Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Dan O.]

My translation:
...

Your translation simply shows your bias in this case. You have no knowledge who Raffaele is talking about yet you inject that it must be Meredith. The important context is that this diary entry was written after several stressful days in prison so it's entirely possible that the memory being written about is a conflagration of other events in other locations with other people that have been melded into a memory of something that has been heavily on his mind for the last three days since he was told about knife and the DNA results.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

partial profiles

There were no unassigned profiles. All the full profiles found in the DNA results were matched.

You are deliberately ignoring partial profiles. Why?

 

[quadraginta]

<snip>

If you want to read and respond to what I actually wrote, I said "I have never yet encountered a landlord who regularly inventoried the contents of the cutlery drawer". Neither have you, from what you have stated. At worst a guilty Amanda and Raffaele would have to have replaced the knife by the time they moved out of the apartment. There was no immediate threat of discovery by means of an ill-timed fork inventory, which was the claim I refuted.

'Every time a tenant takes possession' can certainly comply with a reasonable person's interpretation of "regularly". Investigators with every cause to be concerned about the whereabouts of knives could easily ask for such an inventory as part of an investigation into what should be there.

You refuted nothing.

 

[tsig]

Let's go for another trip around the repetition roundabout. The defence's job is not to prove that they know exactly why the Texas Sharpshooter put every bullet exactly where it landed. It is merely to demonstrate that the bullet's location is not proof beyond reasonable doubt that the accused did it.

We have demonstrated that sometimes burglars leave stools at the scene of a crime. It is therefore not extraordinary that Rudy did so in the process of a burglary, and it is not evidence that some alternative story where Rudy was not a lone housebreaker is true. Our job is done.



Or statements taken out of context, or statements made in an attempt to make sense of being told that there was DNA where it shouldn't have been, or that witnesses had claimed to have seen them where they had not been.



This isn't bingo, and you don't need to tick every box to win. Perfectly normal people can crack and make false statements too, those are just conditions that predispose people to do so and Amanda was subject to some of those conditions (youth, naivety, possibly drug use, probably sleep deprivation and almost certainly innocence of the crime in question).



It's funny that you aren't from PMF, because this is one of their favourite talking points and it's also totally meaningless. I deliberately avoid characterising Amanda's statement as a "false confession" myself, as opposed to a "false statement", to head off PMFers who want to head down that tangent.

So in response: Firstly, you have not shown the existence of some natural point of cleavage in human neurology such that circumstances which can provoke a false confession can not produce other false statements. Secondly, we have already cited case studies of people hauled in by police making false statements that incriminated themselves and other innocent people, just as Amanda's statement is taken to do by guilters. Therefore I conclude that this is a semantic argument in the pejorative sense: an attempt to muddle the waters with irrelevant word games.



If you want to read and respond to what I actually wrote, I said "I have never yet encountered a landlord who regularly inventoried the contents of the cutlery drawer". Neither have you, from what you have stated. At worst a guilty Amanda and Raffaele would have to have replaced the knife by the time they moved out of the apartment. There was no immediate threat of discovery by means of an ill-timed fork inventory, which was the claim I refuted.

Maybe the police had a copy of what should have been in the drawer from the landlord.

 

[JREF2010]

There is a simpler explanation for the uncompleted phone call at 8:56 PM. Meredith attempted to call her mother shortly after leaving her friend Sophie at 8:55 PM. The phone call didn't complete because at that time, Meredith would have been walking down ,URL> Medieval stone walls are not good for cell phone reception.

Meredith would know that cell phone reception at the cottage was better, and may have decided to try again when she got home.

Interesting thought.

Was the location of this 8:56pm call mentioned anywhere?

I've never seen any information or details to add to this uncompleted call, other than Rudy stating he came upon Meredith at 9pm approx. in the driveway.

Raffaele's appeal , Thoughtful's translation-

1. At 20:56 she attempted to call home. The attempt failed because either no one answered, or she wasn't in a good zone, or the network was congested. What is surprising is that she didn't try to call home again, although she usually spoke to her family before going to bed, and even several times a day. This fact together with the absence of her usual text messages seem to indicate that the events leading to the murder started around this time.

 

[Malkmus]

Wait - what? You think that RS could have plausibly explained the knife's absence by telling the cops that he'd "accidentally thrown the knife out with food preparation waste"? You mean the knife that's approximately a foot long? How does one not notice that when sweeping onion skins and potato peels into the garbage can?

Which is a more implausible scenario? Throwing away a foot-long knife in the trash because it may link you to a murder, or carrying a foot-long knife in one's purse for protection which would coincidentally come in handy when impulsively deciding to kill your roommate while forcing her to have sex with your boyfriend of one week and an acquaintance you hardly know?

 

[BobTheDonkey]

You are deliberately ignoring partial profiles. Why?

Are you seriously asking this question?

What causes a partial profile, Chris? That's right - an insufficient amount of DNA to distinguish/recreate the entire profile. Taking samples from the other roommates and boys downstairs would not have resulted in a single further match - so what, exactly, is the point of arguing incompetence from the investigators when there was no valid reason to need further control samples?

Are you saying that the partial profiles would have any effect on the results of the full profiles?

Or are you attempting to imply Stefanoni's team contaminated the scene? Because, either way, there simply wasn't enough DNA left behind to muddle anything up, now was there?

 

[Kestrel]

Interesting thought.

Was the location of this 8:56pm call mentioned anywhere?

I've never seen any information or details to add to this uncompleted call, other than Rudy stating he came upon Meredith at 9pm approx. in the driveway.

Raffaele's appeal , Thoughtful's translation-

1. At 20:56 she attempted to call home. The attempt failed because either no one answered, or she wasn't in a good zone, or the network was congested. What is surprising is that she didn't try to call home again, although she usually spoke to her family before going to bed, and even several times a day. This fact together with the absence of her usual text messages seem to indicate that the events leading to the murder started around this time.

Sophie said that she parted company with Meredith at 8:55 PM. Since we know that location (the corner of Via Lupo and Via Roscetto) and have a good idea of the route Meredith took to get home, it's rather easy to figure out where she was about one minute later.

Meredith was also seen crossing to the cottage driveway by the parking lot camera. Presuming the camera clock was 10 to 12 minutes slow, she was camera saw her a couple minutes after 9 PM. Just about right for someone walking to the cottage from Via Lupo.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

'Every time a tenant takes possession' can certainly comply with a reasonable person's interpretation of "regularly".

If you take it out of context, sure, but ideally we wouldn't do that.

Investigators with every cause to be concerned about the whereabouts of knives could easily ask for such an inventory as part of an investigation into what should be there.

This is getting increasingly silly, irrelevant and detached from reality. I think if you want us to come to agree with you that AK and RS did it you two should be focusing your efforts on more important matters like the phone records, the state of Meredith's stomach contents, the clasp and knife DNA and so on.

The existence of a kitchen knife in RS's house wasn't a secret as far as I'm aware. Any number of people besides the landlord could presumably have been questioned about whether RS's house had a kitchen knife, and confirmed that such a thing existed at point or another. There's no way any remotely sane person would think that they could cover up the fact that RS's house at one time had a kitchen knife.

However this would have been absolutely no impediment to them saying, if they are indeed the criminal genius/idiots you want them to be, that they broke the knife a week before the murder trying to cut a frozen roast or something and chucked it out. Reasonable doubt, boom, done. Even if they didn't bother to replace the knife, which was apparently a perfectly common model, they're still safe.

(Well, safe unless their hypothetical blood-spattered clothes and the supposed two murder weapons are found, which if they were guilty they would have to be worried about that point. Unlike Rudy they don't have a nice big stretch of time in which to dispose of such evidence safely, so I guess they just got really lucky, right?).

So the argument "they had to take the knife home and clean it, or else they would be totally busted when the landlord inventoried the cutlery drawer!" is silly on multiple levels. The landlord wouldn't have done that, but there are plenty of other ways it could have been established that RS owned a kitchen knife. So it's silly on that level, but it's even sillier than that because they could easily have replaced the knife anyway (because the landlord's inventory almost certainly did not include any details about the knife), and even if someone did do an inventory before they could replace it absence of a kitchen knife would not be proof of anything. From every angle they would have been much safer putting the kitchen knife with their bloody clothes and the other murder weapon to vanish forever without a trace.

However does this make any difference to the argument as a whole? If it does I don't see it. If a given chunk of the guilter story makes no sense if AK and RS are smart, that's no problem, you just assume they were idiots for that part of the story, and they disposed of all the other evidence but took home the kitchen knife. Everything's consistent with guilt if you squint hard enough.

Whereas from the perspective of the defence story, there's simply nothing to explain. So either way, no difference.

That's why I think this subtopic is getting increasingly silly. It looks to me like you've stopped trying to make a coherent story and you're just hunting for nits to pick whether or not they are relevant. The same comment applies to your argument about the door furniture: It's been shown that the actual door almost certainly couldn't be opened from the outside if both locking mechanisms were enabled, because the relevant manufacturer produces no such device, but you're picking a fight over whether such mechanisms exist at all in the universe. Who cares? I suggest you focus on aspects of the story that are actually relevant to whether AK and RS did it.

 

[Mr.D]

You seem to be missing the part where the Italian authorities raided Amanda's prison cell and confiscated everything with her writings just a day before the HIV story was published in the press. Of course, it is entirely possible that the two events are unrelated and the authorities were merely seeking samples to be analyzed by their forensic graphologist.

You're right. I did miss that part. But while it leads much credence to the idea that Knox's treatment was rather less than ethical (I think there's plenty of evidence for that), it really does nothing to advance the theory that Knox was

a) Lied to about the results of the HIV tests (possibly twice)
b) as a part of deliberate psychological torture

or support speculation that the false-positive HIV test was an attempt to get Knox to

c) List her lovers in her diary
d) thereby linking her to Guede.

 

[Mrs.Columbo]

Let's go for yet another trip around the repetition merry-go-round. Raffaele's grammar is poor but he is clearly referring to touching Amanda's hand with the knife.

Nobody (not Raffaele, not Amanda, nobody) has ever claimed, before or since, that Meredith was ever at Raffaele's apartment. The idea that Raffaele is claiming that here is very silly. This is not a mistake on the part of Raffaele, it's a mistake on the part of translators which we have already cleared up at least twice in this thread.

that was not written in my post, to the contrary - I pointed out (my opinion) that for me is not clear if he means the cottage or his flat.
Raffaele wrote: 'in the house'

 

[Mr.D]

This isn't bingo, and you don't need to tick every box to win.

I guess I wasn't entirely clear on that so I hereby acknowledge that explicitly here.

Perfectly normal people can crack and make false statements too, those are just conditions that predispose people to do so and Amanda was subject to some of those conditions (youth, naivety, possibly drug use, probably sleep deprivation and almost certainly innocence of the crime in question).

What I was questioning earlier was this statement:

it turns out that Amanda is the sort of person likely to give a false statement under pressure

That Knox was relatively young and criminally naive is pretty indisputable, but the specific cite you used was written specifically regarding juveniles, which Knox was not.

As for the other things in your list, I am unaware of any claims that Knox was under the influence or "hungover" during the interview, and claiming her "almost certain[ly] innocence of the crime" is a rather circular argument isn't it?

Grrr ... Gotta run. More later.

I deliberately avoid characterising Amanda's statement as a "false confession" myself, as opposed to a "false statement",

Note that I am drawing no distinction here. In this context, I am considering Knox's demonstratively false accusation of Lumumba to be a possible "false confession."

 

[Mrs.Columbo]

Your translation simply shows your bias in this case. You have no knowledge who Raffaele is talking about yet you inject that it must be Meredith. The important context is that this diary entry was written after several stressful days in prison so it's entirely possible that the memory being written about is a conflagration of other events in other locations with other people that have been melded into a memory of something that has been heavily on his mind for the last three days since he was told about knife and the DNA results.

I have the complete diary (in orignal) and I do not think (even considering the situation in which this diary was written) Raffaele beeing so stupid to write obvious false and incriminating entries.

What I think, he meant is:
He was cooking together with Amanda in the cottage ('in the house') and Meredith happens to join in and then this 'pricking' happened.

 

[Mary_H]

Taken at face value a plausible reason, albeit via a rather roundabout path. The problem is that it's still little but conjecture written from a biased point of view - take out the supposition and use more neutral language and this is what we get.
<snip>
Which largely fits the known facts and puts us right back to the beginning. You have your theory about the HIV test/psychological torture and I remain unconvinced.

What's really needed is to know which test(s) gave the false positive and what standard practice/relevant law is in in the Perugia system regarding HIV test results.

I agree.

IF for example, Knox was indeed told of two false positives^* (and one was Western Blot results) before a third test turned up negative AND it's standard to NOT tell the prisoner of positive ELIZA tests, then you've got a strong case.

On the other hand, if standard practice was to inform prisoners of positive ELIZA tests (and to ask them to be prepared to provide a list of sexual partners) before the Western Blot was run, then I'd say your theory is a non-starter. (Although the facts wouldn't say much for the medical ethics of the Perugia system)

Very true about the ethics. If the prison has some procedure for obtaining that information and then contacting the sex partners, I'm pretty sure that procedure would not include personal diaries. No doubt it would be handled through the prison clinic, who first would offer support and counseling. If they were going to do another test, they would no doubt wait until after that one before asking for the names of sex partners.

As for the list, my recollection is that it leaked to the media via Knox's prison diary, not a medical form. Unless I'm mistaken it makes for an even more circuitous method to try to link Knox and Guede. (IE, "Let's tell her she's positive, but we're going to run another test to be sure. Then hope she writes in her entirely voluntary diary salacious material and/or her list of lovers, which might include Guede, THEN tell her the negative results.)

So unless someone has that information, I suspect this direction is going to be less fruitful than I had hoped.

I don't agree they were looking for links to Guede; that was Judy Bachrach's theory. I think they just wanted ways to make Amanda look like a "dirty girl."

^* My guess is that the two false positives story is the result of a miscommunication somewhere - someone read or heard there was a false positive and that there were two tests and conflated the two.

Very possible.

 

[LondonJohn]

_______________________

When would the landlord find out? Umm, maybe when the police got a search warrant and asked the landlord about which items had been added or subtracted from the premises? The cleaning lady herself would have noticed the large kitchen knife missing, as she was able to identify the knife in court. Here is what Raffaele's cutlery drawer looked like, just after the cops had removed the large kitchen knife

[qimg]http://www.perugiamurderfile.org/gallery/image.php?album_id=21&image_id=669[/qimg]

Not exactly a large selection.

And there'd be nothing to prove when the knife had been replaced? Huh? Images of the lovebirds had flooded television sets since the day after the murder. An innocuous purchase of underpants didn't go unnoticed, so the lovebirds are supposed to purchase a large knife anonymously, before the cops got a search warrant for Raffaele's flat?

If the lovebirds had just cleaned the knife properly, there would have been no risk at all in retaining the knife. There was more risk---in my opinion--- in going out and buying a replacement.

Bear in mind, my original post on this subject was in response to LondonJohn's "why in the world" bewilderment at the lovebirds keeping the knife. There was some risk in keeping it, some risk in discarding it. Neither option was unreasonable. Maybe we can agree on that.

///

Maybe we can agree to not using the term "lovebirds".

And why did Sollecito apparently dispose of "the other knife used in the murder", rather tan simply cleaning that knife too?

 

[LondonJohn]

Which is a more implausible scenario? Throwing away a foot-long knife in the trash because it may link you to a murder, or carrying a foot-long knife in one's purse for protection which would coincidentally come in handy when impulsively deciding to kill your roommate while forcing her to have sex with your boyfriend of one week and an acquaintance you hardly know?

Plus, I only stated it as a "for example" scenario in the first place. Another example that Sollecito might have used was that the blade snapped while he was trying to cut a piece of frozen meat on a day in October, so he threw the knife away. The point is that it would be far safer for Sollecito to get rid of the knife altogether.

And nobody's yet managed to come up with a rationale for why Knox and Sollecito apparently disposed of the clothes and shoes they were wearing on the night of the murder (although to my knowledge the police have never managed to establish what clothes they were wearing, or even whether any of Knox/Sollecito's known clothes/shoes are missing*), and one of the murder knives, yet they kept the other murder knife. *sings* "go compaaaaaaaaaare!"

* And I would have thought that it wouldn't be so hard for the police to establish this in relation to Knox in particular. This is because Knox would only have a limited amount of clothes and shoes, having travelled to Italy from the US, and the girls in the house would surely have been able to point the police towards any clothes/shoes which they had seen Knox wearing previously but which weren't there now. I wonder if the police went through this kind of process? I think I already know the answer to that one........

 

[LondonJohn]

Interesting thought.

Was the location of this 8:56pm call mentioned anywhere?

I've never seen any information or details to add to this uncompleted call, other than Rudy stating he came upon Meredith at 9pm approx. in the driveway.

Raffaele's appeal , Thoughtful's translation-

1. At 20:56 she attempted to call home. The attempt failed because either no one answered, or she wasn't in a good zone, or the network was congested. What is surprising is that she didn't try to call home again, although she usually spoke to her family before going to bed, and even several times a day. This fact together with the absence of her usual text messages seem to indicate that the events leading to the murder started around this time.

Absolutely. If it can be established that it was extremely out of character for Meredith not to call her family at some point that evening, then this puts the time of confrontation (if not specifically the time of death) into sharper relief. Is it known whether she had called home earlier that day at all? And even if she had done so, was she in the definite habit of calling again at some point in the evening? If so, then the absence of a completed call that evening is most certainly interesting.

After all, what we know of the phone record is that Meredith most likely tried and failed to make a call home at 20.56 (let's set aside the reason for the call failure for a moment). From this, we can make a reasonable assumption that Meredith was thinking about calling home, and tried to do so without success.

From that, it's very difficult to postulate that Meredith got back to the house, went to her room, and did some reading or whatever, or even dozed off, for over two hours before the "murder party" turned up at around 23.00, without re-trying to call home. Any rational explanations for this?

Here's my suggestion: Meredith was confronted either soon after returning home or even at the point that she returned home, and that her nightmare began then - at around 21.00. That's why she never called home again.

 

[Dan O.]

Interesting thought.

Was the location of this 8:56pm call mentioned anywhere?

It is mentioned in the Massie Report that this call is recorded in the phones memory alone. The phone never made contact with the network so there is no cell tower record associated with the call and therefore no location.

 

[Dan O.]

_______________________

When would the landlord find out? Umm, maybe when the police got a search warrant and asked the landlord about which items had been added or subtracted from the premises? The cleaning lady herself would have noticed the large kitchen knife missing, as she was able to identify the knife in court. Here is what Raffaele's cutlery drawer looked like, just after the cops had removed the large kitchen knife

[qimg]http://www.perugiamurderfile.org/gallery/image.php?album_id=21&image_id=669[/qimg]

Not exactly a large selection.

There is no indication that replacement of the knife would have prevented the discovery of the double DNA profiles.

I notice that the time stamp on that video is almost 2 weeks after when the knife was discovered. The Perugia police are recording everything associated with this investigation yet the discovery of this most crucial piece of evidence is not recorded. Not to worry, they can just slip back into the cottage and insure evidence will be discovered there while the cameras are rolling. Too bad they forgot that the funny door latch needs to be locked with a key.

 

[Dan O.]

c) List her lovers in her diary.

I guess you also missed that Amanda wrote in her diary that she was told to think about who she had contact with.


What have the Italian authorities done about this apparent ethics violation? Have they investigated to determine if there was a specific motivation or do we just have an incompetent prison doctor acting on her own and the confiscation of Amanda's writings and immediate publication of the juicy bits was an unrelated coincident?!