Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Kevin_Lowe]

The "actual scientific literature" reveals that scientists do not much trust stomach contents as an accurate TOD indicator. Viz.:

Trigood, if you had been paying attention you would have seen my response to Sherlock_Holmes trying to use exactly the same paper to discredit this point.

Allow me to repeat myself, only substituting "Trigood" for "Sherlock":

Be honest here Trigood... have you actually read the article?

I'm thinking you didn't, because paragraphs seven to twelve of the discussion section concern themselves with "unusually well-defined circumstances" under which stomach contents can eliminate some possible times of death, and cites a case of a woman whose claimed TOD for her children was falsified because their stomachs were full of (undigested) food when she claimed they died eight hours after their last meal.

Since we are talking about unusually well-defined circumstances, where someone's stomach was full of (mostly digested) food, and this is being used to falsify the claim of a much later time of death, your article includes a caveat specifically addressing cases like this one. So if you had read the article then you would be guilty of deliberately misrepresenting its contents, but I'm going to be charitable and assume that you never bothered to look beyond the abstract.

Be honest here Trigood... have you actually followed up the citations for Table One ("Some agents and conditions of potential forensic importance and gastric emptying")?

I checked the most relevant ones and they turned out to be rat studies, unreplicated studies with eight subjects done in 1970 which contradict other studies done on the same topic and which involve the subject slamming five whiskies and so on.

The fundamental problem here is a lack of scientific literacy. You can't just find an abstract that seems to say what you want it to say and declare victory (although if you lack scientific literacy, it might seem to you that this is what other people are doing). You need to find out what the collected, relevant literature actually says.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you mention Dr. Ronchi. As it says in the Massei Report PMF Translation, p 178, Dr. Umani Ronchi contradicts your main thesis:

Once again the question of scientific literacy comes into play here. If you actually read the text you quoted, Ronchi is making statements about how long the stomach takes to completely empty itself. Massei is discussing them because, well, the man's a fool. Since Meredith's stomach was full and her duodenum was empty when she died, the length of time it takes for the human stomach to empty has got nothing to do with the matter at all.

What matters is t(lag), the time for the stomach to start emptying. As we've demonstrated time and time again, t(lag) is typically around 80 minutes, and anything over two hours is already well into the range of the unusual.

The report goes on to state two other issues, on this page and the next, that support the later TOD:

1) The duodenum appearing empty could have been an artefact of poor handling in autopsy. Material in duodenum could have slipped into the small intestine. Therefore, part of her meal may have been in duodenum at death.

Yeah, except for two things. One, Dr Lalli would have to have been a total incompetent for this to happen because any remotely competent investigator ties off the stomach and duodenum before they start mucking around with the contents, to prevent exactly this happenieng.

Two, the autopsy video shows him tying them off. Which kills Professor Ronchi's fairy story stone dead.

But it's nice for us that he tried, because by doing so he confirmed for the benefit of those people who have the relative evidentiary value of the peer-reviewed scientific literature and the Massei report completely backwards that barring some such manoeuvre with Meredith's duodenum contents, she could not possibly have died at 23:30.

2) Presence of vegetal fragment in her esophagus plus a low alcohol level in blood could indicate MK ate another small meal at home, including a mushroom (say) and beer or wine. Alcohol slows down digestion, as well as the other food she ate.

You want to cite us a paper showing that a glass of wine, taken two and a half hours after the ingestion of a meal, will delay t(lag) for another three hours?

Because that seems wildly inconsistent with the literature I've read.

There is an "actual scientific" concept called the normal, or Gaussian, distribution. Most natural phenomena follow it. By this distribution, although most digestion times would mainly fall within the 2-sigma limit, there would be others that would fall under the long tail. This is one reason you cannot say that digestion time is absolute.

Yes, but a 21:05 time of death is already in the long tail, given she ate at 6:30 or earlier and we can establish this with confidence based on the length of the movie they watched.

Another variable is how much MK ate. It's possible she ate heavily as she was hungry from staying up all night the night before. Again, her friends were probably not taking notes on this at the time, unaware that she would be murdered later that evening.

You want to cite us a paper showing that a heavy meal of pizza, mostly digested at 150 minutes after ingestion, will hang around for another 150 minutes without beginning to progress into the duodenum? Because that sounds pretty far out there to me as well.

 

[LondonJohn]

The "actual scientific literature" reveals that scientists do not much trust stomach contents as an accurate TOD indicator. Viz.:




I'm not sure what you're referring to when you mention Dr. Ronchi. As it says in the Massei Report PMF Translation, p 178, Dr. Umani Ronchi contradicts your main thesis:




The report goes on to state two other issues, on this page and the next, that support the later TOD:

1) The duodenum appearing empty could have been an artefact of poor handling in autopsy. Material in duodenum could have slipped into the small intestine. Therefore, part of her meal may have been in duodenum (i.e., partially digested) at death.

2) Presence of vegetal fragment in her esophagus plus a low alcohol level in blood could indicate MK ate another small meal at home, including a mushroom (say) and beer or wine. Alcohol slows down digestion, as well as the other food she ate.

There is an "actual scientific" concept called the normal, or Gaussian, distribution. Most natural phenomena follow it. By this distribution, although most digestion times would mainly fall within the 2-sigma limit, there would be others that would fall under the long tail. This is one reason you cannot say that digestion time is absolute.

Another variable is that neither Sophie nor Robin can say at precisely what time MK ate. (See Massei PMF Translation, pp 35 and 37). They weren't taking notes, after all.

Another variable is how much MK ate. It's possible she ate heavily as she was hungry from staying up all night the night before. Again, her friends were probably not taking notes on this at the time, unaware that she would be murdered later that evening.

Thanks for this. Some points:

1) Umani Ronchi is talking in his "6-7 hours" testimony about stomach total emptying times, not the time when food first starts to exit the stomach. However, the autopsy evidence indicates that all of Meredith's final meal(s) was still within her stomach. The autopsy reports 500ml of content, including recognisable cheese matter and vegetable fibres, which is entirely consistent with a moderate sized meal. The autopsy indicates that none of Meredith's piza meal had yet left her stomach.

2) The autopsy video apparently (I haven't seen it personally) shows that Lalli (the autopsy pathologist) tied off the stomach and duodenum correctly. Furthermore, the only food matter found in Meredith's small intestine was at the very lower end. The small intestine is around 5 metres in length, and is a semi-elastic tube (i.e. it's not rigidly hollow). Therefore, Lalli would have had to manually manipulate the food matter along around 4.5m of intestine for it to have been moved to where it was found. This is, needless to say, incredibly improbable. The matter found at the lowest end of Meredith's small intestine was almost certainly from some food that she ingested at around 12pm-2pm on the 1st November.

3) The level of alcohol found in Meredith's body post-mortem would not have had a material affect on digestion. Nor would any further small amount of food she might have consumed when she arrived home. The stomach doesn't work like that.

4) The "actual scientific concept" of normal distribution to which you so kindly refer has been discussed at length here - and referenced accordingly. Academic research on the time for food starting to leave the stomach after a moderate meal in a healthy adult indicates that a time of 3 hours is already well above the 95th percentile, and that times above 4 hours are above the 99.5 percentile.

5) Meredith's friends have indicated a time of consumption of the pizza meal at some time between 6.00pm and 6.30pm. We know that the pizza meal was totally finished by the time they started watching "The Notebook" on DVD, and we know that they paused the movie briefly to get their dessert of apple crumble. The movie runs at just under two hours, and Meredith and Sophie left to go home at around 8.45pm. This implies that the movie started at around 6.45pm. So it's possible to deduce that the pizza meal was eaten at around 6.15-6.30pm.

6) The total quantity of pizza on the table is known, and if I recall correctly, the girls testified that Meredith ate a small-to-moderate amount.

If you believe that the autopsy evidence is consistent with a time of death of 11.30-11.45pm - some 5 hours after the pizza meal - you may want to dig out some normal curves to support that position. While you're doing that, you might want to add some literature which indicates that stomach enzymes and acids take as long as five hours to break down cheese matter into a uniform chyme, since recognisable pieces of semi-broken-down cheese matter were found in her stomach at autopsy.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

When did they eat

Another variable is that neither Sophie nor Robin can say at precisely what time MK ate. (See Massei PMF Translation, pp 35 and 37). They weren't taking notes, after all.

Nor was Amanda taking notes about when she ate that night, yet it is often said that she lied about this.

The girls watched a film whose length is known.

post script
I see that others have already discussed the film. I would also reiterate that if one has doubts about the prosecution's story to ask a surgeon or anesthesiologist. I did, and he found it unlikely.

 

[christianahannah]

Welcome to JREF Solange. It's good to see someone actually considering the evidence.


I'm not sure what part of the climb through that window you find hard to imagine but I can offer some of my observations that may be of help.

The climb from below is indeed possible to do unassisted as the lawyer in full suit and dress shoes demonstrated (there are more pictures that show the intermediate positions). But that is actually the hardest way to get there. It's a single long step from the edge of the porch under the planter to the top of the grating of the lower window. Why go all the way around the house and clime up when the direct route is faster and easier.

As for reaching the latch once the shutters are opened and the window smashed, the top casement of the lower window protrudes from the wall by at least 1 cm. This would give an ample toehold for an additional step up with the inner window sill providing a good hand hold.

With both windows pushed open, there is plenty of glass free window sill to climb over. Anyone with moderate upper body strength should be able to make this climb as both hands can grasp the inner sill to pull up and in.

The prosecution pointed out the nail in the wall that was left undisturbed by the postulated climber. What they didn't point out is the nail hole close to that one where the nail was recently broken out leaving behind an unweathered chipped hole.

And finally, some posters want to claim that a real burglar would have chosen to enter through the kitchen window off the balcony as indeed real burglars did while the cottage was still a sealed crime scene. What they don't consider is the consequences of waking a resident by the act of climbing to the balcony and breaking the window and then being exposed with no easy retreat if the resident should look out that window or the balcony door.

Hello Dan O,

Are the photos you write of (intermediate positions of climbing and the unweathered nail hole) accessible to the public or are they private? Do you have any measurements concerning both the climb from the ground up to the two windows and/or from the planter to the window.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Should the jurors be talking to the press?

I found this quote in Barbie Nadeau’s recent column,
“Various times throughout her yearlong trial in 2009, the prosecutor and members of the jury told NEWSWEEK. They were ‘offended’ by American criticism of the case.”

Nadeau provided a link in the 2010 article to one she wrote in July of 2009 ("Monkey Trial") in which she said, “In fact, while jurors cannot be quoted in the press, they are still allowed to discuss the case and follow the press coverage.” It is difficult to square what she wrote about the jurors talking to the press here with her subsequent comments. BTW, the July 15, 2009 article has a number of misleading or incorrect statements.

 

[LondonJohn]

I found this quote in Barbie Nadeau’s recent column,
“Various times throughout her yearlong trial in 2009, the prosecutor and members of the jury told NEWSWEEK. They were ‘offended’ by American criticism of the case.”

Nadeau provided a link in the 2010 article to one she wrote in July of 2009 ("Monkey Trial") in which she said, “In fact, while jurors cannot be quoted in the press, they are still allowed to discuss the case and follow the press coverage.” It is difficult to square what she wrote about the jurors talking to the press here with her subsequent comments. BTW, the July 15, 2009 article has a number of misleading or incorrect statements.

Yes - it seems very hard to understand why jurors and Nadeau would have been having a conversation about the case in the middle of the trial. I wonder if that might come back to haunt her and/or the juror(s)?

It's hardly surprising that the press pack in Perugia during the trial (including Nadeau, Andrea Vogt and Nick Pisa, as well as the local Italian hacks) seem to have been engaged in a constant hunt for newsworthy information - after all, that's what they do for a living. It would therefore have been strongly in their interests to have good relationships with the police and prosecutors - since it's via these conduits that the most juicy information was bound to come. They were all seemingly keen not only to "out-scoop" each other, but evidently also to actually file copy worthy of being printed, since it appears that Nadeau, Vogt and Pisa essentially worked on a freelance paid-per-article basis. Therefore anything over and above the usual court report drudgery (and bear in mind that the court usually only sat on Fridays and Saturdays anyhow) was seen as gold dust. And in that kind of environment, ethical boundaries can occasionally get overstepped....

 

[Sherlock Holmes]

Well considering Rudy's eye witness testimony puts Kerchers death around 2200, the stomach contents ToD must be more accurate than the scream Mignini used to determine his version of ToD after 2330

I fully agree the TOD is between 9:30 and 10:00 and maybe even a bit earlier, all I'm saying is don't use TOD based on stomach contents regardless if it is correct in this case or not, it doesn't prove it.

 

[christianahannah]

Yes - it seems very hard to understand why jurors and Nadeau would have been having a conversation about the case in the middle of the trial. I wonder if that might come back to haunt her and/or the juror(s)?

I don't know. The Italian courts seem to be pretty lenient in their attitude towards jurors' discussions, if what is written in the article is true, as long as they are not quoted in the press:

During court breaks, jurists have lunch and coffee at the same cafés as lawyers and journalists. In fact, while jurors cannot be quoted in the press, they are still allowed to discuss the case and follow the press coverage.

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/07/14/monkey-trial.html

I don't know if this would also apply to comments/quotes by jurors after they have reached a verdict in the case.

 

[Solange305]

That is interesting about the stomach contents. Is that one of the things that will be disputed in the appeals? If it's as clear-cut as you guys say, it should be an easy win in that regard.

About talking to the jurors, I don't know if I would consider talking about American criticism with reporters the same as discussing the case itself. Although I can see why some people would be troubled by it, I don't find it as troubling as I would if they were discussing evidence or other case related matters with the press.

 

[Trigood]

Trigood, if you had been paying attention you would have seen my response to Sherlock_Holmes trying to use exactly the same paper to discredit this point.

Allow me to repeat myself, only substituting "Trigood" for "Sherlock":

Be honest here Trigood... have you actually read the article?

I'm thinking you didn't, because paragraphs seven to twelve of the discussion section concern themselves with "unusually well-defined circumstances" under which stomach contents can eliminate some possible times of death, and cites a case of a woman whose claimed TOD for her children was falsified because their stomachs were full of (undigested) food when she claimed they died eight hours after their last meal.

Since we are talking about unusually well-defined circumstances, where someone's stomach was full of (mostly digested) food, and this is being used to falsify the claim of a much later time of death, your article includes a caveat specifically addressing cases like this one. So if you had read the article then you would be guilty of deliberately misrepresenting its contents, but I'm going to be charitable and assume that you never bothered to look beyond the abstract.

Be honest here Trigood... have you actually followed up the citations for Table One ("Some agents and conditions of potential forensic importance and gastric emptying")?

I checked the most relevant ones and they turned out to be rat studies, unreplicated studies with eight subjects done in 1970 which contradict other studies done on the same topic and which involve the subject slamming five whiskies and so on.

The fundamental problem here is a lack of scientific literacy. You can't just find an abstract that seems to say what you want it to say and declare victory (although if you lack scientific literacy, it might seem to you that this is what other people are doing). You need to find out what the collected, relevant literature actually says.



Once again the question of scientific literacy comes into play here. If you actually read the text you quoted, Ronchi is making statements about how long the stomach takes to completely empty itself. Massei is discussing them because, well, the man's a fool. Since Meredith's stomach was full and her duodenum was empty when she died, the length of time it takes for the human stomach to empty has got nothing to do with the matter at all.

What matters is t(lag), the time for the stomach to start emptying. As we've demonstrated time and time again, t(lag) is typically around 80 minutes, and anything over two hours is already well into the range of the unusual.



Yeah, except for two things. One, Dr Lalli would have to have been a total incompetent for this to happen because any remotely competent investigator ties off the stomach and duodenum before they start mucking around with the contents, to prevent exactly this happenieng.

Two, the autopsy video shows him tying them off. Which kills Professor Ronchi's fairy story stone dead.

But it's nice for us that he tried, because by doing so he confirmed for the benefit of those people who have the relative evidentiary value of the peer-reviewed scientific literature and the Massei report completely backwards that barring some such manoeuvre with Meredith's duodenum contents, she could not possibly have died at 23:30.



You want to cite us a paper showing that a glass of wine, taken two and a half hours after the ingestion of a meal, will delay t(lag) for another three hours?

Because that seems wildly inconsistent with the literature I've read.



Yes, but a 21:05 time of death is already in the long tail, given she ate at 6:30 or earlier and we can establish this with confidence based on the length of the movie they watched.



You want to cite us a paper showing that a heavy meal of pizza, mostly digested at 150 minutes after ingestion, will hang around for another 150 minutes without beginning to progress into the duodenum? Because that sounds pretty far out there to me as well.

Kevin_Lowe:

To which paper are you referring?

I don't have MEDline access. Therefore, please post the relevant portions to support your argument.

I wasn't reading this forum when you apparently made this argument and it's not my job to manually search through 140+ pages for this information.

Regardless of what ONE PAPER says, as my source (properly quoted, by the way) says, stomach contents cannot be used for determining TOD, as a single factor. Other factors must be included. End of story.

"The fundamental problem here is a lack of scientific literacy."
Which is a nice way of saying that I didn't earn that B.S. in Chemistry that I received... thanks, buddy. Hmm, funny, though. Phi Beta Kappa thought I did. And what were your scientific credentials, then?

"You can't just find an abstract that seems to say what you want it to say and declare victory (although if you lack scientific literacy, it might seem to you that this is what other people are doing). You need to find out what the collected, relevant literature actually says."

That article was a review or survey article. Such things exist. And what he says DOES reflect "what the collected, relevant literature actually says."

Why does every source I consult say that stomach contents are a bad method for determining TOD, and can't be used alone? Yet that is what the sophistry of this forum insists on doing, over and over.

Please cite your sources, as I have done. Otherwise, you're just flapping in the wind. Thank you.

 

[Chris C]

I fully agree the TOD is between 9:30 and 10:00 and maybe even a bit earlier, all I'm saying is don't use TOD based on stomach contents regardless if it is correct in this case or not, it doesn't prove it.

Sadly everyone wants to point to the big elephant called Stomach Contents. Though I believe that in this case its accurate to use stomach contents since emptying never started. However, the real elephant is Rudy's own statements. Those statements he has never retracted. Like he has never admitted to Knox/Sollecito letting him in the house. He admitted to sexual contact with Meredith. He admits that he was fighting with Meredith's attacker and leaves the apartment at 2230hrs. He also admits to seeing the people in the broke down car, which confirms that he had left the apartment before 2330 since we know the times the car was out front. Now we can discuss to our faces turn blue about whether or not the evidence supports Knox/Sollecito being there. However, Guede has given actual evidence to support a ToD at 2200 hrs or earlier. Guede's testimonies are the Real Elephant.

 

[Trigood]

Thanks for this. Some points:

1) Umani Ronchi is talking in his "6-7 hours" testimony about stomach total emptying times, not the time when food first starts to exit the stomach. However, the autopsy evidence indicates that all of Meredith's final meal(s) was still within her stomach. The autopsy reports 500ml of content, including recognisable cheese matter and vegetable fibres, which is entirely consistent with a moderate sized meal. The autopsy indicates that none of Meredith's piza meal had yet left her stomach.

2) The autopsy video apparently (I haven't seen it personally) shows that Lalli (the autopsy pathologist) tied off the stomach and duodenum correctly. Furthermore, the only food matter found in Meredith's small intestine was at the very lower end. The small intestine is around 5 metres in length, and is a semi-elastic tube (i.e. it's not rigidly hollow). Therefore, Lalli would have had to manually manipulate the food matter along around 4.5m of intestine for it to have been moved to where it was found. This is, needless to say, incredibly improbable. The matter found at the lowest end of Meredith's small intestine was almost certainly from some food that she ingested at around 12pm-2pm on the 1st November.

3) The level of alcohol found in Meredith's body post-mortem would not have had a material affect on digestion. Nor would any further small amount of food she might have consumed when she arrived home. The stomach doesn't work like that.

4) The "actual scientific concept" of normal distribution to which you so kindly refer has been discussed at length here - and referenced accordingly. Academic research on the time for food starting to leave the stomach after a moderate meal in a healthy adult indicates that a time of 3 hours is already well above the 95th percentile, and that times above 4 hours are above the 99.5 percentile.

5) Meredith's friends have indicated a time of consumption of the pizza meal at some time between 6.00pm and 6.30pm. We know that the pizza meal was totally finished by the time they started watching "The Notebook" on DVD, and we know that they paused the movie briefly to get their dessert of apple crumble. The movie runs at just under two hours, and Meredith and Sophie left to go home at around 8.45pm. This implies that the movie started at around 6.45pm. So it's possible to deduce that the pizza meal was eaten at around 6.15-6.30pm.

6) The total quantity of pizza on the table is known, and if I recall correctly, the girls testified that Meredith ate a small-to-moderate amount.

If you believe that the autopsy evidence is consistent with a time of death of 11.30-11.45pm - some 5 hours after the pizza meal - you may want to dig out some normal curves to support that position. While you're doing that, you might want to add some literature which indicates that stomach enzymes and acids take as long as five hours to break down cheese matter into a uniform chyme, since recognisable pieces of semi-broken-down cheese matter were found in her stomach at autopsy.

I'm sorry I was not willing to read through 140+ pages of discussion to pick out your discussions on this topic.

Perhaps Meredith's digestion was unusual, and in the 99.6th percentile, or the 99.99th. You don't know, and neither do I. Therefore, as my citation by Jaffe states, stomach contents cannot be used ALONE as a valid indicator of TOD.

Aside from that, you didn't witness the autopsy tape, and neither did I. But Umani Ronchi did, and he thought there was a chance Lalli didn't tie off the ligaments properly and the contents of the duodenum slipped out. I'd go with his conclusions over yours and mine.

Can you find me a reference that contradicts Jaffe, specifically?

 

[el buscador]

Sadly everyone wants to point to the big elephant called Stomach Contents. Though I believe that in this case its accurate to use stomach contents since emptying never started. However, the real elephant is Rudy's own statements. Those statements he has never retracted. Like he has never admitted to Knox/Sollecito letting him in the house. He admitted to sexual contact with Meredith. He admits that he was fighting with Meredith's attacker and leaves the apartment at 2230hrs. He also admits to seeing the people in the broke down car, which confirms that he had left the apartment before 2330 since we know the times the car was out front. Now we can discuss to our faces turn blue about whether or not the evidence supports Knox/Sollecito being there. However, Guede has given actual evidence to support a ToD at 2200 hrs or earlier. Guede's testimonies are the Real Elephant.

Does anyone know the TOD used to convict rudy at his trial? I've read that it is different from the TOD for Amanda and Raffaele trial, but I've not been able to find anywhere that it's talked about.

 

[Dan O.]

Hello Dan O,

Are the photos you write of (intermediate positions of climbing and the unweathered nail hole) accessible to the public or are they private? Do you have any measurements concerning both the climb from the ground up to the two windows and/or from the planter to the window.

I believe the photos have all been presented on this thread. If not, they should be available on the FOA or IIP sites.

To measure the distances I constructed a 3D model of the room, window and outside wall using various photos and calibrated with both the 3.15m width of Filomena's room and the 8cm square reference plaque in the open window. The hight and width of the window allow the calibration to be carried to the exterior.

These dimensions were posted earlier when we compared the distance from the top rung of the lower window grating to the latch mechanism inside Filomena's window and concluded that Rudy having a height of about 1.8m would have little trouble reaching it. This was before the photo surfaced showing that the top of the lower window casing protruded from the wall providing yet another step up.

I unfortunately missed the opportunity to have Charlie directly measure the exterior wall when he visited Perugia.

 

[Chris C]

Just incase your looking for a link to Rudy's confession, which is the real elephant that no one really discusses.

Rudy's original confession. Rudy's confession could be one of the reasons the Defense is trying to move the ToD closer to 2200. So it lines up with his confession. The prosecution never tried to line up Rudy's confession with the ToD in the Knox/Sollecito trial. The prosecution avoided that confession like the plague.

Guede's confession to German police. Though it can't be used against him, because the court declared he didn't have a lawyer present, why wasn't it used in the Knox/Sollecito trial? German Confession. In this confession he says, "Guede said he met Kercher shortly after 8:30 p.m. at the cottage on the night of the murder for consensual sex, but that "an Italian man" he did not know followed them in and killed her while he was in the bathroom" An italian man followed them at 8:30pm. Sollecito has an alibi for that time period. We also know Kercher arrived home less than 30 minutes later. Thats a fairly accurate statement. Of course apparently after the Italian man followed them in he went to the bathroom.

Notice that in both confessions, he points to he was in the bathroom. He is trying to prove he was in the bathroom at the Merdith's ToD, so he gives evidence freely to try and corroborate his claim he is on the toilet. He gives a rough ToD, which is way earlier than the Prosecutions in the Knox/Sollecito case. He gives how he entered the home, which makes no mention of two roommates. He points to a single attacker not multiple attackers. He points to the LONE attacker entering while he is on the toilet. Even later after he changed his story and tried to throw Knox under the bus, he never changed 4 parts of his story. Consensual Sex, ToD, Lone Attacker, and He was on the toilet.

These are the first 2 statments Rudy has made to police. Both point to either an earlier ToD or to an Italian man that couldn't be Sollecito.

If you look closely at all the statements you start to see a pattern here. 2 MEN. Rudy's 2 confessions, both mention another man. Rudy's skype message. The 2 Nut cases in jail. All these instances mention 2 men breaking into that apartment. Rudy really could be telling the truth. He could have been sitting on the toilet when Meredith walked in and his partner killed her. Thats just a wacky theory, and I think Rudy killed her all by himself. I think he is inventing this 2nd man to take blame off him. However, Rudy's own testimony show that Meredith's ToD doesn't line up with the Prosecutions ToD and it has always shown a Lone Attacker. The defense also could be trying to line up the Guede's testimonies with the child murderer and convicted mobster.

 

[Malkmus]

Therefore, as my citation by Jaffe states, stomach contents cannot be used ALONE as a valid indicator of TOD.

I don't think anyone's arguing the stomach contents alone establish the time of death. There's a variety of other factors, including Meredith's last actions, Rudy's testimony, and witness accounts that all align with the stomach contents and a TOD contradictory to what the prosecution alleged.

 

[Malkmus]

Just incase your looking for a link to Rudy's confession, which is the real elephant that no one really discusses.

I agree, Chris. To see what really happened one only has to look at Rudy's testimony of what happened that night.

 

[Justinian2]

I found this quote in Barbie Nadeau’s recent column,
“Various times throughout her yearlong trial in 2009, the prosecutor and members of the jury told NEWSWEEK. They were ‘offended’ by American criticism of the case.”

Nadeau provided a link in the 2010 article to one she wrote in July of 2009 ("Monkey Trial") in which she said, “In fact, while jurors cannot be quoted in the press, they are still allowed to discuss the case and follow the press coverage.” It is difficult to square what she wrote about the jurors talking to the press here with her subsequent comments. BTW, the July 15, 2009 article has a number of misleading or incorrect statements.

Just back from vacation in FLA. Also I've been visiting a relative on my wife who has been suddenly stricken with Pancreatic cancer.

I think Americans are confident of the belief that AK and RS are innocent not because of our perfect justice system, but because we know that even our system of justice with arguably more protections for the accused, has failed and failed miserably at times. We aren't saying that the Italian system of justice is worse than the American system of justice, although it does seem worse, we are saying the we know the Italian system can fail because the American system has failed so completely at times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Gilchrist

Joyce Gilchrist is a former forensic chemist who had participated in over 3,000 criminal cases in 21 years while working for the Oklahoma City police department, and who was accused of falsifying evidence. Her evidence led in part to 23 people being sentenced to death, 11 of whom have been executed.[1] After her dismissal, Gilchrist alleged that she was fired in retaliation for reporting sexual misconduct.

Gilchrist earned the nickname "Black Magic" for her ability to match DNA evidence that other forensic examiners could not. She was also known for being unusually adept at testifying and persuading juries, thus obtaining convictions. In 1994, Gilchrist was promoted to supervisor from forensic chemist after just 9 years on the job, but her colleagues began to raise concerns about her work.

Gilchrist was dismissed due to "flawed casework analysis" and "laboratory mismanagement".

[...]

Over 1,700 cases in which Gilchrist's evidence was significant to a conviction were reviewed by the state of Oklahoma. Her attorney stated that, "The criticism of her around here is second only to that of Timothy McVeigh." After her dismissal, Gilchrist filed a lawsuit seeking 20.1 million dollars, claiming that her firing was actually motivated by revenge, after she reported sexual misconduct by her supervisor.

Over 1,700 cases were reviewed! America has flubbed up royally! Why can't the Italian ego admit that they flubbed up royally in this one case?

 

[Antony]

(msg #5935, p149)
I've been lurking here for most of this thread. If Amanda's appeal fails will those who believe her innocent change their minds, or will she always be innocent in your eyes?

This is a good question, even if somewhat provocatively put. I will agree with other posters here in that it will take some dramatic new evidence to change my mind, not just one court agreeing with the flawed judgement of another court. Like others here, I'm not staking my shirt on Amanda and Raffaele being exonerated first time round, although there are some good signs, like a new judge being appointed.

I will go a bit further though, and say that I would also have to be convinced of a number of conclusions that can only be described as weird, such as:

- after 6 days together, the accuseds' sex life had become so stale that they felt the need to spice it up with a foursome including Amanda's unwilling housemate;

- a realistic approach for a police investigation is to restrict their enquiries to the 2 people who called them to the crime scene;

- the dramatic new evidence that clinches the case is something that was kept out of the public domain for 3 years.

That'll do for starters. Maybe people can think of a few more?

The pro-guilt faction seem to have been quiet in the last few days, but it would be interesting for some of them to say what it would take to convince them that Amanda and Raffaele are, after all, innocent. Presumably not merely the appeal court overturning the verdicts.

 

[Justinian2]

This is a good question, even if somewhat provocatively put. I will agree with other posters here in that it will take some dramatic new evidence to change my mind, not just one court agreeing with the flawed judgement of another court. Like others here, I'm not staking my shirt on Amanda and Raffaele being exonerated first time round, although there are some good signs, like a new judge being appointed.

I will go a bit further though, and say that I would also have to be convinced of a number of conclusions that can only be described as weird, such as:

- after 6 days together, the accuseds' sex life had become so stale that they felt the need to spice it up with a foursome including Amanda's unwilling housemate;

- a realistic approach for a police investigation is to restrict their enquiries to the 2 people who called them to the crime scene;

- the dramatic new evidence that clinches the case is something that was kept out of the public domain for 3 years.

That'll do for starters. Maybe people can think of a few more?

The pro-guilt faction seem to have been quiet in the last few days, but it would be interesting for some of them to say what it would take to convince them that Amanda and Raffaele are, after all, innocent. Presumably not merely the appeal court overturning the verdicts.

I don't think that the 150 million votes of a presidential election changes anybody's mind about who the best candidate is. It might change the minds of people about who will win, but not about the candidtates themselves.

I don't think that anything will change the minds of those that have their beliefs anchored in solid fact about the innocence of AK or RS except new evidence that has not or could not be manipulated by the prosecution. Were the case to be tried in America with the same result, then people would sadly forget about AK and RS. Perhaps Italy should invite another country to try the case.