Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[katy_did]

I don't agree. The police were asking for help; she thought she was providing help. Helping other people usually leads to rewards, not punishment. I can't imagine Amanda was fearing any consequences during this time of panic, mainly because she knew she was innocent. She didn't even attribute the police's aggression to her own behavior; she thought they were under stress from trying to solve the murder.

The same with Raffaele. One gets the feeling from the report about him telling the police his previous answers were "un sacco di cazzate” that he was feeling nothing but relief and camaraderie with the police who, unbeknownst to him, were about to arrest him for murder.

Amanda and Raffaele were innocent, so they had nothing to fear, or so they thought. If they were any less naive than that, they would already have hired lawyers themselves.

I think I agree with you with respect to Amanda, Mary. She comes across as naive and very open. One of the risk factors for making a false confession is a high trust in authority, and it's very clear from Amanda's e-mail that this is a feature of her personality. She speaks of wanting to 'help' the police, that she knows they're just doing their job, asks them not to yell at her so she can better help them, and so on. Heck, the fact she wrote the statement in the first place shows an almost unbelievably naive trust in the police. I think it's this very high trust in authority figures - probably believing throughout that underneath it all they just wanted to help her help them - that contributed to the false confession in the first place.

Raffaele I'm less sure about, probably just because he's a much more enigmatic figure anyway. He comes across as a more private, closed person than Amanda. Possibly the type to lie to get himself out of trouble, even - especially - if he were innocent, because in that case he would think the lie wouldn't matter very much anyway.

Or perhaps he's not like that at all - very difficult to make any sort of judgment about Raffaele, because we've heard so little from him throughout! Amanda, though, certainly seems (seemed) extremely naive and far too trusting (too trusting for the situation she was in, anyway).

 

[Mary_H]

Hi all,
I like to read A LOT about this particular murder case,
and try to do so, as I've written before, while still looking at the overall picture.
There has been much discussion recntly on the forum over at InjusticeinPerugia regarding the time of the scream Nara heard, which might be Miss Kercher's last.
So thinking about the whole picture, I post this "theory" regarding the time of the murder here also:

I happen to believe that it occurred much earlier than around 11:30pm, since from what I have read, Miss Kercher went home early from her girlfriends apartment, a bit before 9:00pm, because she was tired.

If she was tired, she would have probably put on her pajama's or nightgown on and went to sleep fairly soon after arriving home to her empty apartment, I would think.

BUT wasn't she found murdered with her bluejeans still on, though pulled down?

Since Miss Kercher did not have her PJ's on when found dead, that leds me to believe that the murderer(s) were in the apartment much earlier, possibly around the same time Miss Kercher came home.

If so, I find it hard to believe that Miss Kercher kept them company for some 2 1/2 hours before she was brutally stabbed to death, hence the murder most likely occurred much earlier, and Miss Allesandra Formica might have seen the murderer, (or 1 of them), leaving the general area around 10:30pm that night...
Any thoughts?
RWVBWL

Good analysis, RW. Meredith started a call to her mother at 9:00, but it was cut off. Meredith's British cell phone was used at 10:00 by someone who either accidentally or purposely called her bank. The bank sent a message about 15 minutes after that, but no one answered, suggesting Meredith was already incapacitated. From this evidence and that of Alessandra Formica, it looks like the murder took place between 9 and 10ish.

 

[katy_did]

You mean like this testimony (emphasis mine):

I'm not a cheerleader for Knox. Maybe she lied at her trial. I'm just observing that without a recording of the interrogation no one can be sure. The transcript also shows entries where the lawyers and translator debate the meaning of words and phrases. I doubt that the cops in the interrogation room were quite so scrupulous.

And a bit more from her testimony:

AK: They were suggesting paths of thought. They were suggesting the path of thought. They suggested the journey. So the first thing I said, "Okay, Patrick". And then they said "Okay, where did you meet him? Did you meet him at your house? Did you meet him near your house?" "Euh, near my house, I don't know." Then my memories got mixed up. From other days, I remembered having met Patrick, at Piazza Grimana, so I said "Okay, Piazza Grimana." It wasn't as if I said "Oh, this is how it went."

 

[Mr.D]

Once one's words have landed oneself in custody, one should make only those statements that one's lawyer approves.

I'll certainly not dispute that, but it doesn't change the fact that if she knew Lumumba was innocent of her accusation, her moral responsibility was to take some sort of action to correct things. Now whether or not her legal and practical self-interests ought to have taken precedence is an ethical debate that won't be solved here, but her moral responsibility remains.

The problems with this argument run deeper. The real responsibility for Mr. Lumumba's being in custody reside with both Amanda and her interrogators; however, without a recording of the interrogation, it is impossible to divide up responsibility in a quantitative way.

Ah, but one can put some important limits!

IF Knox was pressured by the police into making a "false confession,"^* then indeed responsibility for Lumumba's false imprisonment lies partly with the police because they participated in the creation of the "false."

On the other hand, IF Knox deliberately "lied"^**, then the "false" part was entirely of her doing and the police were simply the instrument; correctly arresting and imprisoning a person they had reason to believe was a dangerous criminal.

It's a subtle but important distinction.

^* Of the type documented and debated ad nauseum in the other thread wherein a completely innocent person is placed under sufficient stress so as to cause them to have false memories/convince themselves of actual guilt.

^** Meaning she knowingly made up a false story.



In fact, we can debate endlessly how glass should behave when hit by a rock and how messy Romanelli's room looked and the appropriateness of carrying around a kitchen knife, but I'd bet that the most significant differences between individuals in the Knox-as-guilty camp and the Knox-as-innocent one boil down to how each interprets a mere four or five things.

Knox's story about Lumumba (and the subsequent "spontaneous statement") is one of those.

If one believes the story to be a "lie" then one pretty much has to conclude that Knox is guilty of something (though not necessarily what the prosecution says). If on the other hand one believes the story to be a "false confession," then all the facts about the case get viewed through _that_ lens and the natural conclusion follows that Knox is innocent.

So I wonder out loud if all the posts about luminol vs (asparagus? I forget) juice and all those other side topics are really just distractions (not that some of them haven't been fun or interesting) from the key points like the LCN results, or is it the other way around? That one's interpretation of the key points are so diametrically opposed that there's not much to debate except the side topics?

 

[katy_did]

One thing I was a bit confused about with regard to the two police statements is how Amanda was even allowed to make that second statement at 5.45, since she was quite obviously a suspect by then but had no lawyer and the questioning wasn't recorded. I found a sort of answer to my puzzlement while looking through Amanda's court testimony, where Carla Dalla Vedova is speaking:

One thing is, that the declarations -- the sommarie informazioni testimoniali of 1:45 given without the pubblico ministero, and the spontaneous declarations of 5:45 with the pubblico ministero, should be correctly considered as constitutive elements and body of evidence as for being objective elements in the crime of slander. Another thing is their usability for the purpose of ascertaining the truth. Because, the second [5:45 declarations] were declared to be totally unusable erga omnes [for any purpose] since they were violating the right to defense of a person who was substantially a suspect. This is written by the first section of the Supreme Court. The first [1:45 declarations] are not usable contra se [against oneself], against Amanda, since those declarations were being released by the same person who was to become a suspect for that crime. So, in what concerns the acquisition of these documents for the trial dossier, as by our knowledge, we know their content, they can be there. But on the issue of their usability for any future question, the second ones, the ones where the PM was present, are absolutely not usable here. The first ones are not usable against Amanda. We would like to verbalize this.

So the second statement was presumably thrown out because Amanda was essentially a suspect, but had no lawyer, hence her right to defense was violated. So there's no question at all that the police behaved improperly there. The question is only whether she should have been made a suspect earlier. I was probably the only one confused about that, but thought I'd post it anyway just in case.

 

[Bruce Fischer]

Fulcanelli, You have mentioned that the appeal will only last for 5 days. it would be great if you could post your source for this information.

I think it's odd that you know the appeal will be 5 days and the defense teams do not. Maybe it's you that's incorrect.

 

[RWVBWL]

I don't agree. The police were asking for help; she thought she was providing help. Helping other people usually leads to rewards, not punishment. I can't imagine Amanda was fearing any consequences during this time of panic, mainly because she knew she was innocent. She didn't even attribute the police's aggression to her own behavior; she thought they were under stress from trying to solve the murder.

The same with Raffaele. One gets the feeling from the report about him telling the police his previous answers were "un sacco di cazzate” that he was feeling nothing but relief and camaraderie with the police who, unbeknownst to him, were about to arrest him for murder.

Amanda and Raffaele were innocent, so they had nothing to fear, or so they thought. If they were any less naive than that, they would already have hired lawyers themselves.

Great post Mary H!
I do not believe whatsoever that Amanda Knox suspected that the police thought that she was involved in the murder of her friend and housemate Meredith Kercher.
It must have been, in my personal opinion, a complete SHOCK to her when she was arrested...
Hmmm,
RWVBWL

Nice avatar, by the way Mary!
So pretty, I had to post a hibiscus flower of my own...
Have a nice rest of your Friday,
R.

 

[RoseMontague]

I have not been a big fan of Steve Moore. But his latest post on the "interrogation" of Amanda contains some good information on some of the less savory techniques involved.

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/FBI7.html

 

[RWVBWL]

Hi all,
Speaking of post's
check out Barbie Nadeau's recent post on The Daily Beast,
it's an interesting read, coming from a "guilter".

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-...rbie-latza-nadeau-on-new-evidence/?cid=hp:exc

Best to all(!),
on a Friday in June 2010...
RWVBWL

 

[katy_did]

I can see your point of view, and it's clear (to me) that part of her motivation was wanting to help the police. But I still can't see how she could have thought that what she said and wrote down that night might have resulted in the police just saying "Thanks for that - better late than never, eh? You can go home now".....

I agree with this too...perhaps your and Mary's perspectives are complementary rather than contradictory! I don't think the prospect of going home would have featured as some kind of short-term goal in her thoughts at all at this point, perhaps precisely because she was so naively trusting of the police, and genuinely considering the possibility that what they told her - that they had hard evidence placing her at the murder scene, that she may have 'repressed' memories of being there - was true. It seems extremely unlikely to me that she would have accused Patrick and admitted to being present at the murder so that she'd be allowed to go home quicker!

I don't know whether she was conscious that she wouldn't be allowed to go home afterwards or not, or whether she just wasn't thinking about it, but I highly doubt the statements against Patrick were made because she thought the police would say 'thanks' and let her go straight home afterwards.

 

[RWVBWL]

I have not been a big fan of Steve Moore. But his latest post on the "interrogation" of Amanda contains some good information on some of the less savory techniques involved.

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/FBI7.html

Hi RoseMontague,
Thanks for the link!

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/FBI7.html

All I have wow, simply WOW!
RWVBWL

PS-Thank you Mr. Moore for your help in changing perceptions that Miss Amanda Knox, and her boyfriend Mr. Raffaele Sollecito, might be somehow involved in the brutal murder of Miss Meredith Kercher, R.I.P.

 

[RoseMontague]

Hi RoseMontague,
Thanks for the link!

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/FBI7.html

All I have wow, simply WOW!
RWVBWL

PS-Thank you Mr. Moore for your help in changing perceptions that Miss Amanda Knox, and her boyfriend Mr. Raffaele Sollecito, might be somehow involved in the brutal murder of Miss Meredith Kercher, R.I.P.

The thing about this article is that it ties in nicely with what we have been talking about Amanda and her lack of logic with that false confession. To me, the high number of police involved with her questioning is also explained if they were employing some form of the tag-teaming he talks about. I had not believed they had a plan to break her before now. It is a very plausible scenario.

 

[BobTheDonkey]

The thing about this article is that it ties in nicely with what we have been talking about Amanda and her lack of logic with that false confession. To me, the high number of police involved with her questioning is also explained if they were employing some form of the tag-teaming he talks about. I had not believed they had a plan to break her before now. It is a very plausible scenario.

Is it so unreasonable to assume that this is pretty standard Police procedure? What, the Police aren't allowed to use intense techniques to elicit the truth? At the point that Amanda was being tag-teamed by the Police, the Police had just had Raffaele drop her alibi - along with the text message and her "inability" (read: refusal, she remembered as she evidenced later when she blurted out that Patrick was the killer) to remember to whom she'd sent it.

I don't feel the Police acted out of malice, nor intent to find Amanda guilty. To get her to tell the truth (for a change), perhaps. But Amanda didn't exactly break, now did she? She took the out the Police offered her - she fingered an innocent man.

In fact, at no point did Amanda accept any blame for what happened (other than, perhaps, bringing Patrick home). She attempted, again, during her "confession" (really just an accusation) to deflect the guilt from herself and onto another person, whom she knew was innocent. Even if I didn't believe she was involved with the murder, there is nothing that can be said in her defense that removes this burden. Nothing.

 

[stilicho]

Once one's words have landed oneself in custody, one should make only those statements that one's lawyer approves. Fulcanelli's suggestion to the contrary makes me shudder for his clients, if he ever becomes a defense attorney.

...

The real responsibility for Mr. Lumumba's being in custody reside with both Amanda and her interrogators; however, without a recording of the interrogation, it is impossible to divide up responsibility in a quantitative way.

You're likely correct about some of this. It was Amanda's fault that Patrick was arrested. After her "gift" failed to impress the authorities, there wasn't much she could do on her own to free him. Any attempt to do so would have complicated her own defence. "Guilters"--if that's who we are--feel that Amanda didn't show any remorse for declaring Patrick to be Meredith's murderer. She probably never will because there's no pay-off for her now. Amanda's "gift" was her only attempt to beg his forgiveness but it was couched in self-interested language.

We have been over the FOA talking point of the lack of audio-visual records before and there's no reason to rehash them. If you think, as I do, that Amanda Knox pretty much needs a lawyer on her speed dial at all times, then the whole point is moot. She'd be caught doing something else risky or stupid and just press one button and "lawyer up".

Those of us who have relatives or friends who engage in high-risk behaviours counsel them to do this beforehand. I am sure that our street-wise friend RWVBWL would confirm this. If he's anywhere around Huntington Beach then we'd know what each other meant.

In any case, the interviews were obviously recorded somehow or there'd be no point in even having them.

I wonder why it was, then, that Curatolo felt the need to drop any mention of the "witches' costumes" when he came to testify in court...?

I don't know. Do you? Cites?

By the way, in general, I do think that "naive" appears to be a far more appropriate adjective to describe Amanda Knox than "cunning", "stupid", "sophisticated" or "intellectual".

"Naive" fits. So does "manipulative" and "remorseless".

 

[stilicho]

The thing about this article is that it ties in nicely with what we have been talking about Amanda and her lack of logic with that false confession. To me, the high number of police involved with her questioning is also explained if they were employing some form of the tag-teaming he talks about. I had not believed they had a plan to break her before now. It is a very plausible scenario.

Steve seems to have forgotten that Amanda wasn't there for eight hours before she accused Patrick of murder. They scarcely had time to set up the chairs and locate an interpreter for her. The forty hours prior to 05 NOV 2007 is during the time she successfully lied to the police. It was not Amanda who they wanted to talk to on 05 NOV 2007 but Raffaele.

The person of interest was never Amanda (or at least only her). It was Raffaele. He was the one found at the cottage with no real reason to be there. He was the one who went to the Questura on 02 NOV 2007 even though he would have been under absolutely no obligation to go there.

If this thread (and the previous one) were called the Raffaele Sollecito case then Bruce, Charlie, and Chris would have to start all over. That's the problem with the public's perception of everything from Meredith's last hours through the arrests to the trials and verdicts. It was never about Amanda Knox. The police wanted to know a lot more about Raffaele. It was his apartment that the knife fetish, the serial killer admiration, and the first hints of the web of deceit showed up. His phone records. His computer. His missing alibis.

If the "bad cop" routine showed up anywhere at the Questura on the evening of 05 NOV 2007 it was in Raffaele's room and not Amanda's. He was the one who cracked under the pressure. She just changed her story (yet again) and told them Patrick murdered her roommate.

 

[Mary_H]

I'm not denying anything at all. It was indeed in Amanda's power to clarify things and she did not. It's no good her privately telling her mother, it's the police, the judge, Patrick's lawyers she needed to tell, to make an official statement to, be it face to face or via sending them a written and signed statement.

Who made that rule? Was Amanda aware of it? How was she to obtain access to these people, whose names or titles she no doubt was clueless about? I can hear her conversation with her lawyer:

Amanda: "Mr Dalla Vedova, may I speak to you about Patrick? As you and my mother and the international news media well know, I very much regret having named him as the murderer. What should I do about it?"

Dalla Vedova: "Don't worry about it, Amanda, I have already told the police and the prosecutors that you are sure you were not at the scene of the crime and therefore could not know whether or not Patrick was there."

Amanda: "Should I make a statement?"

Dalla Vedova: "No, no, no, don't do that. Let me do the talking. Besides, as familiar as I am with the Perugian courts and Italian law, I can tell you that your conversations in your jail cell have already been recorded. As I said, the prosecutors and police know how you feel."

Amanda: "But Mr. Dalla Vedova! Over the next couple of years, dozens of people on the internet are going to write that I knew Patrick was innocent, but I left him in jail to rot! Folks like Fi, Fu, sti, Mr. D and The Donkey will all say things like, "And it's no good Amanda's lawyers passing on some message, by proxy - 'Now Amanda says 'X' - Amanda has to actually say 'X' to the people that matter."

Dalla Vedova: "Hohoho, Amanda, you slay me! No one would make such ridiculous, illogical claims! If that were true, you wouldn't need a lawyer at all, would you? What will these people be thinking, that you'll be running the Capanne prison by then? Haha! Trust me, honey -- you can't get Patrick out of prison any more than you get can yourself out, and that's a fact!"

 

[Mary_H]

I agree with this too...perhaps your and Mary's perspectives are complementary rather than contradictory! I don't think the prospect of going home would have featured as some kind of short-term goal in her thoughts at all at this point, perhaps precisely because she was so naively trusting of the police, and genuinely considering the possibility that what they told her - that they had hard evidence placing her at the murder scene, that she may have 'repressed' memories of being there - was true. It seems extremely unlikely to me that she would have accused Patrick and admitted to being present at the murder so that she'd be allowed to go home quicker!

I don't know whether she was conscious that she wouldn't be allowed to go home afterwards or not, or whether she just wasn't thinking about it, but I highly doubt the statements against Patrick were made because she thought the police would say 'thanks' and let her go straight home afterwards.

If Amanda bought the police's version that she had repressed the incident, she may have assumed that they were assuming it had been traumatic for her, since that's usually the explanation for repressed memories. In other words, she would be thinking that the police believed Amanda was a victim of Patrick, too -- that maybe he had forced her to hook him up with Meredith, and forced her to cower in the kitchen while something horrible was going on in the bedroom.

The police may very well have given Amanda the impression -- or she may have come to the conclusion via her own thought processes -- that they were trying to help her get at her "own truth," as well as the truth about the crime, and that they would support her afterward for what she had gone through in helping them.

High school and college kids are oriented toward thinking that way, what with all the counseling, retreats, self-exploration exercises and so on their teachers require of them.

 

[Bob001]

In fact, at no point did Amanda accept any blame for what happened (other than, perhaps, bringing Patrick home). She attempted, again, during her "confession" (really just an accusation) to deflect the guilt from herself and onto another person, whom she knew was innocent.

This only works against Knox if she knew that Lumumba was innocent, which would only be the case if she were guilty herself. But if she was innocent, and the cops aggressively said, "Who could have done this? Who do you know? Who sent you a message?," she would have given them the name they wanted. They might even have convinced her that Lumumba did do it. She might have believed that the cops knew more than she did. If she was innocent, she wouldn't have been at the crime scene and could not have known that Lumumba didn't do it. If she was guilty, it would have made more sense for her to blame someone else that she knew was there, most likely Guede, or maybe make up a story about a mysterious stranger. The fact that she accused a person who could not have been there might reasonably be interpreted to mean that she wasn't there herself.

 

[Malkmus]

I stumbled across this story about a man named Gary Gauger whose conviction and later exoneration have some interesting parallels to what is alleged by the Knox defense team. There is more about the story provided in the link, the bolded parts are by me. It's interesting that the false confession was not the only factor in deciding his guilt. The scenario which led to his conviction was also backed by forensic evidence placing him at the scene (hairs), and the pathologist who performed the autopsies. During the interrogation, the confession was elicited via the police introducing a hypothetical scenario and tricking the victim with false evidence of his guilt.

http://www.thejusticeproject.org/profiles/gary-gauger/

In January of 1994, Gary Gauger of McHenry County, Illinois was wrongfully sentenced to death for the murder of his parents. Despite an exhaustive search, no physical evidence was found linking Gauger to the crime. After an all-night interrogation, Gauger made statements that police and prosecutors claimed constituted a confession. He was sentenced to die based only on an unrecorded testimony he denied making. In March of 1996, Gauger was freed on appeal because of trial improprieties. The true murderer of his parents was discovered several years after Gauger’s case was reversed and remanded.

Gauger was indicted on May 5, 1993, on two counts of murder. He denied that he had confessed, claiming he had made the statements only hypothetically after his interrogators persuaded him it was possible he had committed the double murder during an alcoholic blackout. The statements were not electronically recorded, and deputies made no contemporaneous recording of them.

At a hearing on a pretrial motion to suppress the alleged confession, Gary testified that deputies had induced him to speculate about how he might have committed the crime. He said they accomplished this by telling him that he had failed a polygraph examination and that clothes drenched in his parents’ blood had been found in his room. In fact, the polygraph had been inconclusive and there were no blood-drenched clothes.

 

[Sherlock Holmes]

This only works against Knox if she knew that Lumumba was innocent, which would only be the case if she were guilty herself. But if she was innocent, and the cops aggressively said, "Who could have done this? Who do you know? Who sent you a message?," she would have given them the name they wanted. They might even have convinced her that Lumumba did do it. She might have believed that the cops knew more than she did. If she was innocent, she wouldn't have been at the crime scene and could not have known that Lumumba didn't do it. If she was guilty, it would have made more sense for her to blame someone else that she knew was there, most likely Guede, or maybe make up a story about a mysterious stranger. The fact that she accused a person who could not have been there might reasonably be interpreted to mean that she wasn't there herself.

I think, if she were guilty, she likely wouldn't name Guede because she was afraid of him, and he was still on the loose plus, once they pick up Guede, then he can tell them of her involvement - she's safer nameing a guy like Patrick, probally the only other black guy she knew, and the police has mentioned him.