This is my response to Fiona's post - apologise in advance for its brevity in places, but as I stated earlier my time for posting is relatively limited just at the moment.
Fiona said:
1. I believe that there is phone evidence to show that AK was not at RS's house when she received the text from Lumumba....
2. The fact that they both turned off their phones at about the same time does seem important to me...
3. The evidence from the computer that night is important simply because it proves RS did not do what he said he did...
4. RS says AK went out. Thus he destroyed her alibi...
5. If we try to construct their movements from 9:10 until the following morning...
Points one to five, shown in highly abbreviated form above, are to my mind not strongly relevant to the question of Amanda and Raffaele's guilt in regards to the murder of Meredith. It's simply not the case that either they were perfectly honest
and perfectly accurate in their recollection of events, or they murdered Meredith. Whether the alleged discrepancies are the result of lies on the part of the accused, errors, forced errors (like Amanda's coerced accusation of Lumumba), perceived errors or whatever, none of this puts them in the frame as murderers.
6. The evidence that there was more than one attacker is crucial, to my mind. If that is displaced then the case is very different. I have not seen the autopsy report or pictures. I cannot speak to the strength of that evidence and I know it is disputed. From what I have read a single attacker could not have done what is alleged and I note that in order to sustain that idea some have gone so far as to allege necrophilia. All that tells me is that they are desperate, because that is such an unlikely scenario that I cannot take it seriously. Others have argued more reasonably and have proposed that the injuries could indeed have been caused by one attacker. I am hoping the report will clarify this for me because so far I have not seen enough to say for myself: Micheli was somewhat difficult to understand (in poor translation) about this part. Were I the defence I would concentrate my efforts on this part, because if there was only one attacker there is real doubt. Indeed I do not think the conviction could stand.
I've never gotten a clear and convincing story as to exactly what about Meredith's injuries supposedly proved there were multiple attackers. Whenever I've tried to run such claims to ground it always seems to end in statements from the prosecution about Meredith's injuries being
consistent with multiple attackers, which is not remotely the same thing.
As such my current view is that the available evidence does not support the theory that Meredith was attacked by more than one person.
If that is obvious to me it is obvious to the defence: it always has been. Yet they did not manage to displace that evidence. Perhaps it was poor defence but I doubt it.
This particular line of argument I have seen before and I find it inane. We all know Amanda and Raffaele were found guilty, so anyone entertaining doubts about their guilt must presumably believe that they were not defended in court as well as they should have been. The argument "If X was true the defence would have proved it, the defence did no prove X was true, hence X is false" is not compelling to anyone who thinks that the evidence did not support a sound conviction.
7.There is no doubt that Guede was there. He has changed his account several times and so he is not a reliable witness. Without meaning any disrespect at all the certainty that he did not have a consensual sexual encounter with Meredith needs to be addressed...
No. It doesn't. Even if you magically proved right now that he did have a consensual sexual encounter with Meredith it would not close off the possibility that he murdered her too, hence I don't see any relevance. However we agree that the balance of evidence supports the view that there was no consensual sexual encounter.
8. If we accept more than one attacker...
We don't, so 8 and 10 are taken care of immediately.
9. Guede's faeces really puzzle me...
No relevance.
10. If there was no other person there and there was more than one attacker that only leaves RS and/or AK. RS left dna on the bra clasp. This is also disputed and it is certainly unfortunate that it was not colllected timeously. But in fact that seems to me to make contamination in the lab vanishingly unlikely. And there is no route for contamination at the scene, no matter how much the forensic police are criticised for poor practice. There is just no place for it to have come from. So I think that alone makes RS party to the crime. But it is not all we have. There is his footprint on the bath mat. Despite the attempts to attribute it to Guede there seems no doubt that it is RS's print.
My understanding is that there is excellent reason to doubt that the bathmat print was RS's, because it's inconsistent with the known deformity of RS's foot. In fact I'd highlight this claim as one of the one's we've falsified which the Amanda-is-guilty camp keep popping back up like a whack-a-mole.
The bra clasp I also find much less than compelling. Partially because Rudy cut Meredith's bra off with a knife, and hence there was no reason for anyone to be messing around with her bra clasp in the first place. Partially because if RS
was trying to wrestle her bra off then there should have been an excellent chance to find his DNA along with Rudy's on the bra or on Meredith's person, but it's absent from everything except the clasp. Partially because it's evidence that miraculously appeared to support an already-existing, ludicrous theory, which is consistent with falsification.
11. So far as RS is concerned there are also the luminol prints. These have been strongly attacked and I do not know if it true that luminol cannot accurately show the size of a print, as has been claimed. I am going to see what the report has to say on that. Or perhaps people can explain it to me better. At present I just do not know what weight to give that evidence.
Again this looks to me very much like a prosecution attempt to let the theory lead to the evidence, instead of the other way around. The same footprint "expert" who claimed that the bathmat print was RS's was also responsible for the other dubious claims about the luminol footprints: I don't think his opinion counts for much at this point. We know he's unreliable and told the story the prosecution wanted to hear.
12. We now turn to AK. What we have here is her dna mixed with Meredith's blood in several places in the bathroom: and in Filomena's room IIRC. (I may have that the wrong way round: it is very late here) It has been argued that this could have happened at any time. If that were true then it is such an elementary mistake that it should have been very easy for the defence experts to displace the claim. Once again their failure to do that leads me to believe that Stefanoni's assertion that it cannot happen like that is correct. And if that is accepted then it means that AK was there too.
This is the same argument I called inane before, and I stand by that position. It's simply a fact of DNA evidence that it tells you nothing about when the evidence was deposited except in the very crudest way. The fact that individual swabs picked up DNA from both Meredith and AK, taken from a bathroom they both used, proves absolutely nothing.
14. The knife is heavily disputed as to Meredith's dna: whether it is there; whether it is hers; whether there was contamination etc. I have no doubt that it is there; that it is hers...
My understanding is that the test that was done for blood on the blade was more sensitive than the test for DNA, and came up negative. So if we give those tests credence then there was none of Meredith's blood on the blade, yet her DNA was there. I find it hard to imagine clearer evidence for contamination (or falsification) being the cause of the positive DNA result - if the DNA did not get there in Meredith's blood, and we can rule than out, then how did it get there if not by contamination somewhere in the handling procedure?
15. So now we have all three involved as i see it...
Well, no. Even if the DNA test result on the knife was kosher and wasn't contradicted by the test for blood, once again DNA test don't show what time things happened. Amanda's DNA on the knife handle has a perfectly innocent explanation, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that said DNA had to be deposited at the same time Meredith's DNA got on the blade. At best the result could hope to show that the knife was the murder weapon, it can't implicate Amanda.
16. There is then the mop...
Irrelevant again.
17. The phones are important too...
Not that I can see.
18. There has been a lot of discussion of the alleged break in. The absence of glass or footprints outside settles it for me that there was no break in through that window...
As has been discussed recently nobody has a terribly compelling case about what happened with the window, but the prosecution case for how it was faked isn't any more believable than any other story. Because of Rudy's alleged involvement in housebreaking involving a rock on another occasion I say this fits his MO and the least worst story is that Rudy did it for some reason.
19. Guede's footprints go straight out of the door...
This is that same damn mole popping up again: We can have a high degree of confidence that Rudy left a bloody footprint in the bathroom after killing Meredith, hence he didn't go straight out the door. He went to the bathroom, almost certainly cleaned himself up a bit, and may have done all sorts of other things before finally departing.
20. there has been a lot of discussion of the locked door: both who locked it and why. I have no idea why. But again the footprints tell me that Guede did not lock that door...
Another mole - the meme seems to have spread around that Rudy's footprints pointed away from the door or something, and in the PMF echo chamber it's achieved the level of believed fact. As far as I understand the actual evidence this is exactly backwards, and Rudy's foot was facing the door in exactly the kind of way you would expect it to. There is no anomaly there.
Clearly there is also the significance of knox's visit to the cottage the next morning and the inconsistencies in the phone calls and the panic/serenity about the locked door: and most importantly her accusation against Lumumba
Now we get to the positive case for AK and RS's innocence as requested, starting with that accusation against Lumumba you think is important.
Her accusation is a classic false, coerced confession. It took place after extensive interrogation and physical abuse, she doesn't even claim to clearly remember it herself, she retracted it afterwards, it makes little sense if AK was guilty and it fits perfectly with what the police at the time were trying to prove. One of the few things I'm certain about in this case is that the Perugia police physically and verbally harassed AK until she came out with the statement they wanted her to come out with, and that her statement has no relation to the truth.
Their attempts to sue her and her family for pointing this out are, in my view, utterly morally contemptible. This is a point about this case that I do feel strongly about.
This is a point that ones whole interpretation of the case hinges on. The PMF people have put in a lot of effort trying to whitewash AK's forced confession into something she did completely voluntarily, but they have to do so without ever really addressing the core issue, which is that the vagueness of her confession is perfectly consistent with what we know of coerced confessions and if Amanda knew enough about the topic to credibly fake one she's a criminal genius, plus the confession miraculously fit the existing police theory while having no relation to reality.
I don't think you can look at the facts without concluding that the Perugia police were engaging in culpably unethical behaviour to fit the evidence to their theory from a very early stage, and once you've drawn that conclusion the barrier to thinking it likely they falsified the DNA evidence on the clasp and knife is greatly lowered.
Apart from that DNA evidence, there simply isn't anything concrete to tie AK and RS to the murder. The footprint evidence has to my mind been totally discredited, there's no motive, there's no evidence the three accused knew each other remotely well enough to make the prosecution story plausible, there's simply nothing to make the prosecution fantasy credible.
That brings us back to Hume, and weighing up the relative improbability of competing narratives. The prosecution narrative is highly unlikely, it hangs on DNA evidence which is questionable even if it's provenance is completely above-board, and said evidence passed through the hands of police we know to have been bent on supporting the aforementioned highly-unlikely story. The alternative theory that Rudy murdered Meredith by himself and did a runner, possibly after making some effort to hide the body and make it look like a random break-in, is not a particularly unusual story as sex murders go. On balance, the reasonable person should go with the less unlikely theory.
