I am not anti- or pro-AK; at this point I am really trying to decide. I'm just sayin' we do have that other testimony.
One of my biggest problems with the whole case is, it seems to me, to be pro-AK, you must throw out a serious amount of evidence. Mistaken witnesses, shoddy police work, incompetent lab techs, etc. I have a hard time reconciling the fact that all of those people would have to have been mistaken, incompetent, lying, etc.
I am not trying to imply it is unbelievable the lab testing could be erroneous. In fact, I believe the knife had absolutely nothing to do with the crime. What I find difficult to fathom is for all the lab/DNA evidence to be erroneous in addition to all the (credible) witnesses being mistaken, in addition to the several versions of alibis, in addition to all the other ‘happenstances’ that would have had to have occurred for those kids to be innocent.
The over-zealous prosecution is not lost on me; I know it happens (Duke, for one.) But it is the numerous other details, each of which on their own can be explained away but in toto are difficult to swallow.
Just one of those instances which troubles me is this: in Amanda’s own statement she states she noticed the feces when she put the hair dryer back in the bathroom. Who in the world would see that and NOT flush it? Why would you just leave that there… unless you wanted it to be present for a reason? It is the accumulation of all these little nagging details which bother me.
Hi PDiGirolamo,
I personally think that way you will never see through a wrong conviction, don't get me wrong, you're entitled to your own opinion and I don't want to persuade you. I just think these sort of elements you have here speaking against them, this "mountain of evidence", you have that in almost every wrong conviction. After all, the prosecution in all these cases is capable of convincing a whole jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants are guilty. You can't achieve that with a gut feeling that they did it, the prosecution has to make a convincing case, and that's what they try to do.
It's easy in the end when it is finally clear that somebody is innocent and the real perpetrator has been catched, to say; of course, they're innocent, the confession was coerced, the forensics were misinterpreted and the eyewitnesses lying. When the case is all solved, it's easy to aknowledge that.
But if you want to see through it before, you have to be capable to see beyond those things; the contradictory statements, weird behaviour, the eyewitnesses, and not letting you stop and impress by it. One has to look at the whole picture and really ask themselves, if the prosecution theory makes any sense.
For example; why weren't all these things found you would expect if they had committed the murder? Traces of them in the victims room (except for that bra-clasp which is highly qustionable), wounds from a fight on their body, no motive, no prior history of violent behaviour, why didn't Amanda flee? (a murdress isn't impressed if she is allowed to leave the country, if she want's to leave, she does.) Then, why didn't she take herself a lawyer just as her flatmates did? Why did she accuse Lumumba when she knew he had an alibi? Why didn't she accuse Rudy if she wanted to frame him anyway? Why did she place herself at the crime scene if she wanted to deflect attention from herself?
What is gained by the statement about the door always beeing locked? If she wanted to body to be found later, they could just have called the police later. Why would she carry a kitchen knife for self protection, who does such a thing, how plausible is that? Why would she clean only the blade of the knife, but not the handle, so the dna on the handle supposedly shows how she held it while murdering Meredith. If so, why wasn't there any blood found on the handle? Why should we believe this knife is the murder weapon anyway, when it didn't match two of the three wounds and the bloody imprint on the bedsheet and was tested negative for blood. And while there is a reasonalbe scenario lacking, why that knife would even be at the cottage to play part in a not premeditated murder. Then the dna result is being highly disputed anyway, is it even Meredith's? And if so, didn't it more likely result from contamination, given the fact that the the knife shall have been cleaned so thouroughly, that no blood could have been detected, so it wouldn't really make sense for the dna to be still there. Bear in mind the procedure Stefanoni applied raises the possibilty of contamination enormously.
If the dna on the bra clasp is proof of murder why weren't the other people whose dna was on it too, identified and put into jail? How do we even know for sure it's Raffaele's dna, when it was in the low copy range and mixed with other dna, which leaves it often to the experts discretion to decide if the dna is comaptible (there was an article posted here about that. You can give the same sample to different experts and they will come up with totally different results. This is a problem with scant dna samples and especially when they're mixed too, like in this case).
For me an internal logic is comletely lacking in the whole prosecution theory.
