What I find perplexing is that there seems to be an excuse for absolutely everything that Amanda and Raffaele said or did. From a reasonable point of view, there is a lot to be concerned about. I can accept a few things being out of sinc, but everything? Being mixed up about phone calls can perhaps be explained away, but forgetting the phone call to mom is *surprising*. It was made at the time that Amanda was not confused, Meredith 's murder had not being discovered, so no trauma.
Not everything in Amanda and Raffaele's behavior is out of sync. The things that are out of sync are minor, and normal under the circumstances; that is, we can't be sure anyone else in the same anomalous situation would have acted any differently, if not worse. We excuse Amanda and Raffaele primarily because they were young and naive, and because they were fish out of water.
The Perugian authorities, on the other hand, were not young and naive, and were fully in their own element. In terms of what we have a right to expect from police, the inconsistencies in their behavior are ten times as egregious as the defendants'.
We know the police's version of the time of their arrival on the morning of November 2nd is highly suspect. We know the police officer who stepped into the room to lift the duvet from Meredith later lied when he denied doing it. We know the police would not allow Raffaele to contact his father at the time of his interrogation.
We know the Perugian chief of police, the Italian Minister of the Interior, the prosecutors and at least one judge declared the case solved before the forensic evidence from the crime scene had been analyzed. We know they acted to take Amanda into custody before her mother could arrive from the United States to protect her.
We know the ways the kitchen knife and bra clasp were retrieved are statistically unlikely, to say the very least. We know the methods used to test them have raised the eyebrows of scientists worldwide.
We know prison officials lied to Amanda when they told her - twice - that she had tested positively for HIV. We know this was a form of psychological torture.
Shall I go on? All of these behaviors are extraordinary, in most cases unethical, and in some cases illegal. Yet all of them have been excused by the guilters time and time again.
The likelihood that the police were familiar with Patrick, directed Amanda's interrogation in the direction of focusing on Patrick, and had ample time to interview Patrick before the dramatic dawn raid and car parade through Perugia, have all been rationally demonstrated numerous times, but the facts seem to fall on deaf ears (or blind eyes, in this case). There is always an excuse for the police and the prosecutors, who, incidentally, don't need anybody to make excuses for them. They are the ones with all the power.
To me, focusing on a phone call to Mom instead of on a pattern of systemic incompetence or even corruption does not represent a "reasonable point of view."
