Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[BobTheDonkey]

A door that opens from itself right after you leave the house is not going to arouse suspicion in any way. Especially when it's a black guy leaving. It will certainly be less conspicuous than the same black guy locking it. Ahem...
The really problematic part isn't locking/leaving the door but rather the way away from the house where meeting someone might pose a danger to the perpetrator leaving the scene. The whole act with the door is negligible. Especially as the door is set in a way that provides cover enough.
And then is the funny bit about the perp being cunning with locking the door to Meredith's room to get himself more time. If he is that methodical and clever in that situation, wouldn't he want to lock the front door too? Because having it swing around open is sure to arouse suspicion. As is the break-in (staged or otherwise) or leaving it unlocked (and therefore not providing the illusion that nobody is at home).
Which also rubs me wrong when it comes to taking the phones with him. If the perp is calculating enough to think about the phones ringing shattering that illusion, why is he then so stupid as to leave a big signpost with the open/unlocked front door?
Looks like inconsistent MO to me. (Not that that doesn't happen, but it is strange that a perp would have enough cool in such a situation to think of details like the phones and then let one very obvious one hanging.)

I am still curious about the footprints: They do not seem to be blood from the tests. But how did DNA from both Meredith and Amanda end up in Filomena's room? (And what kind of material containing DNA was it?)

Not to mention the other traces of his presence - stool in the toilet, bloody footprints from Meredith's door to the front door, etc.

 

[Fine]

My guess is Fine learned about kicking in front doors from TV and movies, where people can just pop them open with a single kick at will.

In real life police use battering rams for a reason.

_______________________

Oh my. Armchair mountaineering and now armchair lock smithing.

Quadraginta has demonstrated his familiarity with door locks---no?---so let's hear his judgment.

Don't be surprised when he tells you the kid down the street ---not to mention "athletic" Rudy---can kick in your front door anytime he chooses. (But you heard it here first!)

The cop's battering ram is a luxury. The kid down the street can't afford one. That's the reason.

///

 

[Malkmus]

A door that opens from itself right after you leave the house is not going to arouse suspicion in any way. Especially when it's a black guy leaving. It will certainly be less conspicuous than the same black guy locking it. Ahem...
The really problematic part isn't locking/leaving the door but rather the way away from the house where meeting someone might pose a danger to the perpetrator leaving the scene. The whole act with the door is negligible. Especially as the door is set in a way that provides cover enough.
And then is the funny bit about the perp being cunning with locking the door to Meredith's room to get himself more time. If he is that methodical and clever in that situation, wouldn't he want to lock the front door too? Because having it swing around open is sure to arouse suspicion. As is the break-in (staged or otherwise) or leaving it unlocked (and therefore not providing the illusion that nobody is at home).
Which also rubs me wrong when it comes to taking the phones with him. If the perp is calculating enough to think about the phones ringing shattering that illusion, why is he then so stupid as to leave a big signpost with the open/unlocked front door?
Looks like inconsistent MO to me. (Not that that doesn't happen, but it is strange that a perp would have enough cool in such a situation to think of details like the phones and then let one very obvious one hanging.)

I am still curious about the footprints: They do not seem to be blood from the tests. But how did DNA from both Meredith and Amanda end up in Filomena's room? (And what kind of material containing DNA was it?)

Some people really seem to be having a hard time grasping the notion that the door was likely shut by Rudy on his way out, and not left swinging open. Are you guys deliberately ignoring the fact that the door, when shut, would often open from the wind and that Rudy would not have been aware of this little detail?

 

[Moss]

Some people seem to have a hard time reading what quadraginta wrote about that. Depending on how he closed it it actually would have been pretty obvious that it wouldn't stay shut.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

A door that opens from itself right after you leave the house is not going to arouse suspicion in any way. Especially when it's a black guy leaving. It will certainly be less conspicuous than the same black guy locking it. Ahem...
The really problematic part isn't locking/leaving the door but rather the way away from the house where meeting someone might pose a danger to the perpetrator leaving the scene. The whole act with the door is negligible. Especially as the door is set in a way that provides cover enough.
And then is the funny bit about the perp being cunning with locking the door to Meredith's room to get himself more time. If he is that methodical and clever in that situation, wouldn't he want to lock the front door too? Because having it swing around open is sure to arouse suspicion. As is the break-in (staged or otherwise) or leaving it unlocked (and therefore not providing the illusion that nobody is at home).

I think this is more Texas Sharpshooter thinking. If Rudy did it, then after the murder he was awash in adrenaline and aware that he was in deep trouble. People in that state don't behave completely rationally, but nor are they acting completely randomly.

You've decided that locking the door to Meredith's room was "methodical and clever", but unless you have mind reading powers you don't know whether it was methodical and clever, or just a frightened criminal's attempts to delay discovery any way they could think of, or something else.

Which also rubs me wrong when it comes to taking the phones with him. If the perp is calculating enough to think about the phones ringing shattering that illusion, why is he then so stupid as to leave a big signpost with the open/unlocked front door?

Once again you don't know whether this was a "calculating" move to delay discovery of the body, or just a dumb criminal taking valuable objects he thought he could sell quickly (possibly he had stolen and sold mobile phones before), which he shortly afterwards realised were evidence that could tie him to the murder and so he dumped them, or something else.

Looks like inconsistent MO to me. (Not that that doesn't happen, but it is strange that a perp would have enough cool in such a situation to think of details like the phones and then let one very obvious one hanging.)

Seeing as you made up the fact that he was "cool", it's not our fault that your "cool" hypothesis doesn't fit all the facts.

I am still curious about the footprints: They do not seem to be blood from the tests. But how did DNA from both Meredith and Amanda end up in Filomena's room? (And what kind of material containing DNA was it?)

DNA tests tell you nothing about when the DNA-bearing material was deposited so there is absolutely no reason to think that the DNA from Meredith and the DNA from Amanda were deposited on that spot at the same time, and absolutely no reason to think that non-blood DNA got there on the day of the murder.

 

[Malkmus]

Some people seem to have a hard time reading what quadraginta wrote about that. Depending on how he closed it it actually would have been pretty obvious that it wouldn't stay shut.

Quadragnita is just guessing. A guess that contradicts Amanda's testimony that the door could be shut for at least a short period of time.

we had to lock that door, but I thought, if someone didn't close it properly, obviously it would open.

I closed the door, but I didn't lock it, because I thought maybe someone would come, maybe they had just gone out to get cigarettes or whatever.

The point is, it could be closed without locking it. Whether it took another 30 seconds or hour to re-open is irrelevant.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

_______________________

Oh my. A priori mountaineering and now a priori lock smithing.

Quadraginta has demonstrated his familiarity with door locks---no?---so let's hear his judgment.

Don't be surprised when he tells you the kid down the street ---not to mention "athletic" Rudy---can kick in your front door anytime he chooses. (But you heard it here first!)

I think you should move those goalposts back here. The question isn't whether a reasonably athletic man can kick down a randomly selected front door given time, it's whether they can do so quickly and quietly enough that a housebreaker would automatically do so rather than enter through a broken second-storey window (or talk their way inside, or whatever).

It might or might not be relevant that Rudy was caught in possession of a laptop and a phone, which were stolen from a second-storey office which was burgled after someone broke a window with a rock. Rudy's partisans at PMF will stoutly argue that since Rudy said he bought the laptop and phone from somebody else that he is probably telling the truth, and that it's definitely not evidence that Rudy has an MO of breaking into second-storey windows with rocks.

For people who see evidence of guilt in every misremembered phone call, they can be amazingly quick to handwave that away as irrelevant. Or maybe they think Amanda is a psychic criminal genius who staged the break-in that way because she knew in advance that Rudy would later be caught in possession of stolen property obtained through a break-in with that MO? Poor Rudy, how was he to know that the guy he bought the phone and laptop from used exactly the same MO that Amanda used to fake the break-in?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

No, I think the window was pretty visible from the main road (for people/cars travelling in an Easterly direction). As was the front door - although the door had the benefit of some cover from the sloping roof which formed a porch.

And it's fair to say that most of the windows in the girls' apartment were visible from the main road - from one direction or the other. Ironically, the only one which wasn't really visible from the road (I think) was Meredith's - but I believe it had a metal grill over it (possibly for that reason).

I've previously theorised that the exterior shutters on Filomena's window may have been open prior to any break-in (if indeed there was a break-in) and that any person breaking in might then - logically - have closed the exterior shutters to mask the broken window, once he was inside Filomena's room. I have a feeling that, if so, this is why Filomena's window was selected; perhaps all the other top-floor windows had their shutters firmly shut that evening - is there any evidence to show whether or not this is the case.

And one other thing that's intrigued me in this area is why an assailant would go for an upper-floor window, rather than a window in the lower (boys') apartment (which was far less exposed to the street). However, this question is answered if all the lower floor windows had the same type of metal grate that was on the window below Filomena's. Does anyone know if this is the case?

The lower windows were barred. Meredith's window wasn't barred, but it would have been hard to reach. Here is a video clip that will help address your questions:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/cottage_exterior_walkaround.mp4

 

[Moss]

I think this is more Texas Sharpshooter thinking. If Rudy did it, then after the murder he was awash in adrenaline and aware that he was in deep trouble. People in that state don't behave completely rationally, but nor are they acting completely randomly.

While I grant you that we don't know Rudy's exact mental state after the murder of Meredith that poses the same problem for your argumentation: How exactly do you know that he was neither completely out of his mind nor completely unfazed?
And you may want to tone the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" mantra down. It equally applies to the completely unfounded "physical assault and coerced confession" narrative you offered a short while back.

You've decided that locking the door to Meredith's room was "methodical and clever", but unless you have mind reading powers you don't know whether it was methodical and clever, or just a frightened criminal's attempts to delay discovery any way they could think of, or something else.

The first two are not mutually exclusive. What do you have in mind for something else?

Once again you don't know whether this was a "calculating" move to delay discovery of the body, or just a dumb criminal taking valuable objects he thought he could sell quickly (possibly he had stolen and sold mobile phones before), which he shortly afterwards realised were evidence that could tie him to the murder and so he dumped them, or something else.

Given that we don't know either way we are the nice impassé of all those things being possible. And there might as you suggested in just another of those situations a third option fitting neither of our interpretations. (Therefore your suggestion being a false dilemma.)

Seeing as you made up the fact that he was "cool", it's not our fault that your "cool" hypothesis doesn't fit all the facts.

I didn't make up a fact. That is actually just a judgment of mine on the hypothetical behaviour of Rudy in a scenario brought up by your side of the discussion.

DNA tests tell you nothing about when the DNA-bearing material was deposited so there is absolutely no reason to think that the DNA from Meredith and the DNA from Amanda were deposited on that spot at the same time, and absolutely no reason to think that non-blood DNA got there on the day of the murder.

You are jumping to conclusions. I did not imply in any way that the DNA was deposited at the same time or on the day of the murder. I really just wondered how it ended up there and what kind of material it was. It was exactly what I stated: I was just curious about it.

 

[Symbol]

Amanda Knox may not be a murderer but many people believe intuitively that she is holding back the whole truth.

Until she tells the truth, which seems to be something that doesn't do easily, well, her prison sentence will remain hefty.

Why doesn't the silly girl just come clean, especially if she is mostly innocent?

Here is why I don't support Amanda Knox:

If a reasonable person lives in a shared house and spends the night completely away from that house, watching a DVD, eating supper and then sleeping at another person's home, then returns well into the next day to discover a roommate dead...... that would be the truth and that would be the only truth.

You could interrogate that reasonable person for 50 hours, deprive them of sleep, but unless you were pulling out their toenails - which I'm certain Italian police are not in the habit of doing - they would be unlikely to find cause to suddenly announce that they were in the house and heard their roommate scream.

Or that their boss murdered her.

A normal reasonable person could be fainting of tiredness and hunger but would still say "I was away for the night, came back the next morning and she was dead." Period.

Amanda's (enabling) mother is not helping her daughter at all by claiming that every change of story, every apparent lie, is simply the whole world "misunderstanding" Amanda.

 

[Amazer]

It's a conclusion that suggests your opinions are not based on any particular insight into, or experience with, criminal matters.

Right. Now is your chance to dazzle me with your insight and experience with criminal matters.

Under the circumstances, there is nothing peculiar about a burglar not taking more valuables than are thought to have be taken from the cottage.

Please explain. Under what circumstances is it not peculiar that a burglar ransacks a room but fails to take anything of value?

The argument that one or another thing potentially of value being left at a apparent burglary suggests "staging" is, at best, inept.

It's not the only issue that leads me to believe the break-in was staged. It's just the one issue that sealed it for me.

 

[stilicho]

It might or might not be relevant that Rudy was caught in possession of a laptop and a phone, which were stolen from a second-storey office which was burgled after someone broke a window with a rock. Rudy's partisans at PMF will stoutly argue that since Rudy said he bought the laptop and phone from somebody else that he is probably telling the truth, and that it's definitely not evidence that Rudy has an MO of breaking into second-storey windows with rocks.

Did Amanda's or Raffaele's lawyers ever introduce this MO and the testimony of the victim of the burglary at their trial? They were there to defend their clients against an additional charge of staging the burglary. The prosecution provided overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that the burglary was staged and the judges unanimously agreed.

Nobody cares what Rudy said about his actions prior to the sexual assault, murder, and subsequent cover-up. The court didn't. Their lawyers didn't. But we do know as a matter of incontrovertible fact that Rudy was not there in the hours after Meredith's death when the cover-up began.

 

[Malkmus]

Why doesn't the silly girl just come clean, especially if she is mostly innocent?

Maybe because she actually wasn't involved? Just a guess...

Here is why I don't support Amanda Knox:

If a reasonable person lives in a shared house and spends the night completely away from that house, watching a DVD, eating supper and then sleeping at another person's home, then returns well into the next day to discover a roommate dead...... that would be the truth and that would be the only truth.

You could interrogate that reasonable person for 50 hours, deprive them of sleep, but unless you were pulling out their toenails - which I'm certain Italian police are not in the habit of doing - they would be unlikely to find cause to suddenly announce that they were in the house and heard their roommate scream.

So basically your point is that you don't believe it's ever possible for a false confession to happen when in actuality you could be provided with a laundry list of people who were convicted and later exonerated due to a coerced confession. It happens, so you're wrong.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Amanda Knox may not be a murderer but many people believe intuitively that she is holding back the whole truth.

Until she tells the truth, which seems to be something that doesn't do easily, well, her prison sentence will remain hefty.

Why doesn't the silly girl just come clean, especially if she is mostly innocent?

Here is why I don't support Amanda Knox:

If a reasonable person lives in a shared house and spends the night completely away from that house, watching a DVD, eating supper and then sleeping at another person's home, then returns well into the next day to discover a roommate dead...... that would be the truth and that would be the only truth.

You could interrogate that reasonable person for 50 hours, deprive them of sleep, but unless you were pulling out their toenails - which I'm certain Italian police are not in the habit of doing - they would be unlikely to find cause to suddenly announce that they were in the house and heard their roommate scream.

Up pops this mole again... and down comes the hammer.

Your personal, armchair-psychological guess about how people behave under interrogation (combined with sleep deprivation and quite possibly drugs) is both irrelevant and factually incorrect.

It's a known, scientific fact that under certain conditions, some people will start to believe whatever the police are telling them is true, and make statements to that effect even if those false statements put them in the frame for murder.

Whether or not you choose to believe this is completely irrelevant.

While I grant you that we don't know Rudy's exact mental state after the murder of Meredith that poses the same problem for your argumentation: How exactly do you know that he was neither completely out of his mind nor completely unfazed?

We know that because the evidence at the crime scene is not consistent either with a perfectly rational, informed, calculating killer doing a cover-up nor with a lunatic who is completely out of their mind.

And you may want to tone the "Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" mantra down. It equally applies to the completely unfounded "physical assault and coerced confession" narrative you offered a short while back.

No. "I'm rubber you're glue" only works in the schoolyard, if then. I don't think you understand what the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is, if you think that arguing that Amanda's false statement was a result of well-known psychological processes is an example of that fallacy.

The first two are not mutually exclusive. What do you have in mind for something else?

Sorry, were you going somewhere relevant? I don't see that point this question has.

Given that we don't know either way we are the nice impassé of all those things being possible. And there might as you suggested in just another of those situations a third option fitting neither of our interpretations. (Therefore your suggestion being a false dilemma.)

.

No. It is not an impassé. If we don't know either way there is reasonable doubt, hence a properly functioning court cannot conclude that it didn't happen that way.

Also I have to point out that in addition to not understanding what the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is, you don't understand what a dilemma is nor what a false dilemma is. If someone offers three or more options (such as my "or something else") then by definition it is not a dilemma. If someone is not presenting two alternatives as exhausting all possibilities, which do not in fact do so, they are not presenting a false dilemma and since I was presenting three or more (you remember that "or something else"?) then I cannot even in theory have been suggesting a false dilemma.

I didn't make up a fact. That is actually just a judgment of mine on the hypothetical behaviour of Rudy in a scenario brought up by your side of the discussion.

So you still made it up, but it's even further removed from reality because it's your reinterpretation of someone else's hypothetical? Gotcha.

You are jumping to conclusions. I did not imply in any way that the DNA was deposited at the same time or on the day of the murder. I really just wondered how it ended up there and what kind of material it was. It was exactly what I stated: I was just curious about it.

Much like the luminol footprints, I suspect that we'll never know and that it will never be proven to be relevant. It's just a random bullet hole that the Texas Sharpshooter drew a target around.

 

[quadraginta]

I'm not sure what your point here is. Yes, Amanda found the open door to be strange because everyone who lived there knew to lock it to prevent it from opening. If you came home and found your front door open, you'd probably find it strange. I've left my front door unlocked before by mistake, as some of you may have as well. It's a common mistake. What I think you're overlooking is that an unlocked door is not that unusual, but an open door is. And since Rudy was unaware of the faulty mechanism, leaving the door shut meant the door would be shut until someone else came home. At that point, to him, locking the front door would only have been an act of courtesy and a waste of valuable time.

I'm not sure why you're not sure. I think I've been fairly clear.

First you agree that finding the door left unlocked would be strange, then you say that leaving it unlocked would be open.

You base all this on the idea that the "broken" door latch somehow deceived Guede.

I'm just not buying it.

For one thing a door with the spring latch jammed open just doesn't feel the same as one which is merely faulty. For another you are first stating that he has to operate the deadbolt just to get out, and then claiming that there is nothing unsual about him assuming that people will not think twice about finding it unlocked when they go in. All this with a door which doesn't even have an operable handle on the outside.

I ain't buyin' it.

 

[Symbol]

Kevin Lowe: lawyer-speak combined with high-school debating language.

So tiresome, and doesn't further skeptical discussion.

 

[Fine]

something far more deeply interfused

* * * * *

A normal reasonable person could be fainting of tiredness and hunger but would still say "I was away for the night, came back the next morning and she was dead." Period.

* * * * *

_____________________________-

Yes, Symbol, well put. Damn eloquent. Either Amanda is not NORMAL or she was protecting someone....such as herself, for instance.

There's a medium-size industry on the internet manufacturing and marketing a theory of police "coercion" to explain away her "confession," while leaving her---of course--- both normal and innocent. Here, the theory runs, the coercion ain't blatant but arcane, rarefied, using secret tricks that only them cops know, and ---therefore!--- all the more insidious, irresistible and, and, well, something far more deeply interfused! Turns all of us into signing birds. (Okay, maybe not all of us, but all those young, female, blond, blue-eyed, pretty, and American.)

I know that Raffaele said in his prison diary that he had been subjected to multiple psychological tests in jail. Does anyone know whether the same is true of Amanda? I hope so. If she's innocent there must be some disturbance in the brain, a different kind of disturbance should she be guilty. Either way, it would seem, she can use some help.

///

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Yes, symbol, well put. Damn eloquent. Either Amanda is not NORMAL or she was protecting someone....such as herself, for instance.

There's a medium-size industry on the internet manufacturing and marketing a theory of police "coercion" to explain away her "confession," while leaving her---of course--- both normal and innocent. Here, the theory runs, the coercion ain't blatant but arcane, rarefied, using secret tricks that only them cops know, and ---therefore!--- all the more insidious, irresistible and, and, well, something far more deeply interfused! Turns all of us into signing birds. (Okay, maybe not all of us, but all those young, female, blond, blue-eyed, pretty, and American.)

Sometimes a straw man is so blatant that it feels somewhat redundant to even flag it as one. It feels like I'm insulting a hypothetical reader's intelligence.

As we have repeated several times now, false statements under interrogation are a well-known, well-studied scientific fact. I'm struggling to see any explanation for your post other than wilful ignorance seeing as we have made this point repeatedly just in the last few pages. The idea that false statements are a fantasy cooked up specifically to exonerate Amanda Knox by an internet "industry" dedicated to her defence is deranged fantasy.

ETA: Would I be completely off-beam if I guessed that you are repeating something you heard on PMF, that you liked the sound of?

 

[quadraginta]

Quadraginta, this whole subtopic of yours is an extended foray into the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

Kevin, you need to get more than just the one "fallacy". in your rhetorical toolbox. You're wearing that one out, and it's becoming apparent that it doesn't mean what you think it means.

<snip>

That's it. That's all the defence needs.

I'm not the defense. I'm not arguing in court. I'm not even the jury. I'm not making a judgment in court. If I was I would employ a different standard. If you were you would have to as well, since only the evidence presented in court ... as presented in court ... would be valid for you to draw a conclusion. That isn't the standard you are holding yourself to here, either.

I don't care bubkes about how they would do it in court. I'm just trying to make up my own mind about whether or not I think Knox and Sollecito were involved based on the data available to me. What is legitimate or useful in court is an entirely different subject.

It's odd that this ploy is used whenever it is helpful to discount anything which casts doubt on Knox's innocence, but the fact that she was convicted in just such a court under just such rules of evidence is always glossed over, or worse, pointed at as proof of collusion and conspiracy.

Nice to have it both ways like that.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I am still curious about the footprints: They do not seem to be blood from the tests. But how did DNA from both Meredith and Amanda end up in Filomena's room? (And what kind of material containing DNA was it?)

That's an interesting question. Until quite recently, owing to an error in a translation of the index to the DNA test results, I thought the sample in question was Rep. 176, in which Meredith's genetic markers are clearly visible and a faint secondary profile, which seems to correlate with Amanda's markers but is not called on the chart, is also visible.

I recently found out (and disclosed on this forum) that I was mistaken. The sample Stefanoni described in court was Rep. 177, which I thought had been taken in Amanda's room but was actually taken in Filomena's room.

Only half a dozen DNA samples (including two of the rock) were taken from Filomena's room. Two were from the luminol reaction on the floor, which had no shape but was just a large blob. Both clearly show Meredith's DNA, one of them clearly shows Amanda's DNA, and the other seems to show Amanda's DNA faintly. Here are the charts:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/rep_176_luminol_stain_filomena_room.gif
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/rep_176_luminol_stain_filomena_room_color.gif
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/rep_177_luminol_stain_filomena_room.gif
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/rep_177_luminol_stain_filomena_room_color.gif

Reference profiles showing where the markers are found on each allele:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/knox_profile.gif
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/kercher_profile.gif

Now we find out that a TMB test was done on the luminol reaction, and it came up negative. So what is the most likely answer here? The luminol tests were done on December 18, after dark. Typically these are the last tests done in a forensic investigation, and that seems to have been the case here. I would argue that the most likely explanation for these DNA results is that they show material from the investigator's gloves rather than anything that was on the floor.