Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Alt+F4]

I have to disagree: innocent people will do and say odd things when faced with false accusations. What we can say with much more confidence is that guilty people don't behave in the way Amanda and Raffaele did - they don't hang around the murder site the next day; they don't call the police; they don't make themselves available to assist the police, so trusting that they hadn't even contacted lawyers!

Are you saying that guilty people haven't been known to hang out at the scene of the crime? Wrong.

Are you saying that guilty people haven't been known to call the police themselves? Wrong.

Are you saying that guilty people haven't assisted the police? Wrong.

As for, "they hadn't even contacted lawyers", I thought they were not permitted to contact lawyers during their initial interrogations. Are you saying they chose on their own not to contact lawyers?

We can also say that honest police and prosecutors do not conduct investigations in the way we saw in Perugia. Just a few in the list: they lied about the time they arrived at the cottage to make it seem Raffaele hadn't called them first;

Please provide evidence that the Postal Police lied about the time they arrived at Amanda's apartment.

...they interrogated Amanda overnight without safeguards for her rights;

Evidence?

...they obtained a spurious DNA reading by misusing the testing equipment,

Evidence?

... and then tried to conceal the notes which showed that the procedure was improperly conducted.[/quote}

Evidence?

 

[LondonJohn]

I was acknowledging you were correct about the term 'stimulant'? I think my answer was pretty clear about that so not sure what point you are seeking to make.

Because my response was to your post:

"It doesn't make you forget but I have done a number of assault cases where hyperactive and aggressive behaviour was attributed to cocaine use. As I said above, I believe they were on a mix of stimulants but I don't know what they were."

Knox and Sollecito admitted to using alcohol and cannabis, neither of which are stimulants. And absolutely no evidence whatsoever (from dealers, traces in Knox's or Sollecito's residences, or other paraphernalia) suggests in any way that either of them were using any other type of drug either in the weeks before the murder, or during the murder itself. I am assuming also that the police conducted drug tests on the two when they were taken into custody on November 6th (unless they were even more incompetent than we thought), and we can be pretty certain that these would have revealed no "harder" drug use.

So Knox and Sollecito were not taking stimulants, or "hard" drugs of any kind. Their drug of choice in Perugia seems certain to have been cannabis and its variants. And not many violent sexual murders are committed by stoners. Just sayin'......

 

[Katody Matrass]

It must have been because one of them lied about it.

I don't remember Amanda being even asked about it. Not to mention Raffaele. Maybe one of them was asleep and the other one didn't consider it to be important or didn't remember it, and they didn't ask specifically about it?
See, there's no need to introduce sex and drugs murderous orgy to explain it.

Do you have a source that would counter this ?

 

[platonov]

I have a general problem with guilters' theories. It is quite well exemplified by that Alt+F4's explanation of the phone calls, and by various conjectures recently brought here by SomeAlibi.

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To be short, inclination towards skepticism prevents me from taking guilters' theories seriously and accepting the verdict as it is right now.

howgh

Thats fine but the defence lawyers or their clients don't have that luxury.

Perhaps in the early days of the case the defendants had that approach which was part of their problem.
But who among us would claim we could have done better - well apparently some do but in real life, unlike a forum, you don't get to do it over* if you make mistakes. (No I'm not referring to the appeal)

* well thats not quite true - you can modify your story/alibi again and again but it wont have the desired effect.

 

[LondonJohn]

It must have been because one of them lied about it.

Impeccable logic!

 

[Alt+F4]

It looks like Filomena tried calling Amanda 3 times as they were on the way to Meredith's flat.

Yes, but according to Raffaele all the calls occurred after they arrived at her apartment, including the three calls to Meredith's phones. Another lie by him.

 

[piktor]

It's total pseudo-science, and should have been vigorously challenged by the defence in the first trial. Another example of Sollecito's poor original defence by a lead counsel who traded on past glories and couldn't devote nearly enough time to her client's murder trial.

The bathmat footprint is smudged.

But it is a smudge that discards Knox and Guede and is compatible with Sollecito's footprint.

It does not matter if the compatibility is measured in millimeters or nanometers, the proportions remain compatible for Sollecito and Sollecito only.

 

[LondonJohn]

I never said they did. What I said was they have to show it isn't Raffaele's - exactly the same point you write in saying "It merely has to convince a new jury of its invalidity as solid evidence against Sollecito". You appear to be arguing other people's points in relation to topics we are discussing rather than what I'm actually saying. This is the second time in a few posts you are repeating the same point I've already made.

Did I suggest that you said they did? You seem to be incorrectly assuming that every post I make in response to one of yours is intended to attack whatever it is you said. Strange.

 

[SomeAlibi]

Can you possibly provide us with a transcript of that bugged conversation and point it out?

The Massei snippet is quoted above and Amanda also said to her mother that she didn't remember the conversation (that's how she killed the conversation). I've asked for a bit of help finding it and I'll get back to you.

 

[Alt+F4]

Impeccable logic!

Yes, both of them lied repeatedly, glad you got that.

 

[SomeAlibi]

But on two crucial measurements - the width of the forefoot, and the width of the big toe - the police expert measured the print to a point at which there was no blood, based on his guesstimation of how big the actual print would've been had it been complete. Astonishingly, it turned out his guesstimates matched Raffaele's foot to the millimetre. According to the defence, the actual width of the print was 93mm (Rinaldi's estimate: 99mm) while the width of the big toe was 24.8mm (Rinaldi's estimate: 30mm).

Since the print wasn't even measured strictly 'to the millimetre', how on earth can it match Raffaele's foot 'to the millimetre'?

Actually it's in many more parts of the foot than that. There are multiple measurements which you can find in Massei p.339. There are multiple points where it matches Raffaele and Guede's measurements are many millimetres different but even more tellingly, Guedes foot is longer and narrower such that it doesn't matter how much spread or bleed you hypothesise, you simply can't make Guede's foot fit it. We can disagree about a lot but this is incontrovertible.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

on lying

It must have been because one of them lied about it.

Alt+F4,

I don't agree that one of them lied for the same reason as given by others; if I wake up, do something, then go back to sleep, I would say only the time I awoke for good when asked. However, I think it is worth addressing the larger question of what inference to draw from any proven lies.

Cameron Todd Willingham lied about entering his children's room when the room was on fire. He was executed for murdering them. Some of the reason for his conviction lies in the prosecution's ability to spin a narrative that gave him a motive. However, modern arson science has found zero evidence of arson in this tragedy. If the trial were held today, I would bet that he would be legally innocent, and I believe that he was factually innocent as well. Did his own lie hurt his case? Probably, but it did not make him guilty. Maybe most jurors would assume guilt when a defendant is caught lying, but I would be slower in drawing that conclusion.

 

[Katody Matrass]

The Massei snippet is quoted above and Amanda also said to her mother that she didn't remember the conversation (that's how she killed the conversation). I've asked for a bit of help finding it and I'll get back to you.

Thanks SomeAlibi!
I'd love to read all that is available of it.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Yes, both of them lied repeatedly, glad you got that.

And spun cartwheels

 

[SomeAlibi]

I have a general problem with guilters' theories. It is quite well exemplified by that Alt+F4's explanation of the phone calls, and by various conjectures recently brought here by SomeAlibi.

The problem I have is that they are are in fact bona fide conspiracy theories. They get a set of elements that have a perfectly good yet mundane and common sense based explanations, bunch them together and stamp them with some theory, which usually on its own raises eyebrows, a theory that also usually is incomplete, needs various implausible assumptions and spawns countless unanswered questions.

A theory is nice when it explains something, fits the evidence, and provides some "added value" where before there was something unexplained. But it is not so in case of a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory must coexist and compete with usual, ordinary explanations that encompass random coincidences, fallibility of perception and memory, conventional physics, cognitive errors and biases etc.
I understand that such exotic speculations are attractive to some but in my eyes they have hard time competing with the already existing common sense explanations. e.g. I cannot see how Alt+F4's theory of the phone calls being purposefully made to create some kind of inexplicably advantageous situation could prevail over LondonJohn's and Kestrel's simple explanation. That's one example but countless others riddle the Massei report and are promoted by the colpevolisti. They culminate in the bizarre and incomplete theory of the crime which in my eyes loses to the ordinary yet comprehensive scenario of a burglary gone bad.

To be short, inclination towards skepticism prevents me from taking guilters' theories seriously and accepting the verdict as it is right now.

howgh

I guess I'm rattling you because that's entirely ad hominem and could easily be said the other way round about people seeking to disprove the prosecution case. Except that I wouldn't because it's rude. Nevertheless, it's very gratifying that you've chosen to go for a macro-level dismissal this early in the conversation.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

wrong shaped toe

The bathmat footprint is smudged.

But it is a smudge that discards Knox and Guede and is compatible with Sollecito's footprint.

It does not matter if the compatibility is measured in millimeters or nanometers, the proportions remain compatible for Sollecito and Sollecito only.

The shape of the big toe is wrong, as indicated in my recent comment.

 

[Alt+F4]

Cameron Todd Willingham lied about entering his children's room when the room was on fire. He was executed for murdering them. Some of the reason for his conviction lies in the prosecution's ability to spin a narrative that gave him a motive. However, modern arson science has found zero evidence of arson in this tragedy. If the trial were held today, I would bet that he would be legally innocent, and I believe that he was factually innocent as well. Did his own lie hurt his case? Probably, but it did not make him guilty. Maybe most jurors would assume guilt when a defendant is caught lying, but I would be slower in drawing that conclusion.

I don't get the connection. Willingham lied about entering the room where the murders took place. AK and or RS lied about being awake or asleep in an apartment that had nothing to do with the murder. The two of them being awake and just hanging out that morning is just as a good alibi as them being asleep. Why the lie?

 

[SomeAlibi]

This strikes me as an evasive lawyer's answer.

I'm not all that interested in whether Amanda did or didn't forget the phone call, since I don't think that's particularly relevant here. The issue is whether Comodi genuinely didn't know the timing of that phone call, or whether she knew it but lied in order to sway the jury against Amanda. I can't see how any other interpretation is possible from the quotes posted by Katody, particularly this one:

I don't think it's credible that Comodi came to Court with a prepared argument to use in Amanda's questioning, based on her mother's comment that "nothing had really happened yet", without checking the time at which that phone call was made. Timing was crucial to her whole argument: if the call happened at 12, it would be a little surprising that Amanda called her mother at that stage; but if it happened at 12:48, just a few minutes before they called the police, it wouldn't be at all surprising that both sought the advice of relatives first. I don't believe Comodi raised this argument in Court without first checking the timing of that call, and I think the fact she clarifies by saying "in the sense that the door had not been broken down yet" shows that she knew exactly what she was doing.

If she knew the timing of the call, then her misleading questioning in Court (her lie that the call happened at 12) would seem to have been a tactic. She probably thought it was a win-win situation: either Amanda said, "But that call happened just before we called the police, so lots had happened" - at which point Comodi would say, "Aha, so you lied about not remembering it!" - or she continued to say she didn't remember it, leaving Comodi free to imply that Amanda had called her mother for no reason at 3 in the morning, and that therefore she must have known more about the crime than she was letting on. And all of this stemmed from Comodi's lie that the call happened at 12, when "nothing had happened yet".

So again: as a lawyer, what's your view of this sort of tactic? Is it something that surprises you, or that just seems normal in context? Would you do it yourself? I don't care whether your interpretation of Comodi's approach here is relevant to the case or not; I'm just interested, as a non-lawyer, in whether lying in Court is a standard tactic used to 'trap' the defendants, or whether it's something which is considered unethical even within the profession. For all I know, the approach Comodi takes here is pretty standard.

Well you know I don't think it's a tactic and as defence counsel I love when I get the option to run the sort of argument you make here. You can make a lot of mileage out it. Shame on Ghirgha for not being on the ball enough to grab it in the trial of first instance. The conspiracy / deliberate falsification you are seeking to make doesn't really work because the objective telephone records were there. IF Comodi was trying to stitch Amanda and Raffaele up she would have known that those records existed and that it was a "tactic" that could very badly backfire. Therefore there's not a lot of sense in attempting that "tactic" which tends to defeat the point you're trying to make.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Thats fine but the defence lawyers or their clients don't have that luxury.

Exactly, we have the luxury of a distant and sober look, of which the jury was deprived. The constant media smear, pressure of local politics and prevailing witch hunt mentality did its' part.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

conspiracy theorizing

I guess I'm rattling you because that's entirely ad hominem and could easily be said the other way round about people seeking to disprove the prosecution case. Except that I wouldn't because it's rude. Nevertheless, it's very gratifying that you've chosen to go for a macro-level dismissal this early in the conversation.

How is Stilicho's conspiracy theory at TJfM not an ad hominem? not rude?