Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Machiavelli]

It wouldn't be explainable if it was genuine, hence Raffaele's problems making sense of it in his notorious diary entry. But the narrative of it being the murder weapon doesn't make any more sense.

The reading was a false one. There never was any of Meredith's DNA on this knife. Stefanoni could have gone to your house (or any house she chose), picked up one of your kitchen knives and obtained the same result by the methods she used. If evidence like this is to be accepted, then nobody is safe from false accusation and imprisonment.

I really don't think so.

It was an improperly conducted test, run in unsuitable conditions. Why is that so hard for you to understand?

I think the test was properly conducted. The concept of zero error doesn't exist in practical laboratory activity, thus any finding has an intrinsic error occurrence. I don't take any laboratory result as ontologic truth. But the likeliness of false result is always very, very small compared to the likeliness of correct result, and this doesn't depend on "standard" procedures. Such standards are only repetitions of processes, verification iters. They don't change the inherent likeliness of the result. They don't make contamination or mistakes more probable. They mainly check whehter there were mistakes or odd results.
An unrepeated DNA finding is unckecked. More corroboration is required. But nevertheless it is a result. Thus you can keep in your mind a mental reserve and doubt this result was a false positive. I do not think it is reasonable to assume that a series of results and findings were all false positives.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Can you give an example of this bias?

Sure I can.

Others you know say there was no bias, that AK and RS were framed or the investigation was ordered to find them guilty. Which is it?

Who says what? Can you be more specific? Quote what exactly is it others say that you want me to address.

If there is zero evidence againt them then why were they found guilty?

You're not following this thread too closely, are you?


Let's take for starters that shoe prints. The police were so sure they must belong to the guy they already have locked up, what made them so sure about it? Then the other print, that was obvious partial print of the same shoe. Yet for the investigators it became a woman's print, exactly of the size of the girl they happened to have already arrested.
And it takes lots of good will to ascribe that blunders to unconscious confirmation bias, because they very well could have known already how royally they screwed up.

 

[RoseMontague]

I really don't think so.



I think the test was properly conducted. The concept of zero error doesn't exist in practical laboratory activity, thus any finding has an intrinsic error occurrence. I don't take any laboratory result as ontologic truth. But the likeliness of false result is always very, very small compared to the likeliness of correct result, and this doesn't depend on "standard" procedures. Such standards are only repetitions of processes, verification iters. They don't change the inherent likeliness of the result. They don't make contamination or mistakes more probable. They mainly check whehter there were mistakes or odd results.
An unrepeated DNA finding is unckecked. More corroboration is required. But nevertheless it is a result. Thus you can keep in your mind a mental reserve and doubt this result was a false positive. I do not think it is reasonable to assume that a series of results and findings were all false positives.

1. The test was not properly conducted. Many posts have covered the many problems with this test. I can direct you to them if you wish. The problems are also covered in both appeals.

2. Who knows the likeliness of a false result on a test that has never been done before and can't be repeated on this sample? Do you?

3. Standards and protocols help lessen false results.

4. Contamination becomes highly more probable dealing with LCN DNA. I can direct you to links on this as well.

5. As a poster previously pointed out, a bad result is just that, not evidence that combined with other bad results it will suddenly become legit.

 

[Katody Matrass]

I don't take any laboratory result as ontologic truth. But the likeliness of false result is always very, very small compared to the likeliness of correct result, and this doesn't depend on "standard" procedures.

Yeah right, there's no way you can get a false result, so why do the test properly? Too funny

I do not think it is reasonable to assume that a series of results and findings were all false positives.

A seriesof results? you mean too low, too low, too low, too low ?
I'm glad we agree that results were proper

 

[RoseMontague]

Gabriella Carlizzi did die recently. She had a blog; maybe it is still there. There was discussion about her on the 48 Hours program American Girl, Italian Nightmare.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/08/48hours/main4929950.shtml

As I recall, she did not exactly believe Amanda and Raffaele were guilty, but I can't remember anything about her last comments on the subject.

Some info here:

http://translate.google.com/transla...refox-a&hs=2x7&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

 

[christianahannah]

This one is a zero, Machiavelli. I would almost consider it a negative result (a positive score for Amanda's team) just because it shows how disdainfully Stefanono overwrites standards and protocols.

I think Stefanoni explains in detail how and why she conducted her testing on the knife. I don't think she was being disdainful at all concerning standards and protocols. I think she was using what she had at hand to see if a result could be obtained.

Here is, in part, her testimony from the motivations concerning the testing of the knife.

Page 215:

Continuing her explanation, Dr Stefanoni stated that a small quantity of DNA is a quantity of DNA that does not always produce a complete genetic profile for all 16 gene points; accordingly, it does not always produce a peak height that is greater than 50 RFU.

Page 216:

In this case, instead, the extraction volume, equal to 50 microlitres, was almost completely used up to conduct this DNA analysis, so that a repeated amplification of such a scarce amount (of DNA) would have certainly prevented a result from being produced both in the first and in the second attempt. And so, with a view to wanting to repeat the analysis, division of [227] this quantity of would have been needed, [and] certainly there would have been no result obtained, because, below a certain amount of DNA, PCR is ineffective, it is unable to amplify. The systems in use, in fact, have a quantitative threshold below which one cannot go to obtain a genetic profile. Therefore, since each amplification uses a certain amount of DNA so that it is not possible to re-use it, all that was available was analysed and the above-mentioned result was obtained.

Even if the test is not repeated when an analysis is performed correctly, Dr Stefanoni stated, its result is, however, reliable. Moreover, she continued to explain, "the PCR is done only once in general for all the specimens, even if we had a kilo of DNA...; the analysis is reliable when it is carried out according to the recommended settings provided by the kit’s production house and according to the good norms of a genetics laboratory" (page 263).

Nevertheless, she added, if she had had another "small quantity", repeating the analysis would have been desirable (page 264). She re-affirmed what she had already testified to in the preliminary hearing before the GUP, that she was not sure of getting a result with so scarce a quantity. So she used all the extracted DNA, she had proceeded to concentrate it and amplify it, and she had obtained the genetic profiles which she has referred to, not very high in terms of peaks, but complete in almost all their parts.

There is lots more and I know some (or many) do not agree with this testing. Hopefully, once this is argued during the appeal trial it will be investigated and answered to the satisfaction of both sides. Or perhaps not.

 

[RWVBWL]

Hi Charlie Wilkes!
What?
Is this the same PMFers that Rose Montague was speaking about,
you know, the 1's that call Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito "Anita+Biff"?

I wonder if the Perugia Police "Flying Squad" figured that out
and had not 1, BUT both of the Harry Potter books tested for just that,
the knife-used-in-the-murder sheath?
Hmmm...
RWVBWL

 

[samba]

Very well, tell us what you think is 'evidence' against Raffaele and Amanda. No circles, no games, just post it.

I've asked before....don't expect an answer. If you do get one, it will be something like "It's in the Massei Report...go read it" or "I don't have time to list it all".

 

[Alt+F4]

I have read that Amanda wishes to stay in Italy. If she did so, 1 can imagine that she will be a person that might be able to actually help others.

Stay in Italy you say? I would have thought she would like to return to the United States to help her family out of the bankruptcy this case has put them in.

 

[Antony]

I really don't think so.



I think the test was properly conducted. The concept of zero error doesn't exist in practical laboratory activity, thus any finding has an intrinsic error occurrence. I don't take any laboratory result as ontologic truth. But the likeliness of false result is always very, very small compared to the likeliness of correct result, and this doesn't depend on "standard" procedures. Such standards are only repetitions of processes, verification iters. They don't change the inherent likeliness of the result. They don't make contamination or mistakes more probable. They mainly check whehter there were mistakes or odd results.
An unrepeated DNA finding is unckecked. More corroboration is required. But nevertheless it is a result. Thus you can keep in your mind a mental reserve and doubt this result was a false positive. I do not think it is reasonable to assume that a series of results and findings were all false positives.

I'll leave it to others to find a new way to explain to you why LCN testing in a lab full of the DNA you're looking for, and turning up the amplification indefinitely until you get the result you want, is a meaningless process.

There's another reason for doubting that this knife had anything to do with the murder - there are just too many impossible things that you have to believe to make it so:

• it would have to be brought from Raffaele's flat to the cottage for no conceivable reason;
• it would have to be cleaned and returned to Raffaele's flat when the imperative would be to dispose of it;
• the cleaning process would have to remove every trace of blood but still leave detectable DNA;
• the police would have to have had psychic powers to be pick out this particular knife, rather than all the knives at the cottage which were not tested;
• Stefanoni would have to have had psychic powers to pick the one spot on the knife blade for testing that held Meredith's DNA.

Real evidence doesn't consist of isolated facts with no relation to each other, like in the mish-mash of dubious results that make up this part and the rest of the prosecution case. For a convincing case, different elements need to corroborate each other, so there would have to be real indications at the murder scene that matched this knife - but no, they match a different knife; if Amanda's handbag was used to transport the knife to and fro there would have to be scratches and tears inside the bag showing that a knife had been carried; and there would have to be some kind of rationale for Raffaele and Amanda to bring the knife back to his flat instead of disposing of it.

Needless to say, there is no evidence of this knife at the murder scene; there is no evidence that it was ever inside Amanda's handbag; and the "evidence" of Meredith's DNA on the blade was obtained by a process that does not conform to any forensic standards. It had nothing to do with the murder.

 

[samba]

I don't know. This aspect of the dinamic can't be proven.
The knife maybe was used just to threaten, or to cut the bra clasp, or was just cleaned with a rug that had been previously used with bloody hands.

I now know how the Massei Report was written. "The knife maybe...or possibly....or most likely was". In other words, we're not quite sure what happened, but AK & RS were definitely involved.

So was Amanda in the room using the knife or not? I thought I've heard on here that she was involved (or possibly...maybe...most likely in another room) but did not use knife to do the stabbing.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

This case is not decided on a piece of DNA. I think the piece of DNA on the blade is an element. The point is not solved by putting in question the result. The result may not be a certain proof in scientific standars, but there is a result nonetheless, and it is an indicator in the case.
You have to accept the logic of taking in account partial scores. Something that is not a definitive proof, it is like a strike that doesn't get like the full score, so is incomplete evidence, but its is score nevertheless, it is not zero. If you have more findings like that you may build a complete proof.

As an Italian judge once said, half a clue plus half a clue does not equal a whole clue. It equals nothing.

 

[RoseMontague]

Hi RoseMontague and Justinian2,
You know, with that written, I sometimes wonder how Amanda Knox and Raffaelle Sollecito,
-( whom I believe to 100% innocent of any involvement in Miss Kerchers brutal murder), will be when they too are free from all of this?

What good might they give back to their friends, their community, the world?

I have read that Amanda wishes to stay in Italy. If she did so, 1 can imagine that she will be a person that might be able to actually help others.
As she wrote in her diary shortly after being arrested while being held in solitary confinement, -(IIRC),
when the police had tricked her, -(page 27, "Angel Face" author B. Nadeau), by saying that she was HIV positive:
"I want to create something good."...

RWVBWL

Maybe she can start with her new cell-mate, the Black Widow. There is just something not right about being acquitted in the first trial and having to face an appeal of the acquittal that leads to a 30 year prison term.

 

[Machiavelli]

1. The test was not properly conducted. Many posts have covered the many problems with this test. I can direct you to them if you wish. The problems are also covered in both appeals.

Well, I've read the appeals, because I was on the editing team of the English translation and I've dealt a lot with this section too.
I think I could have read many of the criticizing too.

2. Who knows the likeliness of a false result on a test that has never been done before and can't be repeated on this sample? Do you?

Rose, we perfectly know the procedure followed to test this knife. The defence experts were there too! A test takes place only once, it is always so for any result. A procedure can be repeated and can be tested itself.

3. Standards and protocols help lessen false results.

Yes they help.
Also other evidence helps. For example the finding of other clues against the defendants.

4. Contamination becomes highly more probable dealing with LCN DNA. I can direct you to links on this as well.

False. I can direct you on Sarah Gino and the Massei report.

5. As a poster previously pointed out, a bad result is just that, not evidence that combined with other bad results it will suddenly become legit.

There is no bad result.
There are only results. Some are more significant, and some are less significant. Some are more reliable, and some are less realiable.
No result is 100% reliable.
What can we say? We disagree on this. The jurisprudence says pieces of evidence with a lower quality become of high quility when put together. I don't see pieces of evidence as a pile of pieces resting one over another. I see pieces of evidence as the orientations of compass needles to find a magnet. One low quality compass can be wrong, but seven different compasses are not wrong if they indicate the same point.

 

[katy_did]

Great post, Antony.

the police would have to have had psychic powers to be pick out this particular knife, rather than all the knives at the cottage which were not tested

This in particular I've never understood. It seems that they confiscated the knives, but AFAIK never tested them for DNA. Given that when Rudy was caught in the nursery, he had a kitchen knife stolen from the kitchen in his backpack, wouldn't it have made sense for the investigators to check out the possibility that he might have done the same here? Granted, if he'd stolen a knife he might well have taken it with him when he left and disposed of it, but it's still possible he didn't want to be caught carrying it and so wiped his prints off and put it back. It's also possible he handled the other knives, and so even if he left with the murder weapon, he may still have left DNA traces in the knife drawer.

So why didn't they check those knives for DNA? Is it that they weren't looking for evidence of a lone killer, they were only looking for evidence that Amanda and Raffaele were involved? And finding Amanda and Meredith's DNA on a kitchen knife in the cottage would be pretty useless from that perspective.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

There's a short post on the Perugia Shock blog that says the boyfriend's lawyer's are now arguing analysis of the computer shows there was human activity on the computer for:

"the whole of the evening of the crime".

Anyone know what that means in terms of specific times? Is this taking us into 10pm? 11pm? Midnight? Or?

We were talking about it earlier but the pro-guilt advocates here didn't engage with it in any intelligent way so it kind of dropped off the radar.

The defence seem to be saying that an error log (or something similar, I don't think any of us are 100% clear on all the technical details), properly analysed, shows that the screensaver on Raffaele's computer kicked in a few times between 9pm and 1am but never for longer than six minutes, indicating that the computer was in more or less constant use for one purpose or another throughout that time.

They are calling for proper, independent analysis of the file to gin up an authoritative statement about it they can enter into court, I believe.

Since lawyers very rarely if ever lie about easily verifiable matters of fact, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that the expert opinion will back up what we have already heard.

I know there are some blind fanatics that would still consider Knox and her boyfriend guilty even if they both weren't at the crime scene when the murder occured.

We've got a few posting right here. As I recall they firstly argued that only one of them needed to be there to poke the computer so maybe Raffaele should get off but Amanda still definitely did it. Then they tried ridiculing the idea that anyone's computer would be in constant use all evening, the thinking presumably being that they could prove from their armchairs that something had to be wrong with the log file.

But if there's solid evidence they were using the computer all evening, I think most objective people will recognize that as significiant support for their alibi.

I'd go further and say all objective people.

If they weren't there they didn't do it. The pro-innocence thinkers here have been arguing based on very sound evidence for some time that Amanda and Raffaele were at home when Meredith was murdered based on the actual time of death (as opposed to the fantasy time of death based on ignoring the autopsy evidence in favour of Nara's magic scream), but this log file appears to trump that by showing that Raffaele and Amanda were at home throughout both the real time of death and the prosecution's time of death.

At this stage it looks like the guilters are reduced to arguing "Yeah, well, it doesn't absolutely prove that both of them are innocent beyond any doubt... and maybe they're still mixed up in it somehow despite not being involved in the actual murder in any way! Still good enough to convict in Italy!".

 

[Machiavelli]

As an Italian judge once said, half a clue plus half a clue does not equal a whole clue. It equals nothing.

The judges who support this idea are Gennaro Francione and Ferdinando Imposimato. They are in minority. They oppose the law regulating the assessment of circumstantial evidence, a rule called processo indiziario. But they also acknowledged that the judges in the Meredith case applied this rule correctly.

 

[Justinian2]

Hi Justinian2 and others,
I wish to share my own, for it has some similarities to the Amanda Knox case when viewed in comparison to how some some people in power become so narrowly focused in their investigations that they will not back down from what they believe to be "the truth"...

[...]

Someone who has personally experienced false accusations is much more likely to sense when false accusations happen to others. There are 20 million arrests in the USA each year. That means 300 million people would be arrested over a 15 year period if there were no repeat offenders. Trouble is, once you become a 'felon' you are much more likely to be arrested again; you're a marked man.

DOJ reports conclude that the problem of false arrests and police misconduct is vastly under-reported. I can understand why. Peer pressure is a terrific motivator. You can see the wannabe 'peers' on this thread trying to shame others into conformity.

You have seen the light.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Rose, we perfectly know the procedure followed to test this knife. The defence experts were there too! A test takes place only once, it is always so for any result. A procedure can be repeated and can be tested itself.

No. A test of a given sample can be repeated, if the sample is not entirely destroyed in the testing process as it was in this case.

False. I can direct you on Sarah Gino and the Massei report.

I do not think that Massei report knows better than the labs that do proper LCN DNA testing with appropriate precautions. A judge's opinion piece is not the authoritative source on how to conduct LCN DNA testing.

There is no bad result.
There are only results. Some are more significant, and some are less significant. Some are more reliable, and some are less realiable.
No result is 100% reliable.
What can we say? We disagree on this. The jurisprudence says pieces of evidence with a lower quality become of high quility when put together. I don't see pieces of evidence as a pile of pieces resting one over another. I see pieces of evidence as the orientations of compass needles to find a magnet. One low quality compass can be wrong, but seven different compasses are not wrong if they indicate the same point.

That would depend on how many equally reliable compasses are pointing in other directions, wouldn't it? If it turned out even more compasses pointed elsewhere, and the seven pointing the way the prosecution liked had all been fiddled with, then they could be wrong. Some would say that they were highly likely to be wrong, in fact.

 

[katy_did]

The defence seem to be saying that an error log (or something similar, I don't think any of us are 100% clear on all the technical details), properly analysed, shows that the screensaver on Raffaele's computer kicked in a few times between 9pm and 1am but never for longer than six minutes, indicating that the computer was in more or less constant use for one purpose or another throughout that time.

"...both the file “windowserver.log” and the log file of the screensaver “com.apple.screensaver.0016cba0b7.plist” were completely ignored in the Postal Police's analysis".

Those are the two files they're talking about. The first is supposed to record when the keyboard and mouse are deactivated by the screensaver and then reactivated by an interaction from the user, though there are pages missing from the appeal documents so there may be more detail in those.