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Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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open discovery

An anonymous commenter on another site misunderstood my reference to the DNA evidence in the Duke lacrosse case. What happened was that YSTR testing was done by a private lab after the state crime lab had completed standard profiling. The head of the private lab agreed with District Attorney Nifong to keep the fact that the DNA of about five unidentified males had shown up in the rape kit of the accuser. None matched any lacrosse player. This finding completely undercut the notion that she had been raped by a member of the team, as well as torpedoing her credibility. North Carolina has an open discovery law. Nifong turned over 1800 pages of lab material to the defense, not imagining that they could interpret it, given that the information was not in the report. However, one of the lawyers was able to teach himself enough about profiling to piece the story together, even though he was originally looking for something else in the DNA data. Perhaps this story helps to explain why I am so insistent upon full disclosure when it comes to forensics.
 
Kestrel said:
It's the actions implied by the prosecution theory. The prosecution never bothered explaining how the defendants achieved all the tasks they were accused of doing.

As a skeptic, I expect an explanation. Especially for an outlandish claim such as a clean up that somehow scrubbed trace evidence from two defendants while leaving plenty of evidence pointing to a third and left no traces of the cleaning.
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It's not - nor are the court or prosecution required to do so for a guilty verdict.

England may expect - 'skeptics' have to examine [proximity and sobriety permitting]
the available data and see for themselves.

Your last sentence implies you are not familiar with the case - or as with Kaosium have misunderstood.

Any response on the Dreyfusss Q.
 
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platonov said:
It's not - nor are the court or prosecution required to do so for a guilty verdict.

England may expect - 'skeptics' have to examine [proximity and sobriety permitting]
the available data and see for themselves.

Your last sentence implies you are not familiar with the case - or as with Kaosium have misunderstood.

Any response on the Dreyfusss Q.
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I am not really familiar with the Dreyfus case. What is however clear about this case is that the prosecution has tunnel vision. The prosecution decided early on who was guilty by methods that have no scientific basis. They publicly declared the case solved before even knowing about Rudy Guede.

As for the clean up, it's rather clear that you don't understand the nature of trace evidence.
 
Plea Bargains

Hi all....new poster here. Been following this case for quite awhile and have been enjoying all of your posts.

This may be a stupid question but, are plea bargains allowed in the Italian justice system? Forgive me for not searching the forum before asking, but I'm guessing that the answer is "no" since I've never seen it discussed in any article. I'm asking because I'm assuming that if AK or RS were guilty, one of them would have turned on the other.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
It suspect Comodi just didn't have her facts straight when she examined Amanda. If she had deliberately fudged the time, she would have risked having Amanda say, "no, I remember the call, it was after I had talked to Filomena several times and after we found the broken window." As it was, Comodi lucked out because Amanda didn't remember.
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Charlie, Comodi actually says at one point, "nothing had happened, in the sense that the door had not been broken down yet". I think that shows she knew precisely when the call happened. She also knew from the intercepted phone call that Amanda didn't remember it; if Amanda had corrected her, Comodi could have made her look like a liar for having said she didn't remember it previously. So Comodi didn't 'luck out' because Amanda didn't remember the call; she already knew Amanda didn't remember the call before she tried that line of questioning.

I think not only did she 'deliberately fudge' the time of the call, she deliberately lied about it, covering herself by saying (once) that the call happened 'before the door was broken down' and quoting Amanda's mother that 'nothing had happened yet' (meaning she could say 'I'm just quoting your mother' if Amanda objected). A dirty trick but, as Scorpion said, it worked.
 
Kestrel said:
Given this, the prosecution theory that Amanda killed Meredith requires her to change clothes, kill Meredith, fake a burglary including individual placement of dozens of pieces of glass, perform a magical cleanup of her trace DNA in the murder room, clean herself, change back into the clothes she was wearing the night before, dispose of the second knife, take Meredith's cell phones to a garden several hundred meters away, dispose of Meredith's keys, credit cards and money, dispose of the clothes and shoe she wore during the murder, return the kitchen knife to Raff's place, go back to the cottage to take a shower and change again, carry the mop back to Raff's place, come back to the cottage, make a bunch of phone calls and wait for the cops to show up.

It's quite a list. Especially when you consider that a couple of the tasks are basically impossible.
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But Kestrel, some of the clean-up was done inadvertently. Didn't she, by her own admission, do a bath mat shuffle down the hall?

And remember, they did get up early. She had plenty of time to get started on things, whilst Raffael was making up the playlist. Also, they did not complete the operation, because the police arrived.

By the way, does anyone have any ideas as to what was on the playlist? Music to cleanup by? "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin?
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
I don't see how you can think the big toe looks more like Raffaele's than Rudy's.

I think you need to move the Rudy overlay a little to the right.

My conclusion is that the print on the mat was made with less than full body weight. The killer was using the bidet as a fountain for washing up. He put his wet, bloody right foot down briefly to steady his balance, with most of his body weight centered on his other foot. Thus the bathmat print is smaller and narrower than the reference prints. An adjustment is needed for either Raffaele or Rudy, as you will notice. But the line of the arch follows Rudy's reference print, whereas Raffaele's veers off at a different angle.
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Here is the problem with the whole bloody footprint. If there is enough blood on sollecito to force him to wash up before he leaves the apartment. Then where is the evidence he was even in that room. How could he possibly get enough blood that would force him to wash his feet. If someone was to get enough blood on their legs or feet that would require them to wash up, then there would be evidence of them in that room in the blood. Only person there is evidence of in that room is Guede. Whose foot happens to resemble the footprint, even though most guilters refuse to acknowledge it. So either Meredith was killed and the crime scene cleaned(prosecution claims Knox/Sollecito removed their traces by cleaning) before Rudy entered the apartment, took a crap, enjoyed some beverages from the refrig, and then entered into Meredith's room to sexually assault her dead body or he was the one that killed Meredith and thats his footprint on the mat.
 
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Dan O. said:
A sock would give a different flow around the toes which is why I think it's a bare foot and the crease between the foot and toes created a natural barrior because the water would then have to flow uphill to get on the toes.

BTW, has anyone pointed out that the footprint photo is not taken with the camera plane parallel to the mat? I've made the correction here by using the parallel lines in the mat as a reference.

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=597&pictureid=3945[/qimg]


I've scaled this using to ruler on the mat so if you've got the reference prints that can be similarly scaled I can compare them directly.
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When I look at the pic you posted I noticed something for the first time. So I did a crude circling of it. Is that blood in the circle? Because if it is it would line up perfectly with Guede's middle toe, which so happens to also be longer than his big toe.
 

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platonov said:
While Kaosium is wedded to a CT his point is clear and prose less complex than the Massei Report. And shorter.
The recent move to posting videos may be a good thing - it worked well in another much publicized CT.:)
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I'd say more of a deluded prosecutor in a system that can be abused by a powerful man. I think he illustrated beyond absurdity what the absence of checks and balances can do to some systems. The rest will eventually probably be saying they were just taking orders or somesuch.
platonov said:
ETA Kestrel .. In light of the first bolded piece I take it you share my (and others) opinion that comparison to the Dreyfuss affair is beyond hyperbole.
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As I also noted, it won't get that far. It is breathtaking that it got to this stage, a tragedy of errors and one searches for possible comparisons. Somebody is going to have to explain someday how this happened, it will make for fascinating reading. I'm betting Mignini ends up being blamed for everything, that's how it usually works. He was obviously the impetus, so it won't be unfair, but as you imply, others share some blame for not putting a stop to it.

At any rate, have you noticed something? The debate has shifted to whether or not it is possible they are guilty. That's how absurd this miscarriage of justice really was. If you're going to take marching orders and rhetorical tips from a site where some gleefully note that even if freed they will be emotionally scarred for life and no one objects, don't you owe it to yourself to come up with a decent piece of evidence of why they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

That's the standard, right? They have to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Right now they are still due the presumption of innocense under Italian law, are they not? Irrelevant 'lies,' comic books, and whatever else it was are 'proof' of nothing. There's no confession, no motive, no evidence they were at the scene the night of the murder, and that the last verdict was 'guilty' means nothing in a country where 1/3 or so cases like these are overturned on appeal.

What's your proof they actually did it?
 
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piktor said:
The arrows on the bathmat are the bathmat's measurements, they are not Guede's.

The green lines are the outer limits of the blue arrows.

The bathmat measurements are related to Sollecito. That's why Sollecito's foot fits exactly.

To put it simply: the photos on the right are Guede's footprint and Guede's measurements.

The photos on the left are the bathmat's but not Guede's measurements.

The pink outline on the bottom left corner photo is Guede's. The measurements on this same bottom left corner are Sollecito's.
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Thanks. Then that →³⁰ measurement that would correspond to the widest that Raffaele's big toe is does not match this print. The end of that arrow seems to be measured from the far left mark corresponding to the actual start of the measurement of Raffele's big toe at it's widest width but the end of the arrow is a mark at the upper right of the bathmat print that does not correspond to anything in Raffaele's actual footprint. He has nothing in his actual print that could make that mark. On the other hand, it could be Rudy's 2nd toe. It is higher and to the right of his big toe, in my opinion.
 
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christianahannah said:
Well Chris it is difficult to believe that Amanda's defense attorneys would not have known the exact minute of the call and object to the line of questioning by Comodi if they felt she was being unethical.

I still believe Comodi was focusing on the call itself rather than the exact minute of the call. That is only my opinion, I cannot be sure since I do not have all the documentation the court has.

Chris please don't be so cynical. There are good, ethical prosecutors. The same holds true for defense attorneys.
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The problem with the questioning thats also gotta be considered are the culture and language differences between the prosecutor/judge and knox. However, the most telling thing about the questioning is this. Comodi made it clear that the phone call happened before anything had happened yet.
Comodi Tranlation,"MC: But at 12:00 nothing had happened yet. That's what your mother also said--"

The defense attorneys made objections during Knox's testimony previously about the prosecutors adding false information into questions directed at knox and the judge told the prosecutors to continue.

So if the Prosecutor knew knox called after something had happened, then why add the false information into the question, when you know the phone call is 40+ minutes later. Because in point of fact something did happen and thats why knox called her mother. Because in fact Comodi has entered false information into the trial, when they accuse knox of making a phone call at noon to her mother BEFORE anything had happened.
 
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katy_did said:
Is that based on your belief that the width measurement of the big toe on the bathmat is identical to Sollecito's print?

I pointed out in an earlier post that when Rinaldi took that measurement he deliberately measured to an area not marked with blood, because he was assuming that the little mark to the right of the big toe was in fact a part of the toe (the defence expert believed it was the mark of Rudy's second toe). On your diagram that mark is outside the outline of the big toe, meaning it must be the second toe (or at any rate, not part of the big toe): in that case, you would need to measure only up to the point where there's actually blood on the mat, meaning the width measurement is about 24mm, in comparison to Guede's 23mm (and Sollecito's 30mm).

Since as you said yourself, Guede's big toe matches that on the bathmat in terms of height, wouldn't that make it almost a perfect fit?

ETA: This is what I'm talking about:

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=555&pictureid=3943[/qimg]

Rinaldi extended the measurement of the width of the big toe way out to the right to an area not stained with blood (as Massei acknowledges in the report), to accommodate the detached mark at the top-right which he said was actually a part of the big toe. Since Piktor's diagram has that mark outside the big toe, s/he has to also adjust the width measurement to about 24mm, which is the actual width of it (not Rinaldi's estimate of how wide it might be if that mark were a part of it).
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Very nice, I see you have already made this point. Looking at Dan O's adjustment in comparion to Rudy's print, I just do not see how it was possible that Rinaldi ruled out this print from having belonged to Rudy.



 
christianahannah said:
Whether the point being made was one of Amanda being "forgetful" or "evasive" I don't think it would have made the judges more suspicious of Amanda on that one point.
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Hi, christianahannah.

The point being made was one of Amanda having some suspicious knowledge of some things at 12:00 when "nothing happened yet". And it was being made with use of Comodi's malicious dirty trick based on her repeated imprecisions.
Not only Amanda but also Justice Massei fell for that trick.

Katy_did pointed it out to you in the insightful post that you gracefully let slip by without any comment :)
 
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Katody Matrass said:
Hi, christianahannah.

The point being made was one of Amanda having some suspicious knowledge of some things at 12:00 when "nothing happened yet". And it was being made with use of Comodi's malicious dirty trick based on her repeated imprecisions.
Not only Amanda but also Justice Massei fell for that trick.

Katy_did pointed it out to you in the insightful post that you gracefully let slip by without any comment :)
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I think Christiana takes the high road on a lot of this and will not make a negative judgment about something or somebody without more definitive information. I agree with her that there are good and ethical prosecutors. It is of great importance that prosecutors do their level best to both protect the public safety and search for the truth in these types of cases and make an effective presentation in court. There is a fine line in some of the tactics used to do this. In my opinion, Comodi crossed that line with this one but I respect Christiana's position that she is not convinced (yet).
 
Chris C said:
When I look at the pic you posted I noticed something for the first time. So I did a crude circling of it. Is that blood in the circle? Because if it is it would line up perfectly with Guede's middle toe, which so happens to also be longer than his big toe.
Click to expand...

Good eyes. I don't know if it is blood or not but it does seem to correspond to a second toe (or middle toe) in Rudy's print. No toes in Raffaele's prints come close to that high in relation to the big toe.
 
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Chris C said:
When I look at the pic you posted I noticed something for the first time. So I did a crude circling of it. Is that blood in the circle? Because if it is it would line up perfectly with Guede's middle toe, which so happens to also be longer than his big toe.
Click to expand...

In my opinion, no. You can see many other patches of the same colour, the mat appears to be woven from a combination of blue and violet fibres, the mark is simply an area where the violet is predominant.
 
Supernaut said:
In my opinion, no. You can see many other patches of the same colour, the mat appears to be woven from a combination of blue and violet fibres, the mark is simply an area where the violet is predominant.
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Yes but how many of those other patches are also blood? That footprint wasn't the only spot on that mat which is blood.
 
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halides1 said:
An anonymous commenter on another site misunderstood my reference to the DNA evidence in the Duke lacrosse case. What happened was that YSTR testing was done by a private lab after the state crime lab had completed standard profiling. The head of the private lab agreed with District Attorney Nifong to keep the fact that the DNA of about five unidentified males had shown up in the rape kit of the accuser. None matched any lacrosse player. This finding completely undercut the notion that she had been raped by a member of the team, as well as torpedoing her credibility. North Carolina has an open discovery law. Nifong turned over 1800 pages of lab material to the defense, not imagining that they could interpret it, given that the information was not in the report. However, one of the lawyers was able to teach himself enough about profiling to piece the story together, even though he was originally looking for something else in the DNA data. Perhaps this story helps to explain why I am so insistent upon full disclosure when it comes to forensics.
Click to expand...

Could the reason there wasn't transparent open discovery of forensics have anything to do with the fact the testing you write of was performed in a private lab? I am assuming a private lab is a for-profit lab. Would a private lab have more reason to acquiesce to the wishes of a paid client than a government lab would? Are private labs regulated under the same standards as government labs?

I'm not sure if any testing was done by a private lab in the Kercher case but I believe Stefanoni testified to doing the Y haplotype test herself (or the Rome lab).

The lab (Stefanoni) had also received its certification in June 2009, Stefanoni testified that no modifications had to be made to receive the certification. Would that certification explain what the requirements/recommendations are for distributing work status reports, data, etc. in criminal cases or is that a matter left to the judicial system?

Chris I don't think anyone would argue with the fact that all information should be turned over to the defense of Amanda and Raffaele. I am not exactly clear what the law is in Italy concerning material handed over to the defense, what material was handed over, what was not handed over, and what the appeals explicitly say about this material. There were arguments mentioned in the motivations concerning this issue, Massei handed down an request/order for the material (I'm not sure what all was to be handed over) to be transferred to the defense. I do not know if that indeed happened or not.
 
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