Continuation Part 17: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Samson]

Thanks for clarifying. My quick review of the Lundy case likewise revealed glaring problems as to Lundy's guilt.

It seems like the 2nd jury was more interested in reading tea leaves by watching Lundy's reactions in court, than they were with the actual sketchy evidence.

Last year my own daughter, a fairly well educated nurse, shocked me by saying that she could tell Amanda was guilty by watching her reactions in interviews.

Where did I go wrong?

This is extremely common. I thought all sorts of things till this Knox case. I spent 14 years assuming Lundy was guilty till people from a distance, ie northern hemisphereans on this forum, took one look at the case and saw straight through it. You can glance at where the thread starts, and on the first page the problems are obvious, and by the third page it's game over for the prosecution. But as I say (irony intended) the jury would not be fooled by the facts. Disgraceful.
What I found beyond the pale was the judge totally ignoring the fatal flaws, summing up telling the jury they were the gods in the room, and sentencing him to 3 years beyond the statutory minimum of 17 years. His wife, also a judge, was on a panel, and she wanted the shirt evidence thrown out, but was over ruled 2 1. It made me wonder about a domestic power battle.

 

[Kauffer]

It's a classic failure of the inquisitorial system that it is almost always heavily reliant on confessions and witness statements. It's a throwback to the days before forensic science and decent medico-legal standards. And it's incredibly prone to errors, incompetence and malpractice.

It seems that when a serious crime is committed in Italy, almost the first instinct of the investigators is to start tapping phones of anyone with the faintest link to the victim. By doing so, they hope to catch the perpetrator discussing his/her actions, or someone else discussing the crime (either because that person was an eyewitness, or because that person talked with the perpetrator about it). And once they've got that sort of evidence, well: case closed! No need for that sciencey forensics stuff or messy autopsies/wound analysis. We have a tape recording of the perpetrator confessing, or a witness describing exactly who did what to whom, or a person stating that Mr X did it. Guilty!

The industrial level of phone tapping going on in Italy (and I think the Kercher case was totally in line with "standard practice") is astonishing and deeply worrying from both a civil-liberties and justice point of view. Perhaps the ECHR will address this factor as it applied to this case. Certainly, the ECHR should have an ongoing interest in this, as the right to privacy is a fundamental tenet of the European Convention on Human Rights. What needs to happen, of course, is proper legislation from the muppets in the Italian government, in order to prosecute those who order and implement unlawful phone taps, and to make it very clear what the limitations are on the use of phone tap evidence (in England/Wales, for example, such evidence cannot be used in court - it can only be used to direct an investigation).

Yes. You make some very strong points.

They don't seem to be comfortable with or handle well, real evidence. Perhaps this preference for confession in a legal setting has its roots in Catholic purification rites:

"The basic requirement for a good confession is to have the intention of returning to God like the "prodigal son" and to acknowledge our sins with true sorrow before the priest."

http://www.catholic.org/prayers/confession.php

 

[Grinder]

its a shame the prosecution/investigative lead didnt spend more time with Rudy and given up interest in him so easily...instead focusing on other non-associated issues.

you should have gone tile instead of carpet...my tile is like new 20yrs later, the carpet needs replaced again (3rd time, 4th time?$$$$$$)

Wouldn't have passed the hard surface sound test.

 

[Grinder]

Your question which I highlighted above contains some of the answer within. 1) The police and prosecutors were not trying to help Rudi, per se, and 2) they had plenty of evidence upstairs to convict Rudi of murder.

Beyond that, they were preparing for a bigger, more prominent murder trial against an American vixen/manipulator of men and the Manga-collecting son of a wealthy Italian family. The trial of Knox and Soloecito was going to be contested, in contrast to Rudi's fast-track trial wherein Rudi acquiesced to the evidence already developed against him. Any additional perverted behavior by Rudi that the police or prosecutor could document (such as the semen evidence which Stefanoni avoided analyzing) would put more focus on Rudi, and weaken the claims that Mignini and Commodi were going to make against Knox and Sollecito.

The same goes for the evidence that Rudi took refuge downstairs where he apparently cleaned up again, and may have taken clothes. Showing Rudi's post-murder activities downstairs would allow the defense to better defend the two defendants. So Stefanoni shut down the downstairs evidence examination and ascribed it in court to the cat. Stefanoni and the prosecutors suppressed the evidence of Rudi, precisely because it is exculpatory.

Mignini is very adept at exploiting the legal process to skew a case. Laws concerning exculpatory evidence be damned. But we should not be surprised. We saw how he portrayed himself as a notary to exploit Knox's status. Stefanoni is adept at cooking evidence and suppressing evidence.

Could you give a time line of how this went down. When did Steffi start hiding or lying about the downstairs?

I still don't see how Rudi going downstairs with the key directly helps the kids. I see that the useless testimony of Nara is even more useless.

At what point did they ID Rudi in this scenario of suppressing evidence?

 

[Grinder]

Yes. You make some very strong points.

They don't seem to be comfortable with or handle well, real evidence. Perhaps this preference for confession in a legal setting has its roots in Catholic purification rites:
"The basic requirement for a good confession is to have the intention of returning to God like the "prodigal son" and to acknowledge our sins with true sorrow before the priest."

http://www.catholic.org/prayers/confession.php

I think the whole Catholic thing has more to do with the Italian POV on the occult than many would admit. IMO

 

[Desert Fox]

Could you give a time line of how this went down. When did Steffi start hiding or lying about the downstairs?

I still don't see how Rudi going downstairs with the key directly helps the kids. I see that the useless testimony of Nara is even more useless.

At what point did they ID Rudi in this scenario of suppressing evidence?

Grinder, there are issues with many cases where that evidence you want and need to exonerate a defendant just seems to evaporate when you look for it. Whether the police never recorded the information or if it is a case where the evidence is disposed of is always an issue.

I was listening to a case where the audio recordings of a police confession were lost and instead they were relying on transcripts to convict the man. This is another one of those cases of probable false confessions.

 

[Strozzi]

Wouldn't have passed the hard surface sound test.

Nara called. She said she hears the sound of people running on your floor and it is disturbing her sleep.

 

[Grinder]

Grinder, there are issues with many cases where that evidence you want and need to exonerate a defendant just seems to evaporate when you look for it. Whether the police never recorded the information or if it is a case where the evidence is disposed of is always an issue.

I was listening to a case where the audio recordings of a police confession were lost and instead they were relying on transcripts to convict the man. This is another one of those cases of probable false confessions.

As you know by now my default position is incompetence.

I'm trying to understand why and how the PLE would know that hiding the evidence downstairs would work against the framing of the kids. When did ICSI start testing things from downstairs?

 

[LondonJohn]

Yes. You make some very strong points.

They don't seem to be comfortable with or handle well, real evidence. Perhaps this preference for confession in a legal setting has its roots in Catholic purification rites:

"The basic requirement for a good confession is to have the intention of returning to God like the "prodigal son" and to acknowledge our sins with true sorrow before the priest."

http://www.catholic.org/prayers/confession.php

I actually think there's some real traction to this suggestion. Bear in mind that the inquisitorial system (and its associated over-reliance on confessions etc) has its deepest and most pervasive roots in Southern European countries such as Italy, France, Spain and Portugal. And these are all countries with deep (and dark) Catholic traditions. More enlightened countries in Central and Northern Europe have long since embraced a more scientific and evidence-based approach to criminal justice.

 

[LondonJohn]

I think the whole Catholic thing has more to do with the Italian POV on the occult than many would admit. IMO

I think it plays a significant (though carefully concealed) part too.

One of the central tenets of fundamentalist Catholic doctrine is original sin and the associated concepts of driving out the devil and admitting guilt. It's drummed into people from childhood that they are all sinners, and that only by confessing regularly and fully to those sins can they hope for absolution (and any kind of enjoyment in the eternal afterlife!). I know that kids in (e.g.) Ireland as recently as the 1970s used to be scared stiff in church and school by all this stuff - and of course a sceptic would say that this was exactly the intended outcome.......

 

[Diocletus]

As you know by now my default position is incompetence.

I'm trying to understand why and how the PLE would know that hiding the evidence downstairs would work against the framing of the kids. When did ICSI start testing things from downstairs?

There is another possibility here, and that is that the downstairs testing was screwed up. If this is the case, then the hiding of the downstairs results was not really for the purpose of framing the kids (in the sense of creating evidence against them), but rather, to prevent ICSI/PLE from being embarrassed and to prevent the defendants from being able to use ICSI/PLE incompetence to impeach other test results/police work.

 

[Desert Fox]

As you know by now my default position is incompetence.

I'm trying to understand why and how the PLE would know that hiding the evidence downstairs would work against the framing of the kids. When did ICSI start testing things from downstairs?

From "The Red Thumb Mark" in 1907
"You speak of the police as your antagonists; I noticed that at the 'Yard' this morning, and was surprised to find that they accepted the position. But surely their business is to discover the actual offender, not to fix the crime on some particular person."

"That would seem to be so," replied Thorndyke, "but in practice it is otherwise. When the police have made an arrest they work for a conviction. If the man is innocent, that is his business, not theirs; it is for him to prove
it. The system is a pernicious one--especially since the efficiency of a police officer is, in consequence, apt to be estimated by the number of convictions he has secured."

 

[Bill Williams]

I think the whole Catholic thing has more to do with the Italian POV on the occult than many would admit. IMO

It's plain that the version of Catholic faith which Mignini seemed to be defending was a minority one, even within Italy. But it was a faith-view heavily influenced by mediaevalism. Mignini is not an exception to this as there are others who discharge their public duties; who themselves don't even bother to hide that they are, somehow, saving society from modernity.

A big learning in all this is to do with the quasi-religious bodies, with which some versions of Catholicism see themselves at war with - in this case, the Masonic movement.

Whereas there simply is no evidence at all that Masons had any involvement either in the Monster of Florence case or in the wrongful prosecution of others in the Kercher murder saga.....

... it is true that Masons have at times had undue influence on Italian society - probably in the same way, for instance, that Skull and Bones has had undue influence on American society. In 2004, Americans had no choice, really, but to elect a Bonesman as president!

Be that as it may, start with Mignini's own Catholicism mediated through pre-modernity, mix in the unique concept of Italian dietrology, and locate at least one Mason close to this case, and you're away to the races.

We might even fill 17 continuations of the Knox/Sollecito threads with those things alone.

 

[Bill Williams]

I think it plays a significant (though carefully concealed) part too.

One of the central tenets of fundamentalist Catholic doctrine is original sin and the associated concepts of driving out the devil and admitting guilt. It's drummed into people from childhood that they are all sinners, and that only by confessing regularly and fully to those sins can they hope for absolution (and any kind of enjoyment in the eternal afterlife!). I know that kids in (e.g.) Ireland as recently as the 1970s used to be scared stiff in church and school by all this stuff - and of course a sceptic would say that this was exactly the intended outcome.......

Witness Filomena's response, at trial, if she had smoked marijuana. When she said, "yes, I have sinned", they then, at that admission, let her off the hook for it. Many thought that the proceedings was a trial. It turned out to be confession, and the pursuit of the unrepentant.

 

[Vixen]

Vixen, what did Anna Donnino do that causes you to regard her actions as a "little borderline"?

It seems a strange kinda role, "mediator/diplomat". Potential for botching the case up, unless she has had professional training as an examiner/investigator.

 

[JREF2010]

Witness Filomena's response, at trial, if she had smoked marijuana. When she said, "yes, I have sinned", they then, at that admission, let her off the hook for it. Many thought that the proceedings was a trial. It turned out to be confession, and the pursuit of the unrepentant.

sounds like a line off Game of Thrones...."shame! shame!" and some lashings in the street for smoking....wow, thats pretty outdated isnt it? to call smoking a "sin" seems like its behind the times a few hundred years.

 

[Vixen]

With the cube assumption, we find that a grain of salt is about 5.85x10^-5 grams. (We could have arrived at this result by weighing an individual grain, or by weighing a gram and then counting the number of grains in it

Salt (sodium chloride) has a density of 2.17 gm per cubic centimetre, or 2170 micrograms, or 0.002170

You state one grain is about 0.0000585 gms and the Mez DNA on the knife was 0.0000002925 gms.

The smallest virus is visible under the microscope and is as little as 18 nanometres (a parvovirus). There are roughly 8,300,000 nanometres in a centimetre, with a density of 1.31 gms/cubic cm. So if one parvovirus can weigh (18/8,300,000)*1.31 and can be seen (as in medical diagnosis in rate of infection), what makes you think a piece of tissue yielding DNA weighing 1/500 "of a grain of salt", is particularly small?

I can see no compelling reason to believe Dr. Stefanoni got her near full profile of Mez (15 allelles, when the legal standard in the UK is just 11) by chance. The odds are so vanishingly remote to be smaller than the most nano of nanometres.

 

[Strozzi]

It seems a strange kinda role, "mediator/diplomat". Potential for botching the case up, unless she has had professional training as an examiner/investigator.

Yes, I see the potential for, as you put it, "botching the case up," Her actions might result in leading the suspect to believe things that aren't true or leading the suspect to believe her memory is wrong because she was traumatized.

According to law, Amanda should have been provided the services of a competent translator. A competent translator in a police interrogation faithfully translates the questions put to the suspect and faithfully translates the suspect's replies to the police. She doesn't try to persuade the suspect to believe things the suspect does not remember and the translator does not try to convince the suspect her memory is wrong. The ECHR is likely to fault Italy for failing to provide a competent translator.

 

[Vixen]

The official exchange rate in 2002 was 0,29 Euro to 100 GRD so it would be
GRD 63.028.965,52

You have to factor in inflation, say, (1.05)^12.

 

[sept79]

Salt (sodium chloride) has a density of 2.17 gm per cubic centimetre, or 2170 micrograms, or 0.002170

You state one grain is about 0.0000585 gms and the Mez DNA on the knife was 0.0000002925 gms.

The smallest virus is visible under the microscope and is as little as 18 nanometres (a parvovirus). There are roughly 8,300,000 nanometres in a centimetre, with a density of 1.31 gms/cubic cm. So if one parvovirus can weigh (18/8,300,000)*1.31 and can be seen (as in medical diagnosis in rate of infection), what makes you think a piece of tissue yielding DNA weighing 1/500 "of a grain of salt", is particularly small?

I can see no compelling reason to believe Dr. Stefanoni got her near full profile of Mez (15 allelles, when the legal standard in the UK is just 11) by chance. The odds are so vanishingly remote to be smaller than the most nano of nanometres.

Some questions:

1. Why was she performing these tests in a lab not certified for LCN testing?

2. Why won't she show her work? She still has not released the EDFs.

3. Why did she conceal the 'too low' LCN testing results?

4. Why did she conceal the negative results obtained by TMB testing of the hallway 'footprints'?