Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Chris_Halkides]

This is not a "simple" but rather a totally bizarre explanation.

You expect us to believe that Rudy ran out of the house, leaving the bloody shoeprints as they exist from Meredith's bedroom door to the door of the cottage.

Then, he realized his pants were bloody, so he took off his shoes, left them outside (didn't bring them in to clean them? why not?), came back into the cottage barefoot, and went to the bathroom (the one farthest from the door? why?)

Then, he rinsed the blood off his pantlegs (why not just throw the pants away later?), blood ran down his pantlegs and mysteriously got underneath the soles of his feet (laws of physics, anyone? blood will not flow down and then suddenly horizontally to cover the bottom of a foot, certainly not in such thickness and density to form a clear footprint), and then he stepped strategically on the blue bathmat to leave (in your mind) a perfect imprint that could implicate him later.

Hmm. Seems he's solving one so-called "problem" (which doesn't require solution), while creating another worse problem for himself in terms of evidence against himself.

Or do you have someone else in mind for the bloody shoeprint trail that leads out of the cottage? Not a "lone wolf" after all?

Rudy was a pretty dumb murderer, wasn't he? Not only that, he behaved totally inexplicably. Why go back into the house at all?

If he didn't leave the house first, you're expecting us to believe that, after washing blood off his pant legs, for no explicable reason he puts his shoes with blood on the soles back on (why not wash them too, while he's at it?), and then runs out of the house, leaving evidence for all to see and connect him with the murder.

This is the problem the Innocentisti bump up against all the time: They want to selectively look at the evidence, but you can't; it must be taken in its entirety.

Trigood,

I may be missing something here, but I think that Charlie Wilkes put forth the idea that Rudy picked blood back up when he returned to Meredith's room after being in the bathroom. The shoe prints leading away from the room grow fainter, IIRC.

 

[SomeAlibi]

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.

Did you just ask: why did Raffaele point out a "difference" in his footprint to that on the mat? Think OJ and gloves. Did you mean something else?

I don't see we can progress beyond what's been said. Even if you don't believe the measurements (which I don't accept). The proportions of the foot cannot make it Guede's right - the ratio of length and width are out. You literally cannot make this his. So if it isn't his, whose is it?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

If Rudy's semen were present, is his sentence just

How so?

Alt+F4,

It is just my opinion. However, if it were Rudy's, then the sexual assault went further than I would like to believe (trying to be delicate here). Whether it crossed the line to being rape is a question for lawyers. Rudy's sixteen year sentence for participating in a murder and a sexual assault or worse would strike me as too lenient.

 

[Alt+F4]

Rudy said his trousers were wet. How did they get wet?

Rudy also said he didn't murder Meredith. It's the evidence that counts. No evidence that his trousers were wet except that he says they were.

Are you joking? There were several people running around inside that cottage the next morning. Why didn't they leave bloody prints all over the place? Why don't we see any bloody right shoe prints from Rudy?

Who are the "several people" that went in Meredith's room and then walked to the bathroom?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

This is not a "simple" but rather a totally bizarre explanation.

You expect us to believe that Rudy ran out of the house, leaving the bloody shoeprints as they exist from Meredith's bedroom door to the door of the cottage.

Then, he realized his pants were bloody, so he took off his shoes, left them outside (didn't bring them in to clean them? why not?), came back into the cottage barefoot, and went to the bathroom (the one farthest from the door? why?)

No, he went into the bathroom after he killed Meredith to clean himself up, which is why police found splashes of diluted blood in the bidet as well as the print on the mat. That is when he removed his shoe, but he put it back on when he had finished cleaning up. Then he returned to her room, pulled the quilt off her bed, spread it over her body, and sat on the edge of the bed while he went through her purse. That is why police found the knife-blade prints on the top sheet and the purse on the bed, along with a towel. He left the trail of bloody shoe prints when he made his exit from the house, perhaps having stepped in blood when he spread the quilt over the body.

 

[SomeAlibi]

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.

You're expressing your subjective opinion of the evidence rather than making an objective point. You think I'm not objective. I think you're in grade A denial. Doesn't get us anywhere.

 

[Alt+F4]

Alt+F4,

It is just my opinion. However, if it is Rudy's, then the sexual assault went further than I would like to believe (trying to be delicate here). Whether it crossed the line to being rape is a question for lawyers. Rudy's sixteen year sentence for participating in a murder and a sexual assault or worse would strike me as too lenient.

Ok, I see your point. Do you think there was a nefarious reason the prosecution didn't test the stain? I thought Rudy's short sentence was because he took a "short track" trial and that a shorter sentence is given, despite the crime.

Did the defense ask for the testing of the stain during the originial trial?

 

[SomeAlibi]

The forefoot dimensions of Guede and Sollecito's reference footprints are almost the same, once Rinaldi's measuring error is corrected. Guede's foot is slightly narrower. The forefoot dimensions of both reference prints are a slightly longer than the print on the mat, suggesting that more body weight was put on the reference print than on the bathmat. This is consistent with someone putting his right foot down lightly to steady his balance while most of his body weight is centered on his left foot.

No junk science hype about "millimeter accuracy" on a rug can change the fact that the big toe on the bathmat print looks very much like the one on Guede's reference print, and not at all like the one on Sollecito's reference print.

I find the "objection" to Rinaldi's measuring to be highly unconvincing and the photoshopping exploit by those seeking to support Amanda tells a story all of its own. It will be interesting to see what happens in the appeal court.

 

[SomeAlibi]

Then why did you make such a big deal about Raffaele possessing a Japanese comic book from a genre known for its sexual violence?

What was your point with that then, anyway?

Forget the Japanese - it's got nothing to do with Japan, however much you keep on trying to wrestle this non-point into being! The point is that choosing "entertainment" depicting rape goes to character. The particular book Raffaele quoted as his favourite Manga is pretty hard stuff in the violence and forced sex zone. The female lead character has her legs amputated to "teach her a lesson" and there is plenty of forced sex. It's simply not very nice whereas there is lots of Manga that doesn't go to this extreme.

I already said I don't make a big deal out of this and I will not be discussing it with you further because you are clearly trying to manufacture a fight over nothing. Conversation closed.

 

[SomeAlibi]

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.

Point of information: Rudy never did admit to going to the bathroom to clean blood off himself. He said he went to get towels. In his diary he said that he had blood on him as he returned home to change. He says nothing about washing himself or having wet trousers or anything similar.

 

[SomeAlibi]

Alt+F4,

It is just my opinion. However, if it were Rudy's, then the sexual assault went further than I would like to believe (trying to be delicate here). Whether it crossed the line to being rape is a question for lawyers. Rudy's sixteen year sentence for participating in a murder and a sexual assault or worse would strike me as too lenient.

Rudy was not sentenced to 16 years. He was sentenced on appeal to 24 years and receives the automatic fast track deduction down to 16. Completely not the same thing. It's an important point in terms of comensurate sentencing between the three. "Rudy only gets 16" types of comment are frequently misused by Knox-supporters (not saying you) both to suggest some sort of favouritism towards Guede (which is therefore shown to be specious) and to introduce a false note of hope that Amanda can also expect to be "reduced" to 16. Candace Dempsey has made this mistake on more than one occasion.

 

[SomeAlibi]

Still interested in someone please explaining to me the motivation of the judge and jury to "fit up" a young Italian man who is the son of a prominent and wealthy Italian medic?

 

[piktor]

The forefoot dimensions of Guede and Sollecito's reference footprints are almost the same, once Rinaldi's measuring error is corrected. Guede's foot is slightly narrower. The forefoot dimensions of both reference prints are a slightly longer than the print on the mat, suggesting that more body weight was put on the reference print than on the bathmat. This is consistent with someone putting his right foot down lightly to steady his balance while most of his body weight is centered on his left foot.

No junk science hype about "millimeter accuracy" on a rug can change the fact that the big toe on the bathmat print looks very much like the one on Guede's reference print, and not at all like the one on Sollecito's reference print.

One fingerprint "looks" like another fingerprint. Dactyloscopy experts in court will explain why they are different.

It does not matter what "looks" like a match on a computer screen. What matters is what certified experts give testimony to.

 

[platonov]

Still interested in someone please explaining to me the motivation of the judge and jury to "fit up" a young Italian man who is the son of a prominent and wealthy Italian medic?

I'd be very interested in the responses (if any ) to this.

A guy whose family had the money or connections to hire a particular lawyer*
who held a position in the justice dept and was a deputy in the 'alliance' of the guy who runs Italy.

Before I knew anything about else about this case this* was the very thing that led me to dismiss the more lurid conspiracy theories which still prevail in some quarters.

OK I would have dismissed them anyway but.

 

[platonov]

I'm not sure what you meant by including me in this post.

..................
.......................

It was a lighthearted comment -without going into detail I was referring to your earlier for example

Americans are kind of immunized against smear campaigns, in a sense that's all our politics are these days

- the ref to smear campaigns brought it to mind.

Its OT as regards the case itself but perhaps relevant to many of the opinions surrounding it.
No more OT than whether 'Comodi lied ' and Japanese comics.?

Furthermore you have unflatteringly predicted for Mingini an epitaph "Whom Gods Destroy..."
Given the Mediterranean locale the original (Greek ?) might be more appropriate than what I take is a Star Trek ? reference.
But as with the ' cartwheels' which started this thread we will put it down to cultural differences - and as then it wouldn't be believable to try to convict on that alone.

But this is not addresing the issue of what the you think the appeal can hope to succeed on.

 

[Dan O.]

I have heard some ingenious theories in my time, but this running water down the trouser and all under the foot takes the biscuit. There isn't a jury in the world that's going to buy that blood runs down a foot, then miraculously runs from the edge of the foot such that the foot is covered with blood across it's entire width and breadth.

Have you ever heard of Surface Tension^WP? Look what happens when water flows over a curved surface: http://gutter-hood.com/images/surface-tension-water-glass.jpg

The orientation of the bathmat shows the footprint 90 degrees to either the bidet or the sink

And as I've already stated earlier, there is reason to believe that the bathmat had been moved between the night of the murder and when the police arrived the next day.

 

[Kaosium]

If you find entertainment that depicts rape as not worthy of comment, I leave the conversation there.

And it says something about the people who *choose* to read or watch it.

Rape is not entertainment and that those who seek out entertainment forms with it are rather disgusting?

Forget the Japanese - it's got nothing to do with Japan, however much you keep on trying to wrestle this non-point into being! The point is that choosing "entertainment" depicting rape goes to character. The particular book Raffaele quoted as his favourite Manga is pretty hard stuff in the violence and forced sex zone. The female lead character has her legs amputated to "teach her a lesson" and there is plenty of forced sex. It's simply not very nice whereas there is lots of Manga that doesn't go to this extreme.

I already said I don't make a big deal out of this and I will not be discussing it with you further because you are clearly trying to manufacture a fight over nothing. Conversation closed.

Not exactly, I was hoping to illustrate a point and hope you could draw the conclusion yourself. It was the number of posts of yours on the subject that suggested this was important to you, and it reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend years back who was a horror fan. I told him I didn't care for horror movies and wondered about those who were fans as it seemed all they amounted to was pretty girls getting chopped up, much like the argument you were making in the numerous posts above. He told me that wasn't the actual 'attraction' at all, it was that if you want to depict something that made an emotional impact on the audience it had to be something that truly horrified them, which for young men is seeing pretty girls chopped up.

I then noted that if you took your argument about Raffaele's choice of entertainment to the logical conclusion, one would run into the problem that this genre of comic book is produced and consumed mostly by Japan which is renown for it's low levels of sexual violence. Thus I believe there is simply a misunderstanding on your part as to the attraction of the medium, much like the erroneous conclusion I drew many years back.

If you feel the need to flounce off in a huff about it, be my guest, I'm not the one who brought it up.

 

[LondonJohn]

Yes bedroom, thank you. What evidence do you refer to in a *bath*? Do you mean bidet or shower?

I have heard some ingenious theories in my time, but this running water down the trouser and all under the foot takes the biscuit. There isn't a jury in the world that's going to buy that blood runs down a foot, then miraculously runs from the edge of the foot such that the foot is covered with blood across it's entire width and breadth. It crystal clear that that footprint must have been made by stepping in blood and then transferring it onto the surface below. Any child doing a potato print shows you that mechanism. The running water, total coverage idea is extraordinarily weak by anyone's common experience. He would have had to have got a paint roller out and rub it across his sole to get that effect!

The orientation of the bathmat shows the footprint 90 degrees to either the bidet or the sink which it bisects and is clearly in keeping with someone stepping right into the shower. If someone was to clean their foot in the bidet and we posit that they did such a very poor job of cleaning themselves (the very point of them carrying out that action), which I don't accept, then how does the foot get back into that position? In order to get the *right foot* to land there as the first imprint, you have to turn your right foot completely inside your left leg and have it facing at 90 degrees to your body. Try it, it is extraordinarily unlikely.

So now in order to have that work we now also have to posit the bathmat being spun around as well into a position which it is not found. This "explanation" is now looking massively stretched.

Ask a normal person to compare the idea of what you can see in those pictures and ask them does it look like someone with bloody feet walking straight to the shower, with the lack of prior footprints as evidence of a cleanup does it look like the footprint of a contortionist turning their right leg outside-in by 90 degrees and you're going to get very short shrift.

Your argument would last about 5 minutes in a court and I would enjoy making maximum use of it. Some pretty comprehensive work has been done on DNA and the break-in by the proponents for the defence which at least sounds plausible at first blush, but this one? This is the bottom of the credibility pack of any theory I've heard about the case and no jury would believe it.

You don't even seem to have considered the teeny possibility that the bathmat was........moved! Knox herself claims to have used the bathmat to get to and from her room (notwithstanding someone's "devastating" legally-brilliant analysis of how the bathmat couldn't have been placed back beneath the sink after Knox's shower because there was a ridge in it and a bag slightly overlapped it....). How can you possibly know what position it might have been in on the evening of the 1st November 2007?

And, regarding the blood on the sole of the foot, the better proposition is even simpler: Guede removed his shoe to wash blood off his trouser leg without having to remove his trousers. He used the bidet to do this, and stood with his right foot resting in the bowl of the bidet, as he washed blood from his trouser leg with the bidet tap. In the process of doing so, a blood/water mixture pooled in the bowl of the bidet prior to flowing down the plughole. And this is how the sole of Guede's right foot would have become soaked with a blood/water mixture. Guede would then have removed his foot from the bidet and placed it partially onto the bathmat, which he had either moved next to the bidet or it was placed there anyhow.

And here's another thing: the partial foot print was evidently made in a blood/water mix (it was dilute and faint to the naked eye), and yet it was also clearly made with a fairly liguid mixture, since it is a solid print. So this is, in fact, entirely incompatible with someone having stepped, barefoot, into a pool of Meredith's undiluted blood in her bedroom, then having walked to the bathroom and placed their foot onto the mat en route to the shower (or whatever). Not only would the print have been made in undiluted blood under this scenario (which it was not), it would also have been a very faint and broken-up print in undiluted blood by the time it had already been placed upon the floor at least three or four times while travelling between the pooled blood in Meredith's room and the bathmat (ya know, the prints that were allegedly cleaned up....).

Other than that, brilliant stuff!

 

[LondonJohn]

Not exactly, I was hoping to illustrate a point and hope you could draw the conclusion yourself. It was the number of posts of yours on the subject that suggested this was important to you, and it reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend years back who was a horror fan. I told him I didn't care for horror movies and wondered about those who were fans as it seemed all they amounted to was pretty girls getting chopped up, much like the argument you were making in the numerous posts above. He told me that wasn't the actual 'attraction' at all, it was that if you want to depict something that made an emotional impact on the audience it had to be something that truly horrified them, which for young men is seeing pretty girls chopped up.

I then noted that if you took your argument about Raffaele's choice of entertainment to the logical conclusion, one would run into the problem that this genre of comic book is produced and consumed mostly by Japan which is renown for it's low levels of sexual violence. Thus I believe there is simply a misunderstanding on your part as to the attraction of the medium, much like the erroneous conclusion I drew many years back.

If you feel the need to flounce off in a huff about it, be my guest, I'm not the one who brought it up.

It's certainly not how I'd expect a "professional defence counsel" to react......

 

[LondonJohn]

One fingerprint "looks" like another fingerprint. Dactyloscopy experts in court will explain why they are different.

It does not matter what "looks" like a match on a computer screen. What matters is what certified experts give testimony to.

Is this a serious argument?? Comparing the ability to identify the multi-million-permutation loops and whorles of a clearly-obtained latent fingerprint with identifying a smudged blood/water toe print made on a ridged towelling bathmat? We've reached a new low!