's impossible. I'm saying it can be astonishingly difficult to model even a seemingly "simple" piece of human reasoning using numbers.

Take just one element in the list I suggested earlier in respect of the staged break-in issue: if Guede had broken in (rather than this being a staged break-in), then would he reasonably have risked making at least two ascents of the wall in the process?

Do you know how unbelievably difficult it would be to construct a mathematical model to address and answer just this one question? The number of factors - each carrying different implied weights - which would have weighed in a human's mind in trying to decide whether the answer to just that one question should be "yes" or "no". The Massei court decided "no". They used their human experience, their intuition, their weighing of that against their understanding of the mechanics of ascending the wall, their qualitative assessment of how much someone in Guede's position might have feared being seen in that process (and thus how much of a deterrent that would have provided), their qualitative assessment of actually how likely it might be that Guede might have been seen in that process. And so on.

As Anglo also pointed out sagely, how do you begin to mathematically model whether a witness or defendant is believed?? And after all, sometimes guilt or non-guilt can entirely rest on such an assessment. It may be possible to construct a mathematical model to replicate whether one human believes another, but I assure you beyond question that it is astonishingly difficult.

Wouldn't you mathematically model whether a witness is believed in exactly the same way as you'd explain in language whether they're believed? Same for Guede breaking in: if you can explain your reasons in language, as you have to do in a motivation report, then those same reasons should be expressible in figures as well.

Again, it's as if you're saying there's this very complicated process that can't be communicated in any way. Could be, but then the problem is with communication in general, not with Bayesian reasoning in particular.

 

[katy_did]

You'd have to. You'd have no choice. You cannot question that someone believes someone else. You can question their judgement in doing so, but that's all.

Remember Massei's stunning "reasoning" on Nara Capezzali, regarding the veracity of her claims of hearing the "scream of death"? Here it is, in its glory:

If there had not been such a scream, and if Mrs. Capezzali had not actually heard it, then the Court can see no reason why she would have spoken about it.

Try modelling that piece of human reasoning in mathematical terms..................

EXACTLY THE POINT!! That reasoning is crap. If he'd had to give logical reasons then maybe he'd have reached the right verdict back then.