Continuation Part 22: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Mike1711]

Raff took various provisions to the cottage to cook a meal and may have taken the knife there, then.

Nothing in your post addresses any of the questions asked.

Raff "may" have taken a knife to house where there were knives? Is this your very own opinion. Which is fine, but it will always be just careless speculation.

Like...

...maybe Rudy stole it from RS's house committed the murder and then returned it whilst the tramp witnessed RS and AK not being at the basketball court?

...maybe posting facts would help?

Opinion based on nothing is worth nothing.

 

[Bill Williams]

How on earth can Vixen claim there was no interrogation. Vixen says she does not agree that the conduct of the prosecution showed the prosecution had a weak case and a lack of evidence. Vixen does not explain why she disagrees and besides the interrogation Vixen did not address the issues raised in my posts regarding the conduct of the prosecution and the arguments the PGP have to resort to.

I think she is trying to say that Amanda was just invited over for midnight tea and crumpets and a loud discussion where they could call her a liar over and over again. That's not an interrogation.

Author John Follain bears some responsibility for this. In his 2010 book, "A Death in Italy" (which he claimed was the definitive account) he describes the interrogations as interviews where Knox was stuffed with biscuits and chamomile tea to the point where she had to name Lumumba just to stop all this good treatment.

Follain has been the guilter-bible since. It does not matter what is learned subsequently, they won't budge from Follain. It doesn't matter to them what Hellmann wrote about the interrogation or, more importantly, what Boninsegna recently wrote in his motivations report.

 

[Bill Williams]

Bill,

Thanks for this analysis, it really does reveal the nature of the PGP cherry picking.

Analemma

There are a few innocentisti who, somewhat similar to Vixen, are not impressed with Marasca/Bruno's need to offer this synoptic analysis. They see it as this frustrating need for one ISC Section to never ever be seen out of step with another ISC Section when dealing with the same case.

It was Chieffi's section in 2013 which started this lunacy of looking at the case "osmotically". That was the Chieffi concession to the Galati appeal to it on behalf of the prosecution, a prosecution not exactly thrilled that Judge Hellmann's court had basically thrown out all the prosecution "evidence", because it wasn't based on anything substantial.

The appeal to the ISC seemed to say that just because an item of evidence is unsubstantial you don't just throw it out - you keep it hanging around to compare with the mass of other unsubstantial evidence, until some sort of "osmotic" threshhold is reached to prove guilt.

Chieffi then seemed to have tasked the Nencini court with evaluating the case osmotically.

So when Nencini did that to reconvict, the Marasca/Bruno panel is stuck with the "osmotic" process, only chooses to evaluate Nencini's stuff "synoptically", meaning, "with one eye."

So in Section 9.4ff, Marasca/Bruno mashes everything together because, afterall, all evidence no matter how unsubstantial needs to be considered. Knox being found to have "washed blood fom her hands", or Knox being at the cottage during the murder (meaning Raffaele had to have been there too) are then tossed on, not because there's any proof of that, but because .......

...... and here's Marasca/Bruno's unique brand of lunacy......

She'd admitted being there in her memorale!

However, instead of marching off that cliff, M/B conclude with their Section 10 saying that even if these hypotheses are true, there still is no evidence they committed murder. There's the word used at the beginning of Section 9, these "hypotheses".

Everyone should read Luca Cheli's analysis of the M/B report, where the analysis is divided into the light M/B casts on this whole legal charade, the thunder M/B aims at police and prior courts, but the shadows that M/B frustratingly let remain.

 

[Bill Williams]

Bill,

Thanks for this analysis, it really does reveal the nature of the PGP cherry picking.

Analemma

The final blow that Marasca/Bruno puts to this business of evaluating the case either "osmotically" or "synoptically" is as they expressed in Section 10 of their report:

In fact, in the presence of a scenario marked by many contradictions, the referral judge should not have come to a verdict of guilt....​

That is a broadside aimed at Chieffi, in my opinion. Cobbling together disparate pieces of evidence, and sometimes disparate pieces of non-evidence into an osmotic whole is.................

Ludicrous.

That osmotic whole was no reason for Chieffi to have overturned Hellmann's acquittals, it actually was the reason to have sustained the acquittals - so says M/B.

I suspect there were some tense moments in the Cassation lunchroom if the only two chairs available for Chieffi and Bruno just happened to have been at the same table.....

Vixen has lost sight of how Marasca/Bruno nuked Chieffi out of the water....

 

[LondonJohn]

Author John Follain bears some responsibility for this. In his 2010 book, "A Daeth in Italy" (which he claimed was the definitive account) he describes the interrogations as interviews where Knox was stuffed with biscuits and chamomile tea to the point where she had to name Lumumba just to stop all this good treatment.

Follain has been the guilter-bible since. It does not matter what is learned subsequently, they won't budge from Follain. It doesn't matter to them what Hellmann wrote about the interrogation or, more importantly, what Boninsegna recently wrote in his motivations report.

Follain fundamentally didn't/doesn't understand that a) Massei's verdict was inept, logically inconsistent, littered with contradictions and dominated by input from the prosecution; b) the prosecutors were themselves highly personally and institutionally invested in the "Knox and Sollecito teamed up with Guede to do it" narrative, and were willing to bend, distort, misrepresent and even lie about evidence in order to support that narrative; and c) the police and prosecutors were fundamentally untrustworthy in their presentation of their version of events.

So if, for example, Mignini told Follain (as he surely did) that Knox was simply being asked for general witness information on the night of 5th/6th November (replete with lovely tea and cakes) and that she suddenly - almost out of the blue - blurted out that "Lumumba did it" (and all the rest of that "confession/accusation"), and that when he (Mignini) came in to see what all the commotion was about, and Knox simply made the very same "confession/accusation" to him entirely spontaneously and unprompted..... well, Follain was either too stupid, too lazy, or too wedded to the concept of using public authorities as chief primary sources, to even question whether Mignini's account might be anything but honest, honourable and accurate.

Who knows: maybe Follain has learned by now (though as an Italy-based journalist for a fair few years, it's a damning indictment of him that he hadn't learned it long before the Kercher murder and the Knox/Sollecito trial process) that many Italian public institutions are riddled with patronage, corruption, personal fiefdoms and astonishing absences of accountability. And that the Italian criminal justice system is fundamentally unfit for purpose, and can be manipulated by egomaniac prosecutors and pliable judges (many of whom are apparently still wedded to the idea that the prosecution case is the "default" position, presented by prosecutors who are wholly disinterested and purely concerned with finding "the truth", and that it's up to the defence to disprove the prosecution case).

 

[Bill Williams]

Follain fundamentally didn't/doesn't understand that a) Massei's verdict was inept, logically inconsistent, littered with contradictions and dominated by input from the prosecution; b) the prosecutors were themselves highly personally and institutionally invested in the "Knox and Sollecito teamed up with Guede to do it" narrative, and were willing to bend, distort, misrepresent and even lie about evidence in order to support that narrative; and c) the police and prosecutors were fundamentally untrustworthy in their presentation of their version of events..

It's at this point one can only feel for the Kerchers. In 2010 there'd been a conviction, which their lawyer Maresca no doubt advised them was sound, there were 400+ pages of Massei's report to tell them why it was sound, and an author, Follain, writing a true crime genre of it which was almost solely taken from what the PLE had told him.

Three years after the hellish murder, this was the lay of the land.

 

[analemma]

Raff took various provisions to the cottage to cook a meal and may have taken the knife there, then.

Absolute Falsehood: This is nonsense that no one has ever asserted before, not even the fat, ugly troll or the nutcase from TRJMK.
Is there any basis for this assertion except that it sprang from your twisted mind?

 

[Bill Williams]

4. How the crime was an unplanned and a spontaneous escalation of violence (Night with prior engagements, no communication or coordination with virtual stranger Rudy) but also simultaneously a premeditated planned murder involving carrying a kitchen knife across town.

Raff took various provisions to the cottage to cook a meal and may have taken the knife there, then.

This is classic. Note how the guilter-method is to simply reset and provide yet another in an endless series of "may haves" to explain their confirmation bias. When it is shown that there is absolutely no evidence at all that Raffaele did this, yet another "may have" springs from the vivid imagination.

 

[Vixen]

There are a few innocentisti who, somewhat similar to Vixen, are not impressed with Marasca/Bruno's need to offer this synoptic analysis. They see it as this frustrating need for one ISC Section to never ever be seen out of step with another ISC Section when dealing with the same case.

It was Chieffi's section in 2013 which started this lunacy of looking at the case "osmotically". That was the Chieffi concession to the Galati appeal to it on behalf of the prosecution, a prosecution not exactly thrilled that Judge Hellmann's court had basically thrown out all the prosecution "evidence", because it wasn't based on anything substantial.

The appeal to the ISC seemed to say that just because an item of evidence is unsubstantial you don't just throw it out - you keep it hanging around to compare with the mass of other unsubstantial evidence, until some sort of "osmotic" threshhold is reached to prove guilt.

Chieffi then seemed to have tasked the Nencini court with evaluating the case osmotically.

So when Nencini did that to reconvict, the Marasca/Bruno panel is stuck with the "osmotic" process, only chooses to evaluate Nencini's stuff "synoptically", meaning, "with one eye."

So in Section 9.4ff, Marasca/Bruno mashes everything together because, afterall, all evidence no matter how unsubstantial needs to be considered. Knox being found to have "washed blood fom her hands", or Knox being at the cottage during the murder (meaning Raffaele had to have been there too) are then tossed on, not because there's any proof of that, but because .......

...... and here's Marasca/Bruno's unique brand of lunacy......

She'd admitted being there in her memorale!

However, instead of marching off that cliff, M/B conclude with their Section 10 saying that even if these hypotheses are true, there still is no evidence they committed murder. There's the word used at the beginning of Section 9, these "hypotheses".

Everyone should read Luca Cheli's analysis of the M/B report, where the analysis is divided into the light M/B casts on this whole legal charade, the thunder M/B aims at police and prior courts, but the shadows that M/B frustratingly let remain.

You do not understand how law works. It's not like ice-skating, where a series of judges hold up their marks.

A fact found, is a fact settled. It doesn't become open to debate to all-comers. It's like Mike's imaginary referee. If he ajudges a goal, penalty or foul, then the 'fact' remains, no matter how controversial.

 

[Vixen]

Absolute Falsehood: This is nonsense that no one has ever asserted before, not even the fat, ugly troll or the nutcase from TRJMK.
Is there any basis for this assertion except that it sprang from your twisted mind?

Analemma, how lovely!

 

[Vixen]

The final blow that Marasca/Bruno puts to this business of evaluating the case either "osmotically" or "synoptically" is as they expressed in Section 10 of their report:

In fact, in the presence of a scenario marked by many contradictions, the referral judge should not have come to a verdict of guilt....​

That is a broadside aimed at Chieffi, in my opinion. Cobbling together disparate pieces of evidence, and sometimes disparate pieces of non-evidence into an osmotic whole is.................

Ludicrous.

That osmotic whole was no reason for Chieffi to have overturned Hellmann's acquittals, it actually was the reason to have sustained the acquittals - so says M/B.

I suspect there were some tense moments in the Cassation lunchroom if the only two chairs available for Chieffi and Bruno just happened to have been at the same table.....

Vixen has lost sight of how Marasca/Bruno nuked Chieffi out of the water....

Marasca did not have the remit to 'nuke Chieffi out of the water'. In this respect, their MR is a disgrace.

 

[Mike1711]

You do not understand how law works. It's not like ice-skating, where a series of judges hold up their marks.

A fact found, is a fact settled. It doesn't become open to debate to all-comers. It's like Mike's imaginary referee. If he ajudges a goal, penalty or foul, then the 'fact' remains, no matter how controversial.

No. It is you who does not understand. If a court ruled that the earth was the centre of the universe it would not make it so. Oh, I forgot...that already happened so that means by Vixen's logic the earth is the centre of the universe. Why am I not surprised?

...and you completely misunderstood my referee analogy, which was meant to illustrate how "facts" may be wrong.

Keep trying.

 

[NotEvenWrong]

You do not understand how law works. It's not like ice-skating, where a series of judges hold up their marks.

A fact found, is a fact settled. It doesn't become open to debate to all-comers. It's like Mike's imaginary referee. If he ajudges a goal, penalty or foul, then the 'fact' remains, no matter how controversial.

Vixen,
The Court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem Town affirmed that Bridget Bishop, due to her "immoral" lifestyle and odd, black clothing and costumes, was a witch. This was a fact found by the court and she went to trial, was convicted, and was executed by hanging on June 10, 1692.

Was Bridget Bishop actually a witch, Vixen?

 

[Welshman]

I feel there is an important point to make about PGP arguments with regards to Rudy, Amanda and Raffaele which undermines the notion the three murdered Meredith together.
One of the points I have raised in previous posts is if the prosecution had such a strong case and a mountain of solid evidence, why do Vixen and other PGP constantly have to resort to lying to argue their case? Vixen has consistently refused to answer this question. Lying indicates that the PGP have a lack of genuine evidence to base their arguments on and what little evidence the prosecution have is weak and lacks credibility. If the prosecution’s evidence has no credibility, PGP will have to resort to lying to make the evidence appear credible. For instance, Wendy Murphy in her blog lied that Raffaele’s knife had been bleached and was hidden away when this was not case. Vixen lied that Raffaele’s defence accepted there was a solid DNA profile of Raffaele on the clasp when the defence argued the complete opposite.
The situation with Rudy is completely different. I have not come across a single instance where PGP have lied about the evidence against Guede. I have not seen PGP lie about non existent evidence against Guede, lie about things Guede did outside Meredith’s murder or lie about the nature of the evidence against Guede. This indicates that there was a mountain of solid evidence against Guede and PGP don’t feel it necessary to lie when arguing the case against Guede.
How is this difference explained if Amanda and Raffaele committed the same crime with Rudy? If the three had committed the same crime together, there should be a solid evidence against all three and PGP should not have to lie when arguing the case for guilt for any of three.

 

[Mr Fied]

You do not understand how law works. It's not like ice-skating, where a series of judges hold up their marks.

A fact found, is a fact settled. It doesn't become open to debate to all-comers. It's like Mike's imaginary referee. If he ajudges a goal, penalty or foul, then the 'fact' remains, no matter how controversial.

It is a fact that the Guildford Four are guilty, the Birmingham Six are guilty,Stefan Kiszko is guilty, Barry George is guilty. This must be true because if a court finds as fact, that decision is not open to debate.

Or do the courts that overturned these convictions not know how the law works.

 

[Welshman]

Actually, I agree with you about how frightful the press can be: low standards, repetitions and 'copy and pastes' from 'press releases', outright plagiarism, even making stories up. Only a small handful actually go out and find stories. However, that is to miss the point.

What the press does give us is the knee jerk emotional temperature of the community we live in. So, whilst the lurid coverage of 'Foxy Knoxy' was ghastly, nonetheless it raises the interesting sociological issue: what came first, the public's demand for salacious stories, or the press feeding them to society?

A female rapist/murderer is so rare, of course there is going to be prurient press interest. However, that's not to say the interest is erroneous or false.

The Marasca supreme court definitively upheld that Amanda was certainly at the murder scene, and Raff, almost certainly. This is based on the solid evidence of the lower merits fact-finding courts, who evaluate the evidence in extraordinarily fine detail.

It is established as a fact, the burglary was staged after the murder and the perpetrator/s undressed and moved Mez' body after her death and desecrated her dignity and modesty. We know Rudy fled almost immediately afterwards and spent the rest of the night at a public disco. Only one person had access to the cottage that weekend, together with all the time in the world to stage the two scenes. In addition, Amanda and Raff were careful to make sure Rudy's crap remained unflushed, despite cleaning up (Rudy testified the hallway was covered in blood and he couldn't understand how Amanda could have slept there).

These people took the time to cover Mez with her own duvet, that her father had helped her to buy in London.

Amanda has shown zero remorse and shed no tears for her 'friend'. So for her to write that sentences for rapists should be as light as six months shows just what a cold-hearted psychopath she is.

Amanda by her own account, in her own writing, and under no pressure or demand for it, recounted how she took 'Patrick' (= meaning Rudy, as upheld by the Marasca supreme court) to the cottage for sex with Mez.

Vixen yet again lies and uses ridiculous arguments. There is no evidence that anyone returned later to alter the scene in Meredith’s room. This is shown in the link below :-
http://www.amandaknoxcase.com/meredith-kerchers-body/
If Amanda and Raffaele had killed Meredith, why on earth would they need to return to the room and move the body? How does exactly does this help them? If they did return to the room and altered the crime scene, is there not a risk they would be seen by witnesses and they would leave forensic traces in the room? Would Amanda and Raffaele both readily agree to this course of action considering the risks?
Contrary to what Vixen said, Amanda did show grief and emotion over the death of as can been seen from the testimony below from amandaknoxcase.com :-
Amanda’s reaction to hearing about Meredith’s murder
Testimony of Luca Altieri (Filomena’s friend)
Page 224:
Mignini: Listen, when… do you remember if you saw Amanda cry in the Police Station?
Altieri: Amanda had already cried outside the house, also going to the Police Station in the car, yes, at a certain point…
Mignini: When did she cry?
Altieri: Now, after I… she asked me this… I don’t remember well if she asked how, with what she had been killed, basically, how they had cut her throat, and when I gave her the answer to this question she burst out crying.
Page 229:
Dalla Vedova: One last clarification and I’ve finished. On the question of whether Amanda cried outside.
Altieri: Yes
Dalla Vedova: She was crying because she was in shock, do you think?
Altieri: Do I think?
Dalla Vedova: Your statement to the police [verbale] ends thus: she started crying.
Altieri: Yes
Dalla Vedova: As soon as you gave her this news, when you gave her the news that…
Altieri: Yes, I mean it certainly seemed to be a reaction to the thought of what I had said, then if it was or it wasn’t this other thing, I wouldn’t be able to say.
Dalla Vedova: No, I wasn’t asking for your opinion. You said to Amanda: I heard that there is a girl which it seems… killed because she has a cut on her throat and she started to cry as a result of this.
Altieri: Yes
Dalla Vedova: In that moment was Sollecito nearby?
Altieri: He was in the car, in the back seat.
Dalla Vedova: And he was trying to console her
Altieri: We were going to the Police Station
Dalla Vedova: He was trying to console Knox because she was crying?
Altieri: I don’t know, in that moment there I couldn’t tell you, when I said earlier that he was trying to console her I was referring to a scene outside the house, in the period when we were still there.
Dalla Vedova: However earlier you said that Amanda cried the first time when you were outside the house, then also in the car
Altieri: Yes, it’s there that… it’s there that I visually saw him console her, outside the house when she was crying
Dalla Vedova: And to you it seemed right that she behaved this way or did it seem strange to you?
Altieri: No, it seemed normal.
Testimony of Filomena Romanelli (Housemate)
Page 53 (At the police station):
Judge Massei: This breakdown how did she show it?
Romanelli: When one begins to cry and then stops themselves, how can I explain it? One chokes up, cries a little, but it’s not a liberating outpouring of emotion, it’s not crying openly.
Romanelli: My eyes were watery with dark circles around them… Yes (I cried), Marco yes, Paolo yes, Luca I don’t think so, Raffaele no, and Amanda fundamentally I would say no, I saw her just one moment breakdown where she almost cried but then she managed to maintain composure.

 

[Bill Williams]

Marasca did not have the remit to 'nuke Chieffi out of the water'. In this respect, their MR is a disgrace.

And yet he did. And what remains is that you and I and everyone else get to decide who to line up behind.

We know where you line up. I know where I line up. There it sits.

 

[Bill Williams]

You do not understand how law works. It's not like ice-skating, where a series of judges hold up their marks.

A fact found, is a fact settled. It doesn't become open to debate to all-comers. It's like Mike's imaginary referee. If he ajudges a goal, penalty or foul, then the 'fact' remains, no matter how controversial.

On this we can somewhat agree. The last time the Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup, it was their player Brett Hull who knocked the puck into the net (thus winning the series and the Cup) while clearly standing illegally in the goalkeeper's crease.

Trouble was, the Dallas Stars were so busy celebrating and they'd already presented the Cup to them before that was revealed. They decided to let the goal stand, even though it was clearly an illegal goal.

The "goal" was simply a fact. A judicial fact if you will. But the referee later admitted it should never have counted, because it was not a "goal" by the rules of the game.

I may not know the law, but I know ice hockey. To this day when the subject comes up (surprisingly often!) about Brett Hull playing on a Stanley Cup winning team, I remind them that it ain't necessarily so - but I now relate to them my friend Vixen who believes Judicial Facts are facts as if there was a 1 to 1 correspondence in the two concepts.

 

[Methos]

You do not understand how law works. It's not like ice-skating, where a series of judges hold up their marks.

A fact found, is a fact settled. It doesn't become open to debate to all-comers. It's like Mike's imaginary referee. If he ajudges a goal, penalty or foul, then the 'fact' remains, no matter how controversial.

Just for the record, this is from the Marasca/Bruno report on page 21 (on the calunnia):

[...] e furono persino ribadite, dopo qualche tempo, in sede di convalida dell'arresto del Lumumba, innanzi al Gip procedente.

This is from the transcript of the hearing (page 2):

l'interrogato dichiara:"mi avvalgodella facoltà di non rispondere."

You might want to listen to the interesting part of that hearing.
So, is the "e furono persino ribadite, dopo qualche tempo, in sede di convalida dell'arresto del Lumumba, innanzi al Gip procedente." B/M found a fact? I don't think so...

 

[LondonJohn]

Just for the record, this is from the Marasca/Bruno report on page 21 (on the calunnia):

This is from the transcript of the hearing (page 2):

You might want to listen to the interesting part of that hearing.
So, is the "e furono persino ribadite, dopo qualche tempo, in sede di convalida dell'arresto del Lumumba, innanzi al Gip procedente." B/M found a fact? I don't think so...

No "judicial fact" is set in stone.

Imagine a murder trial where a suspect (Mr A) was on trial for shooting dead a man on a quiet street in broad daylight. Imagine if a key piece of evidence in the prosecution case was that of another person (Mr B) who happened to be walking down the same street at the time of the shooting, and had seen it all happen from close up. It so happened that Mr B knew Mr A quite well as they both regularly drank together in the same pub, and Mr B was able to say with complete certainty that he recognised Mr A as the man who had walked up to the victim, shot the victim three times, and ran away. Mr B formed an impressive and persuasive witness in court, and was not dented at all by defence cross-examination.

So we scroll on down to the deliberation and verdict of the court. The court determines that Mr B was a reliable eyewitness to the murder and had reliably identified Mr A as the culprit. This is direct evidence, so arguably this one "judicial fact", all on its own, might be sufficient to convict Mr A - and all without the need for any judicial inference whatsoever. In any event, Mr A is convicted of murder. If there were a motivation report (say this all took place in Italy, for example), the report would state as "judicial fact" that Mr B witnessed the murder, and that Mr B reliably identified Mr A as the murderer by virtue of having seen Mr A (whom he reliably recognised) fire the gun.

Now let's move forward a year after the conviction and sentencing. It suddenly comes to light that Mr B was actually mid-air on a six hour flight at the time of the murder (all of which comes to be unimpeachably supported by airline tickets, airline manifests and immigration records at the country in which Mr B landed that day).

Mr A appeals his conviction.

Question: is it still inalienable (and unchangeable) "judicial fact" that Mr B was an eyewitness to the murder and/or that Mr B identified Mr A as the murderer by virtue of seeing Mr A pull the trigger?

Answer: Well, I think that (almost) anyone with any intellectual firepower whatsoever can divine the answer to this one.