Continuation Part 15: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Vixen]

Your memory is incorrect. You don't remember correctly. If you still think you do remember correctly, please tell us why Mignini kept such important evidence secret from the courts?

No secret. It is catalogued:

[excerpt]
Of the over 480 tests prepared on samples, 93 of these constituted hairs or fibres. 86 were human hairs of varying length, in varying colors. The most significant colors noted were black, blonde, chestnut, light chestnut and red chestnut.

Only 3 hairs yielded DNA; all 3 hairs yielded DNA compatible with Ms. Kercher’s DNA. All 3 hairs were chestnut colored and over 15 cm long.

35 hairs were chestnut in color; the vast majority of these were found in Ms. Kercher’s room. 2 were also found on a kitchen sponge at Sollecito’s apartment. Two hairs, corresponding in colour to Meredith’s hair, found not on a book, or a mat, but a kitchen sponge in Raffaele Sollecito’s apartment.

7 hairs were black in color. 6 of these were 4 cm long or less, and so likely Guede’s hair. 4 of these were on the duvet and 1 was on the mattress cover, both in Ms. Kercher’s room. 1 was also on a sponge at Sollecito’s apartment.

21 blonde hairs were analyzed, and were likely Knox’s hairs. Most were found at Sollecito’s apartment, 10 on a sponge in the kitchen and 5 on a sweater. Three different people, three different hair types, all three on the sponge… 6. Of the 6 blonde hairs found at the cottage, 2 were on the duvet, 1 was inside the small bathroom sink, 1 was on Ms. Kercher’s purse and 1 was on her mattress cover.

[excerpt ends]

Of course only Mez' hair was identified as hers from DNA analysis. But how did they turn up on a sponge in Raf's aptmt?

EMWTO

 

[Vixen]

But NO ONE would say the same about the homeless Curatolo. He had no idea why he was in jail. And IF you came to the conclusion that his rambling incoherent testimony was accurate, you would have to say that if anything old Toto actually provided an alibi for Amanda and Raffaele.

You can't say he was reliable and then cherry pick his testimony.

That was some four years later. <Shrug.> I trust the court to come to its own conclusions about his credibility.

It looks at all the eye witness accounts as a whole, and tests whether they corroborate each other.

 

[Vixen]

What does this have to do with anything?

No wonder the investigation went so badly for the police, if this was an early theory. No forensics supported it. All forensics pointed to Guede and him alone as the perp. One expert of nine said more perps, but did not name them. But 8 of nine told Judge Massei that Guede could have done this alone.

The case is closed. RS and AK are exonerated. Deal with it.

Rudy didn't have any reason to cart the body around the room and rearrange everything.

The acquittal is more to do with Donnino type antics, politics and Nencini's changing motive, than because of any improper forensic evidence. IMV.

 

[acbytesla]

That was some four years later. <Shrug.> I trust the court to come to its own conclusions about his credibility.

It looks at all the eye witness accounts as a whole, and tests whether they corroborate each other.

He was incoherent the first time sround and ovrrall, the witness accounts do NOT corroborate each other.

 

[Dan O.]

If you are going to discredit Curatolo on the grounds of his lifestyle, then how very much worse is a child kidnapper and child killer?

I am all for parties bringing whatever witness they wish, as I have said several times.

The character or credibility of a witness soon becomes clear for all to see, so why worry?

In the event, Alessi was deemed unreliable.

Nobody is discrediting Curatolo on the grounds of his lifestyle. Curatolo is discredited because his memory of the event is faulty. He is conflating events from the 31st, inventing the precise time from a watch he doesn't have, making a positive identification of a couple he didn't know at a distance he couldn't see and if we could rely on his testimony he is giving Amanda and Raffaele an alibi for the entire window of the plausible time of death.

 

[Dan O.]

What does this have to do with anything?

He's making a Machiavellian claim to know what the police were thinking.

 

[Bill Williams]

That was some four years later. <Shrug.> I trust the court to come to its own conclusions about his credibility.

It looks at all the eye witness accounts as a whole, and tests whether they corroborate each other.

Italy's courts concluded on March27 implying that Curatolo had no credibility. What remains is what the Italian system wishes to do with those who pushed him as credible.

 

[Bill Williams]

He's making a Machiavellian claim to know what the police were thinking.

Wasn't that John Follain who knew what the police were thinking? Grinder?

 

[Bill Williams]

Rudy didn't have any reason to cart the body around the room and rearrange everything.

The acquittal is more to do with Donnino type antics, politics and Nencini's changing motive, than because of any improper forensic evidence. IMV.

Your view is wrong. Read the Conti/Vecchiotti report about why Stefanoni's forensics were faulty.

 

[Samson]

I suppose this obsequious fool is still foreign secretary

Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, was in Washington today and was asked whether Britain would feel an obligation on behalf of the family of Meredith Kercher, the British victim in the case, to put pressure on the US to meet any extradition request expeditiously.

Mr Hammond was clear that the UK would expect the US to behave properly over the request, in keeping with international law.

"Sometimes the rules-based system delivers an outcome which you find inconvenient, and the test of our democracy and our commitment to the rule of law is that, when inconvenient things happen, we still comply with the rules.

"The British government does this all the time. We get court judgments that we don't like, but we don't try to dismiss the court judges, we accept the court's judgment. So we will always be arguing for compliance with the rule of law."

From just before the latest annulments.

He demonstrates how witches are still sacrificed by modern man.

 

[moije2]

I suppose this obsequious fool is still foreign secretary

Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, was in Washington today and was asked whether Britain would feel an obligation on behalf of the family of Meredith Kercher, the British victim in the case, to put pressure on the US to meet any extradition request expeditiously.

Mr Hammond was clear that the UK would expect the US to behave properly over the request, in keeping with international law.

"Sometimes the rules-based system delivers an outcome which you find inconvenient, and the test of our democracy and our commitment to the rule of law is that, when inconvenient things happen, we still comply with the rules.

"The British government does this all the time. We get court judgments that we don't like, but we don't try to dismiss the court judges, we accept the court's judgment. So we will always be arguing for compliance with the rule of law."

From just before the latest annulments.

He demonstrates how witches are still sacrificed by modern man.

Excellent post Samson.

 

[Dan O.]

No secret. It is catalogued:

No. You made an outright flagrant lie. Shame. Shame. Shame!

 

[Planigale]

That's true. Is anyone familiar with the video clip of a basketball team, wherein the aim is to count how many times the ball bounces on the ground. By a trick of the mind, noone sees the guy dressed up as a bear in the middle of it all!

OTOH, of course eyewitness accounts and identification parades come with an unreliability factor. However, eye witnesses often do remain useful evidence.

Of course there was no attempt at an identification parade. Curatalo was never shown a range of female / male photos / persons of appropriate age to see if he could identify Knox / Sollecito from others. Nor did Quintivalle. It is hard to think of a worse way of handling an eye witness for reliability. You rely on a journalist with a vested interest in creating a story, who six months on showed around photos of Knox and Sollecito asking do you remember these people from six months ago, strangers who you would have had no reason to remember. Then the prosecution just accept the identification. The defence can't challenge the eye witness in the Italian system it appears as this would be saying that the witness was lying. (The justification for why acoustic tests of the ear witness to show that the scream heard could not have originated from the flat was not allowed).

 

[Planigale]

No secret. It is catalogued:

[excerpt]
Of the over 480 tests prepared on samples, 93 of these constituted hairs or fibres. 86 were human hairs of varying length, in varying colors. The most significant colors noted were black, blonde, chestnut, light chestnut and red chestnut.

Only 3 hairs yielded DNA; all 3 hairs yielded DNA compatible with Ms. Kercher’s DNA. All 3 hairs were chestnut colored and over 15 cm long.

35 hairs were chestnut in color; the vast majority of these were found in Ms. Kercher’s room. 2 were also found on a kitchen sponge at Sollecito’s apartment. Two hairs, corresponding in colour to Meredith’s hair, found not on a book, or a mat, but a kitchen sponge in Raffaele Sollecito’s apartment.

7 hairs were black in color. 6 of these were 4 cm long or less, and so likely Guede’s hair. 4 of these were on the duvet and 1 was on the mattress cover, both in Ms. Kercher’s room. 1 was also on a sponge at Sollecito’s apartment.

21 blonde hairs were analyzed, and were likely Knox’s hairs. Most were found at Sollecito’s apartment, 10 on a sponge in the kitchen and 5 on a sweater. Three different people, three different hair types, all three on the sponge… 6. Of the 6 blonde hairs found at the cottage, 2 were on the duvet, 1 was inside the small bathroom sink, 1 was on Ms. Kercher’s purse and 1 was on her mattress cover.

[excerpt ends]

Of course only Mez' hair was identified as hers from DNA analysis. But how did they turn up on a sponge in Raf's aptmt?

EMWTO

Black hair is so rare in Italy that it is an obvious assumption that 'black hairs found; black man guilty'?

 

[Dan O.]

That's true. Is anyone familiar with the video clip of a basketball team, wherein the aim is to count how many times the ball bounces on the ground. By a trick of the mind, noone sees the guy dressed up as a bear in the middle of it all!

OTOH, of course eyewitness accounts and identification parades come with an unreliability factor. However, eye witnesses often do remain useful evidence.

Of course there was no attempt at an identification parade. Curatalo was never shown a range of female / male photos / persons of appropriate age to see if he could identify Knox / Sollecito from others. Nor did Quintivalle. It is hard to think of a worse way of handling an eye witness for reliability. You rely on a journalist with a vested interest in creating a story, who six months on showed around photos of Knox and Sollecito asking do you remember these people from six months ago, strangers who you would have had no reason to remember. Then the prosecution just accept the identification. The defence can challenge the eye witness in the Italian system it appears as this would be saying that the witness was lying. (The justification for why acoustic tests of the ear witness to show that the scream heard could not have originated from the flat was not allowed).

Vixen needs to take Daniel Simons Selective Awareness Test And see if he can spot the bear.

 

[codyjuneau]

Just a musing:

If the window was such an impossible break-in point for a real burglary as per the prosecution, wouldn't that make it an equally bad staged break-in point?...
.

.
Yes, unless the person wanted to make it look like a staged break-in.

I guess in that case it would be a staged-staged break-in (staged² break-in?).

Cody
.

 

[Dan O.]

CP: Where were you when you answered Patrick's message? AK: At Raffaele's apartment.


A lie under oath? As Amanda is now "Not Guilty", can she still claim the Italian legal protection, guilty parties are allowed to lie. (Numbers?)

As you know, retrieved phone records show she cannot have been at Raf's.

No Vixen. It is you that is ignorant in the way the real world works. That particular tower is in line with Raffaele's street so even though it is more distant it still gets a good signal to the flat down that narrow canyon. GSM phones don't renegotiate to pair with the strongest tower the instant there is a change in signal strength. The negotiation requires transmitting and that means a battery drain. They will stick to the current tower as long as the signal is good enough to receive notifications. An SMS message is like a notification and it will come from the tower that the phone last paired with. For outgoing messages. The phone will use the strongest tower so the phone may use two different towers for receive and send even though the phone doesn't move and the signal strengths don't change. This is all spelled out in the technical documentation for GSM phone systems.

 

[anglolawyer]

Think about it. There is a dead body in Mez' room. Logistically, difficult to ransack stuff over the blood.

The police had an early theory the body was moved into the wardrobe (closet) via wrapped sheets - Mez died in front of it, cornered - and then repositioned, to stage a rape in a position where the body could not been seen from the car park.

For that reason, you would want to stave off discovery for as long as possible, with the staged burglary in a room not viewable from the front.

Your ravings plumb new depths. Blood is blood, not tables and chairs. It's not an obstacle to ransacking. Even if she were hung out the window she would not be visible from the car park area. There was no staging. Your last sentence defies comprehension.

Move on.

 

[Strozzi]

duplicate

 

[Antony]

You may have heard of Dr Harold Shipman, England's worst serial killer.

He was a heroin addict from an early stage of his career as a medical doctor.

Just read Shipman's entry on Wikipedia - no mention of him being a heroin addict, although there is a reference elsewhere to an alleged period of addiction to Pethidine, obtained fraudulently through his medical practice. Of course his method was to give his victim's a fatal overdose of diamorphine (medical heroin), but that doesn't mean he was dependent on it himself.

Should we update the Wikipedia entry, citing Vixen's post as a source of information?

Functioned well enough on a daily basis.

Contrary to popular perception, heroin addicts can live relatively normal lives in between being dosed-up. But Curatolo admitted to being dosed-up at the time of his claimed sighting of the 2 students, and there are any number of other problems with his testimony. Also nobody could describe him as "functioning well enough on a daily basis".