Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

[BobTheDonkey]

Fulcanelli has made the same point specifically with respect to the DNA evidence. However, Guede's lawyer never challenged the DNA evidence against him, IIRC. I accept the DNA evidence against Guede provisionally: If someone has an argument to make against this evidence, let's hear it.

The same lab that was completely competent with Guede's DNA has been incompetent with Sollecito/Knox's? Come now. What happened to "all or nothing" you demonstrated previously?

 

[shuttlt]

Fulcanelli has made the same point specifically with respect to the DNA evidence. However, Guede's lawyer never challenged the DNA evidence against him, IIRC. I accept the DNA evidence against Guede provisionally: If someone has an argument to make against this evidence, let's hear it.

Lots of people appear to entertain the possibility that the DNA on the knife was planted - where else are the statements about the knife being chosen "at random" heading? Why couldn't any of the other bits of DNA evidence etc... be planted by the police as well, particularly if they have the cooperation of the lab in Rome?

If they abuse suspects, destroy evidence, coach witnesses... of what might they not be capable?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Lots of people appear to entertain the possibility that the DNA on the knife was planted - where else are the statements about the knife being chosen "at random" heading? Why couldn't any of the other bits of DNA evidence etc... be planted by the police as well, particularly if they have the cooperation of the lab in Rome?

If they abuse suspects, destroy evidence, coach witnesses... of what might they not be capable?

Shuttit,

My point was only that they should have taken more than one knife. The purpose of testing more than one knife is simply as a good scientific control against contamination.

Chris

 

[BobTheDonkey]

Shuttit,

My point was only that they should have taken more than one knife. The purpose of testing more than one knife is simply as a good scientific control against contamination.

Chris

There were controls against contamination.

If Meredith never visited Sollecito's apartment, then where else could the contamination have occurred? The lab is the only place left. Given that there were numerous controls performed by the lab with no evidence of contamination, we must conclude that contamination in the lab was not an issue.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

contamination redux

Was Sollecito a 4yr old at the time of the murder?

Was any other item with Sollecito's DNA tested that day? Given that the only other place his DNA was found was on the cigarette butt collected during the initial collection of evidence, I'm going to suggest that this is a highly unlikely scenario.

Care to try again?

To BobTheDonkey,

I asked you a simple question. The reason I did was to ascertain whether it was worth my time to discuss DNA contamination with you. You keep telling us how you think DNA contamination is supposed to work, whereas I keep documenting how contamination does work. For example, you continue to ignore Sollecito’s reference samples as possible sources of DNA contamination, despite your being told of their importance. Your unresponsive answer does not indicate that you are being disingenuous, but it does mean that there is no point in trying to explain contamination to you, again.

To everyone but BobTheDonkey,

The point of the Mixer/Ruelas example is that the chance of Ruelas’ bleeding over Mixer’s body is infinitesimally small; therefore, contamination is the only explanation that is left. Also, in this case the contamination had to happen in the lab. Thus, the notion that contamination had to arise from the cigarette butt is wrong; it could have happened at several points in the process of collecting and testing. Sollecito’s DNA was in the house, and it may have been on Meredith’s door (not just the door handle). The bra clasp was mishandled, according to a defense witness, Dr. Tagliabracci (http://abcnews.go.com/International/US/story?id=8118652). Moreover, Sollecito’s DNA might also have arisen from secondary transfer.

Finally, why posit a different mechanism for how Sollecito’s DNA came to be on the clasp versus the other three individuals? Sollecito’s profile was only about 200 RFU in signal strength, considerably weaker than most profiles. The profiles of the other individuals could not have been more than about ten times weaker than this (perhaps less), or they would not have been detected. If those individuals’ DNA profiles arose from secondary transfer or contamination, why not Sollecito’s?

Chris

 

[BobTheDonkey]

To BobTheDonkey,

I asked you a simple question. The reason I did was to ascertain whether it was worth my time to discuss DNA contamination with you. You keep telling us how you think DNA contamination is supposed to work, whereas I keep documenting how contamination does work. For example, you continue to ignore Sollecito’s reference samples as possible sources of DNA contamination, despite your being told of their importance. Your unresponsive answer does not indicate that you are being disingenuous, but it does mean that there is no point in trying to explain contamination to you, again.

To everyone but BobTheDonkey,

The point of the Mixer/Ruelas example is that the chance of Ruelas’ bleeding over Mixer’s body is infinitesimally small; therefore, contamination is the only explanation that is left. Also, in this case the contamination had to happen in the lab. Thus, the notion that contamination had to arise from the cigarette butt is wrong; it could have happened at several points in the process of collecting and testing. Sollecito’s DNA was in the house, and it may have been on Meredith’s door (not just the door handle). The bra clasp was mishandled, according to a defense witness, Dr. Tagliabracci (http://abcnews.go.com/International/US/story?id=8118652). Moreover, Sollecito’s DNA might also have arisen from secondary transfer.

Finally, why posit a different mechanism for how Sollecito’s DNA came to be on the clasp versus the other three individuals? Sollecito’s profile was only about 200 RFU in signal strength, considerably weaker than most profiles. The profiles of the other individuals could not have been more than about ten times weaker than this (perhaps less), or they would not have been detected. If those individuals’ DNA profiles arose from secondary transfer or contamination, why not Sollecito’s?

Chris

I understand how contamination works, tyvm.

I also understand how it doesn't work.

What I refuse to ignore is that there were only 2 other possible sources of contamination - the direct sample from Sollecito and the cigarette butt.

Given that there were only 2 other sources, what is the likelihood that either of these sources were tested the same day as the clasp? Remember, controls in the lab showed no contamination.

Same goes for the knife. Meredith was never at Sollecito's. While I'll admit there is a much higher possibility for contamination from Meredith's DNA (that's a given), controls all came back negative. It obviously wasn't someone else's DNA (really, what are the odds that someone else in the lab would just happen to have as close a match to Meredith's DNA?)

You also are willing to accept that this lab was completely competent with Guede's DNA...but managed to turn incompetent when it came to testing anything with Sollecito and Knox DNA on it.

We are left with the explanation that the DNA samples/results are most likely accurate.

 

[odeed]

Fulcanelli has made the same point specifically with respect to the DNA evidence. However, Guede's lawyer never challenged the DNA evidence against him, IIRC. I accept the DNA evidence against Guede provisionally: If someone has an argument to make against this evidence, let's hear it.

If I remember, you have posted examples of police/prosecution misconduct (this thread and your blog) which has led false allegations against groups of suspects, but in this case Guede can spend a good part of his life in prison while the other two go free, despite being convicted by the the same system.

Also do you think weakening the case against Sollecito DNA makes Knox automatically innocent, even though there is evidence against her.

 

[stilicho]

Well, quite - her memory is fine before and after the illegal interrogation, but becomes confused only for a brief period during it. Remember that she was told they had hard evidence placing her at the scene, and that if she didn't remember being there, it was because she'd blanked it out (this she says in the statement she handed to her interrogators). Rather hard to argue against that kind of logic.

It's entirely possible that had they told her they had 'hard evidence' that there was never any poo in the toilet (hmm, the term 'hard evidence' conjurs up some unfortunate images there!) she may have become confused about that too, but of course, that was never the focus of the interrogation.

Illegal interrogation? Are we talking about the same case? AK's testimony was twice declared inadmissible and only in her murder and sexual assault trial (plus obstruction, of course). Those statements were admissible in the suit brought against her by Mr Lumumba, whom she falsely and knowingly accused of the crimes she was eventually convicted.

Why do you call it blanking out? AK doesn't call it that in her court appearance. She describes her symptoms as a state of confusion in which her imagination took over from her ability to tell the truth. Now most of us would call that lying but AK doesn't. Note that her defenders brought not a single psychological witness to attest to this strange malady which was diagnosed only by the subject herself.

Are you ready to accept that she was lying when she said she was struck down by this mystery ailment?

 

[stilicho]

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim that AK and RS locked the door to Meredith's room?

It follows that they did in the context of the other evidence including, but not limited to, AK's lamp in the room, the body moved after death, the quilt placed on the body after death, and the discarded cell phones. Together these were introduced in the airtight case against AK. I believe the prosecution and not the endlessly lying AK.

Do you really believe the Rudy Guede is an innocent man who was framed?

Are you and Dan O competing for the Non Sequitur Of The Month Award?

 

[shuttlt]

halides1,

I didn't mean anybody in particular by my comment, but you do see a lot of people saying "the knife was chosen at random". If you feel the knife was chosen at random for no reason what so ever and yet turns up forensic evidence that it is "the knife" which you believe to be false, I don't see how we aren't talking about planted evidence. I just don't see a policeman walking into a kitchen, seeing a bunch of equally likely looking knives, randomly choosing one and sending it off to the lab for this kind of deep forensic analysis. If that really is what happened, then as far as I'm concerned all bets are off about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are in this case. If on the other hand it was the only large sharp knife (do we know how well stocked he was for kitchen knives), or some other such reason, then fine.

As for the whole sending other knives off to the lab, lots of people talk about it. Nobody has said whether it is standard practice anywhere. In any case, am I right in thinking there are three possibilities... That the contamination occurred in the lab, that it was tracked back to the appartment by somebody else, or that it was planted. Now testing another knife only matters if we think it was tracked back to the appartment by somebody else, but how much DNA of other people are we tracking about the place if we expect to have a reasonable shot at finding another trace of Meredith at the appartment? Even if the DNA did get there in this way, it just seems to me that the odds of finding more of it by testing a couple of other items from the same draw are pretty low.

As for the possibility of contamination in the lab. Well, it is certainly a possibility, just as the DNA being tracked back to Raffaele's appartment by somebody else is. The question to my mind is what are the odds of this happening? For one thing, how many other people's samples are in the lab with an equal chance of becoming the contaminant? Then there is the negative controls. It's often said that they weren't LCN controls and so don't count. If that's the case I agree, but I'm struggling to find evidence to support that. I've been off on Preugia-shock trying to find out.

Incidentally, do we know how Raffaele's famous knife collection was excluded. I assume it wasn't sent to Rome for analysis?

 

[stilicho]

It's a mountain of rubbish. None of the evidence places Amanda or Raffaele at the scene at the time of the murder.

Stundie-worthy.

The defense has a limited opportunity to present their case to the jury. The constraints of the trial prevent them from exploring every track.

How obvious. So that's why they cobbled together a collection of experts whose testimonies didn't fit with one another. Who knew?

I have the experience and resources to counter the lies that I see presented and cannot be bullied over by weak repeated arguments. That there are a couple of innocents imprisoned as a result of those lies gives me incentive to keep going.

I, for one, am pleased that the guilty parties are behind bars where they cannot be a menace to society any longer.

The question should be reflected right back at you. What's your angle?

Refuting unsubstantiated claims by self-proclaimed disinterested parties and learning more about a justice system which, until this case, I had little knowledge of. It has a lot to be admired.

 

[stilicho]

I expect that Guede did not [know whose] room it was and when they would be back (minutes, hours or days).

This is another key point. It is AK who also places herself in the house after the murder. The Polizia arrived to find both of them there. RG and witnesses at the disco place him away from the scene after the murder.

Both AK and RS place themselves as the first witnesses to Filomena's tossed up room, the blood in the bathroom, and Meredith's locked door. RG doesn't place himself at any of these scenes.

I doubt the pair realised how that speaks to their credibility.

 

[Kestrel]

It follows that they did in the context of the other evidence including, but not limited to, AK's lamp in the room, the body moved after death, the quilt placed on the body after death, and the discarded cell phones. Together these were introduced in the airtight case against AK. I believe the prosecution and not the endlessly lying AK.

I didn't ask you for assertions made by the prosecution, I asked you for evidence. What evidence actually proves that AK or RS moved the lamp, moved the body, covered it with a duvet or discarded the cell phones?

Are you and Dan O competing for the Non Sequitur Of The Month Award?

No, just asking why you made this assertion in the post I quoted.

The pair was so intent on framing RG that they really overdid the cover-up.

 

[lector]

Only if you buy into Mignini's theory that the break-in was staged*. The more obvious explanation is that Guede entered or tried to enter that way, and that he was there when Meredith got back; i.e. that the break-in happened before the murder. Not much he could do about the broken window after the fact, except to hope that Filomena wouldn't be home for a few days (which she wasn't, of course. Who knows, if not for the wide open door and the unflushed toilet, it may well have taken a few days for anyone to find Meredith).

* Mignini does have rather a history of believing apparently simple crimes and events to be staged, even to the point of staging a break-in himself (his men broke into Mario Spezi's car, removed the radio to make it look like a theft and attached a bugging device to the electrical leads). Worth looking into.

The fact that Filomena's room was tossed before the window was broken argues against any attempt to enter that way. Unless Filomena is lying, the broken glass on top of her tossed clothing indicates a staging. An almost unbelievably stupid one, to be sure.

 

[Dan O.]

Did they ever test Amanda's lamp for DNA? Presumably not, since it's still sitting in the room when they go and pick up the bra clasp 46 days later. Coincidentally, right next to the bra clasp...

I believe two lamps were collected from the cottage much later (there were 3 lamps in Meredith's room when the photos were taken). The same source talked about testing for fingerprints but those Italians tend to mix fingerprint/footprint/DNA so it's difficult to say exactly what they were looking for. (One of the squirrels probably just needed a new desk lamp.)

 

[Kestrel]

All this talk of DNA contamination misses the point that no one has showed the DNA contamination from Knox and Kerchers two flatmates, Filomena Romanelli and Laura Mezzetti. The defense has not showed that Kerchers DNA was mixed with Romanelli/Mezzetti thus weakening the evidence against Knox.

The bra clasp sample was dominated by DNA belonging to Meredith. But DNA from several other persons was also present. The peaks belonging to Meredith would be easy to identify, because they are so much larger than the other peaks in the sample. But when peaks are of similar size, you can't really tell which ones belong to which person.

A way around this problem when looking for a male suspect in a sample dominated by a female victims DNA is to do a Y-STR match. Since females don't have a Y chromosome, it only shows DNA contributed by males. As I remember, this is how they matched Sollecito to the bra clasp. Filomena and Laura wouldn't show up in a Y-STR test.

A Y-STR match also doesn't identify someone as precisely as a normal forensic DNA match. My DNA will only match my identical twin. A Y-STR match will match anyone who shares my ancestry along the male line (i.e. my brothers, my father, my father's brothers, their sons, etc.).

 

[Dan O.]

You've hit the nail on the head.

AK is disbelieved because her memory is inexplicably muddled only during the interval that's important. It's razor sharp when pointing to the unflushed toilet, for example and as a contrast. We know the toilet was unflushed and AK's memory was so clear about it that she mentioned it to the investigators, to her roommates, and in an email to her friends before her questioning on the evening of 05 NOV 2007.

Do you see how this works? If her memory is unaffected when we can verify it, and lapses when we have other explanations that she cannot reconcile with her innocence, then we have a pretty good idea that those are the times when she is to be disbelieved.

Try it yourself some time if you have kids that tell fibs.

We know exactly why Amanda's memory is muddled for that particular time frame. You've seen the studies, you've seen the documents. And thanks to Fiona, we now even know the kingpin. It's pointless to try and explain it to you if you are going to stick to your authority figures and ignore science. But maybe someday when you've found reason to question the authorities and start questioning your own beliefs you will be ready to accept reality.

 

[Dan O.]

As for the possibility of contamination in the lab. Well, it is certainly a possibility, just as the DNA being tracked back to Raffaele's appartment by somebody else is. The question to my mind is what are the odds of this happening? For one thing, how many other people's samples are in the lab with an equal chance of becoming the contaminant? Then there is the negative controls. It's often said that they weren't LCN controls and so don't count. If that's the case I agree, but I'm struggling to find evidence to support that. I've been off on Preugia-shock trying to find out.

The odds of DNA contamination in the lab is actually pretty high and may even approach 100%. The question is not whether contamination occurs but the degree of contamination. That Patrizia claims to have never found contamination in the lab is proof that she hasn't looked. The example of the knife may have been the first time ever that she cranked up the amplitudes to actually look at what was in the noise at the bottom of the chart.

 

[stilicho]

I didn't ask you for assertions made by the prosecution, I asked you for evidence. What evidence actually proves that AK or RS moved the lamp, moved the body, covered it with a duvet or discarded the cell phones?

It's all covered in the trial. The evidence was presented, cross-examined, and weighed by the jurors. And they found RS and AK guilty of murder, among other things, by the mountains of evidence stacked against them.

Just as RG was convicted by the mountains of evidence against him.

No, just asking why you made this assertion in the post I quoted.

Aha. I see your confusion, Kestrel. Let's instead say they overdid it in their sloppy attempts to cast RG as the sole perpetrator in the crime they were all guilty of. Unfortunately, it was their cover-up that cast an even brighter spotlight on their own involvement.

 

[stilicho]

We know exactly why Amanda's memory is muddled for that particular time frame. You've seen the studies, you've seen the documents. And thanks to Fiona, we now even know the kingpin. It's pointless to try and explain it to you if you are going to stick to your authority figures and ignore science. But maybe someday when you've found reason to question the authorities and start questioning your own beliefs you will be ready to accept reality.

Have you even read any of the information provided? There is not a single example fitting your assertion. The defence teams did not introduce a single witness to attest to this strange malady that AK--and AK only--asserts.

The only authority figure I have introduced is AK herself--her own voluntary statements in which she posits that Mr Lumumba murdered her roommate while she was in the cottage, or that her boyfriend was lying, or that there might be evidence against another person, or that she was having visions, or that she doesn't remember phoning her mother, or that she might have been screwing her boyfriend while Meredith was being murdered, or that she saw Raffaele had blood on his hands, or that fill in the blanks. I am not relying on what others said that AK said. I can read her own words and there are plenty of them to read.

When a suspect's own words conflict with massive incontrovertible forensic and circumstantial evidence, a reasonable individual will properly conclude that the suspect is lying. That's my reality. What's yours?