Amanda Knox guilty - all because of a cartwheel

[RWVBWL]

Here's a minor insignificant point I’ve wondered about for years now that as far I know, has never been discussed. It’s almost meaningless though, but here it is anyway:

You know the lady that gave testimony about her friend being knocked down by ‘a man of color’. I’ve always wonder why she was the one who testified only, and I’ve never even heard of her friends name. I’ve read the whole story of what they did that evening, but I’ve always wondered why her friend isn’t mentioned or called to testify.
Well, after a year or two, I think I finally figured out the answer, anyone know?

Greetings Mr. Holmes!
I for one would luv to read what you are thinking before I grab some shut eye in L.A. Please do share...
For some reason I believe that I recall reading of his name recently, but I would have to back-track to really make sure, which isn't gonna happen tonight. Maybe Fulcanelli knows it off the top of his head, hmmm?
RWVBWL

 

[Matthew Best]

Knox DNA was found mixed with Meredith's blood in the apartments, including in Filomena's room which puts her there at the time of the murder IMO.

All it proves is that Knox lived in the apartment.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Well I only started posting in this thread at the time the judgement came in (just after i think) and then only because of some fancy theories concerning the staged break in. Since Amanda had already been found guilty by the Court, i work under the assumption that the verdict is correct until I'm provided with evidence to the contrary. That evidence has not (yet) been provided.

Interesting. We are indeed approaching the issue from totally different directions. I'm reviewing the court's decision and asking "Is there proof beyond reasonable doubt they did it?". You're taking the court's judgment as correct, and hence from that starting point it's a case of them being guilty until proven innocent.

I agree that if you take out the bra clasp and the knife from Raffaele's apartment that there doesn't seem to be much to tie them to the scene. But those two pieces are a fact and until some evidence is provided that they should be discounted they will remain to be part of the evidence against Amanda and Raffaele.

The first problem is that those two pieces make no sense as part of a coherent picture. Even the prosecution doesn't try to claim that Meredith's murder was premeditated. Everyone agrees it was a spur-of-the-moment affair whether it was Rudy alone doing it or Rudy, Amanda and Raffaele doing it. That does not fit with the murder weapon being a cooking knife from a completely different house. A cooking knife from Meredith's house maybe, but one from Raffaele's house makes no sense. A disorganised killer isn't going to run home for a murder weapon. Similarly the DNA evidence showed that Rudy cut Meredith's bra off, so it's not immediately obvious why Raffaele would be handling the bra clasp anyway.

The second problem is that they don't fit with the murder room being otherwise completely clean of evidence implicating Amanda and Raffaele. They stick out like a sore thumb, they cannot be replicated, and they miraculously fit perfectly with the existing proecution conspiracy theory.

Put it all together and contamination or outright falsification look reasonable to me by comparison to the prosecution story.

You also keep claiming these confessions were forced, i still haven't seen any evidence that it was. The factors that were mentioned to play a role in false confession are also factors with 'normal'confession given in the course of 'regular' interrogations. So based solely on that I doubt you can conclusively state that the confessions were forced.

Amanda claimed it was a forced confession, it was ludicrously false, and it fit with the existing prosecution conspiracy theory. That's enough for me. Amanda couldn't have come up with that ludicrously false confession uncoerced and unprompted.

I'd say that even if they weren't in the room but if they were present in the cottage that they are part and parcel of the murder. And it's quite simple, Amanda and Raffaele clearly didn't spent the evening/night in Raffaele's apartment. The accounts they gave individually of the events that would have transpired that night are just too divergent for that. So it's on Raffaele and Amanda to provide evidence what they really did that evening.

Not as far as I'm concerned: If the prosecution case doesn't show them guilty beyond reasonable doubt, I don't care where they were. That's the heart of the matter.

 

[stilicho]

The prosecution narrative about a rape plot turned into murder is unlikely, to say the least, yet every single little thing about the scenario (the lamp, the bathmat, the mobile phones, the door, everything) gets creatively turned into evidence that Amanda did it by the supporters of her guilt. Whereas absolutely nothing, as far as I can see, counts to them as evidence for her innocence.

Except that these "single little things" were a part of the prosecution's case against Amanda, Raffaele, and Rudy. If you don't like the rape-plot-went-bad scenario on the basis that it's unlikely then that's your opinion. The evidence is stacked up against the three on the basis--not of the narrative alone--but on the basis of several "little things". And none of the three have been able to create a supportable alternative narrative that fits the evidence.

This is not unusual in a murder case.

My take on the Amanda-is-innocent case is that lots of little things can be construed as suspicious, but that doesn't make any difference to the central problems with the prosecution case, which are the lack of any proper evidence that Knox and Solecito were in the murder room, the lack of any evidence of motive, and the prosecution's pattern of forcing confessions and misinterpreting evidence to support their conspiracy theory narrative.

Now it's "proper" evidence. There is evidence they were there in the murder room. It's just not "proper" enough for you. That's OK because nobody is depending on your amateur observations to determine what's "proper" and what isn't.

It simply doesn't matter how suspicious Amanda and Raffaele look if they couldn't have done it. It doesn't matter if they collected chainsaws and torture porn, worshipped Satan and told the police that the Easter Bunny did it, if they weren't in the murder room they weren't in the murder room.

They weren't convicted for collecting chainsaws and torture porn, nor on a concocted "m.o." of throwing rocks through windows, "woman-bothering", or any other such things. Your focus only on Meredith's room is pathetically transparent because you know that the crimescene encompassed the entire upper floor of the cottage. What happened in Filomena's room, the bathroom, and the hallway, is as crucial to understanding the narrative as what happened in Meredith's room. And when a suspect lies emphatically, deliberately, and repeatedly to the police in a murder investigation, it has a much greater impact on their credibility than you seem willing to accept.

 

[stilicho]

I have several questions for those of you in the UK. Fulcanelli had mentioned how the papers had stopped calling RG such things as a small-time drug dealer after threat of a libel suit. Yet in one of the more recent articles that we were discussing in reference to Mark Waterbury's post about RG as a possible police informant, this paper listed him as a small-time drug dealer in this article of 19 April, 2010.

He also stated that they started again shortly afterwards in a "monkey-see-monkey-do" fashion since his fast-track trial and subsequent conviction.

By the way, I noticed that your posts at Chris Halkides' site mimic what I agreed with about the contamination/secondary transfer trope. I think the people arguing about the DNA have to go the fabrication route too. In fact, as you'd said, it is the next likely scenario after the probability that the results were correct.

The narrative works with the FOA supporters' claim that Mignini was out to get Amanda. How he managed to enlist Stefanoni and Biondi is up to them to prove but you're on the right track.

The contamination/secondary transfer trope only works if you accept that, by some miracle, the precisely same unlikely accidents affected both Raffaele's and Meredith's physical evidence.

Bob Graham is not a reliable source, IMO. Some people like him; I don't.

 

[stilicho]

I agree that if you take out the bra clasp and the knife from Raffaele's apartment that there doesn't seem to be much to tie them to the scene. But those two pieces are a fact and until some evidence is provided that they should be discounted they will remain to be part of the evidence against Amanda and Raffaele.

Curatolo and Quintavalle have to be refuted by the defence on appeal, too. Those two witnesses place the pair in locations they should not have been if their alibis are to stand. The bra clasp and the double-DNA knife are the most important but the credibility issue hurt them in court.

I had read that the defence team was planning on challenging Curatolo's testimony again on appeal but I can't remember where I saw it.

 

[Mary_H]

We disagree on the certainty of the forced false confession. I agree that there was a level of pressure involved, i also agree that it was a false confession. The only difference is that I believe it is because Amanda was involved in the murder which caused her to have a weak alibi that broke the moment some hard questions were asked.

If Amanda's weak alibi broke the minute some hard questions were asked, why has it never broken again since then? And why has Raffaele's alibi never broken at all? These are not hardened criminals, they're not even kids with histories of lying or rule-breaking. They work so well under authority and within structures that both had plans to continue their educations beyond the college level. It seems to me that if the Italian police, trained in getting confessions out of lifelong Mafiosi, haven't been able to get these two to confess to the crime in the ensuing 2 1/2 years since their arrests, there is little hope of it ever happening.

It's extremely hard to keep a secret as horrible as having killed someone, especially if you are as tied to your families and communities as Amanda and Raffaele. I'm not sure about Raffaele, but Amanda doesn't seem like the secret-keeping type in the first place, as we can see by the amount of personal information we have about her life. It is unlikely either of them could hold on to such a serious lie for so long without having gone nuts by now.

 

[Mary_H]

And when a suspect lies emphatically, deliberately, and repeatedly to the police in a murder investigation, it has a much greater impact on their credibility than you seem willing to accept.

This statement may be true, but it doesn't apply to Amanda and Raffaele, because neither of them lied emphatically, deliberately or repeatedly.

 

[JREF2010]

Innocent people don't need to make up alibis or accuse others.

you can add:

"and fair and honest people don't interrogate 20yr old foreign college students, for hours into the morning, without bringing in legal support for them, and then, without sleep since the morning before, ask them to sign legal documents concerning murder, that are written in a foreign language."

 

[stilicho]

Interesting. We are indeed approaching the issue from totally different directions. I'm reviewing the court's decision and asking "Is there proof beyond reasonable doubt they did it?". You're taking the court's judgment as correct, and hence from that starting point it's a case of them being guilty until proven innocent.

You're quite right that a lot of us started from different points. For me, it was the fact that the Seattle media reported four different interrogation lengths (from 06-NOV-2007) during the flurry of stories shortly following the verdict. The very next thing was was the staged burglary. After that it was the locked door.

I will address the reasonable doubt issue again. I think it was you who responded that their lawyers should make them both shut up and let them attack on the DNA evidence alone. I'd said that both of them should explain their actions of the evening of 01-NOV-2007 in a clear and concise manner.

I'm only looking at that from the point of view that complete silence (Sollecito) and aimless ramblings (Knox) tells me as an onlooker from the public that they themselves can't provide any information that would create reasonable doubt. I suppose it's the same feeling I'd get in asking a small child who stole the cookie from the jar. Complete silence or stilted evasion comes across poorly.

Of the physical evidence I've seen, only the prints create any doubts in my mind, although I didn't see the courtroom presentations and the counter-examples come across poorly on web sites with photoshopped lines and measurements. Two-dimensional photographs of three-dimensional space create problems with perspective.

I tend to leave things like DNA to the experts. If they manage to convince the court that the DNA evidence violated scientific principles then I'll accept that. So far they haven't and I've personally thought that was at least in part due to the ineffectual and possibly damaging testimony of Tagliabracci.

 

[Amazer]

Interesting. We are indeed approaching the issue from totally different directions. I'm reviewing the court's decision and asking "Is there proof beyond reasonable doubt they did it?". You're taking the court's judgment as correct, and hence from that starting point it's a case of them being guilty until proven innocent.



The first problem is that those two pieces make no sense as part of a coherent picture. Even the prosecution doesn't try to claim that Meredith's murder was premeditated. Everyone agrees it was a spur-of-the-moment affair whether it was Rudy alone doing it or Rudy, Amanda and Raffaele doing it. That does not fit with the murder weapon being a cooking knife from a completely different house. A cooking knife from Meredith's house maybe, but one from Raffaele's house makes no sense. A disorganised killer isn't going to run home for a murder weapon. Similarly the DNA evidence showed that Rudy cut Meredith's bra off, so it's not immediately obvious why Raffaele would be handling the bra clasp anyway.

The second problem is that they don't fit with the murder room being otherwise completely clean of evidence implicating Amanda and Raffaele. They stick out like a sore thumb, they cannot be replicated, and they miraculously fit perfectly with the existing proecution conspiracy theory.

I do recognize what you are saying. It's just that with my approach it's not terribly important. That evidence has been examined in court and found to be valid. Thus, for me to change my mind on it's validity there is need for evidence that the court got it wrong.

Put it all together and contamination or outright falsification look reasonable to me by comparison to the prosecution story.

Different backgrounds lead to different conclusions I guess. Based on my own personal experiences the prosecutions scenario doesn't look so far fetched.

Amanda claimed it was a forced confession, it was ludicrously false, and it fit with the existing prosecution conspiracy theory. That's enough for me. Amanda couldn't have come up with that ludicrously false confession uncoerced and unprompted.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on this for now.

Not as far as I'm concerned: If the prosecution case doesn't show them guilty beyond reasonable doubt, I don't care where they were. That's the heart of the matter.

If I understood the Italian Legal system correctly their appeal will start with them being considered innocent. So in a way you are correct, if the prosecution cannot show them beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty it won't matter where they were. But if the evidence remains as it is then I don't see a radically new outcome for Amanda upon appeal.

 

[tsig]

It's true, and possibly Stilicho, Bob and Fulcanelli, Amazer, Capealadin and Tsig are doing a disservice to the Amanda-is-guilty case, but it does seem to me that their whole story feels like a pathological conspiracy theory.

The prosecution narrative about a rape plot turned into murder is unlikely, to say the least, yet every single little thing about the scenario (the lamp, the bathmat, the mobile phones, the door, everything) gets creatively turned into evidence that Amanda did it by the supporters of her guilt. Whereas absolutely nothing, as far as I can see, counts to them as evidence for her innocence.

My take on the Amanda-is-innocent case is that lots of little things can be construed as suspicious, but that doesn't make any difference to the central problems with the prosecution case, which are the lack of any proper evidence that Knox and Solecito were in the murder room, the lack of any evidence of motive, and the prosecution's pattern of forcing confessions and misinterpreting evidence to support their conspiracy theory narrative.

It simply doesn't matter how suspicious Amanda and Raffaele look if they couldn't have done it. It doesn't matter if they collected chainsaws and torture porn, worshipped Satan and told the police that the Easter Bunny did it, if they weren't in the murder room they weren't in the murder room.

how do you account for the fact that Amanda lied about her whereabouts on the night of the murder? What was she trying to hide?

 

[stilicho]

It's extremely hard to keep a secret as horrible as having killed someone, especially if you are as tied to your families and communities as Amanda and Raffaele. I'm not sure about Raffaele, but Amanda doesn't seem like the secret-keeping type in the first place, as we can see by the amount of personal information we have about her life. It is unlikely either of them could hold on to such a serious lie for so long without having gone nuts by now.

You have it backwards. People with close ties to a fervent support network are less likely to jeopardise that by telling the truth about a murder or anything else. Some homosexuals remain "in the closet" their entire lives because they fear the loss of their family and business connections.

Colin Thatcher, who killed his ex-wife, was denied parole (unanimously) for years until he promised that all he wanted to do was go home and get closer to his children and grandchildren. Immediately following his release, he wrote a book and went on a cross-country media tour to profess his innocence to anyone who'd listen. He remains close to his children and grandchildren.

 

[Mary_H]

Curatolo and Quintavalle have to be refuted by the defence on appeal, too. Those two witnesses place the pair in locations they should not have been if their alibis are to stand. The bra clasp and the double-DNA knife are the most important but the credibility issue hurt them in court.

I had read that the defence team was planning on challenging Curatolo's testimony again on appeal but I can't remember where I saw it.

I would like to get RWVBWL's opinion of Antonio Curatolo.

"Wheeled to the witness stand in an office chair, Curatolo, who has a long, gray beard and wore a coat, hat and scarf in court, said that he had been sleeping on a park bench in Perugia's Piazza Grimana for eight or nine years."

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=7197242&page=1

How much faith would you put in this guy's testimony, RWVBWL?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Sollecito's DNA was found on the bra clasp, which was found in the murder room, and Knox DNA was found mixed with Meredith's blood in the apartments, including in Filomena's room which puts her there at the time of the murder IMO.

That is the crux of the diverging opinions here. You believe this is reliable evidence. I believe it is worthless evidence.

I have been waging this debate for over two years now. I wish I could write you off as a pack of morons, but I can't. Most of you are highly intelligent. Others, like Fulcanelli, are of at least average intelligence. So how can so many intelligent people be so completely wrong about something? It is because you believe that Meredith's blood was found mixed with Amanda's DNA in Filomena's room, and somehow that proves Amanda was involved, not because it tells us what happened, but because it is so strange that it can't have an innocent explanation.

We are looking at Sample 176. I break it down as follows:

- There is no proof it was blood.
- The sample was swabbed off the floor of a shared residence. It could have been random substrate with no connection to the crime or to whatever reacted with luminol.
- After seeing the procedures used in the crime scene video, it could also have been whatever was on the investigator's glove rather than something from the floor.
- It is worthless as forensic evidence.

I don't expect you to agree with me. I just want you to understand how I view this piece of evidence along with others, including the bra fastener, which, to my way of thinking, are just as murky and inconclusive.

 

[Mary_H]

You have it backwards. People with close ties to a fervent support network are less likely to jeopardise that by telling the truth about a murder or anything else. Some homosexuals remain "in the closet" their entire lives because they fear the loss of their family and business connections.

Colin Thatcher, who killed his ex-wife, was denied parole (unanimously) for years until he promised that all he wanted to do was go home and get closer to his children and grandchildren. Immediately following his release, he wrote a book and went on a cross-country media tour to profess his innocence to anyone who'd listen. He remains close to his children and grandchildren.

I can't figure out how your second paragraph relates to this question, but as far as your first paragraph goes, there is no comparison between being homosexual and having committed murder. I would suggest, though, that someone who feels they come from a family where their sexual orientation would cause them to be banished is not a member of the same kind of families Amanda or Raffaele come from, at least not in this day and age.

 

[tsig]

Interesting. We are indeed approaching the issue from totally different directions. I'm reviewing the court's decision and asking "Is there proof beyond reasonable doubt they did it?". You're taking the court's judgment as correct, and hence from that starting point it's a case of them being guilty until proven innocent.



The first problem is that those two pieces make no sense as part of a coherent picture. Even the prosecution doesn't try to claim that Meredith's murder was premeditated. Everyone agrees it was a spur-of-the-moment affair whether it was Rudy alone doing it or Rudy, Amanda and Raffaele doing it. That does not fit with the murder weapon being a cooking knife from a completely different house. A cooking knife from Meredith's house maybe, but one from Raffaele's house makes no sense. A disorganised killer isn't going to run home for a murder weapon. Similarly the DNA evidence showed that Rudy cut Meredith's bra off, so it's not immediately obvious why Raffaele would be handling the bra clasp anyway.

The second problem is that they don't fit with the murder room being otherwise completely clean of evidence implicating Amanda and Raffaele. They stick out like a sore thumb, they cannot be replicated, and they miraculously fit perfectly with the existing proecution conspiracy theory.

Put it all together and contamination or outright falsification look reasonable to me by comparison to the prosecution story.



Amanda claimed it was a forced confession, it was ludicrously false, and it fit with the existing prosecution conspiracy theory. That's enough for me. Amanda couldn't have come up with that ludicrously false confession uncoerced and unprompted.

Not as far as I'm concerned: If the prosecution case doesn't show them guilty beyond reasonable doubt, I don't care where they were. That's the heart of the matter.

If the police wanted to blame Amanda then how did her accusing Patrick fit with that?

It wasn't a confession, it was an accusation.

 

[odeed]

That is the crux of the diverging opinions here. You believe this is reliable evidence. I believe it is worthless evidence.

I have been waging this debate for over two years now. I wish I could write you off as a pack of morons, but I can't. Most of you are highly intelligent. Others, like Fulcanelli, are of at least average intelligence. So how can so many intelligent people be so completely wrong about something? It is because you believe that Meredith's blood was found mixed with Amanda's DNA in Filomena's room, and somehow that proves Amanda was involved, not because it tells us what happened, but because it is so strange that it can't have an innocent explanation.

We are looking at Sample 176. I break it down as follows:

- There is no proof it was blood.
- The sample was swabbed off the floor of a shared residence. It could have been random substrate with no connection to the crime or to whatever reacted with luminol.
- After seeing the procedures used in the crime scene video, it could also have been whatever was on the investigator's glove rather than something from the floor.
- It is worthless as forensic evidence.

I don't expect you to agree with me. I just want you to understand how I view this piece of evidence along with others, including the bra fastener, which, to my way of thinking, are just as murky and inconclusive.

There has been no evidence or studies, showing that living in a shared residence would leave random substrate (I assume you mean dead skin) whose DNA could be identified coming from an individual contributor.

There was study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18420364 from 2008 and reported on http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826584.200-telltale-dna-sucked-out-of-household-dust.html which had a few posts in the science forum. As the article points out "The amount of DNA in dust is tiny and from so many people that singling out any individual could be tricky", but if we were believe the statement "All it proves is that Knox lived in the apartment", this would be old news in science, so why is it presented as a new study?

 

[tsig]

you can add:

"and fair and honest people don't interrogate 20yr old foreign college students, for hours into the morning, without bringing in legal support for them, and then, without sleep since the morning before, ask them to sign legal documents concerning murder, that are written in a foreign language."

Every point you mentioned has been covered in this thread so I don't feel like riding that merry-go-round again.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

There has been no evidence or studies, showing that living in a shared residence would leave random substrate (I assume you mean dead skin) whose DNA could be identified coming from an individual contributor.

There was study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18420364 from 2008 and reported on http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826584.200-telltale-dna-sucked-out-of-household-dust.html which had a few posts in the science forum. As the article points out "The amount of DNA in dust is tiny and from so many people that singling out any individual could be tricky", but if we were believe the statement "All it proves is that Knox lived in the apartment", this would be old news in science, so why is it presented as a new study?

It's all a fairly new and fast-evolving science. Many jurisdictions have not set clear standards for forensic DNA evidence, which is one reason this case is being watched so closely. I predict that this case is going to end up as a textbook example of why reasonable standards are necessary, and what needs to be kept out of the courtroom. As a practical matter, criminal investigators know that the DNA of anyone living in a given household might turn up at random on swabs from that residence. It's not reasonable to say, "it had to have been deposited at the same time," or "it's mixed blood" if no blood tests have been performed. And it's definitely not reasonable if the defense can produce photos of dirty latex gloves at the crime scene and video that shows investigators handling evidence in a way that is likely to cause contamination.