Thank you for a reasoned and reasonable post.
Up front? I don't have any idea what happened. I don't pretend to, and I'm not willing to guess. Apparently being unwilling to divest myself of any doubt concerning Knox's role in this tragedy has earned me some sort of unsought status as a "guilter" in an atmosphere which has been reduced to a rather simplistic dichotomy by those who advocate her innocence, but the reality is less emphatic.
For the most part (and most recently) all I have bothered to discount are patently fallacious rhetorical tools being offered in the guise of persuasive logic, and even that only on occasion and with some restraint. That this occurs with more frequency where Knox partisans are concerned is as much a function of the relative density of their posts in these threads as anything else, as well as the simple fact that disagreement with those less certain of her innocence is not in short supply here, and rarely needs any additional comment from me.
When this case first broke three years ago I accepted the characterization of Knox as a perhaps mistreated bystander somewhat uncritically, until that presentation in the U.S. press went so over the top in xenophobia, and obvious internal contradictions and mis-characterizations that I felt provoked to dig a bit deeper on my own. What I learned left me in some doubt as to my initial reactions.
The dialogue (a generous description, I think) here has been as much a source of curiosity for its own sake to me as it has been a source of rare offerings of actual new, relevant, unambiguous information.
The dialogue on this issue is a whole another story, itself a fascinating phenomena. I was puzzled at the contentiousness of the debate, so I looked into the roots of what might have occurred to produce such a poisonous atmosphere regarding a murder in Italy. I think one of the pieces just fell into place the other day. It seems to me there's a sequence of events in this saga after the murder of Meredith Kercher which is awfully ugly, and I suspect no amount of context can completely dissipate it for some people. Rage begets rage and I don't think the reaction to that outrage has entirely faded in some quarters.
There are certain aspects of the facts of the case as we seem to know them which continue to trouble me, and attempts made in this thread to discount them have been unconvincing. Please do not ask me to iterate them, because it will only lead to more pointless repetition of the same attempts at persuasion which I found unconvincing to begin with. If any information or perspective that is new to me is forthcoming I am confident I will take note of it.
Although I harbor no certainties or even opinions about any specific acts by Knox, my general overview of what we seem to know has led me to believe that the girl is hiding something ... something serious and non-trivial. I have no concrete, stepwise defense of this feeling, but taken in concert with certain aspects of what we seem to know that are less than thoroughly explained I am not confident that Knox is the untarnished angel her advocates would like to present her as. Just how tarnished or complicit she may be I do not know, and as a consequence am unwilling to offer any conjecture.
I will wait, and watch, and listen, and hope to learn more. If complete enlightenment is not forthcoming then so be it. Mysteries are like that sometimes. Meanwhile the thread alone offers educational opportunities which are often unrelated to the case itself.
I believe I understand what you mean. I arrived at a point where there were some unanswered questions in my mind thus I decided to undertake the intellectual exercise of attempting to produce a cogent argument for guilt of some sort. I was operating under the assumption that it seemed unlikely in the extreme the murder had occurred according to the Massei report, however I was going to see if underneath the smoke there was perhaps some fire, or at least a burning ember or two suggesting some sort of culpability.
I didn't see any way to square the physical evidence of the murder site, and especially the lack thereof, with Amanda and Raffaele being involved in the assault, thus I decided the best option would be to cede that and thus avoid any mention of the bra clasp and the 'murder weapon' which are perhaps the prosecutions' most embarrassing moments, having sourced the whole sordid story to the bone. However I got to thinking that even if the prosecution was overzealous it didn't necessarily mean Amanda and Raffaele were completely innocent, just that obviously the prosecutor thought them so and was willing to take risks to garner a conviction.
I tried to work with the last of what was considered physical evidence and gave up with Amanda being carried to the door by Raffaele and then walking with bloodsoaked feet to the bathroom. Backwards. I was getting tired of backwards, as it seemed at just about every point in the timeline I was trying to construct the counter-intuitive option needed to prevail. Starting from the very beginning with the break-in and the open door.
Thus I decided to retreat from the whole idea they were there in the room and try to make a case that perhaps Amanda wandered over there to get something and just happened to surprise Rudy Guede in the process of murdering Meredith and didn't see him clearly and thought it was Patrick while she cowered in the corner. After all, she said something like that in the interrogation, right? So I decided to go back and read up on that with special attention paid to the diaries available and the note.
I'd read the arguments on this, and excerpts on them, but hadn't gone through all of them at once and even looking for signs of guilt I couldn't escape the growing realization I could pretty much guess what happened in those rooms on November 5 & 6. A tragedy of errors, some due to circumstance, but mostly I came to suspect the interrogators really screwed the pooch on this one. This, after all, is where it all really starts, and outside some anomalous elements and witnesses of ever-shrinking validity, it seems it's basically all the 'evidence' left against Amanda and Raffaele that I can find.
At that point I started to think forwards again, and it was like coming out of a deep dark tunnel. The lights went on for me, and all of a sudden things started to make sense, especially the truly puzzling if minor aspects like why they went to that drawer to pick out that knife, why there was all those odd references to showers and mops, what the deal was with the 'changing stories' and all through the rest of the ordeal. It seems to me what they got was what you'd expect if you took two innocent kids and put them in separate rooms, try to play them off each other, tell them you have evidence of their being involved, and keep after them about it for hours on end. What they ended up with was one severely freaked-out chick, one angry broken-hearted kid and a whole mess of nonsense. Then they went on to try to gather 'evidence' of these innocent people, which culminated in the revealing 'collection' of the bra-clasp.
That's why I was hoping to engage you in a discussion about the interrogation. I am aware there are probably elements of the ordeal I've forgotten about or never read and would like to get to the whole truth of the matter. I don't think the record I've seen is consistent with Amanda either confessing or even accusing Patrick, nor do I think Raffaele's telling the cops Amanda told him to lie for her was anything but the result of a young man being told his pretty new girlfriend just tried to implicate him in a murder and retorting angrily with another lie. I would like to read your input if you're interested in discussing what I think is the genesis of the debacle that occurred.
] shortly.
