Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[SomeAlibi]

We're talking about Japanese comic books, right? So, what are you trying to say about Japan?

You sound like my Women's Studies professor trying to convince us the most successful (in real dollars) movie of all time, "Gone with the Wind," was an indictment of all society for the scene where Rhett takes Scarlett up the stairs.

"What are you trying to say about Japan?". Nothing. I didn't use the word Japan at all - you did. I never did and I'm not and I don't think anyone could understand where you would leap to a comment about the content of certain Manga to a statement about an entire nation. Rather patently silly.

 

[SomeAlibi]

I can't help but think this post illustrates better than any other the 'failure to communicate.' I do indeed get the credibility issue, but I think perhaps we disagree on what the minutiae is, and what is really important.

I've seen dozens of posts here today on absolutely meaningless issues. What Amanda said about mops, what was the deal with the phone calls, who said what about sleeping in--none of that matters. Taking the most paranoid, twisted, and bizarre explanation of each you cannot change the fact that nothing on God's green earth can explain how they participated in the murder and left no trace of themselves or a clean-up.

Thus the true minutiae is that which has no bearing on whether Amanda and Raffaele actually murdered Meredith Kercher, like whether they slept in completely or someone got up to putz around on a computer and answer a phone call the next day. If 'credibility' is the issue, then the prosecution has earned itself a place in infamy. The longer this goes on, two appeals pending, the more likely Amanda Knox will take her place alongside Dred Scott, Captain Dreyfus, John Proctor, and other people otherwise unimportant yet whose suffering at the hands of an unjust court are still remembered.

They are already starting to make movies about it, and the outcome is yet in doubt. The end of the story is still up to the Italian system, and if they think Amanda and Raffaele's 'credibility' is in doubt because of these irrelevancies posted, then the final act will be the indictment of that system.

You may think the mop, the phonecalls, the computer records and who said what about sleeping in don't matter. That's your personal prerogative. The defence lawyers clearly know it matters on the basis of the appeal documents and really I don't think there are many people who would agree with you that they aren't important to the conviction. The fact that you have DNA evidence and the bathmat print on top of this is one of the reasons I've described the weight of evidence as so significant. This case is a full workout for the defence - there's so many fronts to fight.

 

[LondonJohn]

Ah excellent! I see that today's nonsense is that many of us believe Knox and Sollecito must be innocent because people like that wouldn't commit these horrific sorts of crimes. Well, I for one am perfectly sure that anyone is capable of doing anything under the right circumstances. But my doubts about Knox's and Sollecito's convictions have absolutely nothing to do with their backgrounds, mindsets, previous history and so on. It's entirely to do with the actual evidence (or lack therof) linking them to the murder in question.

However, I do believe that most people who murder do not do it completely out of thin air (unless it's a completely unpremeditated crime of passion, perhaps). And since a couple of examples were brought up to compare with Knox and Sollecito, let's have a little look at them:

1) Brenda Spencer (The "I don't like Mondays" killer).
Spencer (aged 16 at the time) killed two people and wounded nine others while shooting towards an elementary school from a window of her parents' house. Her neighbours claimed that she had a history of persistent truancy, petty theft, and heavy use of hard psychotropic drugs (especially PCP, whose use was brought up in her court proceedings). Furthermore, she apparently claimed to classmates the week before the shootings that she was "going to do something big to get on TV", and family members said she'd fantasised to them about being a sniper. She had no proper friends, and used to walk around her school grounds by herself (when she actually turned up at school).

2) Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.
Bernardo and Homolka (in mid-20s and early 20s respectively at the time of the offences) captured, raped and killed a number of young women in Canada. Bernardo was born into an abusive family as the result of his mother having sex with a man who was not her husband. His non-biological father (i.e. his father in every other way) sexually abused his own daughter and was also convicted of a separate case of child molestation. Bernadro was told that his "father" was not his biological father when he was 16, from which point he actively detested his mother, openly calling her "slut" and "whore". By the age of 23 (in 1987), he had started raping women, and gained the moniker "the Scarborough Rapist", although he was not caught by the police.

Bernardo met Homolka in October 1987, having already committed three rapes in the "Scarborough Rapist" tally. She was 17, and became besotted with the 23-year-old who was her first serious boyfriend and almost certainly her first sexual partner. Within a couple of months, Bernardo began to engage in sadistic sexual acts with her, to which she was submissive.

However, it took over three years before they graduated to planning joint assaults on other women. This began when Bernardo developed an obsession with Homolka's younger sister, who was aged 15. Bernardo persuaded Homolka to help him "deflower" her sister, and Homolka acceded to his demands. Together, they drugged Homolka's sister, and Bernardo raped her, before she choked to death on vomit caused by the drugs. After that, Bernardo and Homolka captured, raped and killed two other victims before they were eventually caught by the police.

So, can anyone spot the similarities and differences between Brenda Spencer & Bernardo/Homolka, and Knox/Sollecito? Anyone?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

The bathmat print is smudged. You have to give way for distortion.

Nonetheless it is a footprint without any doubt.

It is one more arrow pointing away from one defendant and up to each individual to give whatever weight to it. If the shape is not Guede's, then whose?

General shapes distinguish individuals. Laurel and Hardy are both male Caucasian of similar age and for argument's sake, similar height. In this pair of individuals, one body type is distinctly elongated and the other is distinctly compact and wide.

Piktor,

So the bathmat print is smudged. Apparently it is smudged so badly (according to you) that we cannot conclude that the big toe looks nothing like Sollecito's foot. Yet not so smudged as to preclude millimeter-precision measurements. Thanks, but that dog won't hunt.

 

[Alt+F4]

The longer this goes on, two appeals pending, the more likely Amanda Knox will take her place alongside Dred Scott, Captain Dreyfus, John Proctor, and other people otherwise unimportant yet whose suffering at the hands of an unjust court are still remembered.

Be sure you let us know when the Italian authorities ship Amanda off to Devil's Island.

 

[Katody Matrass]

I'm sorry I don't understand what "You realized you can't just wrote "it wasn't Comodi who introduced, because it was Edda who introduced". You had to wrote it was Edda who was the source" actually means. Can you please explain.

No problem, my English is coarse especially while I'm still resuscitating myself with a first morning coffee, sorry for that
I was only trying to convey the impression of mine that you used careful wording to conceal the non-sequitur lining your post.

Simply, the fact that Comodi used Edda's words out of context doesn't change the fact that it was Comodi who did it. In my opinion intentionally.

There's no omission in my citation of Massei. If you read it, you will see I've quoted it verbatim as he does and on the proceeding page here I've also given Rose as much of the rest of the transcript as I can find.

I'm not saying it was you who cut the quotation at such an unfortunate point. But it's a pity Massei was so frugal about it. Even with the second short fragment you provided later I cannot see how one can derive the conjecture you made. Have you seen the more complete version of that transcript before?

The precision-as-a-lawyer point makes you look like you're smarting and being snidey. You really should abandon that - as they'd tell you in any advocacy class, it absolutely underlines the point every time you've taken a hit.

My insensitivity of language nuances makes me mostly immune from sensing any hits unless they are based on logic and verbalised in simple declarative sentences but such ones I welcome wholeheartedly. Anyway I agree that we should both cut on the childishness and be more cordial. I promise I'll try

 

[Alt+F4]

Piktor,

So the bathmat print is smudged. Apparently it is smudged so badly (according to you) that we cannot conclude that the big toe looks nothing like Sollecito's foot. Yet not so smudged as to preclude millimeter-precision measurements. Thanks, but that dog won't hunt.

It doesn't matter if the print belongs to RS or RG. It's evidence of a clean up. There is no way that print could have gotten on that bathmat without a trail of blood from the bathroom.

 

[LondonJohn]

Piktor,

So the bathmat print is smudged. Apparently it is smudged so badly (according to you) that we cannot conclude that the big toe looks nothing like Sollecito's foot. Yet not so smudged as to preclude millimeter-precision measurements. Thanks, but that dog won't hunt.

I can't help but smile incredulously every time i hear the words "millimetre precision" when applied to analysis of that bath mat partial print...

 

[Dan O.]

It doesn't matter if the print belongs to RS or RG. It's evidence of a clean up. There is no way that print could have gotten on that bathmat without a trail of blood from the bathroom.

I presume you meant Merdith's Bedroom in that statement.


I can understand SomeAlibi missing our earlier discussion of how the bathmat print could have been formed without necessitating a trail of prints leading to it. But I thought you had been here since that time.

As a recap, the simple explanation for how the watered down print could be formed is that in the process of washing blood off his trousers (which Rudy admitted were wet), bloody water would have run down the pant leg onto his foot (from which the shoe would have been removed). Subsequently stepping on the mat with this wet foot would leave the print. It is not even necessary that the heal would touch the floor and leave the rest of the print though we know that the mat was subsequently moved so we don't know where this heal print would be and the ILE did an excellent job of obliterating any trace evidence in that bath.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

I don't buy the millimetre precision either

I can't help but smile incredulously every time i hear the words "millimetre precision" when applied to analysis of that bath mat partial print...

There is a good image here of two of the measurements.

 

[Kestrel]

I can't help but smile incredulously every time i hear the words "millimetre precision" when applied to analysis of that bath mat partial print...

It is a silly claim.

A partial print from Rudy's shoe is claimed to be a woman's shoe print in Amanda's size. Another partial print is declared to be a match for Raff's shoe. The prosecution expert didn't notice that the pattern actually matched the shoes Rudy admitted to wearing the night of the murder.

Rudy admitted to going to that bathroom to clean Meredith's blood of him. The bathmat print matches the shape of Rudy's foot. But for some reason we are expected to accept the view of prosecution expert witnesses who have already been proven dead wrong a couple of times.

 

[Alt+F4]

I presume you meant Merdith's Bedroom in that statement.

Yes, sorry about that.

As a recap, the simple explanation for how the watered down print could be formed is that in the process of washing blood off his trousers (which Rudy admitted were wet)...,

Rudy is a convicted murderer, rapist and liar. Why do you give credence to what he says?

...bloody water would have run down the pant leg onto his foot (from which the shoe would have been removed). Subsequently stepping on the mat with this wet foot would leave the print.

I'll forget for a minute that you're just making this up, and ask, why the heck would he take his shoe off if he were washing blood off his trousers?

 

[Katody Matrass]

A single piece of evidence puts it beyond doubt: the bathmat print. The blood is over the entirety of the foot.

Are you sure? For me it looks quite incomplete.

This is one of the reasons Amanda invented the bathmat shuffle of course, to try and produce an extremely weak alibi for why the area leading to the bathmat had been cleaned.

That would be a very poor reason, because neither presence nor lack of that footprints incriminates her.

Massei also notes points about a fingerprint on the lightswitch etc but you don't believe that either presumably. The perpetrator cleaned themselves off in the sink and the bidet leaving Meredith's blood traces there and water was run to wash hands and feet that's also a cleanup.

Yes, Rudy cleaned himself, now you're going in the right direction.

Strangely, Rudy Guede didn't leave a single trace of his DNA in that process.

You mean by washing hands you leave DNA in the sink? You're sure about it?

There's a reason for that. I won't go into the co-mingling of the five traces of Amanda because that'll just be another avenue that's massively covered to date.

Surely you won't go because your position is undefendable.

 

[Antony]

(sentencing)

"In relation to the fact that in addition to the said crimes Amanda Knox is also answerable for the crime of calunnia, she must be condemned to a total punishment of 26 years of imprisonment (base penalty 24 years; increased to 24 years and 6 months for the simulation [staging]; to 24 years and 9 months for carrying the knife; to 25 years for theft and increased, finally, by a further year for calunnia).

Breathtaking arrogance on the part of the Perugia court. Not only is Amanda condemned for the murder on the basis of a prosecution narrative with no credible evidence to support it, but she is given extra time for the inventions within that narrative which are made to make it hold together.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Maybe you and Piktor should go hunting together

A single piece of evidence puts it beyond doubt: the bathmat print. The blood is over the entirety of the foot. There isn't a jury in the world that's going to believe that that came out of nowhere and that the perpetrator did not walk up to that bathmat. The fact that there are no footprints on the tiled floor on the way from Meredith's bedroom to that mat shows clearly they have been cleaned from the tiles. QED.
SNIP
Because you are so passionate in denying absolutely everything in the jury's findings, you undermine yourself because you can't even face up to stuff like this which is unwinnable. Know when to concede and when to fight.

SomeAlibi,

Charlie Wilkes in comments 5332 and 8707 has stated what I would have said with respect to Massei's arguments about the origin of the print. As for your last paragraph, it is easy to turn this argument on its head. You have never acknowledged logical or factual flaws in Massei, to the best of my recollection. Yet over the course of the last 180 pages or so, we have analyzed a number of problems in the motivations document.

I have recently mentioned two of them, and here is a third. Massei said that not testing the pillowcase stain for whether or not it is semen was not done because semen cannot be dated. So should no putative semen stain ever be tested? Christianahannah pointed out that Stefanoni said it was more important to analyze this stain for its shoe print. Would this have precluded testing the stain later? The stain may or may not be a decisive piece of evidence, but it is the quality of Massei's reasoning that I am calling into question.

 

[Alt+F4]

Massei said that not testing the pillowcase stain for whether or not it is semen was not done because semen cannot be dated. So should no putative semen stain ever be tested? Christianahannah pointed out that Stefanoni said it was more important to analyze this stain for its shoe print. Would this have precluded testing the stain later? The stain may or may not be a decisive piece of evidence, but it is the quality of Massei's reasoning that I am calling into question.

How is this stain an important piece of evidence? If it's Rudy's it doesn't change anything. If it's Raffaelle's then the defense will just say it's a result of he and Amanda having sex in the apartment.

It's Rudy's defense that said (well up until recently) that it was an unknown person that committed the murder. Did his defense ever ask for it to be tested?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

quick thoughts on the stain

How is this stain an important piece of evidence? If it's Rudy's it doesn't change anything. If it's Raffaelle's then the defense will just say it's a result of he and Amanda having sex in the apartment.

It's Rudy's defense that said (well up until recently) that it was an unknown person that committed the murder. Did his defense ever ask for it to be tested?

Alt+F4,

I have previosly posted a lengthier comment on this. If it is Raffaele's, then their defense crumbles, since I cannot see how the semen could arrive in Meredith's bedroom. If it is Rudy's, then the prosecution's choosing not to appeal his sentence looks even more suspect. If it is Giacomo's, then no big deal. If it is a fourth person's, then time for a wholesale rethinking of the case.

 

[Alt+F4]

If it is Raffaele's, then their defense crumbles, since I cannot see how the semen could arrive in Meredith's bedroom.

Amanda borrowed her pillow. The "great friends" borrowing each other's possessions seems to work when one wants to explain why Amanda's lamp was found in Meredith's room. If borrowing is a good enough explanation for the lamp, why not for the pillow?

If it is Rudy's, then the prosecution's choosing not to appeal his sentence looks even more suspect.

How so?

If it is a fourth persons, then time for a wholesale rethinking of the case.

Has there ever been any serious consideration of that?

 

[christianahannah]

SomeAlibi,

Charlie Wilkes in comments 5332 and 8707 has stated what I would have said with respect to Massei's arguments about the origin of the print. As for your last paragraph, it is easy to turn this argument on its head. You have never acknowledged logical or factual flaws in Massei, to the best of my recollection. Yet over the course of the last 180 pages or so, we have analyzed a number of problems in the motivations document.

I have recently mentioned two of them, and here is a third. Massei said that not testing the pillowcase stain for whether or not it is semen was not done because semen cannot be dated. So should no putative semen stain ever be tested? Christianahannah pointed out that Stefanoni said it was more important to analyze this stain for its shoe print. Would this have precluded testing the stain later? The stain may or may not be a decisive piece of evidence, but it is the quality of Massei's reasoning that I am calling into question.

Good morning Chris. I think Stefanoni also included the importance of the palm print along with the shoe print.

When the defense consultant (Vinci?) discovered what appeared to be a stain, wasn't he analyzing the shoe print on the pillowcase? I believe this was done in May 2009 but I am not sure. I also am not sure if Stefanoni was aware of the stain prior to the May 2009 crimescope analysis.

If the defense had brought up the testing of the stain in May 2009 (according to Massei the defense submitted a memorandum on December 4, 2009, I do not know if they did prior to this date) would the testing of the stain in any way destroy the shoe print and palm print evidence?

 

[Antony]

My reply really didn't focus on "entirely on their reactions during questioning and in the trial" Antony. If you read the post I referenced within it, I talk about the DNA, computer and cellphone records as the most vital evidence. *Then* I then go on to talk about other issues.

OK, I skipped over the reference to your earlier post. Reading that now, I still find it incredibly thin on primary evidence; more than half of it is about details from before and after the time of the murder: the SMS from Patrick, the sleeping-in (or not) on the morning of 2 Nov, and the borrowing of the mop from the cottage. It really doesn't make sense to say, "I think they're murderers because they were playing with the computer and receiving phone calls early in the morning, yet they said they slept till 10 am!" There's not even a contradiction here, if they went back to sleep afterwards.

As for the DNA evidence, even you in your referenced message begin by saying: "the count is low ..." (of the DNA reading on the knife). Then there is Amanda's DNA in her own bathroom - nothing incriminating in any way about that.

Which leaves the disputed footprint. From the analysis in the injusticeinperugia website, I am entirely satisfied that this is not Raffaele's. The size of the outline (even measured with "millimetre precision") doesn't mean anything if the shape of the toes doesn't match. And it was apparently pointed out to police by ... Raffaele himself. Why would he do that if it was his; and why would he have left it there in full view after (according to the prosecution narrative) he and Amanda had spent the night cleaning up all their traces? (And definitely not playing with the computer at his flat, either.)

Not only does this not strike me as very convincing, but if this is what you describe as "overwhelming for the guilt of the accused" then it makes me doubt your objectivity.