Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Machiavelli]

That evidence rules out all times of death later than 22:00, and makes any time of death after 21:30 incredibly unlikely. The most likely time of death by far is the earliest which can be reconciled with the witness evidence that says Meredith wasn't home until 21:05 or so.

It is your convincement that the "literature" "rules out" a time of death after 22:00 but I disagree radically. In my opinion, in you aproach there is 1) an erroneous assumption of trial data 2) a mono-dimensional reading of scientific literature and a mono-dimensional reading of findings (for example you consider the times of emptying in literature and not the state of digestion of the content) 3) an erroneous assumption of some basic factors in science. The topic is complex though, and this is not the moment for me to open this discussion.

You can't say the alteration of Stardust file did not occurr six days later, only the latest alteration occurred six days later. That is a last access log file. You cannot know how many previous alterations there have been. And I disagree with you also on the basic data of the case: the computer was not in police custody, it was inside Sollecito's apartment, and the police didn't have the keys. Moreover, I consider your concept of "motivation to destroy" evidence as pure delusion and nonsense.

 

[Mary_H]

But I am glad to remind you Mignini. Nobody is going to explain how Amanda's diary came to the press, because nobody is supposed to know nor to explain this, moreover this is not your buisness nor mine nor nobody's buisness, and I have no interst in it. I have made quite clear that in the Italian system the sized diary is an unprotected piece of evidence. Nobody will make it safe just to make a favour to Amanda. There is no protection. The diary is not secret. Delivering the trial file to somebody is no violation per se. An investigation file may be secret only for a limited period of time. Even the clerk at a judge's office could have leaked it: clerks always leak documents to journalists from trial files.

You still haven't addressed whether Amanda knew her diary was not secret. This knowledge might make all the difference in the world about what she wrote in it. If she did not know her diary was going into the evidence file, or was subject to seizure, then statements like these are not valid:

"No, she leaked it herself, by writing it in her prison diary. Anything a person in cautional custody does or keeps in their cell is not private."

"Who is the person who "allows"? There is only one person who wrote of this story, Amanda on her diary. Then, Fiorenza Sarzanini accessed the investigation file and published her diary."

"Something produced by her under her own control, while she even had the status of a public person, a writing just expressing image of her including details of her choice."

If the police are allowed to seize a prisoner's writings without her permission, then what is to stop them from taking her bedding without her permission, or even from raping her? There must be some regulations. Amanda's testimony suggests she was not aware of the regulations about written material, hence, she is not responsible for making the information about her HIV test public.

The kind of thinking that holds that Amanda is responsible for her diary being released is the same kind of thinking that holds she is responsible for Patrick's unconventional arrest, and her mother was responsible for Patrick's prolonged stay in jail. Yesterday on Perugia Shock, someone even blamed Raffaele for his sister's dismissal from the police force.

Why are the defendants responsible for so much and the authorities responsible for so little?

 

[Machiavelli]

This is really a reach. If the file was opened at a time when prosecution witnesses or theories have them out on the town or murdering Meredith that is hard fact, recorded in ones and zeroes, that the given witness was lying or that the given theory is false.

If you think it is a hard fact, bring up the verbatim or minutes of Raffaele's police questioning. If you don't have it, there is no hard fact.

 

[Machiavelli]

You still haven't addressed whether Amanda knew her diary was not secret. This knowledge might make all the difference in the world about what she wrote in it. If she did not know her diary was going into the evidence file, or was subject to seizure, then statements like these are not valid:

This idea qualifies you Mary H.
In the British Islands cars drive on the left side and don't stop outside zebra crossings. If you look the wrong direction you are run over.
You would insist that the running over is invalid because you you didn't know the direction was the wrong one. It would be an interesting task to convince the British that you are right and the driver is wrong because you are from the continent and nobody told you about local customs.

 

[Mary_H]

Machiavelli, forgive me if I have misinterpreted your post #7811, but are you suggesting that public health officials in Italy do not routinely perform contact tracing for infectuous diseases such as HIV?

Given the specificity of current 3rd and 4th generation ELISA tests for HIV in the range of 99.5% for a low-risk population (99.9% for ELISA plus confirmatory Western blot), one might be quite justified in questioning the circumstances around her dubious "false positive" result.

Taking only Amanda's court testimony into consideration, one might conclude that there really never was a false positive, but only encouragement to believe there might be:

CDV: How many times did they make the test to check whether you were positive?

AK: So, I think it was three times. I think they made one where it was negative, then one where it was maybe positive, maybe negative, and then one where it was negative.

CDV: How much time passed between the first and the last?

AK: Two weeks.

 

[Mary_H]

This idea qualifies you Mary H.
In the British Islands cars drive on the left side and don't stop outside zebra crossings. If you look the wrong direction you are run over.
You would insist that the running over is invalid because you you didn't know the direction was the wrong one. It would be an interesting task to convince the British that you are right and the driver is wrong because you are from the continent and nobody told you about local customs.

Did Amanda see any of the other prisoners' writings being seized?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

It is your convincement that the "literature" "rules out" a time of death after 22:00 but I disagree radically. In my opinion, in you aproach there is 1) an erroneous assumption of trial data

Can you explain what you mean by this? By itself, this is no argument at all.

2) a mono-dimensional reading of scientific literature and a mono-dimensional reading of findings (for example you consider the times of emptying in literature and not the state of digestion of the content)

To some extent this is simply false. The state of digestion of her stomach contents, with some parts still identifiable, is also consistent with an early time of death and inconsistent with the Massei time of death.

However can you explain what you mean by "a mono-dimensional reading of the scientific literature", and why you think this is relevant?

3) an erroneous assumption of some basic factors in science.

Can you explain what you mean by this? By itself, this is no argument at all.

The topic is complex though, and this is not the moment for me to open this discussion.

On the contrary, unless you resolve this problem you have no sound intellectual basis for thinking it's even remotely possible that Amanda and Raffaele are guilty.

Until this problem is resolved you are rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, as the saying goes. Making purely superficial alterations to a theory which has already been holed fatally.

So far every other pro-guilt speaker who has managed to address the issue at all has tried exactly what you appear to be trying here. They have tried to pooh-pooh or handwave away the mass of evidence for an early time of death, without advancing a single properly-supported, rational argument against it. You are not the first to try this, and it will not go unchallenged when you try it either.

This problem will not go away. Unless you resolve it, belief in the guilt of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of Meredith Kercher is irrational. It is a faith-based position at odds with science and reason.

Here at the JREF forums, we dedicate a lot of time to exploring and destroying faith-based positions at odds with science and reason. You might say we've got a lot of experience with such theories and their believers.

You can't say the alteration of Stardust file did not occurr six days later, only the latest alteration occurred six days later. That is a last access log file. You cannot know how many previous alterations there have been.

This is correct.

And I disagree with you also on the basic data of the case: the computer was not in police custody, it was inside Sollecito's apartment, and the police didn't have the keys.

This is factually false. At the time of the last alteration the computer was in police custody, according to the appeal team.

Moreover, I consider your concept of "motivation to destroy" evidence as pure delusion and nonsense.

That's nice.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Amanda and Meredith last moments

halides,

Amanda has the right to write whatever she likes in her diary, to be a narcissist or a sociopath, without necessarily being a killer. But if you want to speak of what sounds moral - and seems this is what you chose to talk - then your citation says it:



It is exactly so: after her frustration is triggered by the fact they don't believe her, as she cries for her being stuck into things, she also cries for Meredith.
And I believe her, that her friend's death hurts her in that moment.

"So when I went back to my cell, I cried at the ugliness of it all, my being in prison, my friend dead, the police following a cold and irrational trail because they have nothing better".

"so" - after what happened with the police - when she went back to her cell, she thinks to the "ugliess of it all". I believe her. Anyone is free to judge this text as they feel and draw their conclusion.

Machiavelli,

You moved the goalposts with respect to what Amanda said about Meredith, but the fact remains that Amanda did express empathy for Meredith (I am no expert, but isn't that exactly what sociopaths cannot do?). Here is the other excerpt from her diary that I mentioned. I have found a slightly different version in Murder in Italy, page 185, which I quoted in comment 3987 on page 100 of this thread.

She wrote: “I can only imagine what she felt in those moments frightened, injured, raped. But I imagine more what she went through when the blood went out of her. What did she feel? And the mother? Desperation? Did she have the time to find peace or in the end did she have only terror?”

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

A brief aside about a particular fallacious argument I have seen here and elsewhere:

We have put together a very solid, very well-referenced case that Amanda and Raffaele are innocent because Meredith almost certainly died around 21:10, and Amanda and Raffaele were almost certainly at home watching Naruto long after she was already dead.

Various responses have been tried out against this, but the attempts at a factual rebuttal from the Amanda-is-guily have all been trivial and have all already been dealt with.

What we're left with is an argument from sheer incredulity and, perhaps, even petulance. It's the argument that, boiled down to its essentials "I refuse to believe it could be that easy to prove us wrong!". "Judges and pathologists (well some of them) agreed with our story, it cannot be possible that anything less than an equal and opposite number of judges and pathologists could overthrow it!". "I've spend three years on this narrative, and damned if I'm going to give it up now whatever the facts are!".

I can see where some of them are coming from, in a way. It would really suck to spend three years obsessing over minutiae of the trial, translating documents, reading blogs, discussing the details with like-minded friends and so on, only to find three years in that you'd been missing a really huge hole in the story that blew the whole fantasy apart. That would be a big chunk of one's life wasted.

It would be even worse if, and I stress that this is hypothetical, you'd convinced yourself that evil-minded or deluded Friends of Amanda were conducting a campaign of lies to make people think Amanda was innocent, and that therefore it was ethically tolerable or maybe even praiseworthy to respond with lies of your own to counter this. Although this line of thinking is antithetical to the ethos of the JREF forums, many political activists consider it quite okay to try to counter propaganda with propaganda. If you'd spent three years spreading stories that you knew were unfounded that Amanda Knox was a narcissistic, promiscuous, sociopathic, rape-obsessed, Holocaust-denying, manga-reading, heroin-snorting cartwheeling she-devil because you honestly believed that she did it, it would be terrible thing to suddenly be confronted with proof that she was completely innocent all along. That wouldn't do your self-image as a decent human being, a self-image most of us cherish, any good at all.

For some people it would make it even worse if you had begun to think of yourself as an authority on the topic, perhaps even the final authority, and your worldview was destroyed by a bunch of Johnny-come-lately amateurs, some of whom didn't even care that much about the case except as one puzzle amongst many they amused themselves by solving.

The problem is, these aren't logical arguments. A logical argument proceeds from premises to inescapable conclusions, and just because you spend three years on something or because a judge says something does not mean it inescapably follows that it is true. Often, in fact, a person who is not very scientifically-minded can nurse a theory for years only to have it shot down in minutes with a single well-chosen reference to the peer-reviewed literature, or a single well-chosen experiment. Around here such amateur theories, often held for years, routinely get disproved in very short order.

In the end, it simply doesn't follow that just because you don't want something to be true, it isn't true. It's a harsh, cruel world and sometimes people are completely wrong about dearly-held beliefs, sometimes dearly-held beliefs that have led them to do reprehensible things. That's life.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

While I'm holding forth, another philosophical point.

Guilters spend a lot of time on purely constructive thinking. They survey a lot of data (sometimes without worrying too much about it's source, verifiability or accuracy) and they weave it together into a story. They act like scientists who are trying to come up with a new theory, in a way, except that unlike scientists they don't check their "facts" against the peer-reviewed literature.

Scientists and critical thinkers do this too, but they also put a lot of effort into rigorous destructive thinking. They ask themselves "How could I, in theory, prove that this whole theory is rubbish? Which threads, if pulled on, could unravel the whole mess instantly?". They act like scientists trying to test a new theory.

It's been shown by psychological studies that untrained thinkers are not inclined to think this way. They seek out evidence that confirms their theories, but they don't seek out opportunities to falsify their theories. Scientists have to be trained to think this way, and even so they sometimes fall into the trap of fixing belief in an appealing theory before they have excluded every possible way of falsifying it.

This is why a layperson can spend three years immersing themselves in a theory, finding more confirmation for it at every turn, and then get the ground ripped right out from under them with a single evidence-based argument.

It's also why experienced critical thinkers like some of the JREF forum regulars can do this to them: They know to home in on the threads that can unravel the whole sweater, they know how to assemble the relevant facts and collate them, and it doesn't take them too long to do so once they are on the job.

In this case the time of death was one thread, the evidence for Raffaele and Amanda's whereabouts was the other, and between the two of them it's enough to unravel the whole silly business.

 

[LondonJohn]

It is your convincement that the "literature" "rules out" a time of death after 22:00 but I disagree radically. In my opinion, in you aproach there is 1) an erroneous assumption of trial data 2) a mono-dimensional reading of scientific literature and a mono-dimensional reading of findings (for example you consider the times of emptying in literature and not the state of digestion of the content) 3) an erroneous assumption of some basic factors in science. The topic is complex though, and this is not the moment for me to open this discussion.

Hahahaha! To paraphrase: "You're wrong about your views on ToD based on the autopsy stomach/duodenum contents, you don't understand how to interpret science, and you're placing a deliberately biased interpretation on whatever you find in the scientific literature. But it's complicated, and I won't talk about it or tell you why I think you're wrong"

Lovely stuff!

 

[LondonJohn]

This idea qualifies you Mary H.
In the British Islands cars drive on the left side and don't stop outside zebra crossings. If you look the wrong direction you are run over.
You would insist that the running over is invalid because you you didn't know the direction was the wrong one. It would be an interesting task to convince the British that you are right and the driver is wrong because you are from the continent and nobody told you about local customs.

I couldn't resist responding to this non-sequitur. Where the heck did you get the idea that in the UK cars don't stop at zebra crossings? It's the law to stop if a pedestrian is at the kerb waiting to cross from either direction. It's a ticketing offence to fail to stop (if you're caught by a police officer or a roadside camera), and if you hit someone who's crossing at a zebra crossing you're open to criminal prosecution. You may be confusing the UK with Italy in this regard..........

 

[LondonJohn]

Certainity can have different meanings, some subjective and some objective.
I am not objectively certain that extra-terrstrial units didn't land in the Area 51 perimeter, but I have no valid reason to think they did.
With respect to this context, the degree of "certainity" (the word cerainly was chosen by LondonJohn and not by me) is sufficient to make an argument.

It was you who selected the word "certainly" to use, not me.

 

[LondonJohn]

It would frankly be impossible to know what amanda and her boyfriend had in their minds after the murder.
She either thought Laura would be back at any time, or she thought she would take a few hours.
There really is no way to know .

Tho' personally I don't see as it makes much difference in the total picture; at most it would show their hurriedness or relative leisure in trying to erase traces of themselves at the cottage.

But you "believed" that they knew they had several hours before Filomena (or Laura) might return to the apartment. It wasn't "impossible" for you to know, when you made that assertion. Your words again:

"She was reported to have been waiting outside the store at 7:45 when the owner opened; I believe they knew they had several hours at least until either roommate returned. It was a holiday weekend and they were aware of that."

 

[LondonJohn]

Machiavelli, forgive me if I have misinterpreted your post #7811, but are you suggesting that public health officials in Italy do not routinely perform contact tracing for infectuous diseases such as HIV?

Given the specificity of current 3rd and 4th generation ELISA tests for HIV in the range of 99.5% for a low-risk population (99.9% for ELISA plus confirmatory Western blot), one might be quite justified in questioning the circumstances around her dubious "false positive" result.

Very good point. Even if only the first ELISA test had been conducted, there was a very, very low probability of a false positive for Knox, who clearly belonged to the low-risk general population*. So are we to believe that Knox happened to be in that <0.5% of people tested who returned a false positive from the ELISA test?

* Although, according to Machiavelli's in-depth knowledge of science, the presence of HSV-1 (Herpes Simplex) in Knox was very likely to be the cause of the false positive HIV test result........

 

[LondonJohn]

I think it is more likely somebody fetched the knife at a certain time. From the very cottage door to Raffaele's apartment it takes 1 minutes 45 seconds of walk without striding.

Why on earth would they have wanted or needed to travel to and from Sollecito's apartment to collect this particular knife? Not only did Sollecito routinely carry a knife (so much so, he was enough of a criminal double-bluffing mastermind as to take one to his police interrogation), but the girls' house had a drawer full of kitchen knives, and Knox herself had a new box of kitchen knives under her bed.

Some of the phone calls (like Abbey bank) were surely just a touch of the key. About 8:56, my interest goes more to why her mother didn't try to call her back. This implies her mother didn't answer the first call and didn't notice it. And this could be the simple reason why meredith didn't call a second time. Why disturb her again? Howevr, I don't think Meredith voluntarily chose not to call her back for two hours. So I assume something happened meanwhile. I think Meredith was alive in the next hour, but was distracted and engaged in something that was happening, this is why she didn't do any "normal" call.

Even short code calls or a redial of previous calls would take at least a two-key operation to perform. As for the 8.56 call to her mother, I believe (although I'm not 100% certain) that the attempted call never even connected - so Meredith's mother would never have been aware of the call, and would therefore have had no reason to call Meredith back. Furthermore, if the connection was never completed, Meredith herself would not have assumed that her mother was in any way indisposed or asleep, since her mother's phone would never even have had the chance to ring.

And if you think that Meredith was distracted or "engaged in something that was happening" during the alleged two hours and thirty minutes between the aborted call to her mother and the court's accepted time of death, what do you think this distraction was?? Are you suggesting that the confrontation/intimidation element of the murder lasted for over 150 minutes?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Very good point. Even if only the first ELISA test had been conducted, there was a very, very low probability of a false positive for Knox, who clearly belonged to the low-risk general population*. So are we to believe that Knox happened to be in that <0.5% of people tested who returned a false positive from the ELISA test?

* Although, according to Machiavelli's in-depth knowledge of science, the presence of HSV-1 (Herpes Simplex) in Knox was very likely to be the cause of the false positive HIV test result........

Although I can't be sure, it may be that someone heard that most people with HIV have HSV-1, and got it muddled in their heads so that they thought that most people with HSV-1 had HIV. That would explain this meme.

 

[Mary_H]

Although I can't be sure, it may be that someone heard that most people with HIV have HSV-1, and got it muddled in their heads so that they thought that most people with HSV-1 had HIV. That would explain this meme.

According to what I read online, it turns out that having Herpes Simplex Virus-1 or HSV-2 can produce antibodies that may cause a false positive for HIV. This is not because herpes can be a sexually transmitted disease, but because several diseases, including the flu, can produce antibodies that may lead to false positive HIV test results:

Nonspecific reactions, hypergammaglobulinemia, or the presence of antibodies directed to other infectious agents that may be antigenically similar to HIV can produce false positive results. Autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, have also rarely caused false positive results. Most false negative results are due to the window period; other factors, such as post-exposure prophylaxis, can rarely produce false negatives.[3]

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

Given that we don't know whether Amanda actually tested falsely positive for HIV, or even whether she actually was tested for HIV at all, it is somewhat irrelevant to speculate on what have might caused a false positive result.

 

[LondonJohn]

According to what I read online, it turns out that having Herpes Simplex Virus-1 or HSV-2 can produce antibodies that may cause a false positive for HIV. This is not because herpes can be a sexually transmitted disease, but because several diseases, including the flu, can produce antibodies that may lead to false positive HIV test results:

Nonspecific reactions, hypergammaglobulinemia, or the presence of antibodies directed to other infectious agents that may be antigenically similar to HIV can produce false positive results. Autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, have also rarely caused false positive results. Most false negative results are due to the window period; other factors, such as post-exposure prophylaxis, can rarely produce false negatives.[3]

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

Given that we don't know whether Amanda actually tested falsely positive for HIV, or even whether she actually was tested for HIV at all, it is somewhat irrelevant to speculate on what have might caused a false positive result.

The versions of ELISA and Western Blot test that were used in 2007 in the USA and Europe had minimised the chances of false positives due to the presence of antigens associated with other immume-system-related viruses. The false positive rate for HIV was (and is) extremely low if you're not a member of a high-risk group.

But, as you say, given all the other strange factors surrounding this rather sad and unpleasant area of the case, it's probably moot anyhow.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

A new guilter argument spotted in the wild about the time of death (and I'm very glad that they are at least thinking about this):

• The most likely time of death for Meredith based on stomach contents alone, ignoring witness statements, body temperature and everything else we know, is before she got home.
• I don't understand how this can be possible, so I'm not qualified to make any judgments about what this means.
• Therefore nobody else does, and nobody else is, unless they are a pathologist. Preferably one who will tell us t(lag) can be five and a half hours.
• In addition, if this really was a conclusive argument then the appeals team would be focusing on this issue and nothing else. Since they are focusing on other issues, this can't be a conclusive argument.

The first two points I believe are correct.

The third is incorrect. People who know about statistics will recognise that a t(lag) of 150 minutes is very unlikely, but not impossible. It's not even particularly surprising that this one variable produced a statistically unlikely outcome: If the police do one hundred tests on various things related to the case, five of them will be in the top 5% of the distribution and five in the bottom 5% through random chance. It would be more surprising if none of the tests done produced a statistically unlikely result.

In a way we are very fortunate: Between the temperature data, the stomach data and the witness testimony there is only a very small window of plausible overlap where Meredith could have been killed. (I wish the meme that we are relying on stomach data alone would finally stay down though, it really is an incredibly stupid claim).

The last point is pure wishful thinking as far as I can tell, and it's certainly not supported by any references to accepted Italian appeals law practice.