Cont: The Trials of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito: Part 32

[Planigale]

AK left Geude's faeces there because she knew it was his and not hers. The pair made a point of dragging Napoleoni back out of her car, as she was leaving the cottage, to have a look at it. What they didn't realise is that there is too much bacteria in faeces for it to be particularly useful for DNA recovery. But the forensic police did manage to link it to Guede, who never denied it, anyway.

Unfortunately, there was no forensic sign of RG in Filomena's room but there WAS a damning mix of DNA of AK and Mez.
This was via blood which scientists could identify by the high RFU's, as only blood reacts in that way

This is untrue.
Please provide reference.
This 2019 article says that stains have to be tested for blood. It does not say that a high DNA return can be assumed to be blood.

https://www.forensicpaper.com/article/21/2-1-5-791.pdf

A NOVEL METHOD FOR BLOOD DETECTION USING FLUORESCENT DYE

Detection of the body fluid present at a crime scene is essential for any forensic investigation. Amongst all the body fluids (sweat, semen, vaginal fluid, saliva, etc.,) blood is the most frequently encountered evidence at the crime scene. Currently, reagents like benzidine, orthotoluidine...

www.biorxiv.org

If this was true, you would be faced with the unsurmountable problem with the knife. The blade which should have had plenty of blood on it only returned a trace amount of DNA (and had not detectable blood) of Kercher. But returned 'normal' amounts of Knox DNA on the handle. Any cleaning that would have removed the copious DNA and all traces of blood from the knife would also have removed all traces of DNA of the welder. Therefore one can conclude that Knox's DNA could only have been applied after cleaning, and since the knife was lying in a draw and had probably been handled by Knox it has no probative value against Knox.

In reality the only (slim) evidence is against Solicito. The bra clasp, the bloody footprint (which is very dubious), the knife (very dubious). The discredited shoe print that Italian forensics incorrectly said was compatible with his trainer (which shows how generally reliable Italian forensics should be assumed to be).

 

[Planigale]

The hilited is untrue; there certainly are cases that have turned on the testimony of a single witness.

Further, look at Curatolo's testimony. He was accepted as credible by the first-instance court, even though he clearly shouldn't have been, yet he completely fell apart during the appeal trial and was rightly rejected. Yet you excoriate the appeal court for reaching a different verdict.

Curatalo's testimony was peculiar. (Leaving aside the reliability of identification of someone you do not know seen at a distance many weeks previously.) Curatalo's testimony was used to discredit Knox / Sollecito by arguing they were lying when they said they were at home because they were in the park. But had to be assumed to be inaccurate because if Curatalo was accurate about the time they left then it provided them with an alibi for the time of the crime. It also showed they were not conspiring with Guede prior to the crime.

 

[SpitfireIX]

As I recall it was 'ex-FBI' agent Steve [_?] Moore who coined the 'railroaded' term based on the RS article. His wife, Michelle even confronted the prosecution in the court room shouting abuse at them. It was Moore who invented the 'tag teams of twelve' interrogating AK 'all night' and for '53-hours'.

What Gogerty-Marriott did - the PR Agency - was to seize on all the attacks on the prosecutor to promulgate the myth it was a sitch up. It got Doug Preston on board, who had all kinds of big film contacts. Preston had a MASSIVE chip on his shoulder after Mignini threatened to prosecute him unless he left Italy, re the Monster of Florence case, in which he was writing a book with Italian journalist, Spezi. That was an ongoing investigation hence the conflict.

There was also the crime-boff Jim somebody or other who had a show in which he could slag off the Italian prosecutors to his hearts content for US audiences.

Evasion noted. I asked whether you hadn't bothered to read the RS article and were just parroting false guilter talking points about it, or whether you had read the article and were lying about what it says. Those are the only two possibilities.

As for the dreck you did write, I won't comment except to note that the hilited is a fine illustration of how Mignini attempted to harass and intimidate journalists who displeased him.

 

[Vixen]

What Vixen has either forgotten (or, more likely, chooses to ignore) is that phone logs do not record how long a phone rings before being picked up or going to voicemail. It only records the time starting when the call is answered by a person, a message such as "not in service", or voicemail.

Doesn't change the truth AK only let them ring for a few seconds before hanging up.


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[Vixen]

So why did she then implicate Patrick to cover for Rudy?


And, as has been explained to you repeatedly, and you repeatedly ignore, blood with mixed DNA does not mean mixed blood. Amanda's DNA could have gotten on the sink from brushing her teeth, and then Rudy could have dripped Meredith's blood on the sink in the same spot. What is so hard for you to grasp about this? And why didn't Amanda and Raffaele just clean it up??

The Forensic Police scientists identified mixed DNA. Your alternative explanations don't replace those of officially appointed specialists.


Would, could, should. If my gran wore trousers she could be my grandpa.


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[Vixen]

Argument from personal incredulity, as usual. Even assuming that she didn't have a TV in her cell (and if the guards decided to keep her isolated from the general population, they might have given her one), you just have to pretend that she never went out into the common area. Further, you're also assuming that she didn't just sit at a table by herself, or with her cellmate (I know at one point she was paired with another American who was incarcerated on drug charges, but I'm not sure when that happened) and watch TV. Finally, you're assuming that this jealousy manifested itself immediately. It very likely grew over time, especially as the police leaked all the lies about her to the media, and as the first trial progressed.

AK says the other inmates were 'jealous' of her because she was 'famous' right in the opening chapter sample when she curiously talks about herself in the third person at some points and introduces how she was led into a prison, seemingly unaware it was a prison.

Imagine being the prime suspect of one of the most heinous brutal and cruel murders of our time and thinking yourself 'famous'. A class above the usual streetwalkers, I am sure.


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[Vixen]

This statement from or attributed to Mignini is interesting because it may well be a description of Mignini's characteristics.

1. Narcisstic: Mignini imagines himself to be the living equivalent of the fictional super-detective Sherlock Holmes, according to his statement on the Netflix documentary on the case. He doesn't admit to being wrong (incorrect) even when there is abundant proof against his hypotheses.

2. Transgressive: Mignini was prosecuted by Italian authorities for illegal wiretaps of the phones of other prosecutors, the case had to be dropped as a result of Italian judicial "errors" running out of time on the statute of limitation; he was censured by the Italian High Council of the Magistrates for unlawfully denying Sollecito a lawyer. Rather than following CPP Articles 63 and 64 as required, he took a (false) statement from Knox at 5:45 am after questioning her - then certainly a suspect under Italian law - without a defense lawyer present or notifying her of the legally required warnings (such as her right to remain silent).

3. Manipulative: Rather than following CPP Articles 63 and 64 as required, he took a (false) statement from Knox at 5:45 am after questioning her - then certainly a suspect under Italian law - without a defense lawyer present or notifying her of the legally required warnings (such as her right to remain silent). He charged Knox with calunnia against the police for her statements describing the interrogation before the Massei Court, and charged Knox's parents with criminal defamation for their repeating her statements alleging mistreatment by the police to a journalist, although Mignini did not charge the journalist, suggesting that Mignini had a coercive motivation in bringing the charge.

It was Mignini's job as the public prosecutor for the area to - gasp - catch the nastiest, most brutal and cunning of criminals. I am sure they were not too keen on his seeing right through them.

As for charging people with Calunnia, it broke the Italian CPP to try to pervert the course of justice/obstruct justice and, as prosecutor, he had a statutory obligation to press charges.

It's like a thief moaning about being picked on for being caught stealing. "Wah! The nasty prosecutor stitched me up by charging me. Bastard!'



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[Vixen]

No one dragged Napoleoni out of her car. Why do you insist on just making up crap?


If they didn't realize that "there is too much bacteria in faeces for it to be particularly useful for DNA recovery" then what was the point of bringing the police's attention to it?

It's amazing how that crystal ball of yours lets you know what others are thinking or what they know.

It was rather difficult to deny it was his considering he knew he left a dump in the toilet.



Sure, Vixen, it was one of the NINE luminol revealed traces that just didn't have enough blood for a TMB reaction but we'll just go ahead and claim they were in blood anyway. Damn! What bad luck! Just like the postales somehow managed to miss FIVE phone calls made by A and R while they claim they were there!

What about the sample found in FR's room that was ONLY Meredith's DNA? How did that get there?

Ooo it's such a mystery...NOT!




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[Vixen]

And furthermore, Kercher's phone of choice when communicating within Perugia/Italy was the Italian phone which one of the Italian girls had lent her. Knox - and everyone else - knew that it was this Italian phone which mattered most when trying to contact Kercher*.

Now, whoever had Kercher's two phones in their possession (ie Guede) managed to turn off Kercher's Italian phone (but didn't manage to turn off her UK phone).

And that's important, because it meant that every time Knox tried calling Kercher's Italian phone - her preferred means of communication while in Italy, rather than her UK phone - it cut straight into the voicemail (or perhaps the "caller unavailable" message.

So....... Imagine Knox calling Kercher's Italian phone on that fateful morning. She called the phone, but it immediately connected to either the voicemail or network message. Knox wouldn't have had to hear more than a couple of seconds of that message to know that Kercher's Italian phone was switched off - or, alternatively, it was outside of signal coverage.

So Knox called back several minutes later. Once again, the call would have immediately connected to either the voicemail message or the "not available" message. And, once again, Knox would not have needed to hear more than a couple of seconds to realise that Kercher's phone was still either switched off or not connected to the network.

It's funny (in both senses of the word) when people pretend to be knowledgeable about things they don't actually have the first clue about....


* Kercher never used her UK mobile for making/receiving calls within/around Perugia, since such calls would attract significant roaming charges. Her UK mobile phone was purely used for calls to/from the UK - especially those to/from her ill mother.

It doesn't cut to voicemail immediately. It has to ring for a decent amount of time for the person to pick up. If it went to voicemail, how come she didn't leave a message? Truth is, she rang each number cursorily just to establish an alibi for herself of 'not knowing Mez was dead'. I mean, her phone had been switched off for the previous sixteen hours, and the first thing she did was call Mez' two phones just to establish she had rung. Given the pair both switched off their phones ahead of the murder at circa 18:45 and throughout the night - Sollecito having to switch his on circa 6:00am to pick up his father's message (his father had to ring him several times a day as he knew his son was wayward) - it was obviously all carefully planned and that each of them was perfectly well aware of phone tracking.




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[Vixen]

You claimed Madison's boyfriend worked for Rolling Stone. Are you now admitting that you just made that up? And let's have a citation that she knew Rich. If they were more than casual acquaintances and that wasn't disclosed in the article, (I didn't see any such disclosure) that would be a serious violation of journalistic ethics. Not that recklessly accusing people of serious ethical violations has ever bothered you in the past, of course.


I asked you to quote the sections describing "torture" and "railroading" in the article. Here again is the link. Either quote the relevant text or stop making false allegations.


Amanda says otherwise. Due to, inter alia, the failure of the police to make a written record of the interrogation (as required by law), their failure to record the interrogation (as was standard procedure), Mignini's failure to investigate her allegations of mistreatment (as required by law, and by the ECHR), the police's failure to provide her with an attorney (as required by law, and by the ECHR), and the police's treatment of Patrick after he was arrested, I take her word over theirs.

"Everybody is marching out of step except for my little Johnny!"







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[Vixen]

This is untrue.
Please provide reference.
This 2019 article says that stains have to be tested for blood. It does not say that a high DNA return can be assumed to be blood.

https://www.forensicpaper.com/article/21/2-1-5-791.pdf

A NOVEL METHOD FOR BLOOD DETECTION USING FLUORESCENT DYE

Detection of the body fluid present at a crime scene is essential for any forensic investigation. Amongst all the body fluids (sweat, semen, vaginal fluid, saliva, etc.,) blood is the most frequently encountered evidence at the crime scene. Currently, reagents like benzidine, orthotoluidine...

www.biorxiv.org

If this was true, you would be faced with the unsurmountable problem with the knife. The blade which should have had plenty of blood on it only returned a trace amount of DNA (and had not detectable blood) of Kercher. But returned 'normal' amounts of Knox DNA on the handle. Any cleaning that would have removed the copious DNA and all traces of blood from the knife would also have removed all traces of DNA of the welder. Therefore one can conclude that Knox's DNA could only have been applied after cleaning, and since the knife was lying in a draw and had probably been handled by Knox it has no probative value against Knox.

In reality the only (slim) evidence is against Solicito. The bra clasp, the bloody footprint (which is very dubious), the knife (very dubious). The discredited shoe print that Italian forensics incorrectly said was compatible with his trainer (which shows how generally reliable Italian forensics should be assumed to be).

The Italian top forensic scientists said it was a mixture of AK/Mez DNA, presumed to be blood because of the high RFU peaks. Blood can only mix whilst still wet. The evidence for the knife was not just Mez' DNA trapped in a scratch - and it was her near-full DNA profile BTW (15-alleles) - and AK's on the hilt, it was also the knife's outline on the bed's mattress protective sheet. Likewise it fit the stab wound on the left side of Mez' neck.




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[Myriad]

It doesn't cut to voicemail immediately

Have you ever made phone calls to mobile phone numbers?

 

[SpitfireIX]

When I said Vanessa Sollecito was corrupt it was in the context of her trying to help out her brother, via her position in the Carabinieri.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

I am sure she is otherwise perfectly fine. She was disciplined and sacked.

We're still waiting for you to provide actual evidence that a) she improperly sought information about or attempted to interfere in Raffaele's case, and/or b) she was dismissed from the Carabinieri [ETA: because of it].

You don't get sacked for no reason.

Yes, and no one has ever been wrongfully terminated or forced out for unfair reasons.

 

[SpitfireIX]

Vixen, how did a member of a "prominent Italian crime family" get to be a lieutenant in the Carabinieri?

 

[SpitfireIX]

Well, if it wasn't on the British news before 20 Nov 2007, I doubt it was in Italy or the USA much earlier than that.

And, yet again, we have an argument from personal incredulity.

The arrest was the big news. Most news outlets did not name the so-called 'fourth person'.

You just conceded that at least one did. And why wouldn't the local evening news in Umbria be the most likely to, especially when they'd already named Rudy on their website?

 

[LondonJohn]

1) Vixen appears unable or unwilling to assimilate the fact that mobile phone records do not include the time prior to connection of the call. In other words, if I call your phone and it rings and rings for 20 seconds then cuts into the voicemail message, which I listen to for 4 seconds before hanging up......the records show a call of 4 seconds, not 24 seconds.

2) Vixen also appears unable or unwilling to assimilate the fact that Kercher's Italian mobile phone was switched off by her killer (ie Guede) on the night of the murder. Therefore, when Knox called that phone - the phone on which they should have been able to contact Kercher wile she was in Italy - the following morning, it didn't ring at all but instead cut straight through to either the voicemail message or the "caller not available" message. Either way, Knox could immediately tell, literally as soon as the phone connected to either the voicemail or "not available" message, that it was proving impossible to actually reach Kercher, so it would have been entirely natural to hang up.

I sometimes wonder why people pontificate on topics that they so clearly know little or nothing about. Unfortunately, this curious and unedifying spectacle appears regularly within this thread. Courtesy of one poster exclusively.

 

[LondonJohn]

LondonJohn, do you have any thoughts on the retrial, re-conviction, and the next steps?

Ugh, I think it's the same old subterfuge and arrogant self-protection on the part of the Italian criminal justice system. They're not far off the likes of Turkiye, Egypt or Russia in that regard. Whether Knox will have the stomach - and the available funds - to spend another several years going back to the ECHR and then through the Italian courts once again. is open to question. It's a disgrace, of course, but nobody should be surprised at that I guess.

 

[SpitfireIX]

'Moronic' is an adjective, and as such, it refers to the comment, not the hominem.

And it indirectly refers to the person who made those admonitions.

I'd say this is a borderline case, which is one reason I chose to ignore it.

If I say, "That's a stupid argument," I'm clearly attacking the argument, and not the arguer, even though what I'm literally saying is "that's an argument that a stupid person would make." We've all made arguments or done things that would have seemed stupid to dispassionate observers at one time or another, either due to having our judgment clouded by emotional investment, or simply not having thought through an issue sufficiently. The same goes for the word "foolish," although it's somewhat fallen out of fashion.

OTOH, if I say, "that's an argument only a fool would make," or, "that's something only a moron would say," those are pretty clearly personal attacks.

The question of whether characterizing another's arguments or comments as "idiotic," "moronic," etc., constitutes a personal attack is somewhat murky, IMO, and it gets even murkier when such characterization is clearly unjustified, as is the case with Vixen's comment. So, as I said, I consider this a borderline case that I chose to ignore, but I certainly don't fault you for calling her on it.

 

[SpitfireIX]

The Forensic Police scientists identified mixed DNA. Your alternative explanations don't replace those of officially appointed specialists.


Would, could, should. If my gran wore trousers she could be my grandpa.

What part of "blood with mixed DNA does not mean mixed blood" was unclear? There's no "alternative explanation" here; they just said they found mixed DNA. Why is this so hard for you to grasp?

 

[SpitfireIX]

AK says the other inmates were 'jealous' of her because she was 'famous' right in the opening chapter sample when she curiously talks about herself in the third person at some points and introduces how she was led into a prison, seemingly unaware it was a prison.

Irrelevant.

Imagine being the prime suspect of one of the most heinous brutal and cruel murders of our time . . .

Ridiculous rank hyperbole. Suzanne Capper's family would like a word, as just one example.

. . . and thinking yourself 'famous'.

Kindly explain how someone whose face was repeatedly plastered all over the front pages of US, British, and Italian tabloids does not qualify as "famous."

A class above the usual streetwalkers, I am sure.

The fact that you would insinuate that Amanda is a prostitute speaks volumes about you.