Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[quadraginta]

Quadraginta,

Why are you ignoring the study by the Innocence Project that I cited for your benefit within the last couple of days? They found that false confessions played a role in 24% of the erroneous convictions that they studied.

I have ignored nothing. My familiarity with the Innocence Project and their work long predates these threads, this argument, the Knox case itself, and very possibly even your own interest in crime and false convictions.

What role did false confessions play in all convictions? Within the limits of our current discussion your statistic is meaningless unless taken in concert with that one. You are begging the question^WP of the validity of the Knox conviction, which is instead the very topic at issue.

Thought for the day: Maybe you and Alt+F4 should do some of your own research, instead of letting everyone else do the work and then claiming it is not up to scratch in some way.

You seem to be suggesting that I am somehow delinquent for not researching someone else's patently indefensible exercise in illogic. Why on earth would I waste my time doing that? What a fascinating conceit.

I am not contesting the quality of the data, or suggesting that it is insufficient. I am pointing out its irrelevancy. Surely the difference does not escape you.

 

[Machiavelli]

Yes, he does, he refers to it as "psychological torture" in his diary. (..)

Psychological torture is a feeling, a judgement, not a fact. "I lied because I was thretned with ... " is the report of a fact, "I lied because I couldn't bare fear" is a fact. The fact he reports here is "I lied because Amanda asked me to say so", this is the reported fact. The additional judgemental terms to describe his situation - like "torture" - are whihing. He never affirmed he lied due to this pressures, he affirmed he lied because Amanda asked him. And he also never specifies what those "torture" consists in, nothing factual: nothig is given about this term other than the value of a subjective judgement on his suffering.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

25% of erroneous convictions in this study included a false confession

Presented on its own, what we actually know about the Knox questioning does not provide us with enough data to draw the conclusion that she was coerced in any fashion beyond what would constitute standard law enforcement interview techniques generally acceptable even in the U.S. and U.K. Beyond that we have been offered hyperbole, distortion, and the insinuation and innuendo incited and bolstered by these anecdotes. Knox's own words, taken as a body and not scissored into conveniently manipulable bites, suggest that there was not any such brutal coercion.

The initial play on this meme was that she was held continuously for ~fifty hours without food, water, rest, or even sanitation. This did not withstand even casual scrutiny, and the vectors of the meme quickly (and repeatedly) retreated to presumably more defensible exaggeration. Argument by anecdote has become a new tactic of choice, but it no more defensible, just marginally less transparent.

The sad reality is that regardless of such clever verbal constructs as "internalized false confession", using only the facts at hand concerning her individual case, the simplest and thus (as has been often pointed out in these threads for many different reasons) most likely explanation is that Knox lied.

I am still open to conjecture as to why she may have chosen to lie, but I am not convinced by the unrelated anecdotal arguments alluding to coercion. No matter how many of them are posted.

Quadraginta,

It is extremely puzzling to me why you would want to claim that Knox lied when there is no recording of her interrogation. Can you back up your claim with some citations?

Your statements are problematic. No one ever claimed that she was held continuously for 50 hours that I can recall. Moreover, you conveniently ignore comments such as Stilicho made, to the effect that ILE barely had time to move the chairs and sit down before Ms. Knox made her first statement. You also ignore the question of what happened between 1:45 and 5:45. I asked someone in this group whether he or she thought that ILE and Ms. Knox played Chutes and Ladders during this time, but I did not get a clear response.

Why would Knox say that Lumumba was there when she had reason to believe he was at his bar with customers? Why would she not name Guede if she knew that he were involved?


I reserved the largest puzzle for last. Why do you continue to ignore the Innocence Project citations that I (and I am pretty sure others) have given on the frequency with which false confessions play a part in erroneous convictions? Could it be that it does not fit into your implicit claim that your opponents are arguing solely by anecdote?

"While it can be hard to understand why someone would falsely confess to a crime, psychological research has provided some answers – and DNA exonerations have proven that the problem is more widespread than many people think. In approximately 25% of the wrongful convictions overturned with DNA evidence, defendants made false confessions, admissions or statements to law enforcement officials.

The electronic recording of interrogations, from the reading of Miranda rights onward, is the single best reform available to stem the tide of false confessions."

 

[Sherlock Holmes]

It's very uncomfortable to watch this (it was featured on the same programme from where my clip on false confessions came). Interestingly, the police homed in on Michael Crowe when they observed him "emotionlessly" playing on his Gameboy shortly after his sister's murder was discovered. They made a firm link between his "odd" behaviour after the murder and his culpability - sound familiar?

LJ, does this sound familiar too?

"He does what we call a blitz attack on Stephanie. It takes a matter of seconds, literally, and then he exits," says Dutton. "There's not a lot of planning. It's essentially a straight shot."

But what about the fact that there wasn't a single fingerprint, fiber or footprint left at the scene of the crime? "Luck plays a big part in a lot of murder investigations," says Dutton.

 

[Machiavelli]

Throwing someone into a prison cell is threatening and coercive by its nature.

Can you please provide the location of this information in the report?

But the indication is the lack of an information of the contrary in the Massei report and in all defence appeals and documents! The information on the lack of an interview by Mignini is not explicitly written in the report, the report doesn't enlist all things that didn't take place. The interview with the prosecutor never took place because it is the law that provides so, and nobody ever claimed the contrary. An interrogation of a person under arrest by a prosecutor could not take place before the interogation by a GIP. And an interrogation of a suspect by a magistrate cannot take place without the presence of an appointed attorney.
Nobody in the defence claimed those things happend. Nobody reported of such. Why should I assume they took place?

 

[Mary_H]

It is not sophistry to point out that anecdotes are being used as a rhetorical tactic, not as a part of a balanced and nuanced analysis.

Without some measure of comparative frequency quantitative statistical analysis is not merely insufficient in this usage, it is irrelevant. Not applicable at all. This does not even begin to address the subject of causality, in which it becomes necessary to articulate how a set of examples (anecdotes) somehow provide evidence that a relationship between those examples and other allegedly similar ones actually exists, and actually constitutes some basis to assume a causal relationship.

quadraginta, when you and I discussed this subject about ten days ago, with regard to lab misconduct, you started out with what I believe was an erroneous proposition:

"No one is challenging the fact that such things can happen, or that they do happen."

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6493982&postcount=12969

You did the same thing yesterday when you proposed:

"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."

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6525008&postcount=13738

I responded to your earlier claims in this post (excerpted), and i think my answer still applies in the present exchange:

"Your references to rhetoric, persuasion and tactics focus on the structure but not the content of the discussion. I don’t want to speak for other supporters of Amanda and Raffaele, but personally, I am not as strongly motivated by a desire to persuade others of my beliefs as I am by the impulse to correct misinformation and counter the malicious, proactive movement to vilify Amanda and Raffaele. As such, my participation in this discussion is reactive and requires no more than knowledge of the facts. Any further creative use of language or argumentation is unnecessary and elective; it just adds to my enjoyment of the process.

Contrary to your assertion that “no one is challenging the fact that such things” as lab misconduct can or do happen, other commentators have conveyed their beliefs that such things happen so rarely, the topic isn't relevant to this discussion, particularly the concept of actually planting evidence. When analogies have been offered, it often has been in response to such expressions of disbelief. The intention is not to claim that since it happened in other situations, it happened here; the intention is to educate readers that it happens."

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6495415&postcount=12983

Today you wrote:

Presented on its own, what we actually know about the Knox questioning does not provide us with enough data to draw the conclusion that she was coerced in any fashion beyond what would constitute standard law enforcement interview techniques generally acceptable even in the U.S. and U.K. Beyond that we have been offered hyperbole, distortion, and the insinuation and innuendo incited and bolstered by these anecdotes. Knox's own words, taken as a body and not scissored into conveniently manipulable bites, suggest that there was not any such brutal coercion.

The initial play on this meme was that she was held continuously for ~fifty hours without food, water, rest, or even sanitation. This did not withstand even casual scrutiny, and the vectors of the meme quickly (and repeatedly) retreated to presumably more defensible exaggeration. Argument by anecdote has become a new tactic of choice, but it no more defensible, just marginally less transparent.

The sad reality is that regardless of such clever verbal constructs as "internalized false confession", using only the facts at hand concerning her individual case, the simplest and thus (as has been often pointed out in these threads for many different reasons) most likely explanation is that Knox lied.

I am still open to conjecture as to why she may have chosen to lie, but I am not convinced by the unrelated anecdotal arguments alluding to coercion. No matter how many of them are posted.

If we don't have enough data to conclude Amanda was coerced, then how do we have enough data to conclude she lied? "Using only the facts at hand," we have "the body" of Amanda's full court testimony. Why do you choose to disregard it?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

tunnel vision is a way of life for some, one suspects

LJ, does this sound familiar too?

"He does what we call a blitz attack on Stephanie. It takes a matter of seconds, literally, and then he exits," says Dutton. "There's not a lot of planning. It's essentially a straight shot."

But what about the fact that there wasn't a single fingerprint, fiber or footprint left at the scene of the crime? "Luck plays a big part in a lot of murder investigations," says Dutton.

There was at least one stain on his sweatshirt and DNA was eventually found there. A court-appointed defense attorney had to insist that the shirt be tested. What is at least equally troubling in this case is the fact that an unfamiliar man was walking around the neighborhood asking about a girl. Why didn't the police look to him as a possible suspect? He was eventually shown to be the killer.

 

[quadraginta]

<snip>

I reserved the largest puzzle for last. Why do you continue to ignore the Innocence Project citations that I (and I am pretty sure others) have given on the frequency with which false confessions play a part in erroneous convictions? Could it be that it does not fit into your implicit claim that your opponents are arguing solely by anecdote?
"While it can be hard to understand why someone would falsely confess to a crime, psychological research has provided some answers – and DNA exonerations have proven that the problem is more widespread than many people think. In approximately 25% of the wrongful convictions overturned with DNA evidence, defendants made false confessions, admissions or statements to law enforcement officials.

No. It is because there is nothing which compares this number, taken from a limited set of erroneous convictions and compares it to its membership in the set of all convictions.

To use a Kevin Lowe-like analogy, if I came back from a fishing trip and 25% of the fish I had caught were flounder, I would not conclude from this that 25% of all the fish in the ocean were flounder.

This is the insinuation being made by incessantly bringing up what are, no matter how you cut it, isolated examples offered as representative of an undefined whole.

Unless you really are suggesting that this provides evidence that 25% of all convictions are the result of false confessions. Or even that 25% of all convictions involving a confession are the result of false confessions.

Are you?

The electronic recording of interrogations, from the reading of Miranda rights onward, is the single best reform available to stem the tide of false confessions."

I concur with this wholeheartedly. Why do you bring it up?

 

[Mary_H]

But the indication is the lack of an information of the contrary in the Massei report and in all defence appeals and documents! The information on the lack of an interview by Mignini is not explicitly written in the report, the report doesn't enlist all things that didn't take place. The interview with the prosecutor never took place because it is the law that provides so, and nobody ever claimed the contrary. An interrogation of a person under arrest by a prosecutor could not take place before the interogation by a GIP. And an interrogation of a suspect by a magistrate cannot take place without the presence of an appointed attorney.
Nobody in the defence claimed those things happend. Nobody reported of such. Why should I assume they took place?

We have been through this before:

Carlo dalla Vedova: I was asking to speak about the use of the transcripts of November 6. "Peregrina" [bizarre] -- now that she answered, you see there is no more artifice or impediment, we can talk. One thing is, that the declarations -- the sommarie informazioni testimoniali of 1:45 given without the pubblico ministero, and the spontaneous declarations of 5:45 with the pubblico ministero, should be correctly considered as constitutive elements and body of evidence as for being objective elements in the crime of slander. Another thing is their admissibility for the purpose of ascertaining the truth. Because, the second [5:45 declarations] were declared to be totally inadmissible erga omnes [for any purpose] since they were violating the right to defense of a person who was substantially a suspect. This is written by the first section of the Supreme Court. The first [1:45 declarations] are not admissible contra se [against oneself], against Amanda, since those declarations were being released by the same person who was to become a suspect for that crime. So, in what concerns the acquisition of these documents for the trial dossier, as by our knowledge, we know their content, they can be there. But on the issue of their admissibility for any future question, the second ones, the ones where the PM was present, are absolutely not admissible here. The first ones are not admissible against Amanda. We would like to state this.

At least three different people at the trial refer to the "second interrogation," which took place at 5:45, "in the presence of the PM." You might argue that we can't know for sure whether Mignini interrogated Amanda, but he did accept a statement from her, which the Supreme Court ruled not allowed.

 

[Justinian2]

Originally Posted by Dan O.
The guilter community appear to be under some kind of delusion that false confessions only come after physical torture. They won't even watch videos such as this one that demonstrates the techniques employed...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJcqjPxtIXc​

Still waiting for one of the guilters to comment on that video and prove that they watched it.

Excellent. Sounds like the Amanda Knox interrogation, except that she was not being questioned in her native language. Subtle changes in words between languages can entirely change the meaning of the questions and answers.

Michael Crowe was obviously lying when he was told to imagine how he committed the murder; he knew very few details and got most of the details wrong. In fact the police even knew he was lying during the confession, yet they proceeded with the case against him. He was only 14, but held up very well during questioning, I thought. He never should have signed the agreement to let them question him in the first place.

Excellent precedent for the Amanda Knox interrogation!

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

No. It is because there is nothing which compares this number, taken from a limited set of erroneous convictions and compares it to its membership in the set of all convictions.

To use a Kevin Lowe-like analogy, if I came back from a fishing trip and 25% of the fish I had caught were flounder, I would not conclude from this that 25% of all the fish in the ocean were flounder.

This is the insinuation being made by incessantly bringing up what are, no matter how you cut it, isolated examples offered as representative of an undefined whole.

Unless you really are suggesting that this provides evidence that 25% of all convictions are the result of false confessions. Or even that 25% of all convictions involving a confession are the result of false confessions.

Are you?

I don't think that is very likely. I think you are completely misconstruing the point.

We've got a confession that bears several hallmarks of a particular kind of false statement that we know people sometimes make. We've got lots of good reasons to suspect that the conviction was not kosher, including all sorts of misbehaviour on the part of the police, the prosecutor, the forensics team and the "expert" witnesses. We've got hard evidence that false confessions or other false statements are far from uncommon in unsound prosecutions.

Put it all together and you've got grounds for reasonable doubt, to say the least, about the evidentiary merit of Amanda Knox's internalised false statement.

 

[Machiavelli]

We have been through this before:


At least three different people at the trial refer to the "second interrogation," which took place at 5:45, "in the presence of the PM." You might argue that we can't know for sure whether Mignini interrogated Amanda, but he did accept a statement from her, which the Supreme Court ruled not allowed.

First, we were talking about Sollecito
Second, no interrogation of Amanda by Mignini took place before Dec 17, as for what the defence documents claim.
The wording of the people in the court - in this case, in particular the informal wording by speakers who are not judges - have nothing to do with the topic we were discussing.
We were talking about Sollecito's statement we could see there are no grounds to say he was coerced or that his rights were denied during police interogation, or that he was ever suject to unlawful interrogation by Mignini.
I don't know how you can be convinced with such ideas -denial of right, unlawful interrogation by Mignini with no attorney, threat and coercion - while there is no element to say something alike ever occurred.

 

[Mary_H]

Psychological torture is a feeling, a judgement, not a fact. "I lied because I was thretned with ... " is the report of a fact, "I lied because I couldn't bare fear" is a fact. The fact he reports here is "I lied because Amanda asked me to say so", this is the reported fact. The additional judgemental terms to describe his situation - like "torture" - are whihing. He never affirmed he lied due to this pressures, he affirmed he lied because Amanda asked him. And he also never specifies what those "torture" consists in, nothing factual: nothig is given about this term other than the value of a subjective judgement on his suffering.

Suffering is subjective. The question is why you feel you have more knowledge of whether Raffaele was tortured than he has.

Raffaele does affirm he lied due to pressures when, in his diary, he retracts the statements he gave to the police on November 5th. The lies he refers to are not the lies Amanda made him say (it is not a reported fact that Raffaele said "I lied because Amanda asked me to say so"), they are the false statements he gave police on the 5th. We can conclude from what he writes (most of which was documented here in the last several hours) that he regrets the statements he gave to police. We can infer that he gave them under extraordinary circumstances.

 

[quadraginta]

I don't think that is very likely. I think you are completely misconstruing the point.

We've got a confession that bears several hallmarks of a particular kind of false statement that we know people sometimes make. We've got lots of good reasons to suspect that the conviction was not kosher, including all sorts of misbehaviour on the part of the police, the prosecutor, the forensics team and the "expert" witnesses. We've got hard evidence that false confessions or other false statements are far from uncommon in unsound prosecutions.

Put it all together and you've got grounds for reasonable doubt, to say the least, about the evidentiary merit of Amanda Knox's internalised false statement.

I think your "hallmarks" bear many signs of reaching for justifications. I think your "reasons to suspect" show more than a few signs of confirmation bias. I think your "hard evidence", as I have pointed out, is only tangentially related to this specific case.

I think that protestations of "internalised false statement" are equally well accounted for if Knox was simply lying desperately and somewhat artlessly in an attempt to save herself from prosecution.

I can understand the attraction of "internalised false statement" if the premise is that Knox is innocent, and the goal is to defend that premise, but in the absence of any presumption of guilt or innocence it becomes much less alluring.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

You are thinking the blob in Filomena's room is a shoeprint? I really can't tell. Do you have a decent photo of this one?

It was neither a shoe print nor a bare footprint. My understanding is that it was a shapeless area that covered a significant portion of the floor.

 

[Mary_H]

First, we were talking about Sollecito

You stated earlier that:

The fact of being imprisoned without having spoken to a lawyer instead is legal. While instead, none of them was subjected to interviews with Mignini prior to having spoken no a lawyer: this never occurred, based on what reported by Massei.

I was using what happened to Amanda (which you brought up in the post above) to counter your subsequent statement that the law could invariably be relied upon to prevent the prosecutor from doing exactly what he wanted to do.

Second, no interrogation of Amanda by Mignini took place before Dec 17, as for what the defence documents claim.

Which defense documents? Were they written after the interrogation by Mignini was thrown out by the Supreme Court? In that case, there would be no need to mention it.

The wording of the people in the court - in this case, in particular the informal wording by speakers who are not judges - have nothing to do with the topic we were discussing.
We were talking about Sollecito's statement we could see there are no grounds to say he was coerced or that his rights were denied during police interogation, or that he was ever suject to unlawful interrogation by Mignini.
I don't know how you can be convinced with such ideas -denial of right, unlawful interrogation by Mignini with no attorney, threat and coercion - while there is no element to say something alike ever occurred.

As I wrote in my last post, Raffaele diary shows he was coerced into saying things he regretted saying.

I can see what you were saying before about the decree and the dates of the various hearings, but I continue to believe that this passage in Massei says that Raffaele was denied his right to counsel when he was arrested, and that the Prosecutor was the one responsible for that:

At the hearing of January 16, 2009 the Defence for Sollecito, in limine litis, inferred the nullity of the interrogatory session by the magistrate to which the defendant had been subjected because of the violation of his right to assistance – it was affirmed that the Prosecutor, when Sollecito had been subjected to police arrest, had deferred the exercising of the right to confer with his Defence, without however issuing the required decree with the report on the grounds for arrest, as is evidenced by the physical unavailability of the provision of Article 104 section 3 of the criminal procedure code, not present in the acts;...

And where are you getting that, "The fact of being imprisoned without having spoken to a lawyer instead is legal?"

How can one be put in prison without being a suspect? And how can one be a suspect without having a lawyer?

The law is very clear: A suspect must not be interrogated without a lawyer.

Once a suspect, an interrogation must be interrupted, the suspect read his or her rights to remain silent and be provided a lawyer. Italian law does not allow waiver of one's right to counsel. Even if a suspect doesn't want a lawyer, the authorities are required to appoint one.

If a suspect's freedom of movement is hindered, the interrogation must be videotaped.

In Knox's case, a video or audio recording of the entire police interrogation -- authorities have denied that any such recordings exist -- could identify when police began treating Knox as a suspect and what procedures were followed.

In fact, Italy's Supreme Court has already said that some of her early statements may not be used against her because they were made without an attorney present.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/412696_knox30.html

If the law wasn't broken, why were Amanda's statements disallowed?

 

[Justinian2]

Suffering is subjective. The question is why you feel you have more knowledge of whether Raffaele was tortured than he has.

Raffaele does affirm he lied due to pressures when, in his diary, he retracts the statements he gave to the police on November 5th. The lies he refers to are not the lies Amanda made him say (it is not a reported fact that Raffaele said "I lied because Amanda asked me to say so"), they are the false statements he gave police on the 5th. We can conclude from what he writes (most of which was documented here in the last several hours) that he regrets the statements he gave to police. We can infer that he gave them under extraordinary circumstances.

Perhaps Raffaele was told that he couldn't blame the police or a slander charge would result. Or perhaps, being from Italy, he knew the score already.

The closest equivalent to the Italian slander charges in America is the "Contempt of Court" charge. 'Contempt of Court' in America means not following a court order. I could say "I am in Contempt of Court" in America all I want (outside of court) and nothing would ever come of it. In the USA, the Supreme Court gives broad support for freedom of speech, especially speech that discusses government. Not so, apparently, in Italy.

In the USA, I have had a police brutality site for fifteen years and have never had any trouble from authorities outside the fact I am innundated with spam, hundreds of which contain viruses. I also don't give names of police unless they are in a major newspaper that I quote.

However, I have accused police of the excessive use of force in court with the result that the judge looked in the direction of the prosecutor & cop and gave them the 'raspberry' tongue and sound. The people in the court laughed at the police!

Italy=slander charges. USA = 'raspberry' and dismissal.

 

[Mary_H]

Perhaps Raffaele was told that he couldn't blame the police or a slander charge would result. Or perhaps, being from Italy, he knew the score already.

Yeah, that's what I said when I wrote, "The reason we never heard Raffaele say more about what happened to him during his interrogation is because he probably had a better sense that it is verboten than Amanda had when she spoke of hers. He was deprived of counsel, however, which in itself speaks of coercion."

Machiavelli was not convinced.

Yet we have have had many guilters say that the Daily Mail interview with Patrick in which he described being brutalized by police was true, and that is why he later retracted it (personally, I think the whole thing was made up).

The closest equivalent to the Italian slander charges in America is the "Contempt of Court" charge. 'Contempt of Court' in America means not following a court order. I could say "I am in Contempt of Court" in America all I want (outside of court) and nothing would ever come of it. In the USA, the Supreme Court gives broad support for freedom of speech, especially speech that discusses government. Not so, apparently, in Italy.

In the USA, I have had a police brutality site for fifteen years and have never had any trouble from authorities outside the fact I am innundated with spam, hundreds of which contain viruses. I also don't give names of police unless they are in a major newspaper that I quote.

However, I have accused police of the excessive use of force in court with the result that the judge looked in the direction of the prosecutor & cop and gave them the 'raspberry' tongue and sound. The people in the court laughed at the police!

Italy=slander charges. USA = 'raspberry' and dismissal.

Mignini may be more slander suit-happy than most magistrates. If not, it suggests there are very strong restrictions on freedom of speech in their democracy.

 

[Danceme]

I simply do not understand the terrifying certainty with which guilters make claims like this.

How can anyone pretend that they know what young people they have never met, under circumstances they have never experienced, would say and do with such precision?

When these sorts of claims start sounding logical I really think that you need to take a big step back, take a few deep breaths, and consider that just maybe you are deep in the grip of confirmation bias gone rabid.

And I would say you are doing exactly that.

Raffaele was in the same position as Amanda -- in the presence of the police, they both were led to say what the police wanted to hear. Later, they both realized that what they said in the presence of the police did not represent reality, so they tried to retract it, and their retractions were not accepted by investigators. It just took Raffaele longer to get to that point, probably because he was among his countrymen, while Amanda never knew what hit her and didn't feel the same loyalty to authorities that Raffaele did.

Item #1 is the "garbage" that he now realizes was false. He is taking back his earlier statement to the police that Amanda "made" him lie, which is obviously what the police encouraged him to say when they interrogated him,

All of this has everything to do with being confused, coerced and trying to straighten things out, and very little to do with "lying." If you don't have anything more than this petty, irrelevant minutiae to put forward, then you don't have much of a case.

Are you forgetting that Raffaele is writing in his own personal diary which supposedly he would have considered private or he likely would not have kept one at all? In this private diary he has no reason to continue a charade of any sort. He writes the truth as it happened.
You are making up a story to suit your beliefs, confirmation bias I think Kevin-Lowe describes it as.

From the context of the whole diary it appears the cops lied to him and told him Amanda had lied about him, and he got pissed and lied back saying she'd asked him to cover for him and not tell the cops she went to Le Chic. She never asked him that, but in anger that's what he told the police.

The second paragraph from later in the diary kinda clears it up.

The judge questioned me today and he told me that I gave three different statements, but the only difference that I find is that I said that Amanda persuaded me to talk crap [dire cazzate] in the second version, and that she [quella] had gone out to go to the bar where she worked, Le Chic.

<...>

I must admit
[dire] that I said a 90% really stupid thing [grossa cavolata] in my second statement. And that is:

1 that fact that Amanda persuaded me to say something is not true [è una cazzata] and I have said so repeatedly to the judge and to the Squadra Mobile;

2 reconstructing [the events] I realize that it is actually very likely that Amanda was with me all night long, never going out. And I will certainly not be the one to lie in order to help the investigation and get everyone into trouble for no reason [gratuitamente]. Or better still, it would be fabulous for me if Amanda has done nothing, since it is [diventa] impossible that they find any traces on my shoe and on my knife and this story will have a
happy ending for me and for you...

I don't know how you arrive at your conclusions but the fact remains that Raffaele wrote what he wrote and he wrote that he lied in his questionings over and over because Amanda asked him to.

Stellar advice. I took the liberty of striking out the extraneous and transparently prejudicial introductory sentence.

The remainder are words which many could benefit from. In particular I would suggest that you yourself transcribe them onto a couple of Post-It notes, and affix one to your monitor, and one to your mirror.

Better late than never, right?

 

[Antony]

I think your "hallmarks" bear many signs of reaching for justifications. I think your "reasons to suspect" show more than a few signs of confirmation bias. I think your "hard evidence", as I have pointed out, is only tangentially related to this specific case.

I think that protestations of "internalised false statement" are equally well accounted for if Knox was simply lying desperately and somewhat artlessly in an attempt to save herself from prosecution.

Quadraginta, you are floundering. This is nonsense. People in Knox's situation, whether guilty or innocent, do not make statements like this voluntarily. Honest police do not conduct interrogations like this until 5.30 in the morning, nor without recording the sessions, nor without legal advice for their victim.

I can understand the attraction of "internalised false statement" if the premise is that Knox is innocent, and the goal is to defend that premise, but in the absence of any presumption of guilt or innocence it becomes much less alluring.

All of us can understand the inconvenience of the well-established phenomenon of an internalised false statement if the premise is that Amanda is guilty, and the goal is to defend that premise. I'm sure I won't be the only one to point out that presumption of innocence is fundamental to justice. The fact that you seem to want to argue in the absence of such a presumption tells us a lot.