Continuation Part 22: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Stacyhs]

Some authors do write stuff in their head before committing to paper. Others write draft after draft after draft and it takes them weeks/months to write one chapter. My writing colleagues were amazed I always wrote up my stuff in the morning, just a couple of hours before the writers group met, and in just one draft. I just have a chess player mind and it's all there ready before I write.

As you said earlier, your fiction takes less time than your non-fiction to write. That's because you don't have to fact check and do much, if any, research. NVDL wasn't writing fiction. Oh, wait....yes, he was.

By the way, Kerouac did type the book on one long scroll of paper. That is not a myth. That he wrote it in 3 weeks is a myth and, most certainly, he did not write it in five and a half hours.

 

[Stacyhs]

There was far less DNA of Rudy collected. IIRC, just four samples. Compare and contrast with FIVE mixed Amanda/Mez DNA samples collected.

The fact his epithial (_sp?) DNA cells were found in an intimate place does not prove he was the sole killer.

Raff seemed to believe if the stained pillow was tested it would come up with his DNA.
Then why was it the DEFENSE that repeatedly requested that the suspected semen stain be tested? It was the police who refused to test it. Your allegation is not only false, it is illogical.

Three strands of long fair-coloured hair WERE found at the scene, one across Mez' rifled bag (Rudy's bloody fingerprints were on the OUTSIDE of the bag - but there were no blood stains or Rudy DNA INSIDE the bag). This strand of hair MUST have been left AFTER the bag was rummaged as it was across the top of he bag, and which had been carefully posed on the bed (so police believe) and could be seen through the keyhole. There was a similar strand of hair in Mez' rigor-mortised hand, so must have been grasped before death, and another in Mez' vagina.

According to the beloved PGP site, TMOMK, this is where the blonde hairs were found:

"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. "

No mention of any in her vagina. It is a PGP factoid that blonde hair(s) were found in Meredith's hand. A photo does show hairs in her hand, but these were not identified as being blonde. The hair could have been her own which she grabbed during the struggle, perhaps when her hair was being yanked out. By the way, it is very easy to determine if hair has been colored, especially if lightened. Amanda had dyed her brown hair blonde. If the hairs had been color treated, that would have been supporting evidence that they could have been Amanda's. Yet this was never once presented in court. Could that be because the hairs were Meredith's or natural blonde thus excluding Amanda as their source? Guede had been seen dancing with a woman "with long, blonde hair" the night before the murder. Hair clings to everything, especially long hair. I know this well as I have a daughter with long, blonde hair and it's everywhere in my house.

There was a ladies-sized blood stained footstep (size 37) with a narrow ladies-heel UNDER the body.
Identified by Vinci as just another partial print of Guede's by using Crimescope which the prosecution experts had not used.

Raff's DNA was found on the bra clasp which was UNDER a sheet UNDER the body UNDER a duvet UNDER bits of scattered paper, also scattered in Filomena's room.
And just who or what touched that clasp during the 6 weeks between the murder and its collection is unknown. It could have been stepped on by police who failed to change shoe covers between rooms as show in videos. Or handled by anyone who was in the cottage during those 6 weeks.

DNA might be invisible to the naked eye, but forensic police will take their samples from what looks to them organic matter, such as greasy sweat, bodily fluids and decaying tissue.

They also take samples from obvious non-organic places like door handles, cups, and anything else the criminal would likely touch.

 

[LondonJohn]

Then why was it the DEFENSE that repeatedly requested that the suspected semen stain be tested? It was the police who refused to test it. Your allegation is not only false, it is illogical.

Well, there is a (tiny) grain of truth and accuracy to Vixen's allegation, but (as is almost always the case) the truth has been twisted and bent to fit a predetermined agenda.

The truth is that Sollecito did, closer to the Massei trial, express reservations about having the pillowcase tested. But an objective understanding of the context shows clearly that Sollecito's reservations were totally based on his utter lack of confidence in the competence and propriety of the DNA "scientists", police and prosecutors. He had already experienced the laughably inept (but, from his perspective, shockingly worrying) specatacle of the "crack" police forensic experts being unable to count rings on the soles of training shoes, to the extraordinary extent that these "experts" were writing reports stating that certain prints were definitively compatible with Sollecito's shoes, when in fact they were a positive MIS-match (as was easily discovered by a young child.......). And he also knew by then just how shockingly incompetent the bra clasp, knife and bath mat partial print analysis was, and how the police and prosecutors seemed capable of almost manufacturing evidence to support his prosecution - evidence which he knew for sure was fundamentally unreliable at best, and the product of malpractice at worst.

So Sollecito's statement of reticence about the testing of the pillow case, taken properly in that context, is easily recognisable as Sollecito being worried that - through either incompetence or malpractice - the police's "experts" might somehow find some way to link him to that pillow case. THAT is what he was afraid of. It's perfectly clear. But of course it's the sort of statement that can readily be ripped out of context and presented - by those with an appropriate agenda - as Sollecito being worried that the police might find genuine incriminating evidence against him on that pillowcase, and that this fear of genuine discovery was what was making Sollecito nervous about the prospect of the pillow case being tested by the police "experts".

 

[Bill Williams]

Well, there is a (tiny) grain of truth and accuracy to Vixen's allegation, but (as is almost always the case) the truth has been twisted and bent to fit a predetermined agenda.

The truth is that Sollecito did, closer to the Massei trial, express reservations about having the pillowcase tested. But an objective understanding of the context shows clearly that Sollecito's reservations were totally based on his utter lack of confidence in the competence and propriety of the DNA "scientists", police and prosecutors. He had already experienced the laughably inept (but, from his perspective, shockingly worrying) specatacle of the "crack" police forensic experts being unable to count rings on the soles of training shoes, to the extraordinary extent that these "experts" were writing reports stating that certain prints were definitively compatible with Sollecito's shoes, when in fact they were a positive MIS-match (as was easily discovered by a young child.......). And he also knew by then just how shockingly incompetent the bra clasp, knife and bath mat partial print analysis was, and how the police and prosecutors seemed capable of almost manufacturing evidence to support his prosecution - evidence which he knew for sure was fundamentally unreliable at best, and the product of malpractice at worst.

So Sollecito's statement of reticence about the testing of the pillow case, taken properly in that context, is easily recognisable as Sollecito being worried that - through either incompetence or malpractice - the police's "experts" might somehow find some way to link him to that pillow case. THAT is what he was afraid of. It's perfectly clear. But of course it's the sort of statement that can readily be ripped out of context and presented - by those with an appropriate agenda - as Sollecito being worried that the police might find genuine incriminating evidence against him on that pillowcase, and that this fear of genuine discovery was what was making Sollecito nervous about the prospect of the pillow case being tested by the police "experts".

The Crack team of forensic experts were shockingly close to establishing a "judicial truth" about Raffaele's Nike shoes.

Imagine if they had. Every mathematician in every university would say, "look, you just can't go around equating one whole number with another!" Imagine a world renowned mathematician writing as such, and citing the Kercher forensics thusly.

Vixen would call them all lick-spittles, as he did to Boninsegna for writing that RS and AK had been exonerated last year.

He would have called the math experts obvious paid shills for the defence.

All because in her universe 7 must equal 8 or her hatred is unjustified.

 

[Stacyhs]

Well, there is a (tiny) grain of truth and accuracy to Vixen's allegation, but (as is almost always the case) the truth has been twisted and bent to fit a predetermined agenda.

The truth is that Sollecito did, closer to the Massei trial, express reservations about having the pillowcase tested. But an objective understanding of the context shows clearly that Sollecito's reservations were totally based on his utter lack of confidence in the competence and propriety of the DNA "scientists", police and prosecutors. He had already experienced the laughably inept (but, from his perspective, shockingly worrying) specatacle of the "crack" police forensic experts being unable to count rings on the soles of training shoes, to the extraordinary extent that these "experts" were writing reports stating that certain prints were definitively compatible with Sollecito's shoes, when in fact they were a positive MIS-match (as was easily discovered by a young child.......). And he also knew by then just how shockingly incompetent the bra clasp, knife and bath mat partial print analysis was, and how the police and prosecutors seemed capable of almost manufacturing evidence to support his prosecution - evidence which he knew for sure was fundamentally unreliable at best, and the product of malpractice at worst.

So Sollecito's statement of reticence about the testing of the pillow case, taken properly in that context, is easily recognisable as Sollecito being worried that - through either incompetence or malpractice - the police's "experts" might somehow find some way to link him to that pillow case. THAT is what he was afraid of. It's perfectly clear. But of course it's the sort of statement that can readily be ripped out of context and presented - by those with an appropriate agenda - as Sollecito being worried that the police might find genuine incriminating evidence against him on that pillowcase, and that this fear of genuine discovery was what was making Sollecito nervous about the
prospect of the pillow case being tested by the police "experts".

Yes, I do remember reading that now in RS's book. It is understandable how Raff felt. But it is still true that it was the police who could have, and should have, tested that stain automatically. Can anyone name another case where a murder/sexual assault provided a suspected semen stain that the police did not automatically test? I can't.

 

[Desert Fox]

The Amanda Knox case was mentioned briefly in the latest Undisclosed podcast where they used it to describe that the police had an illusion of what they thought Amanda was, some kind of American Drug Addict Sex Fiend.

 

[LondonJohn]

Yes, I do remember reading that now in RS's book. It is understandable how Raff felt. But it is still true that it was the police who could have, and should have, tested that stain automatically. Can anyone name another case where a murder/sexual assault provided a suspected semen stain that the police did not automatically test? I can't.

Exactly. And the utterly risible excuse given by Stefanoni - that a choice had to be made between analysing the shoe print and testing the stain, and that you could do one or the other but not both - only serves to point further to her incompetence and/or mendacity. It's abundantly clear that it would in no way whatsoever have compromised the shoe print evidence if a small area of the staining had been swabbed for testing.

And in any case, once the medium of the shoe print (i.e. Kercher's blood) had been sampled and tested, the shoe print evidence would/could have been amply preserved in the form of good, high-resolution photographs of the pillow case. In effect, the police could have done almost anything they liked to that pillow case once it had been thoroughly photographed, and they would still have had all the evidence it was possible to glean from that shoe print.

There's simply no excuse for the police and their "experts" not to have tested the stains on that pillowcase very early on in the investigation. It's obvious that they either a) forgot to do so, or b) didn't even notice the stains until they were pointed out by the defence, or c) made a conscious decision not to test the stains because they were worried that the results might be incompatible with their case against Knox and Sollecito. Disgusting, once again.

 

[analemma]

The Amanda Knox case was mentioned briefly in the latest Undisclosed podcast where they used it to describe that the police had an illusion of what they thought Amanda was, some kind of American Drug Addict Sex Fiend.

DO you have a link to this?
Thanks

 

[Desert Fox]

DO you have a link to this?
Thanks

http://undisclosed-podcast.com/

 

[js202]

Unjustified?!

The Crack team of forensic experts were shockingly close to establishing a "judicial truth" about Raffaele's Nike shoes.

Imagine if they had. Every mathematician in every university would say, "look, you just can't go around equating one whole number with another!" Imagine a world renowned mathematician writing as such, and citing the Kercher forensics thusly.

Vixen would call them all lick-spittles, as he did to Boninsegna for writing that RS and AK had been exonerated last year.

He would have called the math experts obvious paid shills for the defence.

All because in her universe 7 must equal 8 or her hatred is unjustified.

I've got your justification for you right here, "Bill Williams".

 

[Vixen]

The Crack team of forensic experts were shockingly close to establishing a "judicial truth" about Raffaele's Nike shoes.

Imagine if they had. Every mathematician in every university would say, "look, you just can't go around equating one whole number with another!" Imagine a world renowned mathematician writing as such, and citing the Kercher forensics thusly.

Vixen would call them all lick-spittles, as he did to Boninsegna for writing that RS and AK had been exonerated last year.

He would have called the math experts obvious paid shills for the defence.

All because in her universe 7 must equal 8 or her hatred is unjustified.

Heh, as an accountant, I can make it equal anything you want.

 

[acbytesla]

Heh, as an accountant, I can make it equal anything you want.

We've noticed.

 

[Stacyhs]

Heh, as an accountant, I can make it equal anything you want.

If I were the Perugia police, you'd now be signing a statement admitting to illegally altering financial accounts.

 

[Numbers]

Here is another case of the fallibility of Italian justice, and its ability to (sometimes) correct itself:

http://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/20...ro_paolo_melis_libero_dopo_18_anni-144175963/

Pietro Paolo Melis was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the kidnapping and murder of Vanna Licheri, a business woman/farmer in Sardinia. The main evidence apparently was an intercept of someone - allegedly Melis, based on voice identification - speaking on the phone to someone associated with her kidnapping about the details of the crime.

After 18 years in prison, Melis was acquitted and released from prison with the specification of not having committed the crime, based on an analysis of the telephone voices with modern software that concluded that Melis was not one of the speakers. Melis had always maintained his innocence.

A link to the article describing the case was provided by european neighbour in a post on IIP Forum.

 

[Stacyhs]

I was watching a program today about a man (Ruben Cantu) who was executed in Texas (what a surprise) in 1994 who is now thought to have been innocent after the only witness to the crime admitted he had lied under duress from the police investigators.

When I was younger and naïve, I thought the death penalty was a good thing. I believed justice would always prevail. As I grew older and learned how the world works, I realized "justice" is far too often subject to human fallibility. Do some people deserve the death penalty? Yes. But justice is too often blind to the truth.

 

[Numbers]

There has been an Italian documentary film made dealing with the problem of miscarriages of justice in Italy. This film is discussed in an article:

Errori giudiziari, in 24 anni 24mila innocenti in cella (Miscarriages of justice, in 24 years 24,000 innocent in jail):

http://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/cro...lla_2364f089-90aa-4d15-8230-3be3622dca88.html

The link was posted by european neighbour on IIP Forum.

Here is a Google translation of the article:

Miscarriages of justice and the history of those who remain victims are the focus of a documentary film entitled "Do not Look Back", born from the idea of two journalists, Benedict Lattanzi and Valentino Maimone, who has been working on this issue and have given life errorigiudiziari.com site, which lists 700 cases. The documentary film, presented at the Pesaro festival and that of Ischia, is directed by Francesco Del Grosso, and revolves around the story of five people who lived through the prison and the process to be innocent, then seeing themselves perform. It investigates the consequences of this experience, which every year in Italy involving hundreds of people over the last 24 years - as is also remembered in the film - over 24,000 ended up in prison as innocent and to compensate the state spent more than 630 million euro.

The relevance is that the Knox-Sollecito case must be seen as part of the pattern of miscarriages of justice that the Italian judicial system produces. And it should be pointed out that the US system is not necessarily superior to the Italian system - there have been 1,849 exonerations in the US - corrected miscarriages of justice - since 1989, as recorded by the National Registry of Exonerations. Source:

http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx

 

[JREF2010]

Numbers, that post makes me realize it is a global issue.
I wonder how many of these wrongful cases start with a coerced interrogation? A biased planned outcome of the ignorant questioning? Im new to all this but these interrogations in the beginning sure are an "elephant in the room" for a lot of these cases. The second common issue seems to be the Prosecution doesnt have any penalty applied personally to encourage honest and truthful work.

Will Migninni lose his job? or does he just blame it on the judges and puppet jurors? Even though it was his 40,000 pages of crap that he presented in the courtroom that made the case unclear. I think the prosecution should be penalized harshly when caught in this kind of false presentation to a judge. Same goes for the Napoleoni's of the world and the Stephony's.
Who is going to be disciplined in Perugia or Rome? Maybe the system just let it's go on and on like a cancer ignored.

 

[Numbers]

Regarding the ECHR case of Knox v. Italy 76577/13, and in particular the issue of conviction based on a statement made by a person under police questioning but not assisted by a lawyer, the strength of the case against Italy may be evaluated using a compilation of case-law summaries - called a Factsheet - prepared by the ECHR Registry.

The relevant Factsheet is called "Police arrest and assistance of a lawyer" and is a PDF available from a link on:

http://echr.coe.int/Pages/home.aspx?p=press/factsheets&c=

That site itself may be accessed from a link "Factsheets and Country profiles" on the ECHR home page:

http://echr.coe.int/Pages/home.aspx?p=home

Many of the cases summarized in the Factsheet have been cited and discussed on this Forum and/or IIP Forum.

 

[LondonJohn]

There has been an Italian documentary film made dealing with the problem of miscarriages of justice in Italy. This film is discussed in an article:

Errori giudiziari, in 24 anni 24mila innocenti in cella (Miscarriages of justice, in 24 years 24,000 innocent in jail):

http://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/cro...lla_2364f089-90aa-4d15-8230-3be3622dca88.html

The link was posted by european neighbour on IIP Forum.

Here is a Google translation of the article:



The relevance is that the Knox-Sollecito case must be seen as part of the pattern of miscarriages of justice that the Italian judicial system produces. And it should be pointed out that the US system is not necessarily superior to the Italian system - there have been 1,849 exonerations in the US - corrected miscarriages of justice - since 1989, as recorded by the National Registry of Exonerations. Source:

http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx

Of course it's important to state that the poor/erroneous/unlawful application of justice does take place in every country at times, including countries such as the US and UK. But it appears that this problem is considerably more common and more serious in a country such as Italy. If the numbers being quoted here are accurate - 24,000 people wrongly imprisoned in Italy (pop. 60 million) over the past 25 years vs 1,900 total proven miscarriages of justice in the US (pop. 300 million) over the same time period - then Italy has a vastly bigger problem.

Knowing what I know now about the (broken and fundamentally unfit-for-purpose) Italian criminal justice system, I would argue that there are two main contributing factors to the scale of the problem in Italy: 1) the crazy-long multiple-trial process actually results in worse justice, not better, since the lower courts mess up so often; and 2) (and more significantly IMO) there are huge institutionalised problems within the police and the courts.

To expand upon that latter factor, the police seem to have a default mode of *obtaining* "confessions" as a way of doing business, including the grotesque and near-epidemic level of covert surveillance (phone tapping and visual surveillance) of suspects and anyone connected to a suspect. They are clearly hopelessly out of their depth and incompetent when it comes to proper, modern police investigative work - based upon proper crime scene processing, proper forensic analysis and proper analysis of electronic data.

And then we come to the elephant in the room: the fundamentally unjust way in which prosecutors are colleagues of criminal judges, and are still viewed by judges as entirely impartial "seekers of the truth" (as per the broken and now-discarded inquisitorial system), while at the same time they are directing the actual investigation into the crime. The net result in practice is that whatever batcrap theory of the crime the prosecutor comes up with (and remember, prosecutors are paid to prosecute and to win the cases they prosecute, so even a 4-year-old can figure out that they might just be prone to bias in that direction), the court tends to start with that theory as "the objective truth", and in effect tells the defence that unless they can actively disprove that theory, then that's what "the truth" shall be deemed to be.

It doesn't take a doctorate in criminal jurisprudence to figure out that the Italian system is effectively set up to fail in its current broken form. What's needed is root-and-branch reform. But it's Italy we're talking about - a country on its way to becoming a mini failed-state, with an already insolvent banking sector and huge levels of corruption and patronage - so that won't be happening any time soon........

 

[Numbers]

Of course it's important to state that the poor/erroneous/unlawful application of justice does take place in every country at times, including countries such as the US and UK. But it appears that this problem is considerably more common and more serious in a country such as Italy. If the numbers being quoted here are accurate - 24,000 people wrongly imprisoned in Italy (pop. 60 million) over the past 25 years vs 1,900 total proven miscarriages of justice in the US (pop. 300 million) over the same time period - then Italy has a vastly bigger problem.

Knowing what I know now about the (broken and fundamentally unfit-for-purpose) Italian criminal justice system, I would argue that there are two main contributing factors to the scale of the problem in Italy: 1) the crazy-long multiple-trial process actually results in worse justice, not better, since the lower courts mess up so often; and 2) (and more significantly IMO) there are huge institutionalised problems within the police and the courts.

To expand upon that latter factor, the police seem to have a default mode of *obtaining* "confessions" as a way of doing business, including the grotesque and near-epidemic level of covert surveillance (phone tapping and visual surveillance) of suspects and anyone connected to a suspect. They are clearly hopelessly out of their depth and incompetent when it comes to proper, modern police investigative work - based upon proper crime scene processing, proper forensic analysis and proper analysis of electronic data.

And then we come to the elephant in the room: the fundamentally unjust way in which prosecutors are colleagues of criminal judges, and are still viewed by judges as entirely impartial "seekers of the truth" (as per the broken and now-discarded inquisitorial system), while at the same time they are directing the actual investigation into the crime. The net result in practice is that whatever batcrap theory of the crime the prosecutor comes up with (and remember, prosecutors are paid to prosecute and to win the cases they prosecute, so even a 4-year-old can figure out that they might just be prone to bias in that direction), the court tends to start with that theory as "the objective truth", and in effect tells the defence that unless they can actively disprove that theory, then that's what "the truth" shall be deemed to be.

It doesn't take a doctorate in criminal jurisprudence to figure out that the Italian system is effectively set up to fail in its current broken form. What's needed is root-and-branch reform. But it's Italy we're talking about - a country on its way to becoming a mini failed-state, with an already insolvent banking sector and huge levels of corruption and patronage - so that won't be happening any time soon........

The Italian judicial system appears to have all the problems you have pointed out in your post. Apparently, a residual of the (legally but not quite practically discarded) inquisitorial system includes alarming and blatant denials of defense rights, as seen in the Knox-Sollecito case.

For the US, the number of proven exonerations is certainly less than the actual number of miscarriages of justice. New cases of miscarriages of justice from years ago frequently come to the current attention of the judicial systems of the states and federal government and to the media.

Here's a recent example of a miscarriage of justice case from Kentucky that originated in 1995:

A Circuit Court in Meade County, Kentucky, today [15 July 2016] reversed the 1995 murder convictions of Garr Keith Hardin and Jeffrey Dewayne Clark based on new DNA and other evidence pointing to their innocence. The two men have served more than 20 years of a life sentence for the crime.

“We are grateful that the court vacated the convictions of Mr. Hardin and Mr. Clark based on compelling new evidence of their innocence,” said Linda Smith, supervising attorney of the Kentucky Innocence Project. “We hope that Commonwealth’s Attorney David Williams will realize the futility in continuing this wrongful prosecution and join us in our motion to dismiss. The original case was based on nothing more than hysteria and unreliable evidence that has today been completely discredited.”

Seema Saifee, a staff attorney with the Innocence Project, added, “The new DNA and evidence of egregious police misconduct completely disproves the state’s theory of what happened in this case. Mr. Hardin and Mr. Clark have served more than 20 years fighting for justice and we hope they will soon be reunited with their families.”

Source: http://www.innocenceproject.org/ken...ions-garr-keith-hardin-jeffrey-dewayne-clark/