Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

[quadraginta]

<snip>


I have to ask the threadgoers a couple of questions in relation to the supposedly inadequate alibis. Exactly what were you doing the entire night four nights ago? Are you sure your memory is correct? Can you prove that you were doing what you remember doing?

<snip>

Perhaps I have an over-inflated opinion of my powers of recollection, but I'm pretty sure that if the questions related to my having found a roommate brutally raped and murdered in my apartment three days before, my memory would be pretty damned clear on the subject. I doubt that I would have been thinking about much else in the interim.

Well, except maybe for some down-time for lingerie shopping with my ... um ... alibi.

 

[NewtonTrino]

I asked a lot of questions earlier and I haven't seen any answers.

Honestly I'm losing what little faith I had left in humanity.

I think for a crime like this motive is an incredibly important thing to show. Without a good motive theory how do explain the two of them working together with Rudy? What's a plausible story there? And if there is no plausible story there do you think Rudy was not involved? In which case what about all of the physical evidence tying him to the crime.

Flimy evidence like this simply isn't enough to convict these people of this crime. If Rudy wasn't around and didn't exist it would make the loose ends a lot easier to tie up. I still haven't heard a good explanation or theory by any of those who think she did it as to what happened that night. Anyone care to try?

 

[NewtonTrino]

Perhaps I have an over-inflated opinion of my powers of recollection, but I'm pretty sure that if the questions related to my having found a roommate brutally raped and murdered in my apartment three days before, my memory would be pretty damned clear on the subject. I doubt that I would have been thinking about much else in the interim.

Well, except maybe for some down-time for lingerie shopping with my ... um ... alibi.

You obviously have a pet theory. Care to share it? Are you saying Amanda and Rudy committed the crime without Raf? You are making it sound here like buying lingerie is some sort of bribe to Raf to ensure he goes along with the alibi. Or are you just being ridiculous?

I'm honestly surprised at how callous people are being here. It doesn't do meredith any good for them to put the wrong people in jail. In fact she would probably be kinda pissed about that herself. Isn't everyone in this case entitled to a thorough investigation using skeptical principals?

 

[Jaggy Bunnet]

Your assumption is incorrect.

Then it seems pointless to mention it.

The pressure from the conviction-obsessed prosecutor could have led someone in the chain of custody to willfully contaminate the evidence or at least his hyping of the case and his leaks of evidence and outrageous claims engendered a circus atmosphere where boasting and curiosity could have led to unauthorized viewing of the evidence and thus careless handling.

Sure it could have. But, IMO, the fact that something COULD have happened with no evidence that it DID happen does not amount to reasonable doubt.

Given the police's bungling of other areas of the case including inappropriate leaks of information, mishandling of the crime scene, and abusive interrogation, I don't think it unreasonable to think the likelihood of mishandling of the evidence is enough to dismiss the DNA evidence since there was so little.

How exactly did you go from "could have" to "likelihood"?

It seems so difficult for some people to understand that it shouldn't be up to the defendant's lawyer to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was not DNA left by the defendant on items in the process of committing a murder. It's up to the prosecutor to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was DNA left by the defendant on items in the process of committing a murder. That includes establishing beyond a reasonable doubt that there was not willful or accidental contamination.

Nobody has suggested the defence has to prove there was not DNA left by the defendant so I am confused as to why you mention this.

Does the US routinely throw out DNA evidence because the DA wants to obtain a conviction (it is their job after all!) and therefore may have pressured someone to contaminate evidence? If not, why do you expect the Italian system to do so? Is there any ACTUAL evidence that contamination took place?

 

[Fiona]

Footprint evidence.

Shoe prints were found in the victim's room. They were all a match for Guede's shoes, except for one smaller one which has not been attributed to anyone and which was found on the pillow under Kechner's body. It did not match any of the shoes seized by the police. The print experts were able to say it was a size 37 or 38, and one of them said it was a particular type of tennis shoe.

A visible footprint was found on the bath mat in the bathroom the two girls shared. Two (in some reports three) more were found in the corridor, using luminol. Two bare bloody footprints were found in the bedroom of Filomena Romanelli, where the broken window was, also using luminol.

In Italy the judge must make the full reasons for his decision public. In his 106 page account of his reasons for deciding to commit Knox and her boyfriend for trial after the conviction of Guede, these footprints were a strong factor.

It has to be noted that the evidence in Guede's trial was that it was not possible for this to be the work of a lone killer. It seems that two knives were used: that the victim fought hard; that the injuries were extensive. According to this account it would not have been possible for one person to hold the victim down while wielding two knives and sexually assaulting her. There is also the fact that the victim's body was moved from the place where it fell some time after her death. She was wearing her bra when she was killed and it was cut off her body after she had been lying in a different position for some time.

Given that there seems to have been strong reason to believe that the killer was not alone: and that someone must have moved the body and removed the bra after Guede had left the house (he was seen leaving and he can account for his movements later that night, per the summary of the judge's report) the questions are: who had opportunity to do that; why would they do it; and what evidence is there for suspicion of any particular person or persons?

The prosecution say that the blood footprint on the bath mat matches that of Sollecito. To support this they took prints from his foot and compared them with the one on the bath mat. He also compared it with prints taken from Guede and from Knox. This appears to have been a detailed exercise using measurements. It should be noted that only half of the foot was in the print, and this may reduce the certainty of the identification. However a second expert agreed with the conclusion of the director of the forensic print section of the Perugia police.

This evidence is disputed by the defence and a main plank of this dispute is deformity of Sollecito's foot, such that one of his toes is permanently raised. That is a serious problem for the prosecution if it is true this toe can never touch the ground.

If the print is not Sollecito's, and it does not match that of Guede or of Knox, then there must be the possibility that someone, as yet unknown, was present, in bare feet, after the victim was killed. Alternatively the statement that Sollecito's toe never touches the ground may be false. I do not know.

Three footprints were found in the hall using luminol, which turns blue in contact with blood. The expert witness states that this substance can also react to other substances but it reacts differently and the difference is easily detectable. It seems not to be disputed that someone tried to clean up the flat, else why was the luminol required.

Two of those footprints are compatible with Knox's feet. One is at, or just inside, her own bedroom door and the other is in the corridor.There are no other footprints in between those of the same size. One of those prints also contains some of the victim's DNA.

The third footprint matches Sollecito's feet

The defence accept that the smaller prints do not belong to Guede or to Sollecito. The did ask about whether they matched the feet of the other two women who shared the flat. If the prints were wrongly said to be contain blood that is relevant question: but if the expert testimony is correct and the did contain blood it is not easy to see why that would be important: the other two women were not there because one was in Rome and the other was with her boyfriend


The footprint and blood stain in Romanelli's room are important. One of them contained a mix of Knox's DNA and Kerchner's blood. Guede's DNA was not found in that room, nor in the bathroom with the footprint. There is no explanation for the pair's presence in that room at all

As I said in my earlier post it was this evidence which led the judge to commit Knox and Sollecito for trial. I do not see how any prosecutor could do otherwise, given the admitted inconsistencies of the defendant's account of the evening in question; the undisputed lies of both (whether due to nerves or immaturity or coerction or for any other reason) and these actual footprints.

Since he made his decision much more has been said about these and other matters: but to pretend there is no case to answer goes beyond what I can accept.

 

[quadraginta]

You obviously have a pet theory.

<snip>

I have no pet theory. I have no theory at all at this point.

This is because I did not begin with a conclusion and then proceed to dismiss out-of-hand any information which might contradict it.

What info I have managed to accumulate so far appears on its face to be a situation with no outright "smoking gun" proof, but enough accumulation of detail to present a case. This is by no means uncommon in murder trials. I don't think, at least at this point, that it is unreasonable to suggest that the same case with the same details could bring a jury in this country to return a verdict of guilty. As I learn more I am more inclined to that conclusion.

What I have found disturbing is the outright and frankly xenophobic dismissal of any possibility that Knox may be guilty based on little more than media spin and some sort of weird nationalistic jingoism.

There seem to be two groups in this thread. Those who are convinced that Knox is innocent, and those who are not.

The first group appears to have difficulty grasping that the second is not necessarily convinced of her guilt either. They seem puzzled that their categorical dismissal of anything which isn't completely in agreement with their position is not a persuasive argument in their favor.

If it had not been for the sheer, overwhelming weight of such prejudice in the news I would never have wondered why they were trying so hard, and would not have gone off researching on my own. I would have just accepted this received wisdom.

Now, I'm not so sure.

 

[Philip]

I'm not absolutely convinced that Knox is innocent; I'm convinced that there is reasonable doubt that she is guilty.

 

[NewtonTrino]

I just want to make clear that there is a big difference between thinking she is innocent and not thinking that the prosecution has proved it's case. I don't know whether she's innocent. IMHO there isn't enough evidence and most important not a good enough theory of what did happen to convict. Big difference. All I'm asking is that the prosecution prove their case.

 

[plumjam]

Hmmm.. a toe that doesn't touch the ground. The plot thickens.

*twirls Poirot-ian moustache and stares thoughtfully into the firelight glimmering through a fine glass of merlot*

Good post, Fiona.

 

[Fiona]

Forensic expert, Dr Elizabeth Johnson, says the knife DNA means nothing, and could not have come from blood.

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.)

She does indeed. She has not examined the evidence in any way, however. This comes down to a disgreement between two experts,one of whom has seen the actual evidence and one of whom is talking in generalities (and selling a book). Obviously anything could have happened. But did it?

Testimony states that the knife was found in a shoe box in Sollecito's apartment; It has Knox's DNA on it, but not, apparently Sollecito's (they may just have failed to mention that because it is his knife: but that is also in doubt because Knox said it was hers and that she could not account for how it got to his place: Romanelli denied she had ever seen it in their flat, however so this is just more mud).

The team which found the knife were not the team which investigated the cottage. The knife was bagged and placed in a shoebox (perhaps the one it was found in, I do not know).

There is testimony that it stayed there until it reached the lab: might be lies of course.

Dr Johnson says that the knife is not compatible with some of the wounds and that is perfectly correct according to the evidence given in the trial: it has been stated there were two knives, which gave different kinds of wounds.That is part of the reason that the idea of one lone killer is not easily accepted. It is not easy to see how one person can wield two knives while sexually assaulting a resisting victim.

Dr Stefanoni never claimed that blood was found on the knife: in fact she specifically testified it was not. She also addressed the question of the small sample size and the testimony is beyond my ability to assess: I repeat, she is an expert in her field and her evidence was extensively tested in Guede's trial: the judge found it convincing but noted he expected this to be addressed again in the trial of Knox and Sollecito. And as I noted, and independent expert retained for the Kerchner family, agreed with Dr Stefanoni's conclusion. She also has the advantage of actually seeing the evidence and the tests it is based on: unlike your Dr Johnson.

There is no evidence at all of contamination. The possibility exists as it does in any dna test: but unless there is something to suggest that it happened this is nothing more than a possibility. To be assessed in the usual ways.

The bra clasp was found 47 days after the murder without a known chain of custody.

Indeed it was: at a sealed crime scene. The room was searched on November 2nd and the clasp found under the pillow: it was not collected as evidence till Dec 18th. That is very very unfortunate and it is certainly a problem. But there was not other DNA on it: if it was contaminated that would be expected.There is not a shred of evidence that it was moved or handled during that period (it seems to have lain on the floor under a mat): and DNA discovered after a long period is quite regularly accepted in evidence. Neither is there any source of contamination, because the only DNA belonging to Sollecito in the flat was on a single cigarette end in the kitchen (which is itself curious, if you are correct that he regularly visited the house: but of course, he didn't: He said he only got closely acquainted with Knox on October 24th. That might have been another lie, though). It is perfectly true, as Philip noted, that they could not have tested everything: but it is a plank of the defence case that there was nothing else of his dna in the murder room, where the clasp was the whole time it was not in evidence. So where did this contamination come from?

Dr Johnson says there are many, mostly innocent ways that the "very small amount" of DNA could have got onto on the clasp, such as Raffaele Sollecito having used the bathroom at the apartment or by the mixing of clothes in the laundry.

"These DNA results could have been obtained even if no crime had occurred."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5PmwUhjEw

Yes. These point have also been raised at the trial. They do not seem to be true. At least the evidence presented at the trial does not say this was a "very small amount of DNA": it is described as "abundant". It was not "brushed on"; it was very firmly fixed. There is also some exploration about how easy such transfer actually is: and it does not seem it is as easy as Dr Johnson likes to imply.

 

[quadraginta]

I'm not absolutely convinced that Knox is innocent; I'm convinced that there is reasonable doubt that she is guilty.

Don't let Skeptigirl find out. She'll holler and say mean things at you.

I am less inclined to think that reasonable doubt exists as I learn more. Fiona's discussion of the footprints is an excellent example of the sort of conversation that we are not hearing through our media outlets. It is by no means the only example.

There are descriptions of the blood found in the shared bathroom which do not lend themselves to casual explanation. We aren't hearing those on HLN. Sollecito's claims of computer use on the night of the murder are not substantiated by the hard disk analysis. Cell phone use is problematic in many ways. A load of Meredith's clothes was running in the washing machine when the police arrived. Etc., etc., etc. These and other details just don't seem to be surviving the seive of our U.S. media rendition of events.

They are out there, but they won't be served up on a plate by Nancy Grace,or 48 Hrs., or others like them.

I would dearly love to see a transcript of the trial proceedings released and translated into English (for the benefit of those of us without the decency to be multilingual.)

I have never been willing to criticize the findings of a U.S. jury without learning what exactly they heard in the courtroom, as opposed to what the media outlets had to say.

I am no more willing to do so because the jury is European and not American.

 

[Fiona]

My problem is this - no credible motive has been put forward

That is true and it is utterly irrelevant. There is no onus on the prosecution to provide motive and in fact it can never be any more than icing. What motive would you find acceptable? I personally cannot find a motive for Harold Shipman: but that does not mean he did not kill a lot of people. I cannot find a motive for Guerde either. But I do not think his conviction is flawed. Perhaps you do? If you think he is guilty and you think he was acting alone then do please explain how a petty thief suddenly turned into a sexual killer in any way which could not apply to the others.

(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).

Described by the judge who committed them for trial as "fantasy". I infer it was not part of his reason for considering there was a case to answer. You?

The evidence was mishandled

The fact the bra clasp went missing for an extended period is poor: no disagreement there. What else you got?

and mostly circumstantial (person who lives in house has trace DNA in places).

Circumstantial evidence is important here, as it often is in murder cases.
No idea what point you are trying to establish with your second point: are you arguing that bloody footprints are common in most households? What different lives we all lead

The 'evidence' is a moving target and does not appear to be looked at skeptically.

Well I have to agree that some who are already convinced of Knox's innocence do not seem to be looking at it sceptically. So there we can agree

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.

Missed that bit: can you cite for it please? All I saw them say is that there were three sites where Kerchner's blood was mixed with Knox's DNA. But there is a great deal to digest and so I may well have overlooked this claim and the reasoning behind it

This obviously calls for self-defense wounds on Knox, which... weren't present.

Interesting. Where are you getting the idea of self defence wounds? Didn't see the defence make that point. I saw them attribute the DNA to earrings removed in the bathroom cause a new piercing had become infected. Though how that got into the bidet was not made clear. Saw the prosecution witness refer to a fresh scratch on Knox's throat/neck but I did not see the prosecution make very much of it. So can you cite for that too, please?

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...

In fact many do. They don't really account for a man's bloody footprint on the bath mat, though. Do they? Are you sure you know what sceptical means?

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.

Oops, there you go again.

Any time you manage to get your interrogation thrown out by a judge, you've managed to fail completely and utterly.

It was thrown out because it could not be properly established at what point Knox became a suspect, I think. Is there more to that?

Guilty or innocent, losing crucial evidence for over 40 days makes your police force a complete joke.

It is a problem: it is one thing in a sea of things. Not enough to constitute a complete joke, IMO. But your standards are clearly perfection. How common is that, where you are? Seems to me that some of what Skeptigirl has cited suggests not very. The question is how significant is it: I do not think anyone has yet made any coherent case as to why this is a case killer

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.

Well it would be if that were true: it isn't, so it ain't

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 don't really think you have made your case: I like the spluttering, though

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Unrelated information that YOU requested a source for. Why did you do that if it was of no relevance?

A noisy party has only been claimed as evidence that Ms Knox may not live up to the alleged portrayal in the US media.

Interesting how distorted you view this particular line of discussion. You seemed to have missed the beginning of it.

...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.

Do you have any source for your claim Knox was accused of a crime before departing for Italy? This is the first I have heard such an accusation.

As for incriminating an innocent person in the murder, that has been addressed.

Notice I replied to stilicho with two answers because I wasn't sure what he was talking about.

Stilicho said Knox had a prior conviction. She didn't have a conviction in the case of the accusation against the boss and I'd not read anywhere Knox had some criminal record in the US as it appeared stilicho was claiming.

So I answered asking for a link about the defamation conviction. There has not been any conviction regarding the false statements Knox made under the duress of the police interrogation despite the fact stilicho continues to rant about it.

Stilicho then cited an unrelated charge, a noisy party, instead of a citation supporting his erroneous claim which would have clarified his post.

Originally Posted by Doghouse Reilly
I didn't cry at my little sister's funeral, because that's just not me...

Close to being a strawman.

Not a straw man and it appears stilicho needs to review the definition of straw man. But I digress...

Giving an anecdotal account of a person's behavior being misread was relevant to the discussion.

We're talking about a rape and murder of a roommate and your subsequent framing of your boss. I'll bet you've never experienced any of that and that your behaviour at your sister's funeral would have had no bearing on it either.

Again, the "thing about throwing a noisy party" wasn't to you but to SG, who'd never heard about it before. I threw wild parties when I was in university, too, but never got a citation. Maybe I was just lucky.

Saying you were lucky about never having gotten a ticket for throwing a loud party, and going off on one's own straw man "we are talking about a rape and murder of a roommate and your subsequent framing of your boss," which stilicho is talking about but no one else is .... not so relevant. Telling Doghouse, "I'll bet you've never experienced any of that and that your behaviour at your sister's funeral," also not so relevant.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Ok. It is clear that the top of skeptigirl's game is poisoning the well of anything that disagrees with her predetermined conclusion. ...

This accusation is bull.

I said two sources here were not worth wasting time replying to. One was an unsourced list in someone's forum post and the other was a general claim that the web page, "Justice for Meredith Kercher", was a valid source of information about the evidence against Knox. I saw and still see no value in wasting my time slogging through that web page.

Now that you have posted more credible sources, I have no issue looking to see if there is any evidence I have yet to see.

Here you cite a source of details about the knife and bra clasp evidence. I have seen that. It is not new and it has been posted in previous links. It has also been rebutted and the fact you've expanded the description into a half a forum page hasn't added anything new.

JihadJane addressed this evidence in this post. And I addressed it very early in the thread in this post.

 

[Fiona]

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?

No, they are not unbiased and they are not even true, for the most part.

Knox alleged that she was interrogated for 14 hours straight with no opportunity to get food, and that she was physically abused by the police. In the trial of Guerde her lawyer said that "there were pressures from the police but we never said she was hit".

On the day of the extremely long interrogation which is claimed, it has to be understood that at the outset she was not a suspect. She had gone to the police station voluntarily and was being interviewed as a witness. She had not been asked to go there, according to police testimony: Sollecito was to be interviewed and she accompanied him. She was free to leave at any time but declined to do that saying she wished to support her b/f.

In the course of her own interview her statements led the police to change their view of her status. It is not clear at what point that happened and so the interview was not deemed reliable: a witness does not have the right to a lawyer nor the automatic right to an interpreter: a suspect does.

In February the police officer in charge testified that throughout her questioning Knox was given the opportunity to rest; use the bathroom; and eat. The officer in charge said that when Knox was shown a text from Lumumba sent on the night of the murder she made her accusation against him and the officer stopped the interview and informed the "judicial authorities".She specifically denied that Knox was threatened or subjected to violence. That was confirmed by another officer in Perugia and also by an officer from Rome said to have been watching through a one-way window

At the same hearing Knox is then reported to have told the hearing that they did offer her food and drink and she added that they only started treating her like a person after she made those accusations.She did not explain what that meant, nor is it in anything I have seen whether she did actually take food or drink.


Knox alleged that her statement that she was at the scene the night Kerchner was murdered was coerced. But she wrote a note in which she made the same statement later when there was no possibility of coercion and that note was deemed admissible for Lumumba's case because she had given it voluntarily.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

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.

I recognize we all need to be careful about not continuing to defend a position once evidence supports another conclusion. And to conclude I am observing that behavior in others of course opens one up to the cross accusation.

Which is why I cited the basis for the conclusions about Knox:

Those here who see her as innocent of the charges are citing the lack of evidence.

Those here who see Knox as guilty are citing the basis of the conclusion on the assumption the jury must have based their decision on the evidence.

The knife and bra clasp evidence are wholly inadequate by any standard of common sense. The knife was never established to even be the murder weapon. The trivial amount of evidence compared to the murder scene, the fabricated motive, also never substantiated by any evidence whatsoever....

And your argument is maybe there is something the jury saw that didn't make it into the public arena. So I should not have any confidence in my conclusion.


Anyone not familiar with the Innocence Project should take the time to investigate their work. Not because every person behind bars is innocent, but because the IP has been able to demonstrate just how and why innocent people are convicted and this case fits the pattern completely.

Coerced confessions, just not reliable. Such confessions were found in 25% of the cases overturned because of conclusive DNA evidence.

Overzealous prosecutions, public sentiment influencing the jury, sloppy crime scene evidence collection, lack of credible or substantial physical evidence.....

These errors plague our justice system. Jury verdicts are wrong and I've cited some of the reasons why. If you take a critical thinking approach to this case, you cannot find convincing evidence to convict either Knox or her boyfriend.

 

[Dunstan]

Anyone not familiar with the Innocence Project should take the time to investigate their work. Not because every person behind bars is innocent, but because the IP has been able to demonstrate just how and why innocent people are convicted and this case fits the pattern completely.

Coerced confessions, just not reliable. Such confessions were found in 25% of the cases overturned because of conclusive DNA evidence.

And in 100% of the cases overturned because of conclusive DNA evidence, the judge was wearing a robe.

Your statistic only shows that false confessions do happen. It doesn't tell us anything more specific about the reliability of confessions. To do that, we'd need to know what percentage of cases in which a suspect confessed later resulted in exoneration.

 

[Micromegas]

I only got interested in this case after Knox's conviction. Initially I believed she had been railroaded by the overzealous Italian prosecutor and his police goons. Now I think it's more likely that she was involved in Kercher's death.

The myth persists that nothing could tie Knox to the murder scene, but there's actually more than people admit. Bloody footprints, fingerprints, and evidence of cleanup efforts go a long way toward casting doubt on Knox's claims that she's the victim of a frameup. And the ridiculously inconsistent stream of testimonies is a classic example of the desperate whack-a-mole defense. The bleach-covered knife that was found in a shoebox in Sollecito's apartment is a case in point: he claims the reason it supposedly had Kercher's DNA on it (whether or not it actually did) was because he accidentally pricked her with it when she was cooking with him at his house. But it turns out she never visited his house, so why the fraudulent alibi?

There seems to be a bottomless reservoir of speculation on the part of people who doubt Knox's guilt. The DNA evidence could have been contaminated, it could have been tampered with, or it could have been wholly fabricated. The reason Knox has given several completely different versions of that night's events (including one where she implicated an innocent person in the murder) is that there could have been police brutality, or she could have been insane with grief over the death of her roommate, or she could have been too high to remember anything.

It's just too much. There's a difference between reasonable doubt and denial.

-Mike

 

[quadraginta]

And in 100% of the cases overturned because of conclusive DNA evidence, the judge was wearing a robe.

Your statistic only shows that false confessions do happen. It doesn't tell us anything more specific about the reliability of confessions. To do that, we'd need to know what percentage of cases in which a suspect confessed later resulted in exoneration.

It would be even more helpful if she would demonstrate with more than stridency and scornful dismissal why this case in particular is relevant to the statistics.

Fiona has provided an alternative narrative of the "interrogation" which is quite at odds with the general tenor of Skeptigirl's. Unlike her, Fiona is willing to engage in discussion beyond the equivalent of "That source doesn't agree with me, so I won't acknowledge it."

More than that, the "confession" doesn't really seem to be a core element of the case presented, but rather just another stone in the wall. The various and contradictory stories are perhaps more telling, although also (in Skeptigirl's mind at least) tainted by this element of "coercion". Similarly it has still not been made clear to me that the cartwheel episode somehow constituted a central aspect of the case made against her. What I seem to be uncovering is a case built up the old-fashioned way, by a preponderance of evidence. Small pieces of evidence, perhaps, but there nonetheless. When every dismissal of such evidence seems to involve allegations of incompetence, conspiracy, or police brutality and nothing else I cannot help but question that point of view.

Skeptigirl's Innocence Project arguments, as developed here by her, seem to suggest that all trials are invalid. Or at least the ones whose verdicts she disagrees with.

 

[Fiona]

I want to turn now to the prosecutor, Mignini, because many here appear to assume that he is mad, bad and dangerous to know. I am not sure where the information underpinning that assumption is coming from

In the first place he is not the sole prosecutor in this case. A woman called Manuela Comodi is also prosecuting. Perhaps they are both mad but I do not see anything to indicate that as I dig about

Some posters seem to think that the Italian prosecutor can do whatever he likes without any check on his power. That does not seem to be true. In fact the prosecutor seems to have far less freedom than his american counterpart and perhaps also less than a british one. In this country there is a two stage test for whether a prosecution will be brought. In the first place there has to be a 50:50 chance of securing a conviction on the basis of the evidence. That is the primary test and no case should be brought unless it is met.

After that test is passed each case is considered with respect to the public interest. Prosecution may not follow if there has been unreasonable delay between the offence and the prosecution, for example, or if a trial will adversely affect the victim's mental or physical health. There is a code of factors to be considered and in general the more serious the crime the more likely the prosecution.

As I understand it the Italian prosecutor does not have even this level of discretion. It seems he must bring a case if the evidence is there.

If a person becomes a suspect in Italy the police have the power to detain that person for 48 hours: and during that 48 hour the prosecutor must consider the evidence and if he considers it strong enough he applies to a judge for validation of the arrest. So Mignini could not hold anyone without persuading a judge that there was at least a prima facie case to answer.

When a person becomes a suspect they have an immediate right to a lawyer. The lawyer has the right to appeal against detention and and there is a hearing. Another judge considers the evidence from both sides and decides whether to release the suspect. This can happen several times in the course of an investigation and each hearing is before a new judge.

To me this seems to undermine any suggestion that the prosecutor has an easy task in Italy: to continue to hold a suspect without evidence would require the complicity of a series of judges. To that extent the accused seems to me to enjoy more safeguards than the do in this country. I do not know how that works in America

Once the investigation is complete there is a pre-trial hearing: I think there is a corresponding mechanism in America called something like a grand jury (correct me if I am wrong: we do not have that in Scotland). In Italy this pre-trial hearing is before yet another judge who similarly can decide to release the suspect if he does not think the evidence is strong enough: or he can decide that a full trial is warranted. At this point the charges are official and the judge can also decide where the suspect should be while awaiting trial: in jail; under house arrest; or free

In face of that what leads people here to believe that this trial has gone forward on the basis of no evidence and a crazy prosecutor?

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