Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Kevin_Lowe]

It's funny how nobody had a response to this! Well, what do you guys think?

Frankly, I find this third party claim to have been involved very strange indeed, and I have no idea where it's going to turn out to fit into the story. If they come forward with Meredith's keys and the murder weapon it could support Rudy's initial claim that he was innocently standing around the house when someone else came in and murdered Meredith.

Another interpretation is that Rudy told them where to find those items, and that this is an attempt to get Rudy off. Rudy certainly has a history of strangely lenient treatment from the Italian police and courts, so possibly somebody over there likes him.

It would be interesting to see whether Alessi's DNA matches anything collected from the murder house.

If they present the murder weapon and the keys, and Alessi's DNA turns out to be a match, that would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.

If they present the murder weapon and the keys but no DNA match results, then it would be inconclusive. Maybe Rudy's innocent and maybe Rudy's got someone to take the fall for him.

If there're no keys, no knife and no DNA match then I'll plump for saying that the whole thing is bollocks and that I don't see why the defence would bring it up. This is, in my view, the most likely outcome.

It's irrelevant to Knox and Sollecito's innocence though, since the stomach evidence and computer evidence still combine to rule them out as suspects.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I don't believe the "rubber gloves in Sollectio's apartment" is a rumor. Charlie Wilkes has stated prior that there were a pair of rubber gloves recovered from Sollecito's flat. The Massei Motivations also mentions the rubber gloves on page 194 (from the PMF English translation):

The gloves are for real:

Rep. 89 - Nr. 1 paio di guanti da cucina di gomma di colore fuxia taglia L rinvenuti all'interno dello scolapiatti posto al di sopra del lavello della cucina

Not to be confused with the latex gloves in the wastebasket.

 

[Danceme]

I think the defense is bringing this up not because they believe Alessi, they are bringing it up to show the prosecution was looking at this case with blinders. They had tunnel vision when looking at Knox and refused to investigate anything that would prove innocence or could be used against the prosecution. They are using that to show that the prosecution viewed Knox/Sollecito as the murderers before they even had evidence and even when the evidence pointed in a different direction they refused to accept it.
Not all of it is Mignini's fault. The Italian scientifica and investigators shoulder some of the blame.

From what I read Alessi has a history of saying things like this and trying to draw attention to himself and that the judges dismissed him as completely unreliable. I would however, have liked to see someone say they did indeed check out his brother.

If there're no keys, no knife and no DNA match then I'll plump for saying that the whole thing is bollocks and that I don't see why the defence would bring it up. This is, in my view, the most likely outcome.

I think it's bullocks as well. If these things did in fact exist, and Alessi's brother's dna was found on them (mitochondrial testing), then I think it would have resulted in an immediate special hearing for the release of Amanda and Raffaele. Whether or not they got it is another story.

 

[Alt+F4]

You really believe that Amanda is taking 26 years in prison for a crime she didn't commit simply to... what? Protect Rafaelle, her boyfriend of one week?

I don't think she was trying to protect him, I think she never believed for one second she would be convicted. If she had told (what I believe) is the truth, that she was present but not participate, and helped cover up the crime her situation would have probably turned out very differently. She could have plead guilty and with time off for good behavior she might have been home already.

I think you should re-read her "statements" from that interrogation and count all the logical fallacies. It's clear that those statements in conjunction with her trial testimony show a hypothetical scenario conjured by the police - not Amanda - in which she was there that night.

Hard to say seeing there is no complete transcript or recording of her police interrogations. However when you look at her email back home, her trial testimony and his prison diary, they have many inconsistent and contradictory statements (none of which were coerced).

There was cash, cards, keys and phones taken. Funny that 400 dollars was never found on Amanda or Raf. It couldn't possibly have been Rudy, whose DNA was on the purse and who fled the country, eventually running out of money again days later.

Yet nothing taken from Filomena, who was the initial target of the break-in. As for the money, no way to know if AK or RS had it as they were not serched.

It doesn't seem strange to you that each piece of forensics evidence, and even most of the circumstantial evidence against Amanda and Raf comes with some sort of glaring caveat?

glaring caveat=excuse (confusion, upsetment, beautiful girl is a strange land filled with swarmy men!)

Unlike the evidence against Rudy which is cut and dry and has no caveats.

Not according to his lawyers and supporters.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

show me the money

Hard to say seeing there is no complete transcript or recording of her police interrogations. However when you look at her email back home, her trial testimony and his prison diary, they have many inconsistent and contradictory statements (none of which were coerced).



Yet nothing taken from Filomena, who was the initial target of the break-in. As for the money, no way to know if AK or RS had it as they were not serched.

Alt+F4,

DanO had an interesting comment on Rudy's knowledge of the money on page 106. Given that Raffaele's father was well-to-do and willing to support his son and given that Amanda had roughly $4000 in her bank account, I think that Rudy is the most plausible suspect for the theft of the money. I agree that we will probably never know with certainty.

There is at least one error in Amanda's first statement (the one made around 1:30 in the morning). She claims to have left Raffaele's flat at 8:30, but we know that she spoke with Ms. Popovic at 8:40. However, I take your point to be that the existence of errors does not show that the statement was coerced/concocted by the police. Fair enough. However, I disagree with you about the caveats in the forensic evidence. To take a single example, I would feel differently about the bra clasp if

Three unknown profiles were not present
The crime scene had been more secure (we know that there were break-ins in 2008)
The bra clasp had not been moved by unknown means
The bra clasp had been handled more circumspectly when it was collected
Raffaele’s DNA were present in greater than LCN quantities on the clasp
Raffaele’s DNA were also present on the bra itself
Dr. Stefanoni held more conservative views about the ease with which contamination takes place

 

[Alt+F4]

To take a single example, I would feel differently about the bra clasp if

Three unknown profiles were not present
The crime scene had been more secure (we know that there were break-ins in 2008)
The bra clasp had not been moved by unknown means
The bra clasp had been handled more circumspectly when it was collected
Raffaele’s DNA were present in greater than LCN quantities on the clasp
Raffaele’s DNA were also present on the bra itself
Dr. Stefanoni held more conservative views about the ease with which contamination takes place

I think your first statment could answer the rest. Why the heck hasn't RS's defense team tried to identify the unknown profiles? If they match to 1) any of the investigators who handled the clasp, 2) anyone who worked with the clasp at the lab; or 3) any other cases the lab was working on at the time, then I would say contamination would be a given.

 

[Supernaut]

Where are the keys and the knife Alessi's brother supposedly had him bury? I don't see them being introduced as new evidence in the appeals summaries Bruce Fisher posted. They want the judge to hear the Alessi story but as soon as the judge asks about these two crucial items it will be an obvious wash.
So where are these things? Do they exist? Were they unearthed? Will the defense seriously try to introduce this story and then just say they didn't bother to go get them? [/QUOTE}

It's funny how nobody had a response to this! Well, what do you guys think?

Most people believe that Alessi's assertions are bogus, including, I suspect, AK and RS's defence teams.

The point is that nobody knows for sure because the cops have made a point of ignoring Alessi for over 2 years, evincing a a competely blinkered attitude, and you're apparently unaware that this is precisely the reason it has been rasied by AK's and RS's defence.

 

[Alt+F4]

Thinking about the bra clasp again, perhaps someone can explain something to me. According to RS's appeal (from Bruce's site):

There is no video whatsoever showing any investigators changing gloves at anytime. Video does show ample proof that transfer did occur from the samples to the gloves. This observation proves without a doubt that contamination occurred during evidence collection.

How? Is the argument here that they touched something else in Meredith's room that had his DNA on it and then transferred that DNA to the bra clasp?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I think your first statment could answer the rest. Why the heck hasn't RS's defense team tried to identify the unknown profiles? If they match to 1) any of the investigators who handled the clasp, 2) anyone who worked with the clasp at the lab; or 3) any other cases the lab was working on at the time, then I would say contamination would be a given.

Do they have access to the bra clasp, the ability to obtain DNA samples from those who worked at the lab, access to the lab's logs so they know who was working that day and what they were working on, and the ability to run DNA tests?

I know at least one of those things they do not have access to: The lab refused to let the defence see its raw data or its logs. The court did not force the lab to hand them over. So I suspect they do not have access or the ability to order most of the other things on my list.

That is one of many reasons to be suspicious of the bra clasp result. You don't normally go back to a crime scene six weeks into the investigation to fossick about for more evidence, and in this case it looks highly likely that they did so specifically because they had nothing to tie Raffaele to the crime whatsoever and they were hoping to find something to help them out. Hey presto, Stefanoni finds just exactly what they needed! What luck! However when the defence get suspicious that this result might not have been entirely legit, they refuse to hand over their raw data and the lab logs.

Call me a cynic but I tend to suspect that when they hide the raw data and the logs, they are hiding something that would help the defence case substantially. The same goes for the fried hard drives, the logs for the day they tested the "double DNA" knife and the transcript of the interrogation session that prompted Amanda's "confession". If they didn't have something to hide, they wouldn't be doing their damnedest to keep those pieces of evidence from seeing the light of day.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

The defense needs more information

I think your first statment could answer the rest. Why the heck hasn't RS's defense team tried to identify the unknown profiles? If they match to 1) any of the investigators who handled the clasp, 2) anyone who worked with the clasp at the lab; or 3) any other cases the lab was working on at the time, then I would say contamination would be a given.

Alt+F4,

In order for the defense experts to be able to identify the individuals they would need several things, one of which is the electronic data files. These files were never handed over to the defense teams. I was given a good deal of grief on the previous thread about this issue. But Dr. Hampikian’s statement to an Irish reporter (and to which I have previously linked) should have put the question to rest once and for all. Moreover, Raffaele’s appeal indicates that the lack of file release was an issue for the first defense expert as well.

The defense would also need reference DNA samples from various individuals, and I wonder whether they have the authority to compel someone to provide them with a reference sample. Even then, it is not certain that they could identify the individuals; it might depend on the number of loci that they observe.

However, the very existence of DNA from these individuals is important. It is difficult to see how so many people would deposit DNA by primary transfer. That leaves only secondary transfer and contamination as explanations for its presence. The second of those two possibilities would contradict Dr. Stefanoni’s questionable claim of zero contamination in seven years.

 

[Dan O.]

You can't always get away with swapping a board:

http://www.essdatarecovery.com/parts_exchange.asp

I have 2 criteria that I use before attempting a board swap myself. First is that that data is not worth sending the drive to a professional for recovery. Second is that I can find a replacement board with the same firmware revision. Since I have a collection of hundreds of old hard drives, I can usually get close enough on the firmware match whereas your typically computer user would be hard pressed to match the same model. The professionals will have a database built from experience with thousands of drives and may even have custom firmware or knowledge of how to use maintenance hooks to extract all the data without the possibility of corrupting it further.

I think that is what Professor Bernache tried to do, and it worked just well enough on Amanda's drive to spin up the disk and permanently scramble the files.

This is what happens when you take new tech to an old hack.

But I still don't believe the data has all been destroyed. It takes hours to completely overwrite a large drive. Did he just turn it on and watch it spin while the drive went into a self format mode?

Hard drives come with a virtual geometry determined by the controller, which can vary within a single model.

The geometry is hard coded in the firmware (at least I've never come across drives with dynamic geometry that was individual to each drive). But even with an exact match to the firmware, there will be a few sectors that are unrecoverable after a board swap due the the bad block replacement map that is stored in flash on the controller card. Without custom software the extract the bad block map, there can be holes in the recovered data that you wouldn't even be aware of. This is another reason to take important data to the pros for recovery.

If you have swapped boards, then you must have run across drives with dead boards. I never have. Every drive I have ever had to rescue was one that still had a good controller, but was unreadable because of bad sectors. I use Testdisk and, if that fails, a raw disk editor to recover photos etc.

Of the drives I see with actual failures, it's been an even mix of controller card failures and head crashes. See the link in my last post for an extreme case of head crash on a modern drive. (I told the user that their data was not recoverable.)

 

[Chris C]

I don't think she was trying to protect him, I think she never believed for one second she would be convicted. If she had told (what I believe) is the truth, that she was present but not participate, and helped cover up the crime her situation would have probably turned out very differently. She could have plead guilty and with time off for good behavior she might have been home already.



Hard to say seeing there is no complete transcript or recording of her police interrogations. However when you look at her email back home, her trial testimony and his prison diary, they have many inconsistent and contradictory statements (none of which were coerced).



Yet nothing taken from Filomena, who was the initial target of the break-in. As for the money, no way to know if AK or RS had it as they were not serched.



glaring caveat=excuse (confusion, upsetment, beautiful girl is a strange land filled with swarmy men!)



Not according to his lawyers and supporters.

Yeah but her statements are not suppose to be used against her in the murder trial. This was ruled in the supreme court. This is the thing everyone keeps throwing in her face as reason to convict.

 

[Chris C]

I think your first statment could answer the rest. Why the heck hasn't RS's defense team tried to identify the unknown profiles? If they match to 1) any of the investigators who handled the clasp, 2) anyone who worked with the clasp at the lab; or 3) any other cases the lab was working on at the time, then I would say contamination would be a given.

Actually, if i read the appeals right, they are claiming that the profile they claim is Sollecito on the bra clasp isn't his and want a LCN test to prove it.

 

[Alt+F4]

Does anyone have a link to the testimony of Giuseppe Privitera, the fingerprint expert, in either English or Italian?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

bra clasp and the Turner case

Thinking about the bra clasp again, perhaps someone can explain something to me. According to RS's appeal (from Bruce's site):



How? Is the argument here that they touched something else in Meredith's room that had his DNA on it and then transferred that DNA to the bra clasp?

Alt+F4,

I speak for no one but myself, definitely not for the authors of the appeal. Dr. Stefanoni’s comments in Massei’s report (see my comment upthread) indicate that she thinks that contamination is difficult, requiring either liquids to be involved, or perhaps vigorous rubbing. Therefore, to her the lack of glove changing is no big deal. My position is that her comments are nonsense, and the technique that we saw on the various tapes was execrable. First, a couple of us have turned up forensics guidelines, one of which says change gloves often, and the other says change gloves for each new piece of evidence. Second, Dr. Stefanoni ignores examples of contamination that did not involve liquids. For example, the DNA from a dead woman was found on Gregory Turner’s wedding ring. How do we know it was contamination in this case? The technician’s own DNA was also found on the ring, and the source of the DNA was the dead woman’s fingernails.

To those who are assessing whether or not contamination was likely in the case of the clasp, I would urge you not to equate the DNA from Raffaele that were found with the total amount of his DNA in the cottage. For example, it is likely that he left DNA on one or more towels there because he cooked there. Besides contamination during evidence collection, evidence can also be contaminated in the lab. It is helpful to bear in mind that the post-amplification samples are a potentially serious source of contamination. With respect to the argument in the appeal, I would say that one seldom knows the precise moment of contamination.

 

[RoseMontague]

I think your first statment could answer the rest. Why the heck hasn't RS's defense team tried to identify the unknown profiles? If they match to 1) any of the investigators who handled the clasp, 2) anyone who worked with the clasp at the lab; or 3) any other cases the lab was working on at the time, then I would say contamination would be a given.

My understanding reading the Massei report is that Stephanoni had 5 reference samples of DNA. Amanda, Raffaele, Rudy, Meredith, and Patrick. Nothing is mentioned about a database that they were run through or other reference samples. Stephanoni claims this lab has had no instances of contamination. Of course, if you don't have reference samples of the lab techs or investigators (or Stephanoni for that matter), these unidentified profiles are not considered contamination even if they possibly were the result of contamination. They are just "unidentified profiles". So easy to avoid having contamination if you know how the game is played. I think this is one reason the defense is asking for the (most likely non existent) contamination logs. Just to show how idiotic this really is.

 

[Danceme]

<snip>
........and you're apparently unaware that this is precisely the reason it has been rasied by AK's and RS's defence.

Oh I'm aware alright, stop jumping to conclusions. I'm more interested in whether or not it will have any teeth. I would prefer the defense raised issues that may actually go somewhere than one that is considered by all who hear it to be completely bogus, therefore the argument that the prosecution had blinders on doesn't help if it is commonly agreed no one could consider Alessi credible. In such a situation, of course he was ignored.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Thinking about the bra clasp again, perhaps someone can explain something to me. According to RS's appeal (from Bruce's site):



How? Is the argument here that they touched something else in Meredith's room that had his DNA on it and then transferred that DNA to the bra clasp?

That seems like an odd interpretation.

I imagine a much more likely argument is that they cannot rule out the possibility that they touched something else not in Meredith's room that had his DNA on it and then transferred that DNA to the bra clasp. A possible candidate is a cigarette butt, which I believe is the only other item in that pass that they claim to have found Raffaele's DNA on.

Until they submit to full discovery, however, I'm going to suspect that contamination at the lab is the real explanation for the DNA result. That contamination might have been innocent and might have been deliberate, but if everything there was kosher they would have no reason to hide their files.

The defence's job is to highlight every weakness in the chain of evidence, and incompetent collection procedures indicative of Stefanoni engaging in cargo cult forensics certainly count as such a weakness. However I don't think that's the first rock I'd turn over on this issue, if I only got to turn over one rock.

 

[LondonJohn]

That seems like an odd interpretation.

I imagine a much more likely argument is that they cannot rule out the possibility that they touched something else not in Meredith's room that had his DNA on it and then transferred that DNA to the bra clasp. A possible candidate is a cigarette butt, which I believe is the only other item in that pass that they claim to have found Raffaele's DNA on.

Until they submit to full discovery, however, I'm going to suspect that contamination at the lab is the real explanation for the DNA result. That contamination might have been innocent and might have been deliberate, but if everything there was kosher they would have no reason to hide their files.

The defence's job is to highlight every weakness in the chain of evidence, and incompetent collection procedures indicative of Stefanoni engaging in cargo cult forensics certainly count as such a weakness. However I don't think that's the first rock I'd turn over on this issue, if I only got to turn over one rock.

Isn't it strange how there doesn't appear to have been a decent discussion about the stomach/intestine contents vs time of death on PMF or TJMK? It's hard not to conclude that some of the more perceptive posters on these sites privately realise that this area is looking more and more as if it could blow the prosecution's case out of the water all by itself.

I wonder if some of the more......impassioned (shall we say) posters on those sites are starting to realise that the Massei report is anything but a high-quality demonstration of Knox/Sollecito's guilt, and that the appeal submissions appear to be pretty strong? I wonder if they are now questioning their constant, blinkered defending of the police and prosecutors? And I wonder if they are considering, even now, what they might write if the verdicts are overturned on appeal?

Just sayin'

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I have 2 criteria that I use before attempting a board swap myself. First is that that data is not worth sending the drive to a professional for recovery. Second is that I can find a replacement board with the same firmware revision. Since I have a collection of hundreds of old hard drives, I can usually get close enough on the firmware match whereas your typically computer user would be hard pressed to match the same model. The professionals will have a database built from experience with thousands of drives and may even have custom firmware or knowledge of how to use maintenance hooks to extract all the data without the possibility of corrupting it further.




This is what happens when you take new tech to an old hack.

But I still don't believe the data has all been destroyed. It takes hours to completely overwrite a large drive. Did he just turn it on and watch it spin while the drive went into a self format mode?




The geometry is hard coded in the firmware (at least I've never come across drives with dynamic geometry that was individual to each drive). But even with an exact match to the firmware, there will be a few sectors that are unrecoverable after a board swap due the the bad block replacement map that is stored in flash on the controller card. Without custom software the extract the bad block map, there can be holes in the recovered data that you wouldn't even be aware of. This is another reason to take important data to the pros for recovery.




Of the drives I see with actual failures, it's been an even mix of controller card failures and head crashes. See the link in my last post for an extreme case of head crash on a modern drive. (I told the user that their data was not recoverable.)

It sounds like you have far more experience with this than I do. My experience is limited to the odd case here and there, with tasks ranging from zeroing out a boot manager to recovering photos, always in situations where failure was a viable option. I wouldn't know what to do if a drive had a bad controller, and I didn't realize they failed very often.

The handling of Amanda's drive showed an incredible degree of incompetence. When the board swap didn't work, they tore the drive down to expose the bare platters, apparently thinking they might be able to see what was wrong. Now the parts are sitting in a box or bag in an evidence locker. I don't know if recovery from that kind of handling is possible under any circumstances. Toshiba apparently told Amanda's lawyers that if they could do it, it would cost about $10k.