Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

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Bob the Donkey writes:

What are the odds that the alleles would all match those of Meredith's DNA?

Presumably the egram shows her DNA. But is this knife really the murder weapon? Is it reasonable to think that Amanda and Raffaele went out, taking this knife along with them, and then used it in conjunction with another knife to kill Meredith? Or is it more likely that Meredith was killed with a single, smaller knife and the faint DNA profile shown in the egram for rep 36B is from laboratory contamination?
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
Bob the Donkey writes:

What are the odds that the alleles would all match those of Meredith's DNA?

Presumably the egram shows her DNA. But is this knife really the murder weapon? Is it reasonable to think that Amanda and Raffaele went out, taking this knife along with them, and then used it in conjunction with another knife to kill Meredith? Or is it more likely that Meredith was killed with a single, smaller knife and the faint DNA profile shown in the egram for rep 36B is from laboratory contamination?
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So, here we go again...shifting from "No no no, that's not Meredith's DNA" to "well, even if it is Meredith's DNA...it's from contamination."

Move the goalposts much?


ETA: Besides your desire to see Amanda exonerated (for whatever reason), what reason do you have to believe these findings were due to contamination? What other items were most decidedly contaminated in the lab, and why Meredith's DNA and no one else's? Do you suspect the lab/forensics team to be inept? If so, on what grounds do you base that suspicion? Do you have any evidence of contamination, or is it just wishful thinking?
 
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Bob the Donkey writes:

ETA: Besides your desire to see Amanda exonerated (for whatever reason), what reason do you have to believe these findings were due to contamination? What other items were most decidedly contaminated in the lab, and why Meredith's DNA and no one else's? Do you suspect the lab/forensics team to be inept? If so, on what grounds do you base that suspicion? Do you have any evidence of contamination, or is it just wishful thinking?

First, this sample is the only one among several hundred in which the lab called such weak genetic markers. It stands out as marginal for that reason if for no other.

Second, I have discussed this case with experts, and they agree that contamination is a very real problem in crime labs. That is why LCN is controversial even when special protocols, like positive air pressure, are used, which was not the case in Stefanoni's lab. If you read about the Leskie case in Australia, that is one that got a lot of attention, and there are many others. Ruth Teichroeb wrote about problems in Washington State crime labs for the Seattle PI several years ago, and the articles are available online if you are interested.

Third, I don't think this knife is plausible as the murder weapon.

Fourth, after studying Patrizia Stefanoni's slovenly procedures at the crime scene, I can only guess what she does when the camera is turned off. I have zero confidence that she is a competent forensic investigator.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
Bob the Donkey writes:

ETA: Besides your desire to see Amanda exonerated (for whatever reason), what reason do you have to believe these findings were due to contamination? What other items were most decidedly contaminated in the lab, and why Meredith's DNA and no one else's? Do you suspect the lab/forensics team to be inept? If so, on what grounds do you base that suspicion? Do you have any evidence of contamination, or is it just wishful thinking?

First, this sample is the only one among several hundred in which the lab called such weak genetic markers. It stands out as marginal for that reason if for no other.

Second, I have discussed this case with experts, and they agree that contamination is a very real problem in crime labs. That is why LCN is controversial even when special protocols, like positive air pressure, are used, which was not the case in Stefanoni's lab. If you read about the Leskie case in Australia, that is one that got a lot of attention, and there are many others. Ruth Teichroeb wrote about problems in Washington State crime labs for the Seattle PI several years ago, and the articles are available online if you are interested.

Third, I don't think this knife is plausible as the murder weapon.

Fourth, after studying Patrizia Stefanoni's slovenly procedures at the crime scene, I can only guess what she does when the camera is turned off. I have zero confidence that she is a competent forensic investigator.
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Perhaps you should have been the Defense Attorney, or the expert witness. You could have put that one to bed...
 
Charlie Wilkes: "In any case, both Amanda and Raffaele quickly reverted to their original account of the evening, and both have based their defense on the premise that they spent the night together at his apartment."

Didn't they say that they were at a party that night?
 
colonelhall said:
Charlie Wilkes: "In any case, both Amanda and Raffaele quickly reverted to their original account of the evening, and both have based their defense on the premise that they spent the night together at his apartment."

Didn't they say that they were at a party that night?
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The last I heard on this claim, it was something that Raffaele was quoted as saying to a journalist. I'm not sure that it was ever claimed to the police. Perhaps Fulcanelli, or one of the other oracles could confirm.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
Second, I have discussed this case with experts, and they agree that contamination is a very real problem in crime labs. That is why LCN is controversial even when special protocols, like positive air pressure, are used, which was not the case in Stefanoni's lab. If you read about the Leskie case in Australia, that is one that got a lot of attention, and there are many others. Ruth Teichroeb wrote about problems in Washington State crime labs for the Seattle PI several years ago, and the articles are available online if you are interested.
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We've seen the articles on contamination in the labs in Houston, Washington State, and other locations around the US.

Did your experts also tell you that juries universally reject defences based on DNA contamination? It's not because it doesn't occur. But you have to have evidence of contamination and that is normally done through reviews and audits. That's how the labs in the US were discovered.

To date, nobody has provided a link to any audit--not even to a single media report--of contamination at the Rome crime lab. You are welcome to become the first. Maybe your experts will assist.

Remember, too, that this is the same crime lab that helped nail RG. If there's contamination in two cases then there's probably contamination in that one too. I doubt that's what you're intending to argue but you have to maintain consistency to be credible.
 
Charlie,

Charlie Wilkes said:
Second, I have discussed this case with experts, and they agree that contamination is a very real problem in crime labs.
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I don't think anybody argues that contamination isn't an issue that labs have to be careful about. This though is surely a starting point for an attack on the LCN evidence rather than, in and of itself, a reason to throw it out. As for negative controls, and other lab practice... I'm still looking for a good source of information on that. People say a lot of stuff, but I am utterly defeated in my attempts to track down good sources of information on all this stuff. If the reason for this is that the court have denied requests for this data, then I am utterly defeated in my attempts to track down good sources for the defence making a serious attempt to discover this information and having it denied. I've seen some information about a request being denied in October, but for one thing the trial was already practically over by then and for another what information I have been able to track down is pretty thin.

Charlie Wilkes said:
That is why LCN is controversial even when special protocols, like positive air pressure, are used, which was not the case in Stefanoni's lab.
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Could you point me in the direction of information on what protocols were and weren't followed with respect to the LCN tests? As for the positive air pressure, I had assumed that that was to keep the noise level on the test down. It doesn't seem very likely to me that 5 cells, or 20 cells, or the DNA from 5 or 20 cells from a swab would float down the corridor and land on the test that was looking for Merediths DNA. Of course if no controls were done, all bets are off. This just seems like a rather unlikely occurrance. Surely if DNA was floating down corridors and accross rooms there would be vastly greater odds of the DNA from a lab assistant showing up than Meredith's?
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
Bob the Donkey wrote:

OH? Because their stories don't match (as has been pointed out time and again) - not with each other, not with their own various re-tellings.

Actually they do match, and always did match except when they were interrogated on the night of Nov. 5-6. It is unfortunate that the police, who recorded everyone else's statements, apparently did not record these crucial interrogations. In any case, both Amanda and Raffaele quickly reverted to their original account of the evening, and both have based their defense on the premise that they spent the night together at his apartment.

There is plenty enough other evidence (such as the footprints, lack of alibis, etc) that led to the guilty verdict.

But none of the evidence is credible and it doesn't fit into a believable scenario.
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No Charlie, they don't and never have. Not one single detail of their alibis match. It's not good enough to simply claim 'I was home/in Raffaele's apartment', you also have to explain what you were 'doing' while there. And that's their problem, those explanations do not match any of the explanations of the other, never have done and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down exposing it for the complete lie that it is.

Raffaele claims he spent the whole evening on the computer until he went to bed at 1 am. This is in complete contrast to what 'Amanda' says they both were doing all evening (reading Harry Potter, having deep conversations with Amanda about his suicided mother and her lesbian bullying at school, a very long shower together where he cleaned her ears and they made love). As far as Raffaele is concerned, he did not a single one of those things. And what he 'does' claim he was doing, being on the computer, has been proven by his computer that he wasn't on it at all during the time immediately proceeding, during and shortly after the murder (9:10 pm until well after midnight.

The only two things, the only two activities/events the two agree with each other actually happened and had hitherto claimed to have done so late that evening (9:30 - 11 pm) was have dinner and then when washing up after, the leak in the kitchen and watching Amelie. It has since been proven that dinner 'actually' happened no later then 8:30 pm and the leak had happened some time before 8:42 pm. And by Amanda's own admission on the stand, they'd already finished watching Amelie before they ate dinner. As far as Raffaele is concerned, Amanda wasn't even there that evening, she left his apartment.

It is clear that Amanda's claimed events of that evening for post 9 pm are nothing more then a pastiche of events that probably did happen, but on PREVIOUS different nights to the night of the murder and the rest are events that happened well before 9 pm that she moved to a later time in the evening in an attempt to give herself an alibi.

It is not enough to simply say "We were at the apartment", that is not an alibi, for the devil is in the detail and all the details they have given have been proven it to be a lie.
 
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stilicho said:
That's just what RS told a reporter: http://www.mirror.co.uk/sunday-mirror/2007/11/04/italy-murder-details-emerge-98487-20058122/. We don't know if he also told that lie to the police.
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At the very least, it demonstrates he's in the habit of telling different people different stories. Just like Amanda. In Anglo Saxon we call that LYING.

Yet, the FOA finds the pair credible and demands everyone else do so too.


I'd also like to know how Charlie accounts for Raffaele's claims that Amanda wasn't at his apartment that evening and how that sits with 'her alibi'.

If you are truly innocent, you don't need to be telling lies. If you are truly honest, you wouldn't be telling them in the first place.
 
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By the way, a minor thing that has been bothering me for a while. Why is the claim always that the "fsa files" have been withheld. Surely this is only the file extension associated with a particular file format, all be it a common one? There seem to be other extensions associated with the fasta format "fa, seq, fsa". Presumably there are other file formats? I could be wrong, but here is a list of similar formats:

* AB1 - In DNA sequencing, chromatogram files used by instruments from Applied Biosystems
* ACE- A sequence assembly format
* CAF- Common Assembly Format for sequence assembly
* EMBL- The flatfile format used by the EMBL to represent database records for nucleotide and peptide sequences from EMBL databases
* FASTA - The FASTA file format, for sequence data. Sometimes also given as FNA or FAA (Fasta Nucleic Acid or Fasta Amino Acid).
* FASTQ - The FASTQ file format, for sequence data with quality. Sometimes also given as QUAL.
* GenBank - The flatfile format used by the NCBI to represent database records for nucleotide and peptide sequences from the GenBank and RefSeq databases
* PHD - Phred output, from the basecalling software Phred
* SCF - Staden chromatogram files used to store data from DNA sequencing
* Stockholm - The Stockholm format for representing multiple sequence alignments
* Swiss-Prot - The flatfile format used to represent database records for protein sequences from the Swiss-Prot database
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_formats#Biology

FastA (.fss) seems to be a US format. Are we sure that the defence haven't been provided with scf files, for example?
 
Fulcanelli said:
At the very least, it demonstrates he's in the habit of telling different people different stories. Just like Amanda. In Anglo Saxon we call that LYING. <snip>
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It seems that in some dialects it is called "explained away". The precise distinction is apparent only to a privileged few. Truth does not appear to be a necessary prerequisite.
 
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