Thank you for the welcome. However, I should note that I do not post at the PMF forums, and I'm not sure why you would assume that to be the case.
This is not the first time there has been cross-forum drift between the JREF forums and other forums which cater to believers in non-mainstream theories, and if you are being less than completely honest about your familiarity with such other forums you would be far from the first to do so.
You wouldn't even be the first cross-forum poster to make claims about relevant personal expertise which turned out to be less than factual, if indeed your claims to personal expertise are not founded in fact.
So call it a view informed by my previous experiences.
Likewise, there is no reason to believe that any one instance is entirely non-representative of the phenomenon as a whole. At any rate, your line of argument is largely moot, because I have had a multitude of experiences with crime and the law that inform my judgment of AK's & RS's guilt. It is not simply one data point.
I think you are failing to grasp the point: No one person's opinion or experiences should ever be taken as authoritative, when properly collected scientific data is available as an alternative authority. I don't care if you tell us you've been in and out of the prison system for eighty years in fifty different countries, as well as having been a police officer, lawyer, judge and hit man. It doesn't matter.
We have scientific studies regarding the issue, which any rational person will take as trumping the opinions of an anonymous internet source with unverifiable claims to personal expertise.
Even allowing for a higher probablility of AK giving a false statement than a random sample of the population, all you have is that - a higher probability. You don't know that it happened in this case. I believe that it probably didn't.
So you agree then that there is reasonable doubt as to whether or not Amanda's statement accusing Lumumba and putting herself at the scene was a false statement elicited by sleep deprivation, physical abuse and sustained interrogation? That's fine then, we can add it to the pile of irrelevant, inconclusive "evidence" and move on.
The evidence that Amanda's false statement was the result of abuse was? Was she able to identify the person or persons who abused her? Her defense attornies presented how many witnesses that testified that they also had been abused by the Perugia police? Her defense attornies entered how many reports of abuse by the Perugia police into evidence?
Rhetorical questions are a convenient way of avoiding actually making any factual claims or declarative statements. If you have a point to make, I suggest you rewrite it in the form of factual claims supporting a specific conclusion, instead of "Just Asking Questions" (or JAQing off as it's sometimes referred to around here).
I've already stated the facts that led me to my conclusion, and what my conclusion is. Your turn.
Exactly the point that Stellafone was making about diverting topics tominutia. Whether Raffaele said that he cut Meredith or merely touched her is irrelevant. The fact is that he did not contest that some of Meredith's DNA was on the blade of the knife.
I think you need to reread the relevant posts again, because you are clearly failing to understand the point which is being contested. The PMF talking point, which is malignant nonsense, is that Raffaele wrote that he touched Meredith with the blade of the knife. He did not do so: He wrote that he touched
Amanda with the blade of the knife, presumably speculating that Amanda somehow had DNA from Meredith on her hand at that time.
The PMF spin is that he was claiming that Meredith was in his house when he was cooking dinner one night. The fact that neither he nor anyone else has ever claimed that Meredith was ever at his house, before or since, doesn't seem to bother them, nor does the fact that this talking point makes zero sense. (The problem with partisan echo chambers like PMF is that confirmation bias runs amok and claims like this gets picked up and repeated despite the fact that they are patent nonsense).
Since this was written
after he had been told by the police that Meredith's DNA was on his kitchen knife and he was trying to make sense of this claim, claiming that "the fact is that he did not contest that some of Meredith's DNA was on the blade of the knife" is also malignant nonsense. It is not indicative of criminality to take the police at their word - at worst it is indicative of naivety when it came to how the Perugia police and Mignini were tackling the case.
We do? And how would have Raffaele's DNA gotten into Meredith's bedroom?
He was a frequent visitor to the house and would have shed skin cells all over it as human beings do, and the bra clasp had six weeks to sit around gathering dust in a corner. That's ignoring the demonstrated flaws in police handling of the bra clasp which could have contaminated it, and ignoring the fact that we
know that the bra clasp was contaminated with foreign DNA because it had DNA from multiple unknown people on it. So unless you are espousing a theory where AK, RS, RG and two or three extra people all ganged up on Meredith, with most of them taking turns handling the bra clasp for some damned strange reason, you have to concede that irrelevant, foreign DNA got all over the bra clasp.
That's also ignoring the possibility of outright falsification.
We've cited papers showing that the dust from well-travelled corridors can contain testable levels of DNA, albeit relatively degraded. It's consistent with what we know of the topic that an object gathering dust in a house where someone is a frequent visitor could pick up trace amounts of DNA from that visitor. As such, it looks to me like one more piece of "evidence" which is inconclusive and can't get us to proof beyond reasonable doubt.
