You're eating your words because you were proved to be mistaken. All you're doing now is restating that the Perugia police did the right thing at the right time as we had always explained to you was required by law. That it was also the right thing to do regardless of jurisdiction is simply icing on the cake. If you want to invent new methodologies for Italian law enforcement then that's your problem.
What you're also ignoring is that the lack of an immediately verifiable alibi, along with the pings near the cell tower covering Via Pergola, and the issues with the software in his phone, each combined to strongly suggest to the Perugia police that Amanda had not been lying and that they had the rapist-murderer in custody.
So you've acknowledged that the timing was not extraordinary, have invented procedures that don't exist in Italy, and have now been told why they could not immediately release Patrick too.
And all of this was due to the words of one person and one person only--Amanda Knox. You can sugar coat it, slide step around it, do the hokey-pokey this way and that, but you're stuck with the fact that an innocent man was nabbed, no procedures were violated, and that only Amanda Knox is responsible.
The courts agreed with us. Thank you for playing. Next.
You're walking a very narrow tightrope here with the tone of this post.
Where was i proved to be mistaken? What have I sugar-coated, or where have I done the "hokey-pokey" (sic)?
Additionally, your argument here is from an ex-post perspective. You've argued that my scenario wouldn't have made any difference in the event since Lumumba didn't in fact have an immediately-verifiable alibi. But the police didn't know that at the time they knocked on his door in the early morning of the 6th.
Of course you could argue (and I'm sure you will...) that the police also didn't know at 6am on the 6th whether or not they were dealing with a potentially dangerous rapist and murderer. I'd agree totally, and would completely agree with the need for police caution against someone whom they believed might be the killer of Meredith Kercher (although you and I differ on the extent to which that belief might be justified). They still didn't need to ARREST him, let alone with "maximum force" elements.
You say above: "All you're doing now is restating that the Perugia police did the right thing at the right time as we had always explained to you was required by law".
Firstly, stop using "we". You represent YOURSELF only. Others may share some (or even all) of your views, but you have no right to refer to a collective "we" in this context. The only acceptable time to use "we" is as a direct synonym for the more correct (but more arcane) personal pronoun "one" - e.g. "we can see that xyz happened". It shouldn't be used to denote a specific group of people within a forum environment like this.
Anyway, that aside, your statement above misrepresents me (it's deja vu all over again....). I haven't claimed that the Perugia police did the right thing, but I have conceded the point about the time, purely in order to remove the emotive issue of police leaving a murderer/rapist on the loose from the more important (in my eyes) argument over the method of his detention.
Furthermore, I'd argue that his arrest WASN'T required by law (Italian or otherwise). Being arrested is a serious blemish on one's character. In the UK at least, it remains on your record and can be used in many different ways in character assessments - although I freely admit that I don't currently know whether the situation is similar in Italy. And Lumumba was arrested NOT because of anything he'd said or done personally up to that point, but instead on the word of someone whom I'd generously describe as "unreliable". Oh, and a text message.
Another point to ponder: I believe I'm correct in saying that following Lumumba's dramatic "dawn-raid" arrest, he was placed in a cell at the Perugia police station with no food or water, and was only brought out to be informed of the evidence against him (and to be accorded an opportunity to speak in his own defence) at around 17.30 - some 11 hours after his arrest. This, if true, doesn't speak volumes of the police's intentions (or ability) to expedite the investigation of Lumumba, which - at the very least - they should have been doing as a matter of great urgency.
Of course, it's also indisputable that Lumumba was detained in custody for 14 days before being exonerated and released. I believe that his alibi witness (the Swiss professor) had been alerted to the situation by an Italian friend of his (not by the Perugia police) on or about the 7th-8th November. Incidentally, this would imply that the police had known of Lumumba's alibi in general terms on the 6th or 7th November (i.e. shortly after his arrest), in order for this information to be provided to the media on the 7th or 8th.
The professor flew to Perugia (seemingly of his own accord), and gave his first statement to the Perugia police on the 10th . It then apparently took the police a further 9 days or so to believe that the Swiss Professor was telling them the truth.
Bear in mind that AS SOON AS they could satisfy themselves that a) the professor was a credible witness, with no agenda or motivation for providing a false alibi (not difficult to prove, I'd suggest), and b) that he wasn't honestly mistaken in his recollection (and this might, generously, have taken a day or two to sort out - the pizza inconsistency etc), then they should have released Lumumba more-or-less immediately. So I'm puzzled as to why they couldn't have ended Lumumba's ordeal by, say, the 12th November as a maximum?
As a slight aside: how hard could it have been for the police to establish whether any Swiss universities had sent teacher/student parties to Perugia over the 1st November, even if they didn't know the professor's name or the exact university he came from? There are twelve major universities in Switzerland, and around a further 50 lesser universities or colleges of higher education. So a logical staring point would have been the 12 major institutions. And the professor in question did indeed work at one of these 12 - the University of Zurich (admittedly the last on an alphabetical list of 12!). In addition, the police could have applied a logical filter even to this list of 12, since Lumumba might very well have told them that the professor was a native German speaker (in fact, his name is Roman Mero, and he is Swiss-German). They could therefore have logically started by contacting those universities in German-speaking cantons - of which there are seven. Had they done such a trawl, I suggest it wouldn't have been hard (or taken long) to discover that the University of Zurich had indeed sent a delegation to Perugia on an exchange with students of the Magistrale school between 24th October and 2nd November 2007. And that one of the professors accompanying the students on that trip was Roman Mero.
