Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Chris_Halkides]

forensic bias in this case

What is this "clear incentive" you speak of? Are you claiming that the job, reputation, and salary of a professional scientist is dependent on some prosecutor's good will? Is this true for all prosecutors? All labs? All scientists? All conclusions? How can we tell when it isn't?

What I have seen discussed about this topic in these threads has been more argument by anecdote, supporting still again the proposition that no one can be justly convicted anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances, for anything.

There is no aspect of trial law or practice which has not been demonstrated in this discussion by the "evidence" of unrelated examples to be completely unreliable. The only conclusion it can be reasonable to draw from this sort of "evidence" is that we have no business at all ever having any trials.

Quadraginta,

By implication you are setting up false alternatives with respect to forensic bias: Either do nothing to fix the problem of forensic bias, or give up on using forensic information altogether. This problem did not start with the Knox case; I again offer the Patricia Stallings case as just one example. Moreover, thoughtful individuals have contributed ideas for reform. “CSI for real,” by Roger Koppl is an eye-opening read. Gritsforbreakfast has so much thoughtful commentary that it is difficult to pick just one article, but this one makes some broadly applicable points.

Dr. Stefanoni had to apply for permission to be allowed to be on both the collection team and the analysis team. Dr. Biondo was an unpaid consultant for the prosecution. Because he is Dr. Stefanoni’s direct supervisor, it is difficult to see how this constitutes an independent evaluation of her work, in the way that an expert from an unrelated branch of ILE would be. However, I do not know who Dr. Biondo’s superior is nor how their job performances are evaluated, and I agree with your implication that would be helpful to know these sorts of things better to evaluate their independence from the prosecution. I have instead focused on Dr. Stefanoni’s actions that raise doubts on their own merits, without reference to how independent she is. There has never been a shortage of these.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Amanda's behavior

Fair enough, but people always say that about guilty people. They say the same thing about Casey Anthony. It's STRANGE to the average person, it just is. I would never, ever try to assign guilt to someone based on those things. But when you have evidence against you, and you sit there and act like Casey Anthony and Joran Van der Sloot, you are NOT helping yourself. At all.

I know people deal with grief in different ways, but it seems like Amanda has all cosmic energy against her. She must be the unluckiest person in the whole world. She gets a crazy prosecutor, abusive police, biased judge and jury, DNA against her and her boyfriend ACCIDENTALLY deposited on suspicious items, witnesses saying they saw her outside the Raffaele's house when she says she was there, AND on top of that, she copes in the same way that sociopaths on trial seem to do. Do you see how someone looking at the big picture might say, this is all absolutely improbable?

Solange305,

Frank Sfarzo wrote of Amanda Knox in November 2009, “If she smiles it's wrong, if she cries it's wrong, if she moves it's wrong, if she's still it's wrong, if she watches it's wrong, if she doesn't watch it's wrong."

Whether she did cartwheels or just stretches and whether she did them spontaneously or at the request of a police officer are contentious questions that garnered many long comments in the previous thread. The arguments are too long to summarize in a single sentence. I do not contend that her behavior in the days that followed the murder was perfect; however, I think some of her actions can be explained on the basis of her being scared, tired, and emotionally drained. The DNA evidence deserves a separate comment.

 

[Antony]

(msg #6312, p158)
Do you see how someone looking at the big picture might say, this is all absolutely improbable?

Yes, I do see that, which is why I say that when you become familiar with the details of the case, you will see that very little is as it seems. People don't want to believe that the police and courts can't be trusted, and it's a lot of effort to read up and understand the detail of the evidence, so they take police reports and court rulings at face value as a ready-made personal judgement.

What I am asking you to do, rather than focussing on Amanda and Raffaele's reported behaviour and telling yourself that innocent people do that, is to focus a bit on the actions of the police and prosecutor, and the rulings of the court. I think the sheer volume and nature of the questionable police actions and court decisions very quickly drowns out the suspicions against Amanda and Raffaele.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

And there was me thinking you had that down to a fine art.

My, what are all these coroners thinking, wasting all that time and money on their medical education and gaining all that experience when they could just read a few medical papers they found on Google and voila, become a medical expert like Kevin_Lowe!

In the meantime, I'll leave you to continue teaching the experts their jobs...

I think there is a persistent problem here with scientific literacy and a lack of basic understanding about how science works.

Professionals keep their information current by reading articles exactly like the ones we have been citing for you. They are not privy to some ethereal realm of pure scientific information which they and only they can apprehend directly like mystics communing with the spirits. They are not taught some arcane and secret code in medical school by which they can decipher the secret meaning of phrases like "mean t(lag) is 80 minutes", which turn out to really secretly mean "mean t(lag) is 240 minutes".

The reason they are experts is because at any given time they retain the knowledge of lots of individual papers, plus various other skills to do with putting their knowledge to use.

If all you need to know to solve a problem is one particular fact, and you can find that fact via the literature, then yes, you are exactly as good for the purposes of solving that problem as someone with a relevant degree.

By the same token, if an expert's "expert opinion" contradicts the literature on a matter of plain fact then the expert is wrong. That's an end to the matter. The job of an expert is to keep current on the literature. It is not the literature's job to keep current with whatever came out of the mouth of some "expert".

I think this really is an argument of last resort for the desperate: "Never mind what the literature is saying! Ask instead who is saying that the literature says that!". It just doesn't matter who is saying the literature says that.

All that matters is what the literature says.

 

[RoseMontague]

If they'd told home they were going away, one would have thought that would have been heard in the trial...don't you think?

The house was dark because all the shutters were closed. Amazing thing, shutters.

I have posted extensively on this and what is clear about Filomena's many different statements on the shutters is that saying the shutters were closed with any certainty at all is not correct.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6306406&postcount=5363

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Why didn't they attend Meredith's vigil?

Why was Amanda doing cartwheels and fooling around in a police station, while they are investigating the death of her *ahem* "dear friend"?

Why did she seem to revel in the attention she received at trial? That seems awfully narcissistic to me, and not consistent with an innocent person in jail for murder. (Examples, smiling all the time, "All You Need is Love Shirt", laughing while testifying, and just a general nonchalant attitude) Although Ill admit, I haven't seen any footage of the whole trial, so I can't say for sure if she acted like this the majority of the time or part of the time or what, so I'll admit my judgement on this may not be correct.

I guess it's natural for the human mind to take this kind of social guesswork as being the best way to figure out who is guilty. Back on the African savannah we didn't have fingerprint dust, DNA analysis, modern pathology, computer forensics or any of the modern scientific apparatus we use to investigate crimes today. Back then if someone looked shifty, that was the best evidence you were going to get - might as well lynch them!

However the modern, trained human mind should start with the hard facts as established by science, and work forward from there. If it turns out that the hard facts contradict our social guesswork, too bad for social guesswork.

In this case, the combined evidence placing Meredith's overwhelmingly likely time of death in the 21:05-21:30 range, and placing Amanda and Raffaele at home until 21:49 or later, means that they just can't have been there when she died.

If they weren't there when she died, it wouldn't matter if they played Charades in the interview room and claimed that they saw the Easter Bunny do it. They still couldn't have done it.

That said, I also personally find such amateur social guesswork no better than palm reading.

Why did Raffaele lie and say he pricked Meredith with a knife while cooking?

It's a popular if blatantly incorrect move in guilter circles to claim it as a fact that he did so.

What he actually wrote was ambiguous: He wrote that he had touched "her" hand with a knife. If he was writing precisely grammatically correctly he meant Meredith, but that interpretation makes little or no sense because neither he nor anyone else has ever claimed before or since that Meredith ever visited his house. If he had his grammar screwed up (and we know that he does that all the time) he meant Amanda, and was speculating about the possibility of secondary DNA transfer from Meredith to Amanda to the knife.

Claiming as a fact that he claimed to have pricked Meredith is not accurate, nor is it honest in the case of the posters here who have been participating long enough to have had this discussion already.

Also, although I know this has been debated to death, why accuse Patrick? Why let it stand even while in the safety of her cell, when no cops were around to pressure her? I know you guys talk a lot about false confessions, but this is a false accusation.

This business of arguing that it was a "false accusation" as opposed to a "false confession" is pure semantics.

There are plenty of examples of innocent people accusing others, who were also innocent, under sustained police interrogation. The psychological mechanics are exactly the same as far as we can ascertain: Psychologically vulnerable or worn-down people internalise the police accusations, whether they be accusations aimed at themselves or others, come to believe them, and repeat them.

I know you guys have good questions too supporting the other side, and a lot of them I can't answer adequately. But I just wish people would stop acting like as if people who have questions like mine are crazy or conspiracy nuts. We're not, there is a lot for us to be suspicious of on this side of the fence as well.

The problem is, if they weren't there, they didn't do it.

All of the armchair psychology in the world can't make them guilty if they were at home watching Naruto when Rudy murdered Meredith.

 

[Dan O.]

Dan, do you know if we have any documentation of this anywhere -- that investigators had the phone records by the second?

That comes primarily from the fact that the phone records cut off in the middle of the evening of the second yet they continued to make and receive phone calls that night. Also, the phone records would be a primary source to confirm activities and establish exact times of events. The investigators would be negligent if the failed to procure the phone records as soon as possible.

Also, someone wrote somewhere recently that Patrick was one of the people who had set up the memorial for Meredith? Has anyone heard that before? If true, it certainly would increase the mystery around why the police did not question Patrick before they arrested him.

Patrick was handing out flyers for the memorial but it was the owner of Merlins and another patron from that bar that organized it.

ETA: Guardian 2007-11-06:

Two other residents who knew Ms Kercher, Gennaro Crugliano and Pasquale Alessi, were planning a candlelit vigil last night outside Perugia's cathedral,with a banner hoisted at the town hall bearing her name. Flyers announcing the event handed out in the city during the day read: "With greatest love from all your friends in Perugia, addio Meredith."

 

[Mary_H]

That comes primarily from the fact that the phone records cut off in the middle of the evening of the second yet they continued to make and receive phone calls that night. Also, the phone records would be a primary source to confirm activities and establish exact times of events. The investigators would be negligent if the failed to procure the phone records as soon as possible.

Patrick was handing out flyers for the memorial but it was the owner of Merlins and another patron from that bar that organized it.

Does anyone still doubt the police knew about the texts between Amanda and Patrick before the interrogation?

Does anyone still doubt the police were remiss in not interviewing Patrick before arresting him?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

doing my part for dollar-general psychoanalysis

Solange305,

Amanda word the "All you need is love" shirt the day after Meredith's British friends testified (this was when the toy vibrator story made headlines). According to her friend DJ, she was responding to the criticism of the day before. Of course, maybe she wore it because it was Valentine's day.

 

[Dan O.]

Does anyone still doubt the police knew about the texts between Amanda and Patrick before the interrogation?

I'm not prepared to state as fact that the police had the SMS text before Amanda's interrogation. They would have know of the SMS exchange from the phone records but I don't know if the details of the "Piss on you" legislation (see Pisanu's law art. 6) extends to preemptively capturing the text of messages or if the phone companies would have these messages cached for any length of time after they were delivered to the recipient.

Certainly, the interpreters recollection, as posted in the original thread by Fiona, is a strong indication that the interpreter had at least seen the text that Patrick had sent.

Does anyone still doubt the police were remiss in not interviewing Patrick before arresting him?

Absolutely. To invade a man's home with guns drawn based solely on an uncorroborated statement acquired in a coercive interrogation is totally unjustified.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Micheli and the time of dinner

Both of these judgments seem to be using the time dinner was finished as the 2-3 hour starting point AND and they are using that time as roughly 20:00-21:00. Both of these assumptions are not correct. The Micheli report even quotes Sophie as saying dinner was at 6PM or even earlier and it is the start of the main meal that should be the starting point of the 2-3 hour time frame.

Because the defense teams of Amanda and Raffaele made such an issue of the stomach contents and time of death, I believe all this prosecution nonsense outlined in your post was simply an attempt to backtrack on the obvious holes in Rudy's motivation. Of course Rudy still doesn't have an alibi at 9PM (and admits being there at that time) so his defense didn't push this issue the way it was contested in Amanda's and Raffaele's trial.

In any case both of the above motivations are using the stomach contents to pin down a time of death.

RoseMontague,

This is a very good point. Did the defense bring it up the Micheli report in the appeal document?

 

[Chris C]

Does anyone still doubt the police knew about the texts between Amanda and Patrick before the interrogation?

Does anyone still doubt the police were remiss in not interviewing Patrick before arresting him?

According to Knox, during the interrogation they asked to look at her phone and she gave it to them. They then read her text messages and started questioning her on the text exchange between Patrick and her. The police have always said they knew she was the murderer the first time they saw her. Which would be on nov. 2. Which would make her a suspect on Nov. 2. However, if she was there just to help with the investigation, why where they asking her questions unrelated to what she saw in the apartment. Thats why I say the moment this interrogation started she was officially a suspect. Because now they are asking her for an alibi. They are now calling her a liar for answers they dont like.

 

[Chris C]

Both of these judgments seem to be using the time dinner was finished as the 2-3 hour starting point AND and they are using that time as roughly 20:00-21:00. Both of these assumptions are not correct. The Micheli report even quotes Sophie as saying dinner was at 6PM or even earlier and it is the start of the main meal that should be the starting point of the 2-3 hour time frame.

Because the defense teams of Amanda and Raffaele made such an issue of the stomach contents and time of death, I believe all this prosecution nonsense outlined in your post was simply an attempt to backtrack on the obvious holes in Rudy's motivation. Of course Rudy still doesn't have an alibi at 9PM (and admits being there at that time) so his defense didn't push this issue the way it was contested in Amanda's and Raffaele's trial.

In any case both of the above motivations are using the stomach contents to pin down a time of death.

RoseMontague,

This is a very good point. Did the defense bring it up the Micheli report in the appeal document?

In Rudy's original 2 statements. He says he rushed over to meet meredith and waited outside by the downstairs apartment for her to get home. The 2nd says he met up with her at 8:30pm and they where followed home by a italian man with black hair who raped and killed Meredith.

 

[Danceme]

It's also an interesting piece in relation to one often-repeated claim - that Rudy wouldn't have disposed of the phones there because he was local, and would've known it was a garden. Well according to Rudy, he doesn't even know where the road itself is, let alone that there's a house in that area. Unless he's lying, of course, which leads to the obvious question as to why he felt the need to lie about it...

Personally, I took the judges remarks as irony. She was basically saying if he continued to deny he knew where that road was, having grown up in Perugia after all, then she had no further questions and was particularly dismissive of him.

I think there is a persistent problem here with scientific literacy and a lack of basic understanding about how science works.

Professionals keep their information current by reading articles exactly like the ones we have been citing for you. They are not privy to some ethereal realm of pure scientific information which they and only they can apprehend directly like mystics communing with the spirits. They are not taught some arcane and secret code in medical school by which they can decipher the secret meaning of phrases like "mean t(lag) is 80 minutes", which turn out to really secretly mean "mean t(lag) is 240 minutes".

The reason they are experts is because at any given time they retain the knowledge of lots of individual papers, plus various other skills to do with putting their knowledge to use.

If all you need to know to solve a problem is one particular fact, and you can find that fact via the literature, then yes, you are exactly as good for the purposes of solving that problem as someone with a relevant degree.

By the same token, if an expert's "expert opinion" contradicts the literature on a matter of plain fact then the expert is wrong. That's an end to the matter. The job of an expert is to keep current on the literature. It is not the literature's job to keep current with whatever came out of the mouth of some "expert".

I think this really is an argument of last resort for the desperate: "Never mind what the literature is saying! Ask instead who is saying that the literature says that!". It just doesn't matter who is saying the literature says that.

All that matters is what the literature says.

So basically, are you saying that all the experts who testified just don't keep up with their continuing education and are spouting knowledge learned way back when in school?
You find a couple of articles to say what you want to believe and you want us to believe the experts testifying at trial have kept up with nothing within their own fields.
Sorry Kevin, but you have no way of knowing the so called 'trade' literature these people read on a regular basis and it's extraordinarily presumptuous of you to think they read nothing. In fact this presumption defies belief.

 

[Chris C]

Personally, I took the judges remarks as irony. She was basically saying if he continued to deny he knew where that road was, having grown up in Perugia after all, then she had no further questions and was particularly dismissive of him.



So basically, are you saying that all the experts who testified just don't keep up with their continuing education and are spouting knowledge learned way back when in school?
You find a couple of articles to say what you want to believe and you want us to believe the experts testifying at trial have kept up with nothing within their own fields.
Sorry Kevin, but you have no way of knowing the so called 'trade' literature these people read on a regular basis and it's extraordinarily presumptuous of you to think they read nothing. In fact this presumption defies belief.

I agree with you on the first statement. Basicly the interrogator was like, whatever nothing left to discuss.

The 2nd I disagree with. Kevin is using literature to support what the CORONER put in his autopsy report. Remember its the autopsy report that says 2 to 3 hours. So Kevin, in fact, is agreeing with the Medical expert, Dr. Lalli, who did the autopsy and is just showing you how the literature supports the CORONER's findings. What Kevin is NOT doing is using trade literature to disagree with the CORONER's findings.
Even the prosecution didn't disagree with the 2 to 3 hour ToD after eating. Instead they focused on trying to discredit the coroner's procedures and enter into evidence a bigger Time of Death window if there was food already in the duodenum. Neither judge disagrees with the 2-3 hour window. Instead Kevin and others are showing you the 2 - 3 hour window is suppose to start at the beginning of consumption not 2 hours after consumption starts like the judges seem to think. If Knox and Sollecito didn't have an alibi at 2100, then the prosecution wouldn't be trying to discredit the Doctor who did the autopsy.

 

[katy_did]

Personally, I took the judges remarks as irony. She was basically saying if he continued to deny he knew where that road was, having grown up in Perugia after all, then she had no further questions and was particularly dismissive of him.

Yes, of course; the judge obviously thought he was lying. My point was that people have claimed that since he was a local, Rudy would have known there was a garden just in that spot and so he wouldn't have thrown the phones there, when according to Rudy himself he doesn't even know where the road is. If - as is almost certain - he's lying about it, then we have to ask why he's lying about it. Either way, saying Rudy knew the road so well that he would've been able to pinpoint the exact location of that particular garden (in the dark) is contradicted by his own words, whatever his reasons for saying them.

 

[RoseMontague]

Originally Posted by RoseMontague View Post
What I find really interesting about this is the way the time of death based on stomach contents is treated in the judgment motivations against Rudy in his trial and subsequent appeal.

The Micheli report has this:

Starting the investigations, the Public Prosecutor and the Judicial Police proceeded to reconstruct the movements of the girl in the last hours of life, including moving from the assumptions made by CT in medico-legal point of time of death, to be placed at a distance of not more than 2 or 3 hours after last meal, and likely to be understood happened around 23:00 on November 1, 2007.

And Rudy's appeal motivation (issued 22 December 2009) has this:

The time of death was placed with minimum waste and maximum of one hour, at 23.00 (ie, between the hours. 22.00 and 24.00 hours) of November 1, 2007; this, on the assumption that dinner between it and English friends found to be consumed at; 21.00 earlier, but, according to the GIP, this time could be anticipated timing arc between the hours of 21.00 to 23.00 is, given statements of Sophie Purton, that at 21.00 the dinner was finished, and at that time she Meredith-stood on the way home.

Both of these judgments seem to be using the time dinner was finished as the 2-3 hour starting point AND and they are using that time as roughly 20:00-21:00. Both of these assumptions are not correct. The Micheli report even quotes Sophie as saying dinner was at 6PM or even earlier and it is the start of the main meal that should be the starting point of the 2-3 hour time frame.

Because the defense teams of Amanda and Raffaele made such an issue of the stomach contents and time of death, I believe all this prosecution nonsense outlined in your post was simply an attempt to backtrack on the obvious holes in Rudy's motivation. Of course Rudy still doesn't have an alibi at 9PM (and admits being there at that time) so his defense didn't push this issue the way it was contested in Amanda's and Raffaele's trial.

In any case both of the above motivations are using the stomach contents to pin down a time of death.

Originally Posted by halides1 View Post
RoseMontague,

This is a very good point. Did the defense bring it up the Micheli report in the appeal document?

In Rudy's original 2 statements. He says he rushed over to meet meredith and waited outside by the downstairs apartment for her to get home. The 2nd says he met up with her at 8:30pm and they where followed home by a italian man with black hair who raped and killed Meredith.

I see that I forgot Matteini:

From the first reading of a written summary prepared by dr. Lalli and deposited at the Public Prosecutor on 8.11.2007 concerning the necropsy findings on the body of Meredith Kercher appears that the injury had not affected the carotid for whom death was preceded by an agony quite slow, a fact which can be traced back in time the criminal acts with the result that they may fall between 21.30 and at 23.30 the day 1 November 2007, hours that can retreat from 20.30 to 22.30, if account is taken of consummation of dinner at a time prior to 21.00.

 

[Supernaut]

Thanks Fulcanelli, Im glad there is someone on here who can present the other side, because I honestly do not know enough details of this case to do so. .......

That much is obvious, but it doesn't seem to give you much pause, does it?

But like I said, I still highly doubtful they are innocent. At the end of the day, I have to wonder why their actions seem to match the evidence (whether it's contested or not, there is evidence).

Why didn't they attend Meredith's vigil?

Why don't you ask the same of any number of people, not least many others who knew her, who also didn't attend it?

Why was Amanda doing cartwheels and fooling around in a police station, while they are investigating the death of her *ahem* "dear friend"?

Not very subtle, are you?

Why did she seem to revel in the attention she received at trial? That seems awfully narcissistic to me, and not consistent with an innocent person in jail for murder. (Examples, smiling all the time, "All You Need is Love Shirt", laughing while testifying, and just a general nonchalant attitude) Although Ill admit, I haven't seen any footage of the whole trial, so I can't say for sure if she acted like this the majority of the time or part of the time or what, so I'll admit my judgement on this may not be correct.

There were no press cameras in court during the proceedings. ALL the images you are referring to were captured during Amanda's and Raff's arrival and departure form the court, and during recesses. The ONLY footage of the trila itself was grainy "cam" footage glommed off the monitors outside the court room.

And frankly, I have a tough time believing you didn't know that.

Amanda was "smiling all the time, laughing while testifying, revelling in the attention, blah blah"? ******** - this and all the other hateful spin used to prop up your malign guilter agenda is just getting SO OLD.

Amanda smiled whenever she arrived in court because each and every time she was happy to find herself in the presence of friends and family, and her supportive legal team after x hours or days locked up in a cell.

Edited by Locknar: 

Edited, breach of rule 10. Please do not use swear words in your post, or attempt to mask/disguise them in an attempt to avoid the autocensor.

 

[RoseMontague]

I find it amusing all the complaints that Amanda can't get the time she had dinner correctly and the three judges I quoted seem to be having the same issue with Meredith's dinner.

 

[Fulcanelli]

If the Italian equivalent of America's FBI ever investigates this and similar cases, they could plausibly produce a case similar to that of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Gilchrist

Is there a list of the prosecution outnesses in this case?

1) The police picked at random one shiny knife from a draw full of knives at the RS apartment. Why only one knife? The implication is that they "knew" they would find DNA on that knife (because they intended to put it there).

2) An unsubstantiated story of a "sex orgy" was proposed as an explanation to the involvement of AK and RS. Otherwise Guede was the sole murderer. Since MK can't be murdered twice, an explanation for the involvement of AK and RS had to be found. A story from another case was used because it seemed that it could be believed. This type of fantasy had caused other cases to be tossed by other Italian courts. Why was it allowed in this court?

3) An exact ToD was needed to circumvent the alibis of both AK and RS. An exact ToD was needed to Place Guede, AK, and RS together at the crime scene and thus, by innuendo, associate AK and RS with the murder. Isn't this very poor police work? It is a logical fallacy called circular reasoning to use the intended result to prove the evidence that proves the result.

All these things are red flags that the state has made egregious errors.

I have no doubts about the innocence of AK and RS. I had a few at the beginning, but none now. My only amazement is why the Italian FBI hasn’t investigated this case.

1) False. Below is a picture from Raffaele's cutlery drawer after the kitchen knife had been removed. Unless you are suggesting the police should also have supposed Meredith might have been murdered with a butter knife or a bread knife. Photo from Perugia Murder File:

2) The prosecution never used the term "sex orgy", that was a media invented term.

3) Actually, they used the 'evidence' to establish TOD.