Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[tsig]

I am curious if you believe everything Amanda wrote because that sex with a stranger on a train is not believable to me. .

You think she's lying or was this a false internalized confession?

 

[RoseMontague]

Well, until it's proven otherwise in court, I'll go along with the court's judgement. It is clear the matter was examined thoroughly and they are far more qualified then you or any of the other armchair detectives and self appointed experts, don't you think?

Yes, the cottage was thoroughly searched, inventoried and Filomena and Laura testified the cottage was never cleaned with products containing bleach. Why, have you got another candidate it may be? The best suggestion the defence could come up with was 'maybe fruit juice', so unless you're expecting us to accept it as a remotely probable that Amanda and Raffaele were paddling around the cottage barefoot in fruit juice (which they have never claimed by the way), do you have a better candidate?

Where is the inventory list of cleaning products? They have nothing in the apartment containing bleach or a similar chemical compound that might cause a luminol reaction? Four women without a single product containing bleach that is contained in a lot of cleaning products. That is hard to believe. They never used bleach when they washed their whites even?

You also did not answer the question of how Amanda was able to clean Meredith's DNA from the "bloody prints" in her room without streaking those 3 footprints and leaving her DNA from floor contact while removing Meredith's DNA from the "blood".

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I guess the luminol revealed the footprints in turnip jiuce then?

As I stated, we don't know what it was and neither do you. It could even be blood, and the negative test result could have been a false negative. However since we don't know, it's not evidence.

And yes the footprint was obviously way too small to have been Rudy's footprint.(RS wore a 42, RG a 46). This one was compatible with size 42.

You and Fulcanelli appear to have swallowed one of the more embarrassing PMFer whoppers. Their preferred shoe sizes were quite different, but their bare feet differed in size by only three millimetres, as stated on page 348 of the Massei report among other places.

The guilters have managed to convince themselves that there was a huge a difference, and in their echo chambers you never hear any different.

Easily dealt with.

1. Stomach content is not an accurate method for determining TOD, relying on a range of factors. As such, iy must only be used in combination with other elements, as was done in this case. TOD was after 11 pm.

I think you need to do some reading outside the PMF echo chamber.

Here are some links for you, originally from LondonJohn:

http://www.ijp-online.com/article.a...e=4;spage=238;epage=240;aulast=Awasthi;type=0

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-1746.2006.04449.x/abstract

The take-home message is that t(lag), the time until food starts leaving the stomach after a meal, does cover a range but it's usually a range of one hour to two hours, and times outside that range are increasingly unlikely the further outside those times you go.

Meredith ate at 18:30, and a time of death of 21:05 (as soon as she got home) is already pushing the limit of what is physiologically plausible. Anything substantially later is absurd.

Professor Ronchi was very much aware of this issue, which is why he concocted the preposterous (and false) fairy story that Dr Lalli manually moved digested matter out of Meredith's duodenum to the very end of her bowel while botching the autopsy. This is all in the Massei report, of course, but guilters don't like talking about that bit so you don't hear about it unless you come to the JREF forums where we work from an evidence-based paradigm.

2. That cell tower also covers the cottage. "never pinged the phone before"? And the records you're using go back how long?

If the prosecution had a skerrick of evidence that Meredith's phones had ever pinged that tower, we'd have heard about it. The fact that all they have is the mere fact that it was possible, from which they leap to the conclusion that it happened, is a major instance of sloppy thinking in the Massei narrative.

However this result is perfectly explicable if Meredith was attacked shortly after 21:05 and Rudy was already out and on his way with her phones at 22:13.

3. A completely leading question based on your own arbitrary subjective opinion. Her interrogation matches someone telling 'lies', it is not similar to what you claim.

You cannot handwave these facts away. An internalised false confession is a well-established psychological phenomenon, and Amanda's false witness statement has several highly indicative characteristics of an internalised false confession which I already listed for you. This is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of documented scientific fact.

So I put the question to you again: Do you think that Amanda was knowledgeable enough about the phenomenon of internalised false confessions to fake one, and she faked one? If not, then it was not faked, it was a real internalised false confession.

4. Another leading question which assumes your self imposed ROD is accepted. It is not. Meredith was murdered after 11 pm, as was established in the trial.

Massei managed to get to that conclusion only by accepting Ronchi's false (and stupid) excuse for ignoring the stomach evidence. Massei was wrong. Now I have brought you up to speed on the evidence that proves the Massei TOD is incorrect, I hope you will answer this question.

5. The cartoon (Nurato). You people are talking of this as though it is something 'new'. It is not. It was argued by the defence in the pre-trial under judge Micheli and rejected. Just as it was not accepted in the trial. The last human interaction on Raffaele's computer was around 21:10. Activity after that period did not require human interraction and was automated.

How do you automate the opening of such a file, and what is your evidence that it was automated?

6. Again, a leading question which presumes your altered TOD is accepted, it is not. There are many forms of evidence of which scientific evidence is only one kind. It is not a requirement that Curatolo's testimony be supported with "scientific evidence".

Now I have brought you up to speed on the evidence that proves the Massei TOD is incorrect, I hope you will answer this question.

7. Another leading question. See above.

Now I have brought you up to speed on the evidence that proves the Massei TOD is incorrect, I hope you will answer this question.

8. It is not Amanda's DNA on the handle alone that us the evidence. It is her DNA on the handle combined with Meredith's DNA on the blade. Since Raffaele and Amanda were the only individuals with access to the knife (unless you want to blame the cleaning lady) and both their alibis are entwined, one of them used that knife on Meredith. The DNA on the handle indicates that person was Amanda. There is no other DNA on that handle.

No. This is simply nonsense.

Amanda's DNA could have been deposited on the blade by perfectly innocent means after it was used to murder Meredith (if indeed it was, which it almost certainly was not, but that's a different question).

You do realise that absolutely nothing about DNA evidence indicates that Meredith's DNA and Amanda's DNA got on the knife at the same time, right? Someone could have killed Meredith with that knife (say, wearing gloves), cleaned it, put it back in the drawer, and then Amanda could have picked it up and used it afterwards. DNA evidence cannot even in theory be evidence that the two samples on the knife were deposited simultaneously.

It just doesn't work that way.

9. Amanda's DNA mixed with Meredith's blood combined with the absence of anyone else's is a clear indicator of guilt.

You cannot expect to merely assert this and be taken seriously.

As before, nothing about those DNA results is proof of simultaneous deposition. Amanda's DNA has a perfectly good excuse for being in the house where she lived, and Meredith's blood could (as far as the DNA is concerned) have perfectly well landed on an existing bit of Amanda's DNA.

If Stefanoni had been a proper scientist instead of a cargo cult scientist she'd have taken appropriate control samples and depending on how those came out maybe you'd have had a leg to stand on. However she didn't, so the claim that the mixed DNA results are evidence that the DNA was deposited simultaneously is simply the product of ignorance.

10. No, there is also the knife and her footprints in Meredith's blood.

Let's be precise here. Are you talking about footprints in a very dilute solution of blood and water, compatible with her having been in the bathroom with existing bloodstains left by someone else, possibly Guede, possibly on a bathmat?

If so, they aren't evidence of involvement in the murder either for obvious reasons.

11. The break-in was clearly staged per the in depth evidence and reasoning cited for it in the Massei Report, which I refer you to. Some of the glass being under clothing as well as in top, IF Filomena actually did state that (which I'm not entirely convinced of), is easily explained. The stagers of the break-in would have been in the room, so their feet would have been in the room, right by the window where the floor was covered with items they'd strewn on the floor, Some of these items no doubt would have been knocked or kicked about as they moved in that area, causing some items to shift onto previously exposed parts of the floor that had glass on them.

I have read the relevant passages, and Massei presents nothing but unfounded surmise to support the claim that the burglary was staged. There is no hard evidence of any kind to exclude Rudy simply breaking in as per his usual modus operandi, merely the unsupported word of police that because they couldn't see any obvious signs of scrabbling about that it followed conclusively that nobody got in that way. You might as well have asked the drover's dog what he reckoned and admitted that as conclusive evidence.

12. No, since the police worked with a copy of the data on Raffaele's drive, not with the original drive.

You appear to be under the incorrect impression that the police in charge of computer forensics in this case could organise flies at a barbecue. Competent police would have done exactly that. However as evidenced by the appeals documents they did not mirror the drives until after they had already mucked about with them, altering the metadata for both the Naruto file and the Stardust files that Raffaele and Amanda's alibis relied on.

13. If you think that's the 'first three way sex crime in history' there's no helping you. They found the evidence they needed because they searched the crime scene. I fail to see why conspiracy theories are required. Indeed, you could take the time to explain in such an event, why they didn't plant or fabricate strong evidence as opposed to (as you've been arguing for months) weak evidence and how that makes any kind of logical sense.

You appear to have completely avoided answering the actual question I asked, so here it is again. For the sake of clarification (although it should not be needed) I am not claiming that this was the first three-way sex crime in history. Merely the first time that two young people with no serious criminal history who had been going out for a week teamed up with a crim they barely knew to sexually assault and murder a friend of theirs on the spur of the moment for no damned reason anyone can figure out.

Now that is clear, doesn't it ever strike you as weird that Mignini "figured out" that this was a once-in-history three-way sex crime more or less on sight, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support that theory? That's a pretty amazing leap of logic... and what evidence did he have to base it on at that time? Nothing.

Isn't it just a bit convenient that when absolutely all the forensic evidence failed to confirm his theory, miraculous and unreproducible LCN DNA evidence gathered at the eleventh hour popped up out of Stefanoni's lab to save his theory, but they refuse to show their raw data or their log files?

Isn't it cause for concern that the best evidence for the prosecution can't be reproduced and they refuse to show their work, and that the vital pieces of evidence that could have confirmed Amanda and Raffaele's alibis (the Spotlight data for Stardust and the metadata for Naruto) was destroyed by police?

 

[RoseMontague]

You think she's lying or was this a false internalized confession?

This was an email sent to a friend of hers in Washington. I have not seen the email but I read what was said about it here:

Deanna makes short shrift of what the family sees as one of many slurs on Knox, an e-mail she sent to a friend in which she said she had sex with an Italian on a train during that journey. “That is so untrue. I was everywhere with her. It’s true we met a guy called Federico and we had dinner with him. But nothing happened. I think Amanda was just making fun of Italian men. They stare at you a lot more than men do here. ”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4113087.ece

The train journeys and her short story were listed on her myspace which is supposedly an unedited version here:

http://patrishka.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/amanda-knox/

There are many people promoting the story of sex on a train with a stranger while her young sister was nearby based on something they can't even quote.

 

[RoseMontague]

Hello Rose.

I remember reading several weeks ago a post from Yummi at PMF concerning the luminol footprints (with reference to the Motivations).

http://perugiamurderfile.org/viewtopic.php?p=49586#p49586

I am not a scientist so I cannot say how accurate Yummi's assessment is, however, it is interesting and may provide answers to questions concerning the luminol prints.

Yes,
I saw that post when I was still an active participant in the discussion at that website. Yummi seems to be a very articulate and reasonable poster on most occasions. My opinion is that if any of the revealed by luminol prints were cleaned it would be the "blobs" in Filomena's room. Those are pretty much worthless but I suspect the floor was cleaned after whatever made those blobs was deposited. Yet those contain DNA. Go figure. There are also luminol revealed footprints at Raffaele's place that nobody is claiming are the result of blood. Why is that?

 

[Amazer]

The quote is: "She buckled and made an admission of facts we knew to be true." (The "facts" that Felici is referring to here are the allegations against Patrick Lumumba, later attributed by police to Amanda. Bear in mind Felici's statement was made at the time of the arrest of Amanda, Raffaele and Patrick, 2 weeks before Rudy Guede came on the scene.)

How, exactly, is a different interpretation of Felici's statement from mine possible?

There is nothing in that statement that indicates if the "story" was fed to Amanda. That is something you want to read from it.

Also the coercion part depends on how you define coercion. If you mean physical coercion (slap on the back of her head) then I disagree with you. If you mean mental coercion in the form of the police stating that the story Amanda told didn't match the facts as they knew them at the time, then yes. But then, such "coercion" is fairly common during any interrogation.

 

[Dan O.]

OK.
Your timeline has this for the 22:13 call:



You should probably add that Raffaele's appeal does find the cell tower significant and could be an indication the the cell phone's location had changed from Meredith's apartment to a location between her apartment and the garden where they were left.

Yes, I'll need to update that to show where the "not significant" statement came from. I would have to agree with Massei though that Meredith could have been playing around with her cell phone and dangled it outside her window where the prosecutions expert measured the signal strength and where it would have been shielded from the local cells by the full thickness of the cottage and better exposed to the distant tower.

 

[Fulcanelli]

Where is the inventory list of cleaning products? They have nothing in the apartment containing bleach or a similar chemical compound that might cause a luminol reaction? Four women without a single product containing bleach that is contained in a lot of cleaning products. That is hard to believe. They never used bleach when they washed their whites even?

You also did not answer the question of how Amanda was able to clean Meredith's DNA from the "bloody prints" in her room without streaking those 3 footprints and leaving her DNA from floor contact while removing Meredith's DNA from the "blood".

On the bleach question, I'm not sure how many times this needs to be answered 'NO'. Was this not dealt with in court, during a year long trial...or was it all a dream, never happened?

She didn't clean the DNA in the traces in her room. You are not always going to get a DNA reading in a sample, especially when the sample is too small. For example, the print on the bath mat.

 

[RoseMontague]

On the bleach question, I'm not sure how many times this needs to be answered 'NO'. Was this not dealt with in court, during a year long trial...or was it all a dream, never happened?

She didn't clean the DNA in the traces in her room. You are not always going to get a DNA reading in a sample, especially when the sample is too small. For example, the print on the bath mat.

So she cleaned the bloody footprints in the corridor that showed no DNA but left the incriminating bloody footprints in her room alone? I guess she could tell by looking they only contained her DNA and not Meredith's despite the blood supposedly from Meredith? Or maybe you are saying she did not clean any of these bloody footprints?

 

[Chris C]

Amazing how none of the other people who "lived there" or visited, left profiles in Meredith's blood...not even Filomena in her own room. Maybe it's because Amanda has 'American DNA', it's just superior to everyone else's?

There was a 3rd females dna in the blood.

 

[Matthew Best]

Her family took it down.

But it's okay, we can pretend it never existed if it makes you feel better.

That's kind of how it works here. (Of course, you can't be expected to know that as you have only posted in this one thread.) On this forum you are expected to present evidence - your unsupported word is, sadly, not considered sufficient.

So, got any evidence of this alleged sexual liaison on a train or not?

 

[Fuji]

A disinterested observer can rely on his intellect, analytical ability, life experience and knowledge of the facts to determine whether any given individual is unable to recall pertinent events.

Your answer is largely what I anticipated. My intellect, as formed by experience and informed by the substantiated facts of this case, is what leads me to judge Knox as having lied to the investigation.

Recollection of pertinent events is not really at issue here, though, is it?

In all criminal investigations, but particularly for ones involving heinous crimes such as this one, it most certainly is.

Amanda recalled what she did the night of the murder.

Not accurately, not according to Francesco and Raffaele Sollecito. From Massei, p. 78:

"In the course of her [AK] witness examination she indicated that they [AK & RS] had dinner around 21:30 pm to 22:00 pm; then she put the time further out, at about 23:00 pm. But this claim is contradicted by the declarations made by Francesco Sollecito."

She did not recall what the police told her to recall, because it didn't happen.

As noted above, the dinner of November 1 was something that near certainly did occur - as such, her inability to answer this question with any fair degree of accuracy can not be attributed to the actions of the Perugia police.

In addition to her allegedly lying, what is it that you do hold as evidence for judgment of Amanda's character? As halides1 implies, offering examples will increase your credibility.

My assessment of her character is that she is a liar and an unrepentant murderess. I offer the present case as support for that assessment.

 

[Fuji]

The Massei report and conduct of the trial is marked by spectacular lack of impartiality. This bland subjective claim is just one example.

"This bland subjective claim" is in fact part of a larger paragraph which provides a logical context. The following sentences from Massei, p. 384 immediately follow the one to which you are objecting:

"In fact, the bare foot which, stained with blood, left its footprint on the sky-blue mat in the bathroom, could only have reached that mat by taking steps which should have left other footprints on the floor, also marked out in blood just like (in fact, most likely, with even more [blood], since they were created before the footprint printed on the mat) the one found on the mat itself. Of such other very visible footprints of a bloody bare foot, on the contrary, there is no trace."

Massei's reasoning (based here on the bathmat footprint) is faulty - the absence of a trail of footprints leading to the one on the bathmat simply means that the foot making the print became bloodied while the killer was rinsing blood from himself in the bathroom.

That claim is not supported by the evidence, which in fact revealed via Luminol application the "missing" footprints that one would logically expect to exist.

In any case, why would someone cleaning away the trail of prints not also dispose of the bathmat or simply rinse out the footprint?

I do not know. Knox and Sollecito have not been forthcoming on this or many other details of this crime.

It would not make sense to clean a trail of prints away and leave the last one for all to see.

No. What doesn't make sense is arguing that because a clean-up attempt was not perfectly executed that consitutes demonstrable proof that it was not attempted.

Where is the evidence of this alleged clean-up?

Massei has an entire subsection devoted to a discussion of the Luminol evidence, starting on p. 344.

It's impossible to clean some traces so thoroughly that they cannot be detected, while leaving other traces untouched.

Of course it is possible, and in this case, logical. AK & RS selectively removed evidence which they believed pointed to their guilt, while leaving (and fabricating, in the case of the staged break-in) evidence that they believed would tend to incriminate RG.

 

[Fuji]

That's a question for the pro-guilt faction. Why is every inaccuracy or minor discrepancy by Amanda or Raffaele taken as indication of "lies"?

My question ("How do you propose that a disinterested observer is to determine whether any given individual is unable to accurately recall pertinent events, or is instead simply dissembling?") is for anyone in any situation where they have to evaluate the truthfulness of another's statements.

Given the epistemological quandary posed by objective attempts to determine the contents of another's subjective consciousness, I hope you realize that your question (whose premise I do not agree with, but will ostensibly allow for the sake of argument) implies a corollary formulation:

Why are no inaccuracies or minor discrepancies by Amanda or Raffaele taken as indication of lies?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

your claim about Amanda

My question ("How do you propose that a disinterested observer is to determine whether any given individual is unable to accurately recall pertinent events, or is instead simply dissembling?") is for anyone in any situation where they have to evaluate the truthfulness of another's statements.

Given the epistemological quandary posed by objective attempts to determine the contents of another's subjective consciousness, I hope you realize that your question (whose premise I do not agree with, but will ostensibly allow for the sake of argument) implies a corollary formulation:

Why are no inaccuracies or minor discrepancies by Amanda or Raffaele taken as indication of lies?

Fuji,

You made the claim about Amanda's familiarity with lying. It is your job to support it, as I have repeatedly asked you to do. If you cannot, I suggest you withdraw it.

 

[Fuji]

Hi Fuji, let me clarify my question.

You wrote

I see that Dan O. and Kestrel are continuing to spout the stupidity of the "no evidence of a clean-up" line.​

Does it mean that in your opinion there is evidence of a clean-up?

That would be a logical deduction to draw from my quoted statement, yes.

If so, could you give some concrete examples?

See Massei, p. 344, "The Prints Highlighted by Luminol".

 

[Fuji]

Its called caveman logic.

Excuse me? Are you referring to my reasoning or to Massei's? If it's the former, I think that verbiage is out of place in this forum.

Found dead girl. She was murdered.
Found no evidence. It was cleaned up.

What are you arguing here?

Are you asserting that Meredith Kercher was not murdered??

There was ample physical evidence left at the scene. Much of it was easily found by the Perugian authorities, some of it was found only using investigative techniques (i.e. Luminol) that served to incriminate AK & RS in a poorly executed attempt at crime scene staging, or "cleaning up", and some of it was never found (i.e. Meredith's keys). Again, I do not understand what are you trying to assert here.

 

[LondonJohn]

"This bland subjective claim" is in fact part of a larger paragraph which provides a logical context. The following sentences from Massei, p. 384 immediately follow the one to which you are objecting:

"In fact, the bare foot which, stained with blood, left its footprint on the sky-blue mat in the bathroom, could only have reached that mat by taking steps which should have left other footprints on the floor, also marked out in blood just like (in fact, most likely, with even more [blood], since they were created before the footprint printed on the mat) the one found on the mat itself. Of such other very visible footprints of a bloody bare foot, on the contrary, there is no trace."

I fear that you've inadvertently provided a further example of Massei's flawed reasoning. He's claiming here that the blood/water partial footprint on the bathmat "could only have" got there via a foot which must have also left other similar prints on the flooring. In fact, he goes even further than this to suggest that the bloody footprints must have originated in Meredith's room, and hence not only should there be other prints leading from Meredith's room to the small bathroom, these other prints would probably be even more visible since they were close to the source of the blood. And of course in saying this, he concludes that all these bloody footprints between Meredith's room and the small bathroom must have been cleaned up.

However.....Massei appears to reject out of hand another rational possibility - that the print in the bathroom was the result of someone washing their hands (and possible also trouser legs) in the bidet, stepping in a blood/water mix which pooled in the bowl of the bidet, then stepping onto the mat. In this way, there would never have been a continuous trail of prints from Meredith's room to the small bathroom.

In addition, Massei's conclusion of a clean-up is totally unsupported by physical evidence - the Luminol tracing revealed no evidence of the smearing that would be almost inevitable if someone had wiped any bloody footprints from the floor between Meredith's room and the small bathroom. It would take an extremely thorough cleaning effort to leave no Luminol-detectable residue; and if anyone had been cleaning with that exceptionally high degree of diligence, it's hard to reason that they would have left the partial print on the mat.

 

[RoseMontague]

That would be a logical deduction to draw from my quoted statement, yes.



See Massei, p. 344, "The Prints Highlighted by Luminol".

See Amanda's appeal p. 114, "D. Traces positive luminol."

 

[Fuji]

Fuji,

Your question is a good one, but perhaps you should have asked it of yourself before making the statement that you did. You were the one who said that Amanda lies with ease and familiarity. That statement indicates that she lied on multiple occasions. I am once again asking you to explain exactly what you mean.

As indicated in my reply to Antony, there is a central epistemological problem with attempting to objectively ascertain the contents of another's subjective consciousness. I agreed with MaryH that intellect, experience, and specific knowledge are the only tools by which one can even attempt to do so. My conclusions regarding AK & RS are based on them as such.

My previous comment referred to the interrogation of the 5th-6th. My point was that if that is the only instance of Amanda's alleged lying that you can find, we are going to have to agree to disagree. Her statements during that time were the product of very poor interrogation techniques. MOO.

I actually had not used the interrogation of 5-6 November as evidence of Knox's lying. I did this because it is irrelevant for the case of establishing Knox's legal guilt, as it was not entered into evidence at her trial, as you are no doubt aware.

In the same reply to MaryH, I make reference to another instance which I take as evidence of Konx's mendacity, that being her account of the time which she and Sollecito ate dinner on 1 November.