• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

Status
Not open for further replies.
The testimony you quoted was referring to the statement Amanda wrote on the evening of Nov. 6th. Not the one she signed at 5:45 AM.

What is your reason for doubting that the 5:45 statement was voluntary?
 
The testimony you quoted was referring to the statement Amanda wrote on the evening of Nov. 6th. Not the one she signed at 5:45 AM.

So she was still in the questura on the evening of the 6th? Really?


ETA: I do not think you are correct about that because Knox was removed to jail during the day on the 6th, if my understanding is correct. I understood she signed one declaration at 1:45 on the 6th; one at 5:45 on the 6th; and wrote a third spontaneous declaration on the 7th. But in any case she also said this in court:

.....But as the pubblico ministero notes, you then you wrote the memorandum spontaneously. We heard that you yourself asked forpaper to be able to write it.

AK: Certainly.

If you have any reason to suppose that both of these statements refer to something other than the 5:45 declaration then please show it because it seems very clear to me in the testimony that they do refer to that statement
 
Last edited:
Where is your evidence that she requested the second interrogation?
The police say it was, does anybody deny it, surely they would if it wasn't? In any case, to what end force her to have another inadmissable interview, only this time clearly an illegal one? They had already gotten the "truth" out of her that they had wanted from the get go. Were they going for something more, but in front of Mignini she was able to resist her tormentors in a way that she wasn't during the first interview?
 
Back in May of 2009, Edgardo Giobbi stated in court:

Yes: we have discussed that before too. So you choose to accept that testimony rather than Knox's own testimony (repeated more than once) and the testimony of the police, once again. Ok fair enough.
 
So she was still in the questura on the evening of the 6th? Really?

Just to clear up your confusion.

On the evening of Nov. 5, 2007, Amanda and Raffaele were called to the police station. The order to do so came from investigator Edgardo Giobbi.

Amanda signed a statement at 1:45 AM the morning of Nov. 6th, and another statement at 5:45 AM.

She wrote a letter on the evening of Nov. 6th while in custody.

The testimony you quoted referred to the letter. Not the statement she signed at 5:45 AM.
 
Was Amanda really free to leave at any point? In the US, the police are allowed to detain someone as a witness, I would expect something similar in Italy.

I don't believe that the early morning interview that resulted in the 5:45 statement was voluntary.

She was free to request to leave. At which point they would have made her a suspect. The same rules apply to all witnesses.

Strange you don't believe the 5:45 statement was voluntary, since all the judges have ruled it was and Amanda herself and her lawyers have never contested the fact.
 
The police say it was, does anybody deny it, surely they would if it wasn't? In any case, to what end force her to have another inadmissable interview, only this time clearly an illegal one? They had already gotten the "truth" out of her that they had wanted from the get go. Were they going for something more, but in front of Mignini she was able to resist her tormentors in a way that she wasn't during the first interview?

Nobody denies it...except Kestrel.
 
Just to clear up your confusion.

On the evening of Nov. 5, 2007, Amanda and Raffaele were called to the police station. The order to do so came from investigator Edgardo Giobbi.

Amanda signed a statement at 1:45 AM the morning of Nov. 6th, and another statement at 5:45 AM.

She wrote a letter on the evening of Nov. 6th while in custody.

The testimony you quoted referred to the letter. Not the statement she signed at 5:45 AM.


I edited while you were posting, sorry.

I have looked at her testimony again and I can see no way you can read it that way. Please show from the testimony what makes you believe that
 
Kestrel said:
On the evening of Nov. 5, 2007, Amanda and Raffaele were called to the police station. The order to do so came from investigator Edgardo Giobbi.

Only Raffaele was requested.
 
The conditions of the interrogation. Carried out at an absurd hour of the morning, on a suspect without a lawyer who had at most an hour of sleep.

Amanda was never interrogated as a suspect until December. She had two lawyers present in the December interrogation.
 
She had not even been asked to go to the police station on the 5th. She would certainly not be free to leave once she became a suspect but up until 1.45 she was a witness. I was not aware that the police could detain someone as a witness in the USA: they cannot do so in this country. Are you sure about that? It is at odds with what Humanity Blues said in post #3090

<snip>


Detaining witnesses is something of a legal playground ... and minefield ... in the U.S.

The most common instance is any situation where someone is stopped, but not because they were being caught in the act of committing a crime. This is a usage of "detain" which gets somewhat technical, like stopping a motorist or a passing pedestrian. It's a rather broad field and in some ways touches on this discussion, but I'm not sure it is helpful. Here's a brief overview for anyone interested.

What I think is being referred to here is a special class which is "material witness", someone believed to have special knowledge material to the investigation of a crime. A "material witness" is actually "arrested", complete with a warrant secured from a court official after a suitably acceptable affidavit is submitted. The rights of a "material witness" are notably different than those of a "suspect", which has caused no small amount of embarrassment in recent years to the U.S. Justice Dept. in general, and to John Ashcroft in particular. "Material witness" detentions have in some cases lasted over a year.

There is a line sometimes tread (the source of said embarrassment) where the purported reason for detention is alleged to be evidentiary, but the real motive is due to a suspicion of guilt. There is a large body of case law addressing this abuse of the "material witness" statutes, much of it generated subsequent to 9/11 and the "war on terror", but the practice was unfortunately far from unknown prior to that. Some misrepresentation of it has been a plot device in movies and on TV for many decades. This is a source of much of the common wisdom (and confusion) about detaining witnesses here.
 
Last edited:
The conditions of the interrogation. Carried out at an absurd hour of the morning, on a suspect without a lawyer who had at most an hour of sleep.
To what end? Why would Knox claim police brutality, but not deny that the second interrogation was voluntary? Doesn't the "gift" suggest that she might have been in the mood for clarifying her original statement.

Incidentally, the interview was certainly late, but impossibly late for a student with an active social life? I was a rather dull student but I could certainly stay out until that time in the morning when the mood took me, I even spent 48 hours straight drinking cola and finishing a project. Perhaps Amanda is different. Would Mignini have been doing shift work? Surely the hour would have been far more inconvenient for an adult someone with a regular job than a student in her early 20's?
 
Back in May of 2009, Edgardo Giobbi stated in court: I'm mathematically sure that I gave that order, in that moment our attention was on Amanda and Raffaele, I decided that we needed to hear them together in order to study their reactions. We called them and they were eating in a pizzeria.

From AK's testimony:

LG: All right, I've exhausted this topic. Now, I said we were just coming to the evening when you were called in, or rather when Raffaele was called in to the Questura on Nov 5. Where did you come from? Were you having dinner somewhere? Do you remember?

AK: We were at the apartment of a friend of his, who lived near his house, and we were having dinner with them, trying, I don't know, to feel a bit of normality, when Raffaele was called by the police.

One of the frustrating things about this case is that there is often very little agreement about even the most trivial matters.
 
Just to clear up your confusion.

I do not think I am confused, Kestrel.

On the evening of Nov. 5, 2007, Amanda and Raffaele were called to the police station. The order to do so came from investigator Edgardo Giobbi.

That is your belief. It is at odds with what Knox said more than once in her testimony. For example

AK: Yes. What happened is that they weren't expecting me to come. I went
somewhere a bit outside near the elevator, and I had taken my homework with
me, so I started to do my homework, and then I needed to do some "stretching",

this is in line with Filomen's testimony about the phone call she had with Knox while Knox was in the waiting room at the questura, too

So the fact is that you choose to believe what Giobbi said: and I choose to believe what Knox and the rest of the police said. I choose this because it seems to me to fit the facts better. I cannot believe that if she had been asked to attend she would have been in the waiting room doing cartwheels. It could happen if the police wanted to do consecutive interviews; but Giobbi said he wished to see Knox and Sollecito interviewed together. That did not happen. His testimony is at odds with knox's; with that of the police;with what Filomana said; and with what happened. As I said before, where testimony conflicts one must make a judgement.

What are your reasons for preferring Giobbi's account?


Amanda signed a statement at 1:45 AM the morning of Nov. 6th, and another statement at 5:45 AM.

She wrote a letter on the evening of Nov. 6th while in custody.

The testimony you quoted referred to the letter. Not the statement she signed at 5:45 AM.

I am interested to see what leads you to this conclusion, as I said
 
From AK's testimony:

LG: All right, I've exhausted this topic. Now, I said we were just coming to the evening when you were called in, or rather when Raffaele was called in to the Questura on Nov 5. Where did you come from? Were you having dinner somewhere? Do you remember?

AK: We were at the apartment of a friend of his, who lived near his house, and we were having dinner with them, trying, I don't know, to feel a bit of normality, when Raffaele was called by the police.

One of the frustrating things about this case is that there is often very little agreement about even the most trivial matters.

If you understand how human memory works, this is perfectly understandable. Human's don't have a TIVO inside their heads that records and plays back exactly what happened. We remember some things and then fill in with assumptions. In this example, Giobbi may have accurately remembered they were having a pizza, but his mind filled in the detail of a pizzaria.
 
two clarifications

Fiona,

I wrote (#2531), “You are relying on nothing but your own gut instincts. That is not science, and it is as unconvincing an argument as I have seen in this thread.”

You replied (#2532), “That is also a straightforward lie. The evidence which refutes you is all over this thread and I expect an apology”

In the interests of trying to start anew, I will withdraw my use of the phrases, “gut instincts” and “textbook versus feelings.” With respect to Sollecito’s sister, I should have stated more clearly that I did not view this conversation as a formal police report, and I regret the confusion.

Chris
 
If you understand how human memory works, this is perfectly understandable. Human's don't have a TIVO inside their heads that records and plays back exactly what happened. We remember some things and then fill in with assumptions. In this example, Giobbi may have accurately remembered they were having a pizza, but his mind filled in the detail of a pizzaria.
How does any of this discussion relate to the question of whether the second interrogation was voluntary? Or indeed anything else of any significance?
 
The conditions of the interrogation. Carried out at an absurd hour of the morning, on a suspect without a lawyer who had at most an hour of sleep.


Do you disagree that Knox went there of her own free will?

Do you disagree that she was not summoned, or required by the police to be there?

Do you disagree that she chose to go there at 10:00 at night?

By the sort of standards you seem to espouse she could easily be the one regarded as abusing the police, not the other way around. If she had something she felt compelled to share with them she could have done it in the daytime during regular working hours, and not kept them up all night.

ETA: Sorry. I see that you do disagree. Funny how Knox's testimony becomes so undependable to you when it isn't convenient for her to be telling the truth.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom