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Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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Out, out, brief candle

Rose,

A comparison to Lady Macbeth can also be found at PMF, so I think it is meant to be taken as is.

I wanted to comment on something that Barbie Nadeau said in the Peter Popham article. Popham quoted Nadeau, "For example, Sollecito's lawyer said Meredith was killed by one person from behind, Amanda's expert said no, she was killed by one person from in front. So the jury was left to believe what they considered the more reliable source: the prosecution. All the way through, the defendants' lawyers contradicted each other."

This argument never cut any ice with me. If the defense provides two plausible alternatives, then one could argue that it is better than one. If nothing else, it shows that forensic reconstructions are not geometrical proofs. As for the last sentence, I have no idea what she is talking about. Can someone suggest some examples?
 
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Kevin_Lowe said:
This too is irrelevant. (Also we have already whacked these moles. The luminol footprints are evidence of nothing, and the bra hook DNA trace does not meet minimal standards for properly collected forensic evidence).
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The luminol footprints are not irrelevant. Where are the studies that normal households without any sort of blood on the floor reveals footprints through the application of luminol? What logical substance made the footprints? If this could be shown I'd tend to agree with you.

Mary_H said:
I thought that post was odd at first, too, but then I discovered that the idea of Amanda becoming a nun has been in the news lately, so I assume Justinian was responding to that.

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/posts/view/160606
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It says Amanda "has told the priest that she bitterly regrets her “wild” lifestyle." Hmmmm.
 
Danceme said:
The luminol footprints are not irrelevant. Where are the studies that normal households without any sort of blood on the floor reveals footprints through the application of luminol? What logical substance made the footprints? If this could be shown I'd tend to agree with you.
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It works the other way around. The prosecution has to show that the luminol footprints mean something.

Nobody knows what reacted with the luminol. It could be blood, despite the police concealing the fact that no test for blood came back positive, and despite the fact that DNA tests came back negative too, but there are plenty of things it could have been and we'll never know which of them it was.

There were multiple, meaningless luminol results in Raffaele's house, mostly in the bathroom - I guess either he washed himself with turnip juice, he had a whole lot of nosebleeds, or commonly found substances other than blood and turnip juice (some commonly found in bathrooms) give positive luminol results.

Nor does anybody know for sure whose those footprints are as far as I can establish. The prosecution's "experts" claimed that they could measure luminol footprints with millimetre accuracy to prove that they belonged to Raffaele and Amanda, but my understanding was that we established that such claims to accuracy were pure nonsense, since luminol does not work that way, and in any case they didn't bother comparing the size of the prints to the size of the feet of any of the other people who had been in the house in the days before the murder.

So we've got some footprints that could be blood or could be something else, that could belong to Amanda and Raffaele but could belong to someone else, that could have been made on the night of the murder or the subsequent morning but could have been made earlier, that did not test positive for Meredith's DNA or for blood, and which don't lead anywhere or tell us anything useful from their position.

That's not evidence of anything. You are saying "This could be evidence, can you prove that it's not?". No, we can't. We don't have to though. You have to prove that it is evidence, not merely that it could be.
 
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halides1 said:
Rose,

A comparison to Lady Macbeth can also be found at PMF, so I think it is meant to be taken as is.

I wanted to comment on something that Barbie Nadeau said in the Peter Popham article. Popham quoted Nadeau, "For example, Sollecito's lawyer said Meredith was killed by one person from behind, Amanda's expert said no, she was killed by one person from in front. So the jury was left to believe what they considered the more reliable source: the prosecution. All the way through, the defendants' lawyers contradicted each other."

This argument never cut any ice with me. If the defense provides two plausible alternatives, then one could argue that it is better than one. If nothing else, it shows that forensic reconstructions are not geometrical proofs.
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I think that might have worked against them as well. Had there been more consistency in the forensics it might have left the prosecution as the odd one out and been more convincing. Three different scenarios, albeit two of them with one attacker, suggests one version is as likely as another.


halides1 said:
As for the last sentence, I have no idea what she is talking about. Can someone suggest some examples?
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I was interested in this facet too, I hadn't run across anything about it. I looked and all I could find was an article by Nadeau which states the same thing:

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/07/14/monkey-trial.html

I find some of that article very interesting, I missed all of this defaming of the family, I never knew it occurred at the time until now. When I was googling for information a few weeks ago I came across a clip of a Knox supporter, I think it was Anne Bremmer, and Nadeau 'debating' the issue and Bremmer came across as angry and crass, while Nadeau seemed reasonable and surprised by her vehemence. I think I understand better some of that anger reading through some of these old articles riddled with errors and a whimsical disdain for everything Knox.
 
halides1 said:
I agree that trying to discern the identity of the tissue from the mere presence of DNA or the peak height of the signals in the electropherogram is nonsense. If one wants to look for blood, one tests for blood. Period. It is almost impossible to say anything about when DNA was deposited, other than that a given sample does or does not look degraded. I am ever the optimist, however, and I wonder whether Colonel Garofano has changed his mind about this point or something else.
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He's a lackey. He would never have made this assertion in the first place if he had the slightest trace of integrity or self-respect.
 
Danceme said:
The luminol footprints are not irrelevant. Where are the studies that normal households without any sort of blood on the floor reveals footprints through the application of luminol? What logical substance made the footprints? If this could be shown I'd tend to agree with you.
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Are these the footprints leading out of the bathroom? Thus if someone went from the murder site to the bathroom with bloody feet they'd have had to have been walking backwards to make those prints?
 
Kaosium said:
Are these the footprints leading out of the bathroom? Thus if someone went from the murder site to the bathroom with bloody feet they'd have had to have been walking backwards to make those prints?
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The fact that we are still discussing this shows how tenaciously people will cling to a false belief, even after it has been thoroughly debunked.
 
reasonable doubts

Kaosium said:
I think that might have worked against them as well. Had there been more consistency in the forensics it might have left the prosecution as the odd one out and been more convincing. Three different scenarios, albeit two of them with one attacker, suggests one version is as likely as another.




I was interested in this facet too, I hadn't run across anything about it. I looked and all I could find was an article by Nadeau which states the same thing:

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/07/14/monkey-trial.html
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Kaosium,

If one scenario is as likely as another, then I am well into the reasonable-doubt range. As for Ms. Nadeau's article, it is because she wrote things like her Newsweek piece, and nothing that I have ever seen about how Ms. Knox's picture went up in the hallway of the Rome police or how the Perugia police paraded the three suspects through the old town upon their arrest, that I take her self-evaluation of being objective at something less than face value.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
Here's an interesting case. Following are two videotaped confessions to the same crime. One is false, the other genuine:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/jessica-reids-confession-11533129
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/matthew-livers-confession-11533097

Watch them and see if you can tell which is which.
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Without knowing anything else about the case other than watching the two confessions I would have said that Matthew Livers was more believable.

Shows what I know!
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
It works the other way around. The prosecution has to show that the luminol footprints mean something.

Nobody knows what reacted with the luminol. It could be blood, despite the police concealing the fact that no test for blood came back positive, and despite the fact that DNA tests came back negative too, but there are plenty of things it could have been and we'll never know which of them it was.

There were multiple, meaningless luminol results in Raffaele's house, mostly in the bathroom - I guess either he washed himself with turnip juice, he had a whole lot of nosebleeds, or commonly found substances other than blood and turnip juice (some commonly found in bathrooms) give positive luminol results.

Nor does anybody know for sure whose those footprints are as far as I can establish. The prosecution's "experts" claimed that they could measure luminol footprints with millimetre accuracy to prove that they belonged to Raffaele and Amanda, but my understanding was that we established that such claims to accuracy were pure nonsense, since luminol does not work that way, and in any case they didn't bother comparing the size of the prints to the size of the feet of any of the other people who had been in the house in the days before the murder.

So we've got some footprints that could be blood or could be something else, that could belong to Amanda and Raffaele but could belong to someone else, that could have been made on the night of the murder or the subsequent morning but could have been made earlier, that did not test positive for Meredith's DNA or for blood, and which don't lead anywhere or tell us anything useful from their position.

That's not evidence of anything. You are saying "This could be evidence, can you prove that it's not?". No, we can't. We don't have to though. You have to prove that it is evidence, not merely that it could be.
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Luninol reacts with rust, I believe. My house has a bathroom in the new section and a bathroom in the old section. The old section still has iron pipes in the walls. When not used for awhile, the water is brown and rusty. Draw a bath with that water and let the rust settle to the bottom. A layer of brown sediment will be on the bottom of the tub. Step from that onto the bath mat and I'm sure a print that would react with luminol would emerge.
 
Danceme said:
It says Amanda "has told the priest that she bitterly regrets her “wild” lifestyle." Hmmmm.
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Well she's going to make up for her "wild" lifestyle when she becomes a nun, right? :rolleyes:

Stories like that creep me out. What next, a story about conjugal visits at the prison?
 
Matthew Best said:
Incidentally, Charlie, I presume you have already seen this blog, but just in case others haven't, it's an exhaustive list of people convicted (or acquitted) after having made false confessions.

http://blog.law.northwestern.edu/bluhm/false_confessions/
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Can you direct us to a similarly exhaustive list of people convicted (or acquitted) after having made true confessions?

The one is of very little use without the other, unless your only point is to defend the premise that false confessions are indeed made from time to time.

That would seem to be a remarkably useless endeavor, since I don't believe anyone is seriously questioning that they do.

If you are trying to intimate that they are likely then you should offer some comparison of relative frequency. Are you suggesting that they are more likely than true ones? Should we add confessions to the list of "things which must be discounted in a court of law", along with DNA evidence, and any presumption of competence or honesty by anyone involved with any aspect of the trial which might reflect badly on the defendant's case?

How about some statistics, Matthew? Anecdotes don't cut it in rational debate. That's just sensationalism. It works for manipulative 'news journal' creatures and the sad audience of ghouls they try to attract, but not for anyone who is interested in reason.

Your "exhaustive list" encompasses ten instances of cases with false confession over a span of a quarter century and across the entire U.S. Out of how many cases? How many cases which involved a confession of any sort? Frankly I think your blogger could have gone on for even longer, but that would still be irrelevant. Anyone can pick out ten bad ears in a field of corn, but until they reveal the size of the cornfield it means nothing.

Pony up some numbers, here. Then you've got a basis for intelligent discussion.
 
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Matthew Best said:
Well, Knox's statement seems to be called a "confession" when it suits the guilters and called something else when it doesn't. The point is that she told the police what they wanted to hear.
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She never made a confession, false or otherwise.
 
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