Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Kermit]

His obsession with strange sexual scenarios and stories may indicate that he is a pervert.

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Take it easy, Withnail.

In addition to murder, there was sexual assault in this case. It's normal for a prosecutor to come up with a / some sexual scenario(s) to explain the case. It's also normal for those scenarios to evolve as the investigation advances.

According to your yardstick, any prosecutor of sexual crimes is a potential pervert as soon as he has a scenario.

 

[Amazer]

I think he probably climbed onto the concrete planter, grabbed the edge of the roof, and swung across to the window ledge, in which case he would be crouching rather than pulling himself up.

From what I understood, the glass pieces on the left side, nearest to the planter, were not disturbed after they fell down on the sill.

How did Rudy manage to avoid all that glass while he swung over from the planter to the ledge?

 

[Mary_H]

I posted this before but some of you may not have seen it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOOlUR9Cg1Q

Very enjoyable, Charlie. Thanks.

 

[TomCH]

His obsession with strange sexual scenarios and stories may indicate that he is a pervert.

And which obsession would that be?

And even if there where such an obsession, so what? I know lots of people who like strange sexual scenarios, I find that appealing in a woman.

 

[Justinian2]

Pgaa = Probability that Guede acted alone.

These probabilities are probably redundant:

Psbi = Probability of the break-in being staged
Pcg = Probability of collusion with Guede

Because if the break-in was NOT staged, then Guede probably acted alone and there was NO collusion. The Psbi --> 0 as the probability of the break-in being real increases.

Instead of: Pga = Psbi* Pkdna*(1-Pgaa)*Pkkk*Pcg*Pfc*Pfn*(1-Paw)*(1-Ptod)*(1-Pac)

--> Pga = Psbi* Pkdna*(1-Pgaa)*Pkkk*Pfc*Pfn*(1-Paw)*(1-Ptod)*(1-Pac)

 

[Machiavelli]

Your are ignoring Nadeau's report that Mignini wanted to reintroduce the satanic element into his closing remarks. Comodi demurred, but that did not stop Mignini from doing something almost as ridiculous, which was to manufacture words to put into Amanda's mouth utterly without basis in evidence, as Scott Greenfield noted.

False. There was no satanic element brought in by Mignini.
His theory - objectionable as you want - was about a sex game with some ritualistic flavour. Had nothing to do with satanic cults.

 

[Mary_H]

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Take it easy, Withnail.

In addition to murder, there was sexual assault in this case. It's normal for a prosecutor to come up with a / some sexual scenario(s) to explain the case. It's also normal for those scenarios to evolve as the investigation advances.

Yes, that would have been normal, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, the scenarios that were presented to the press on November 6th and in Matteini's report on November 9th were pretty much full-blown.

According to your yardstick, any prosecutor of sexual crimes is a potential pervert as soon as he has a scenario.

And now on to quadraginta's favorite subject -- analogies, a/k/a/ evidence by anecdote. Can anyone provide a case of a prosecutor who described the precise roles the suspects played in a murder before the evidence had been returned from forensics?

 

[RWVBWL]

Hi Kermit,
At around 11:00am on Nov 3, 2007,
Amanda Knox was driven back to the apartment she lived at.
Several detectives were there, as was prosecutor Mignini.

I am sure you have seen the photograph of Amanda Knox surrounded by a bunch of male police officers,
the 1 where she has her hands together and 1 cop has his hand on his forehead.

They took her downstairs to look at the guys apartment and ask her more questions.
Police had found blood spots in several places, even on the light switches.
It turned out the blood was from Giacomo's cat.

Kermit, as a member of the PMF crew, I would really like to get your opinion on something I feel might be relevant to this murder case:
Who do you believe it was that went into the guys apartment downstairs and got cats blood on the light switches?
From what I have read, Stefano's room had been stripped of linens and his comforter had been shoved on top of his bed, with blood drops on it.

What was going on downstairs while the boys were outta town?
Did someone who might have had Meredith's keys, with Giacomo's key too, s
spend the night in Stefano's room, after the murder?
Do you think that the 2 incidents are connected?

I wonder if you, Kermit, a person who has spent much time discussing and working on this case, will share your opinion on what happened below the girls apartment...

Thanks, RWVBWL

 

[platonov]

Ahh, so there's evidence he touched the lower part of the wall?

In any case, how does it step on the top part of the grating without touching anything above it?

How does he grab the upper window ledge WITHOUT TOUCHING IT?

This is all very well but among other things how did he (the loose limbed african) scatter the clothes inside the room before the glass was broken & break the window while the outside shutter was closed leaving the broken glass only on the inner part of the ledge

Even the satanic maestro Mignini would struggle to do all that - and he has the power of the darkside to call on.

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[Mary_H]

To divert attention from themselves, i.e. to make it look like an outsider had entered the house.

Duhhh.

And why would Fulcanelli not have the same motive?

Oops -- LOL -- what a Freudian slip. I think I will leave it there, though. Food for thought.

I meant to say, why would Rudy not have the same motive?

 

[Kermit]

Your are ignoring Nadeau's report that Mignini wanted to reintroduce the satanic element into his closing remarks.

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Let's talk about it if you think that the non-incorporation of satan in the trial (instead of its incorporation) somehow affected the court's decision. I guess Satan can influence you even if you don't talk about him.

that did not stop Mignini from doing something almost as ridiculous, which was to manufacture words to put into Amanda's mouth utterly without basis in evidence, as Scott Greenfield noted.

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So, we're off of Satan and on to possible words uttered in the sexual attack. You're incorrect if you say that Mignini said that that dialogue was evidence, he used it simply as part of his closing speech.

If Mignini said that, I'm not surprised. Since Mignini didn't have a tape recorder running when Meredith was actually attacked, he described in the trial the type of dialogue which he imagined could have taken place in his (non-Satanic) scenario. What prosecutor anywhere in the world hasn't painted this type of scenario for a sexual assault? In any case, I'm sure that Amanda's capable Italian lawyers took issue with him and defended her. I don't see what you're upset about. It's a typical trial sort of courtroom transcript.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Nadeau's report in Angel Face

False. There was no satanic element brought in by Mignini.
His theory - objectionable as you want - was about a sex game with some ritualistic flavour. Had nothing to do with satanic cults.

It is your claim that is false. I did not say that he did introduce it; I said that he wished to, according to Nadeau (and I gave a page number in a previous message). Do you accept this report or not?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

That scenario would be as difficult as climbing up, as he would have to drop down on to a small ledge with nothing to hold on to if he fell back.

He'd have the outside shutters of the window to hold onto.

 

[Mary_H]

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Umm ... Amanda and Rudy and Raffaele were all brought to trial on the basis of the same body of evidence which resulted from the same investigation which ended at the same moment for all of them.

It just so happened that Rudy's legal strategy led him to an abbreviated trial, while Amanda and Raffaele opted for the full-blown trial. Otherwise, all three suspects would have been together for the whole long trial.

It's a common FOAKer talking point to suggest that Rudy was somehow found guilty first and that Amanda and Raffaele were brought to trial later. That in fact is not true.

That, in fact, is true, and your explanation above does nothing to contradict it.

Well then start another thread.

Huh? Why? To accommodate you?

Now let me get this straight. There are some posters here who referred to Mignini's supposed "satanic" scenario. Yet that scenario was not part of the trial. Is "satan" mentioned in the Massei report?

Halloween rituals are mentioned in the Micheli report that followed Rudy's conviction. That theory was rejected, hence its absence from the subsequent trial of Amanda and Raffaele.

Mignini was not present on the night of 5 November 2007 until after Amanda had admitted her presence in the cottage on the night of the murder.

No, he was called in, because he was already in charge of the investigation, and is most likely the one who instructed the police to follow the connection between Patrick and Amanda.

 

[Kaosium]

It's mysterious, Kaosium. When the police grabbed the knife from Raffaele's kitchen drawer on November 6th, they had no reason to be looking for another knife. They had Raffaele's flick knife in custody. The fact that they claimed to have found Amanda's fingerprints on the knife, and not Raffaele's, suggests they may have been looking for ways to put murder weapons in both of their hands, the easier to charge them both with murder, rather than with just being at the scene.

Even that doesn't make sense though, because they had Patrick in custody and no murder weapon to put in his hand. Maybe they thought they could put Raffaele's flick knife in Patrick's hands. Keep in mind that at the time of his arrest, no evidence whatsoever, not even hearsay, existed against Raffaele.

The only alternative for beyond stupid that I can see is activity based on a fully-formed fantasy in Mignini's head, the early descriptions of which went a little something like this: Raffaele held Meredith's arms while Amanda pricked her in the chest with the tip of a knife, threatening her, and Patrick raped her and cut her throat, not necessarily in that order.

Or, as the Massei and Matteini reports would put it, "Maybe something else happened, we don't know."

If they went straight to that drawer after the interrogation that suggests to me that Raffaele did at some point under questioning say that he pricked Meredith with that knife, and the police considered that an 'admission' that it was the murder weapon. Then later in his diary he sticks to that story, which as far as we know he might have convinced himself of, how the hell else might it have gotten there?

Absent the transcripts or tapes of that interrogation we'll never know for sure, however that seemingly unexplainable facet of the case puzzled me and I thought that a reasonable explanation.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

dust study

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Okay, first of all 3035. This goes back to your suggestion that Raffaele's DNA on the bra clasp could have been transferred there by dust. I suppose your chain of events is:

- Raffaele tries to force door and DNA from his hands or clothing sticks to door, transported on dust.
- At some point the dust floats around or gets kicked around and ends up on the bra clasp

You linked this summary of a scientific article to support your argument:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826584.200-telltale-dna-sucked-out-of-household-dust.html

I pointed out that a reading of the New Scientist summary you linked us to indicates that "With further research it might be possible to find ways of recreating someone's profile or even working out how recently they'd visited a crime scene from the decay of their DNA."

I found some other links which seemed to support the idea that DNA through dust testing was not yet a standard forensic technique nor practise (if you want, I'll find them again).

You now say "Your argument that this technique is in its initial stages is wrong; people have been studying touch DNA for over ten years."

I think that you are criticising inappropriately my observation of the article's text. Of course human DNA has been observed in dust, and that has been the object of academic study. However, when you take into account the date of this article (from 2008) and the date of Meredith's murder (2007) it seems to me that as a forensic analysis technique at that time, that you wouldn't detect Raffaele's DNA on the bra clasp (which was detected with 2007 DNA testing techniques) through a dust based transfer.

You said in the earlier discussion: "With respect to DNA and dust, a little history is in order. I first brought up the DNA-in-dust paper to show that Stefanoni was wrong in her assertion that skin cells do not contain DNA."

If Stefanoni asserted that skin cells don't contain DNA (citation? exactly what did she say?), she was surely referring this same issue: that the positive for RS's DNA, obtained through forensic testing carried out in this case (or in any case in Italy and most or all parts of the world at that time and perhaps even now), precluded the transfer of Raffaele's DNA through dust.

Kermit,

No, your supposition is wrong. I don’t think that household dust is a likely mechanism for transfer of Raffaele’s DNA to the clasp. The DNA on the door might have been transferred via a glove to the clasp, for example, or from towels, as katy_did pointed out. The whole issue came up because Dr. Stefanoni claimed that skin cells did not contain DNA, which is at best an overstatement. It also illustrates how your pro-guilt point of view colors your reading of the scientific literature.

Ann Wise reported on Dr. Stefanoni’s testimony, “Sollecito would have had to rub the bra hook forcefully for DNA from his skin cells to be on it, she said. Dead skin cells floating around the room do not contain DNA and would not stick, she said.”
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7656872&page=2

There is also the Massei report on page 202, which states, “She clarified in this regard, the concept of exfoliated cells, of which she had spoken about and had also explained in the report. She emphasised therefore, that the exfoliated cells which she was referring to are not the skin cells‚ that come off naturally from the skin because they are dead cells‛ (page 133) that are shed continuously, without any rubbing. She stressed that it’s not even possible to extract DNA from those cells, because the nucleus is practically dead; they are keratinized cells. She further clarified her explanation by adding that the case of cells that, due to the position in which they were found on a finding, may lead one to believe a friction occurred is different; cells that are found in the layers underneath the *skin’s+ barrier, if you will, made up of dead cells.” We can discuss Dr. Stefanoni’s “theories” about DNA transfer another time.

I gave the citation about dust that is from the primary literature (Toothman et al, 2008, etc.); I don’t recall who first linked to the New Scientist article, but I have pointed out previously that it is better to go straight to the source; besides showing an image from the paper itself in the dust thread, I contacted the lead author and mentioned our conversation in one of my messages.

A paper whose publication date is 2008 typically concerns research begun years earlier. The review process alone takes several months in my experience. Moreover, the publication date is not relevant here. The DNA profiling techniques were not out of the ordinary in the 2008 paper, only the fact that they were applied to dust. In other words the study could have easily been done years earlier. To sum up, there has been nothing to prevent DNA transfers from dust from occurring and from being observable for a number of years.

One of my points concerns the reasons why the authors did not analyze the peaks in a way that would show the contributions from individuals. There are two reasons, of which the first is that deconvoluting mixtures is not a specialty of the lab that did the work. The second is that the dust DNA shows clear evidence of being degraded. Thus there is no reason inherent in the analysis of DNA from dust why a full profile for a single individual cannot be found with current technology. My prediction is that if one sampled from a house occupied by a small number of people, one would see some full profiles.

 

[RWVBWL]

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Let's talk about it if you think that the non-incorporation of satan in the trial (instead of its incorporation) somehow affected the court's decision. I guess Satan can influence you even if you don't talk about him.


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So, we're off of Satan and on to possible words uttered in the sexual attack. You're incorrect if you say that Mignini said that that dialogue was evidence, he used it simply as part of his closing speech.

If Mignini said that, I'm not surprised. Since Mignini didn't have a tape recorder running when Meredith was actually attacked, he described in the trial the type of dialogue which he imagined could have taken place in his (non-Satanic) scenario. What prosecutor anywhere in the world hasn't painted this type of scenario for a sexual assault? In any case, I'm sure that Amanda's capable Italian lawyers took issue with him and defended her. I don't see what you're upset about. It's a typical trial sort of courtroom transcript.

Page 29, "Angel Face", B. Nadeau

In his final argument, the lead prosecutor hypothesized that as Amanda helped assault Meredith,
she yelled, "You are always behaving like a little saint.
Now we will show you. Now we will make you have sex."

All 4 people in that little bedroom of Meredith's and Amanda said that?
Sure...

Peace to you all,
RWVBWL

 

[Mary_H]

.
Take it easy, Withnail.

In addition to murder, there was sexual assault in this case. It's normal for a prosecutor to come up with a / some sexual scenario(s) to explain the case. It's also normal for those scenarios to evolve as the investigation advances.

According to your yardstick, any prosecutor of sexual crimes is a potential pervert as soon as he has a scenario.

At the time Mignini came up with his scenario of one black man and two white college students trying to force Meredith into sexual relations she did not want, the medical examiner, Dr. Lalli, had stated that he did not have unequivocal evidence that Meredith had been sexually assaulted.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

From what I understood, the glass pieces on the left side, nearest to the planter, were not disturbed after they fell down on the sill.

How did Rudy manage to avoid all that glass while he swung over from the planter to the ledge?

I don't think he avoided it. He just didn't knock all of it off the ledge.

You want to make this into an impossible feat, but it's not. I am reminded of the people who have expended an enormous effort to convince the world that an airliner could not possibly collapse a skyscraper.

 

[LondonJohn]

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You're right. Under the FOAKer approved scenario, not only did Rudy not have to bend a nail, he didn't have to spread broken glass on the outside, nor rob anything, nor - deciding to take the time to wash the soles of his running shoes - wash anything else (nor having washed only the soles of his running shoes for whatever reason, promptly get them bloody again to mark his way out of the cottage), nor take more than one shot to break the window and inner shutter, nor cut himself on the way in ....

What you've done here is mistakenly tried to assert that all people who believe that Knox's and Sollecito's convictions may be unsafe are one single homogeneous group, who all "follow" some guiding philosophy or "script". There is no "FOAKer approved scenario" (and your casual usage of a thinly-disguised offensive termn - FOAKer - is noted as well....).

But for what it's worth, you might want to bear the following in mind:

1) A rock thrown through a thin glass pane from the outside will ordinarily cause the glass to fall inwards or straight down, with only miniscule fragments being propelled back towards the ground on the outside.

2) It entirely rational to believe that Guede might have entered the house with the intention of burglary (not robbery), but that the confrontation with Meredith and her subsequent death may easily have - shall we say - changed his priorities. In any case, money and credit cards were taken from Meredith's room.

3) Who suggested that Guede stopped to wash the soles of his shoes? The thinking by many people here (including me) is that Guede may well have gone to the small bathroom to clean off his hands and arms (probably in the sink) and to clean visible blood from his trousers (using the bidet). In this theory, the contention is that he may have removed one or both of his shoes to place his foot into the bidet, and that the dilute blood/water pooled in the bowl of the bidet under his foot. Then, when he removed his foot from the bidet, he placed it partially onto the bathmat, leaving the saturated blood/water print that was discovered.

4) In the same vein, a more widely-held conjecture is that Guede might have then returned to Meredith's room to cover her body, steal her cards, phones, cash and keys, and then make his escape. The suggestion is that it may have been at this point that he inadvertently stepped into the pooling blood, then left a faint trail of bloody shoeprints as he walked to the front door (so faint, in fact, that the "crack" forensics team trampled all over them for a while, before somebody realised they were there.....).

5) Why on earth would it take more than one shot to hit a sizeable window with a 4kg rock from a distance of no more than three or four metres? Particularly when you factor in Guede's basketball prowess....

6) Most people who go equipped to burgle (burglarise) via breaking-and-entering are at least smart enough to realise that rugged clothing and strong gloves are pretty much required uniform for the job. And somebody entering through Filomena's window wearing a heavy jacket and thick leather/canvas gloves would neither cut himself nor leave any evidence of himself on his path of entry or inside the room.