Do you know who Madison is?
"Amanda is confused, terrorized," he told the jury. "She can hardly speak Italian."
By his count, she sat through more than 53 hours of police questioning over the course of five days before she was eventually arrested after breaking down and blaming an innocent man,
Do you think Dalla Vedova was confused as well?
You do know who he is, right?
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Amanda-Knox-a-victim-targeted-for-being-881849.php
On Wednesday, Luciano Ghirga, a lawyer representing Knox, claimed Knox had blamed an innocent man, local barman Patrick Lumumba for the murder after 53 hours of police interrogation spread out over "four days of stress and fear".
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/03/amanda-knox-meredith-kercher-case
Madison here must refer to Amanda's friend.
The lawyers' statements to the press may be less precise than what they present to a court. In fact, the actual hours of questioning* seem not to have been recorded by the police; it is their responsibility to keep track of such things. The lawyers were not present during any of the Nov. 2 - Nov. 8 interviews, interrogations, or custody, up to (for those who were actually called up to be present) apparently several minutes before the arrest confirmation hearing. Yet another violation of Convention Article 6.3c.
You don't have to accept the hyperbole of such statements; look for the actual records. Find the transcripts or other recordings of the Nov. 5/6 interrogations, for example.
*Although a single time (start?) of questioning is provided on the witness statements.
If you had bothered to read the article you would know it was said in court.
Isn't it clear that I don't accept the hyperbole?
Indeed, I have not yet read the article. Nor have I read the specific in-court statements that the article is based on. However, have you considered the possibility the media account may be a distortion (not necessarily intentional) of what was said in court? Have you checked your media source against court documents? Even relatively reliable media may make reporting errors.
I have now read both media articles and I disagree with your analysis as presented in your posts.
Neither article directly quotes the lawyer's reference to the police contact hours and questioning in
closing remarks. Thus there are two issues: 1) the potential for rhetorical effects, including some
hyperbole, in the closing remarks and 2) the potential that the media reports have abridged or distorted (without malicious intent) the lawyer's statements. I suggest that rhetorical effects are traditional in lawyer's closing arguments, certainly in the US, and probably more so in Italy.
Thus, I do not consider that the statements as reported in the media necessarily reflect the most accurate and precise rendering of the content of the defense arguments. In fact, to my (limited) knowledge, there is no document stating how much time Amanda actually was questioned and/or interrogated as a proportion of her total police contact time. If you are aware of such a document, please cite it.
In terms of the media articles you have cited, both contain either inaccuracies or lacunae which lead me to question their total commitment to accuracy and precision required to fully understand the legal situation at the time, which was the at or about the end of the first-instance trial in December, 2009. Here are some inaccuracies that misrepresent the situation and would mislead the uninformed reader:
1. The Guardian refers to 2 judges a jury of 6 in this case. That is misleading. The Italian system, as applied to this case, provided for a judicial panel of 2 professional (career) judges and 6 lay judges. There was no jury as in the US or UK sense. The only qualification of the 6 lay judges for a first-instance trial, AFAIK, is that the must be Italian citizens and have completed elementary education. The lay judges are not interviewed prior to trial with an intent to eliminate any biased individual, nor are they forbidden from using or viewing non-trial information about the case. The lay judges and the professional judges together render judgment by a majority vote.
2. The Seattle article was somewhat incomplete in stating that Amanda's parents were the target of a defamation suit by police for repeating Amanda's statements that she had been mistreated to a UK reporter (Follian, IIRC). What is more significant, and is omitted from the article, is that Amanda was charged with a serious crime, calunnia, for stating in open court that she had been mistreated by the police. In fact, the series of trials in Italy for this alleged offense is continuing to this day. The point is that Amanda was prosecuted for making a complaint in court of mistreatment by the police; however, the proper course of action for the Italian authorities, according to the European Convention on Human Rights and ECHR case-law, would have been to launch an independent and thorough investigation of her claims of mistreatment. I find this failure of completeness a serious defect of the article, since the lack of such information denies the reader a fuller understanding of some of the peculiarities of the Italian judicial system compared to the US system.
Furthermore, since the hyperbole in the closing statements occurred at the approximate end of the trial, while the misconduct of the authorities, including the forensic malpractice or fraud by Stefanoni, occurred early in the case (in 2007 - 2008), I fail to see the relevance of the hyperbole, if it was in the closing statements, to the actions of the authorities. I do believe you are in your posts blaming the victims and their defense teams for the prior actions and misconduct of the Italian authorities.
