Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

[JihadJane]

Another thing struck me as odd about Knox's behavior when buying the thong the next day. Think about this for a moment; your roommate has been horribly murdered and raped; wouldn't there at least be a little fear that the killer was still on the loose? Wouldn't the possibility that you were the intended victim put a damper on your sex drive?

Speculative cod psychology.

Since when were sex and fear incompatible?

The proximity of death and extreme violence is consciousness altering.

 

[quadraginta]

Is there not some contradiction inherent in these two objections?

"According to testimony the only identified source for Socellito's DNA in that house was a cigarette butt in the kitchen." The investigators couldn't have swabbed the entire house.

Could you address the fact that substantial quantities of Guede's DNA were found in the murder room and on Kercher's body but none of Knox's DNA was found in the murder room and the only bit of Solecito's DNA was that on the clasp

It seems that on one hand the objection is that the investigators couldn't have found everything, and then later the objection is that they didn't. This is a good technique for obfuscation, but it doesn't lend itself well to rational review of the data.

Even if there was no contamination in the lab or at the crime scene or Solecito's apartment, that does not eliminate the possibility of contamination during the chain of custody of the knife, clasp, and other DNA sources.

How secure were the containers between the time they left the crime scene, I've seen a picture of an officer taking the knife out of the box to show reporters. Did other policemen go through the evidence for curiosity or show and tell? Also, what about willful contamination?

Are we quite certain that alien space lizards didn't transmute all the evidence from gold into base metals? Any number of things are possible and defenders of the accused will attempt to plead them as possible. For there to be any merit to the pleadings there should be at least a test of likely. Is there some data beyond "Well. It could have happened." that we have not had shared with us?

The prosecutor has a history of obsessive unjust prosecution

Leaving aside discussion of the merits of that accusation how is it of significance unless some demonstration of evidence tampering is forthcoming? Does that accusation include demonstration of prior evidence tampering?

Can you think of any case where an allegation of the possibility of evidence tampering could not be brought up? How would you weigh the value of such assertions as a general defense?

The far more plentiful evidence in the OJ Simpson case was dismissed by the that jury, in part, because of suspicion of deliberate contamination of the evidence, and there was no credible evidence of police misconduct.

It is not clear what you are trying to say here. You point out that the O.J. jury disregarded a wealth of valid evidence because of the possibility that some of it might have been tampered with and found him not guilty.

I don't understand how that applies to Knox's conviction. Are you saying that the Italian jury demonstrated error because they did not arrive at the same flawed conclusion as the O.J. jury for the same flawed reasons?

 

[Aepervius]

In the video interview, below, she states that the DNA sample on the knife, that appeared to be Meredith Kercher's, consisted of "20 or fewer human cells". Chemical tests for blood, which are more sensitive than DNA tests, were negative therefore the DNA cells "cannot come from blood". (If cleaning the knife was thorough enough to remove detectable traces of blood , DNA would also have been destroyed.)

If the DNA came from less than 20 cells, the chance that you detect it with a chemical seem slim to me. Assuming tehy are togetehr 10 micrometer size, in a disk of 4 blood cell of diameter would be 0,04 millimeter in diameter. Can even forensic chemical detection even detect that ? DNA analysis OTH multiply the sample so don't need as much. I know the article put her as a forensic expert but it looks to me that a direct detection of blood has less chance even with a good photodetector(*) to find blood, rather than anotehr method which clearly enhance the sample...

Does anyone has a reference data on the minimum blood quantity a chemical anylsis can detect ? I found nothing with a quick googling.

(*) I am assuming blood is associated with a fluorescing marker then a photo detector detect the fluorescence at a specific wavelength

 

[Fiona]

ETA. I see your post's content is from the truejustice site supporting the conviction of Knox and Solecito which gives short shrift to the defense's rebuttal and witnesses and appears to overly state the credibility of the DNA evidence. If i have time, I'll look for an independent source that unbiasedly tells both sides.

Well, as I said, I was having a look at what the other side say: and I have already expressed the fact there are reservations about the site. However the fact that this site wants justice for a victim does NOT of itself mean they wish a false conviction nor that they are reckless about that.

I do not agree that it gives short shrift to the defence: the site follows the course of the evidence given: the prosecution case came first (although the sequence is disordered to bring various points about the same thing together). But you will judge that for yourself, because all that they have to say is there for us

Another site would be great if you can find it and I look forward to reading anything you can find.

Meantime I will continue to have a look at what they are saying, though that might be wasted effort given it is there for all to see

 

[GreyICE]

Hey, it beats the hell out of the prosecutors. Satanic rites? Honestly, group 'psychopathic ritual' killing is rare. When these crimes are committed, the individuals tend to have a very twisted relationship. The two boys who killed the kid because they were 'supermen,' the Washington sniper, etc.

This seems like a teenager and her boyfriend.

My problem is this - no credible motive has been put forward (the theory that her boyfriend and her wanted someone to participate in their drug-fueled satanic ritual sex and killed her when she said no isn't a theory. It's a bad joke). The evidence was mishandled and mostly circumstantial (person who lives in house has trace DNA in places). The 'evidence' is a moving target and does not appear to be looked at skeptically. For instance, the prosecution claimed that the traces of Knox and Kercher's blood indicates Knox cleaned her own blood and Knox's off in the bathroom. This obviously calls for self-defense wounds on Knox, which... weren't present. Looked at with a skeptical eye, an explanation for how traces of blood could be possibly found in a bathroom two girls share presents itself...

Moreover, what defenders of the Italian justice system are failing to note is that the police are already in hot water. Guilty or innocent, the interrogation was a complete farce. Any time you manage to get your interrogation thrown out by a judge, you've managed to fail completely and utterly. Guilty or innocent, losing crucial evidence for over 40 days makes your police force a complete joke. Guilty or innocent, having a team that can't even properly identify if a knife has blood on it makes your police force a complete joke.

So, regardless of Knox's guilt or innocence the police are obvious incompetents. That's the only conclusion. At that point, we simply are too frequently relying on the word of documented incompetents.

 

[quadraginta]

Her father puts it at 41. So first off, you're already failing on basic premise.

She was kept overnight, so 30 hours seems very reasonable. It seems like a logical number, while 6 and 14 do not.

I'm not sure that the father's statements can be assumed to be unbiased.

If you are not equating being in custody with interrogation in your second sentence then I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest. If you are I would point out that the two are not necessarily the same. We seem to be in agreement that at least some part of that time in custody was spent by Knox doing floor exercises. I'm pretty sure you're not suggesting that was part of the interrogation.

Do we have some way of verifying what part of her detention was actually spent being questioned beyond partisan statements to the media?

 

[quadraginta]

Another thing struck me as odd about Knox's behavior when buying the thong the next day. Think about this for a moment; your roommate has been horribly murdered and raped; wouldn't there at least be a little fear that the killer was still on the loose? Wouldn't the possibility that you were the intended victim put a damper on your sex drive?

Note as well that nobody has addressed Fiona's point about the broken glass from the window being found atop the ransacked clothes in the other roommate's room. If this is true it strikes me as a vital piece of evidence. Guede would have no reason to fake a break-in; indeed, the only reason for faking a break-in would be to provide cover for someone who was ordinarily in the house.

Another oddity is the reluctance of the Italian boyfriend to completely back up Knox's story that she was at his place that night. He was on the computer, he was smoking a lot of pot, he just doesn't quite remember? I find that extremely odd. Wouldn't they both have been talking about it the next day, after learning about the murder? You know, something like "Gee, Amanda, it's a good thing you spent the night with me or you might have been killed, too!"

A computer which, it seems, showed no evidence of having been in use during the time period he claimed to be using it.

 

[Brainster]

Another odd bit: the claim that there was only one trace of Sollecito's DNA in the house. That doesn't quite jibe with this:

But the American girl was spending her time with far too many peculiar people, in the opinion of her three housemates, who didn’t appreciate running into these conquests at breakfast.

And yes, it appears that he was not an uncommon visitor to the house:

Later that same month, Amanda attracted a new admirer: 23-year-old Raffaele Sollecito, a computer-science student she met at a classical-music concert and slept with that very night. Tense and anxious, he always carried a penknife and smoked hashish and pot with great frequency. He was presumably not very popular with Amanda’s housemates. He would later observe that, whenever he showed up at the house on Via Pergola, Meredith appeared “quiet” and “exchanged few words” with him.

On November 1, All Saints’ Day, a religious holiday in Italy, Meredith spotted Raffaele and Amanda in the kitchen around four p.m. and went off without a word to the couple about her destination or plans. She joined some English friends for pizza and ice cream, then left at nine p.m., saying she was exhausted.

Also, on the claims of marathon interrogation sessions, note this from the Vanity Fair piece:

Simultaneously, in a separate room, Raffaele, too, was questioned by police. Like Amanda’s, his version of events seemed to change whenever things got rough. And judging by his second interrogation, which lasted from 10 one night till 4 the next morning, the grilling was pretty exhausting.

So a six-hour session was exhausting, but the writer fails to mention the 41-hour grilling? Sounds like that excuse came up after this article.

 

[NewtonTrino]

Hey, it beats the hell out of the prosecutors. Satanic rites? Honestly, group 'psychopathic ritual' killing is rare. When these crimes are committed, the individuals tend to have a very twisted relationship. The two boys who killed the kid because they were 'supermen,' the Washington sniper, etc.

This seems like a teenager and her boyfriend.

My problem is this - no credible motive has been put forward (the theory that her boyfriend and her wanted someone to participate in their drug-fueled satanic ritual sex and killed her when she said no isn't a theory. It's a bad joke). The evidence was mishandled and mostly circumstantial (person who lives in house has trace DNA in places). The 'evidence' is a moving target and does not appear to be looked at skeptically. For instance, the prosecution claimed that the traces of Knox and Kercher's blood indicates Knox cleaned her own blood and Knox's off in the bathroom. This obviously calls for self-defense wounds on Knox, which... weren't present. Looked at with a skeptical eye, an explanation for how traces of blood could be possibly found in a bathroom two girls share presents itself...

Moreover, what defenders of the Italian justice system are failing to note is that the police are already in hot water. Guilty or innocent, the interrogation was a complete farce. Any time you manage to get your interrogation thrown out by a judge, you've managed to fail completely and utterly. Guilty or innocent, losing crucial evidence for over 40 days makes your police force a complete joke. Guilty or innocent, having a team that can't even properly identify if a knife has blood on it makes your police force a complete joke.

So, regardless of Knox's guilt or innocence the police are obvious incompetents. That's the only conclusion. At that point, we simply are too frequently relying on the word of documented incompetents.

I would really like to see a response to this from the pro conviction tribe. The police completely bungled this case. Does anyone dispute that?

Does anyone dispute that this prosecutor should have been removed from the case after bringing up crazy satanist theories?

Does anyone dispute that the jury wasn't sequestered and that they was tried in the media to a great extent?

Does anyone dispute that the DNA evidence is anything but flimsy?

Does anyone dispute that there is solid physical evidence typing Rudy to the scene? Does anyone think he wasn't involved? Can anyone account for why he would work together with Knox to kill Kercher? Can anyone come up with a good motive for Amanda or her boyfriend to want to kill Kercher?

There's just no there there people.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Or was it a cultural misunderstanding?

You have to take it one step further than that.

Did you note the original police hypothesis? A Satanist ritual killing. Knox acted "suspiciously" in the police station because she was sitting in her boyfriend's lap inappropriately, kissing, doing cartwheels and the splits.

Does that behavior strike you as indicative of depraved indifference?
Or a dumb kid clueless the police suspected her?


If it were just the police that made the accusations against Knox, I'd say it was the police culture or an individual like the bizarre prosecutor. And, the bizarre prosecutor certainly had a role in this.

But the case for 2 years has been portrayed completely differently in the Italian press vs in the US press. Many in the Italian public see Knox as an evil sociopath. That is not the case in the US, despite the opinions expressed in this thread. One of the newsworthy aspects of this case is that very fact, it is being reported very differently in each of the 2 countries.

I brought this issue up in the thread because it is a fact the two countries have different views of Knox. I didn't bring it up, as many here wrongly assumed, because I think Italians are [fill in the blank]. If the tables were reversed, Americans are just as likely to misjudge the behavior of someone from a foreign culture. We judge people based on expectations. If they don't act as we expect, we are likely to assign meaning to that behavior that may or may not be valid.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

... You're not in a place where you have access to the Seattle media. ...

Really? I live in Bellevue, the city next door to Seattle and I went to the U of WA where Knox also went before going to Italy.

As for your link, it says:

But Knox did have another run-in with police when she received a public-disturbance citation for throwing a noisy party in June 2007 - she paid a $269 fine.

That's not how the conviction was portrayed earlier. You said:

But this isn't the only guilty verdict against Ms Knox in this incident. She was also found guilty of defamation against Lumumba, a bartender who used to be her boss.

Lumumba is the accusation that was addressed earlier in the thread, like I said. Knox was coerced into saying a lot of stuff. From your link:

"It was a complicated situation."
- Explaining at her trial why she originally confessed she was in the cottage the night of the murder when police asked her to imagine what might have happened that night. A higher court later ruled the confession couldn't be used as evidence because she made the statement without an attorney or translator present (TIME, June 12, 2009)

Fox News; December 02, 2009

Knox is also being tried on charges of defamation for allegedly accusing Diya "Patrick" Lumumba — a Congolese man who owns a pub in Perugia where she worked — of being the killer. Because of her accusation, Lumumba was briefly jailed. He was later cleared and is seeking damages from Knox. The American testified last June that she was beaten by police and confused when she was questioned and that the pressure led her to accuse Lumumba.

And I posted a link to the Innocence Project statistics indicating 25% of the cases where they proved exoneration via physical evidence, false confessions were involved.


You need to get your facts straight.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Doug Preston's book in which he covers the circumstances of the insane prosecutor attempting to accuse innocent people of crimes they had nothing to do with was written well before the Amanda Knox case.

The Amanda Knox case is exactly the sort of case you would expect to happen after reading about this man. He sees conspiracies everywhere and is obsessed with Satanic cult murders, to the point that he views everyone through that lens of suspicion.

I've been following Knox's case since the very beginning and it has always been clear to anyone willing to assess the evidence objectively that the only things linking her to the crime are imagination and inference. The physical evidence makes it abundantly clear that it was a sadly typical murder performed by a single male intruder.

And the comments about trusting judges and juries more than yourself are scary. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the remarkable miscarriages of justice that have occurred in this country, let alone a country like Italy where the justice system is based in archaic notions of the supremacy of the prosecution and the inferiority and lowly position of the accused, would know that juries and judges can accomplish remarkable and unbelievable feats of stupidity.

As far as her false accusation of the innocent bartender, any shock at that reveals a profound ignorance of the behavior of people being falsely accused and held in isolation and questioned under extreme duress.

Nice summary of the issues in the case and in the thread. Thanks.

 

[quadraginta]

<snip>

I brought this issue up in the thread because it is a fact the two countries have different views of Knox. I didn't bring it up, as many here wrongly assumed, because I think Italians are [fill in the blank]. If the tables were reversed, Americans are just as likely to misjudge the behavior of someone from a foreign culture. We judge people based on expectations. If they don't act as we expect, we are likely to assign meaning to that behavior that may or may not be valid.

This is all very well and good except that I have not seen one iota of evidence to suggest that Knox's behavior would have been perceived or stressed in any fashion at all differently in the U.S. than it was in Italy. My expectation from other cases here that I have followed in more detail is that our cops would have been equally bemused and alerted, and our prosecutors would have seized upon such behavior as indicative of mood and attitude, and done their level best to have it introduced to the jury. They are routinely successful in such efforts.


Keep in mind that we are not talking about only the floor exercise episode. We are not talking about only the underwear shopping episode. We are not talking about only the kissy face antics in the police station. We are not talking only about any of the other reports of Knox's attitude which are not normal in someone who has just discovered a friend brutally raped and murdered. We are not taking each separate demonstration of incongruous behavior in isolation and judging the entire trial on the merits of that one point.

At least we shouldn't be.

I'm among the first to condemn criticism of demeanor as some sort of magic window into the secret soul of a defendant. I made that clear in my first post in this thread. Even an overall trend of such is not sufficient in my mind to constitute a kind of a priori proof. This does not mean that such considerations are utterly without merit, or that the sum total of a protracted demonstration of such incongruity has zero relevance to an investigation.

Your contentions appear to be that this single episode of floor exercises constitutes the entirety of the case presented against Knox, and that this resulted solely from some sort of cultural bias by the Italians which would not have taken place in the states.

You have not proven either contention.

Absent that the entire line of reasoning is nothing but blatant misdirection.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

For Scrut and others, there is no such thing as 'normal' behavior in a police station. Cops and detectives can behave normally, but anyone who doesn't work there is outside their experience when they enter.

No one ever claimed otherwise.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

You have to take it one step further than that.

Did you note the original police hypothesis? A Satanist ritual killing. Knox acted "suspiciously" in the police station because she was sitting in her boyfriend's lap inappropriately, kissing, doing cartwheels and the splits.

Does that behavior strike you as indicative of depraved indifference?
Or a dumb kid clueless the police suspected her?


If it were just the police that made the accusations against Knox, I'd say it was the police culture or an individual like the bizarre prosecutor. And, the bizarre prosecutor certainly had a role in this.

But the case for 2 years has been portrayed completely differently in the Italian press vs in the US press. Many in the Italian public see Knox as an evil sociopath. That is not the case in the US, despite the opinions expressed in this thread. One of the newsworthy aspects of this case is that very fact, it is being reported very differently in each of the 2 countries.

I brought this issue up in the thread because it is a fact the two countries have different views of Knox. I didn't bring it up, as many here wrongly assumed, because I think Italians are [fill in the blank]. If the tables were reversed, Americans are just as likely to misjudge the behavior of someone from a foreign culture. We judge people based on expectations. If they don't act as we expect, we are likely to assign meaning to that behavior that may or may not be valid.

Interesting to note that you still refuse to answer the question.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

This is all very well and good except that I have not seen one iota of evidence to suggest that Knox's behavior would have been perceived or stressed in any fashion at all differently in the U.S. than it was in Italy. My expectation from other cases here that I have followed in more detail is that our cops would have been equally bemused and alerted, and our prosecutors would have seized upon such behavior as indicative of mood and attitude, and done their level best to have it introduced to the jury. They are routinely successful in such efforts.

Highlighted for the OP's benefit.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

....The supporters of Ms Knox are trying to paint the Italian justice system (police, investigators, jurors, prosecutors, judges) as incompetent and unable to 'properly' assess a case.

For the record, I view the Italian justice system as about the same as I view the US justice system. It probably mostly gets it right, but there are blatant cases where that isn't true and this is one of them.

....Instead, and contrary to the Seattle media accounts, the Italians worked tirelessly to obtain justice for the Kercher family and to get the evidence right. ....

Or not. They more likely worked tirelessly to save face. Prosecutors in the US have a long history of just such behavior, going so far as to appeal overturned convictions where DNA evidence has exonerated falsely convicted persons. Just recently Texas executed a man for arson and murder despite every indication it was an accidental fire. Yet when evidence surfaced the fire was accidental the prosecutor stuck with his original belief the fire was arson.


Expert Hits Arson Finding in Case that Led to Defendant’s Execution

A nationally known expert has concluded that a fire was not arson, a finding that contradicted trial testimony that led to the conviction and execution of a Texas man.

The expert, Craig Beyler, reviewed the case of Cameron Todd Willingham for the Texas Forensic Science Commission, created to investigate allegations of forensic mistakes, the Chicago Tribune reports. The newspaper obtained a copy of his report.

Willingham was convicted of murder for the deaths of his three children who perished in the fire. Beyler is one of nine top fire scientists who have reviewed the case and found that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore, the story says.

One of the prosecutors interviewed on Nightline and transcribed here replied:

Moran: They say the conclusions reached by these [arson] investigators are not warranted by modern fire science and are based on primitive old wives' tales and folklore.

Jackson: That's not to say that they're not correct, though.

Moran: You sent a man to death on that.

Jackson: I'm comfortable with that.

This is human nature at its worst. And I have no reason to think it is any less true for Italian prosecutors than it is true for US prosecutors or Canadian prosecutors. Our brains are programmed not to back down. Just as I suspect people in this thread who were convinced Knox was guilty before looking at the facts are unlikely to change their view after looking at the facts.

You, yourself, are basing your conclusion for the most part on the underlying assumption, 'only guilty people get convicted'. I read that same theme running through this thread. It would seem to be leading more than a few people to discount the fact there is no convincing credible evidence against Knox or her boyfriend. It's not that people are saying [x] is the evidence that is convincing. They are saying the jury must have made an informed decision. The basis is not the evidence, it is an assumption. An assumption easily proved to not always be true.

Those of us arguing Knox is not guilty are saying, the only evidence presented was unconvincing and the rest was all prosecutor fantasy, a suggested but unsupported scenario of what occurred.

 

[Philip]

I originally tried to submit this about an hour ago, but either the website didn't respond or my DSL was out a while:

Is there not some contradiction inherent in these two objections?

It seems that on one hand the objection is that the investigators couldn't have found everything, and then later the objection is that they didn't. This is a good technique for obfuscation, but it doesn't lend itself well to rational review of the data.

I'm sorry if I expressed myself poorly.

The witness for the prosecution mentioned in Fiona's quote said that the only other source of Solecito's DNA in the flat besides the bra clap was the cigarette butt. This was offered by the witness to support the contention that it was unlikely that the bra clasp could have been contaminated with Solecito's DNA from having been left in the apartment for 46 days.

I added the word identified to the quote because, as JihadJane source pointed out, there could have been more of Solecito's DNA in the apartment besides what was on the cigarette butt. I thought that biological matter could have been tracked onto the clasp after the murder, but JihadJane's source stated that DNA on the bra clasp could have been left before the murder from Solecito's presence such as his use of the bathroom.

Are we quite certain that alien space lizards didn't transmute all the evidence from gold into base metals? Any number of things are possible and defenders of the accused will attempt to plead them as possible. For there to be any merit to the pleadings there should be at least a test of likely. Is there some data beyond "Well. It could have happened." that we have not had shared with us?

Leaving aside discussion of the merits of that accusation how is it of significance unless some demonstration of evidence tampering is forthcoming? Does that accusation include demonstration of prior evidence tampering?

Can you think of any case where an allegation of the possibility of evidence tampering could not be brought up? How would you weigh the value of such assertions as a general defense?

I was speculating on alternate possibilities to the the prosecution's claim that the DNA on the knife and bra clasp was placed on them during the murder. You feel those possibilities are as remote as alien space lizards. I think they're far more likely. Even in the past couple of years in the US there have been scandals in US forensics labs and cases of DNA sample switching and evidence lost from storage.

In a trial, it comes down to how much the jury trusted the involved police force, chain of custody of evidence, and forensics lab.

Given the prosecutor's zealotry in this and previous cases, the poor handling of the crime scene, and the Perugia police's abusive interrogation, I think reasonable doubt is raised by the possibility of DNA contamination when weighed against the absurdity of the prosecutions claimed motive and the improbabilty that Knox and Solecito would have carried the murder weapon back to Solecito's apartment and put it in his kitchen. Were they really so in need of keeping kitchen knives that they wouldn't have just disposed of it?

It is not clear what you are trying to say here. You point out that the O.J. jury disregarded a wealth of valid evidence because of the possibility that some of it might have been tampered with and found him not guilty.

I don't understand how that applies to Knox's conviction. Are you saying that the Italian jury demonstrated error because they did not arrive at the same flawed conclusion as the O.J. jury for the same flawed reasons?

Comparing the Knox case to the OJ case was probably a mistake because there are so many cases of some juries disregarding overwhelming evidence of guilt and other juries convicting when the evidence is so weak that there clearly was reasonable doubt.

What I do feel is that the DNA evidence is so sparse in the Knox case and that the evidence of a conviction-obsessed prosecutor and police so strong in the case that a jury would be justified in feeling that the existing DNA evidence could have resulted from willful or careless contamination.

However, the forensics expert shown by JihadJane said that the DNA evidence is so weak that contamination by the police may not have even been necessary to explain it as not being due to the crime.

For either reason, I would consider there to be reasonable doubt that the DNA evidence indicates Knox's and Solecito's guilt.

 

[Ryokan]

Our brains are programmed not to back down. Just as I suspect people in this thread who were convinced Knox was guilty before looking at the facts are unlikely to change their view after looking at the facts.

Those of us arguing Knox is not guilty....

Take a look in the mirror. You don't know anything more than most of us do, you have no idea if she's guilty or not.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Lesson to all: it is really really hard to get a good thread out of a completely insane and idiotic thread title and opening post. Lots of people intentionally make inflammatory/false headlines to try to get attention to their thread, but you rarely get fruitful discussions that way.

Yes.

Please don't compare the scientific evidence for the Big Bang to your opinion that Knox isn't guilty or that cartwheels in police stations have some kind of "cultural significance".....it's pathetic.

No one cares if YOU think a killers motive are ludicrous. This might come as a shock, but murder doesn't have to have some logical motive that "makes sense". Some people are freaking nutcases and are psycho....and they kill people.

What I have seen no evidence of, though it may be available somewhere, is that Amanda Knox is a psycho, or a nut case.

I had the strangest experience of seeing someone who looked just like Amanda Knox at Piccadilly Circus tonight. Very freaky.

Was she doing tumbling maneuvers? Were you afraid?

With hazy knowledge of the case, I'd been convinced she was guilty... but seeing the post-trial analysis, I'm with Newton and Chicken on this. There's no way she did it.

There sure are some questions raised in re the Italian justice system, and the possibility that Amanda was railroaded here. Since the way they deal with evidence, and other stuff, in Italy appears to differ from how we are supposed to do it in the US, the only cross cultural matter is ... the cases are handled differently in technical detail.

The cartwheels are a red herring.

DR