Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Mary_H]

Plea bargain.

I don't believe you.

 

[lionking]

I don't believe you.

Good for you.

He's a lawyer, was asked to give his opinion and gave it. What's not to believe?

 

[Kaosium]

Strangely, that's not what it says here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Code_of_Criminal_Procedure



Does this information need to be re-edited? Or are you incorrect? What's your source for the assertion that the prosecutor can't appeal in a fast-track trial?

Thank you for digging that up, John, along with the cite about police practices regarding lawyers.

What could possibly have been the reason Rudy Guede's sentence wasn't appealed? The convicted him of murder, yet he still pretended he wasn't involved and tried to place himself in a failed heroic role even. Is that really 'remorse?'

 

[Kaosium]

Waiting to hear about Raff's statement as to who the real killer was/ See y'all later.......Time to think of a response that makes sense, Yes???????

How could they possibly know for sure who killed Meredith? They were home cuddling and smoking hash. What on earth could they say on the stand?
'Our lawyers think he did it, so...um...we do too?'

I think its best they just leave that argument to their lawyers.

 

[Kaosium]

Well, to begin, the "trial" is over, we're now in the midst of the appellate process, just FYI.

Now, in terms of the the discussion here, we've got an Australian school teacher/ part time mature student of "social inclusion" claiming to have a better understanding of stomach emptying than medical doctors who've specialized in forensic pathology, so I'm thinking we'll pretty much blow the lid off of the case.

What do you think will be the prosecutions argument on time of death?

I've seen speculation that the prosecution won't even try to put them in that room, being as they may lose the DNA evidence and even if they don't neither item is really proof of murder and comes with embarrassing stories. How would you make the case?

 

[lionking]

Edit. Not worth a response.

 

[shuttlt]

I have faith that if shuttlt reads the testimony, he will see that it does not show that Amanda told her mother that Patrick was innocent.

That depends. I'd say she doesn't positively assert his innocence, in the sense that she would be lying if he turned out to be involved. She can't really do that without providing him with an alibi, or admitting that she was present during the crime. Since she doesn't do either, she is not positively asserting his innocence.

What she does do is unequivocally cease to assert that he is involved and make it clear that she does not believe he is involved. One problem with this is that she does it in a perfectly straight forward way, in contrast with her statements to the authorities.

I fail to see what all this argument about her saying on not saying that Patrick is innocent is about. There seems to be some nonsense fear that it's a trap and that if it's admitted that she told her mother he didn't do it, somebody will jump up and shout "AH! But how could she know, unless she was there". This is such nonsense it's not worth considering.

As far as I'm concerned she makes a strong assertion (she's lying if it's false) to her mother that she has no reason to believe Patrick is the killer and a weak assertion that he isn't the killer (she's not lying if it's false).

Is this acceptable, Mary?

 

[RoseMontague]

The prosecutor CANNOT appeal a verdict in a fast track trial. Get it?

That is how I understood it as well, from what has been discussed before and what has been stated at PMF. However, I have not seen a cite for it and the cite LJ provided says the opposite. My point was that it does not matter in this case as there was nothing for the prosecutor to appeal at the appeal level and the cite he provided does not discuss the supreme court level procedure, which may be a different thing.

There is no need to tell me to get it unless you provide me a link contradicting the one LJ posted. You must have got it (a link) at some point to be so certain of it. In the meantime my opinion on this is that it makes no difference in this case but if you want to, go ahead and prove your point. At this time I consider it both not relevant and not proven.

 

[Mary_H]

That depends. I'd say she doesn't positively assert his innocence, in the sense that she would be lying if he turned out to be involved. She can't really do that without providing him with an alibi, or admitting that she was present during the crime. Since she doesn't do either, she is not positively asserting his innocence.

What she does do is unequivocally cease to assert that he is involved and make it clear that she does not believe he is involved. One problem with this is that she does it in a perfectly straight forward way, in contrast with her statements to the authorities.

I fail to see what all this argument about her saying on not saying that Patrick is innocent is about. There seems to be some nonsense fear that it's a trap and that if it's admitted that she told her mother he didn't do it, somebody will jump up and shout "AH! But how could she know, unless she was there". This is such nonsense it's not worth considering.

As far as I'm concerned she makes a strong assertion (she's lying if it's false) to her mother that she has no reason to believe Patrick is the killer and a weak assertion that he isn't the killer (she's not lying if it's false).

Is this acceptable, Mary?

It is to me, shuttlt. platonov wanted to make the case that Amanda told her mother she knew Patrick was innocent. He cited some testimony as proof of his assertion. That testimony, though, does not support his assertion. He highlighted these sections:

---------------------------------

AK: Well, it's true that after several days in prison, I did come to realize that what I had imagined was nothing but imagination, not a confusion of reality. So I realized that he wasn't guilty of these things, and I felt really really bad that he had been arrested.

---------------------------------

GCM: Excuse me, avvocato. To just return to this question. The defense is expressing his perplexity and we also feel it. You are saying: "I didn't know if Patrick was innocent or not." This is on the 6th and the 7th. But on the 10th, you essentially say that he's innocent. So what the defense lawyer is asking is, what happened in between to make you change your mind?To change your conviction about the role of Patrick? It's this.

AK: Well, yes. I knew he was in prison uniquely because of my words. At first I didn't know this. I thought the police somehow knew whether he was guilty or not. Since I didn't know, I was confused. But in the following days I realized that he was in prison only because of what I had said, and I felt guilty.

--------------------------------

Even taken out of context as it is, this testimony does not show Amanda saying she knows Patrick is innocent of the crime. She says first that she realized he was not guilty of the things she had accused him of (as far as she knew), and second, she says she [mistakenly] realized he was in prison because of what she said.

It supports platonov's point even less when put in context and considered with other parts of Amanda's testimony, especially where she says that she thought the fact that she let the police know she was not at the crime should have made it clear to them that her accusation of Patrick was not valid.

People make this argument primarily to censure Amanda and her mother. They want to maintain that both Amanda and her mother knew Patrick was innocent, did nothing to get him out of prison, and therefore are bad people. The many reasons why this is an unsupportable claim have been repeated here a number of times.

 

[RoseMontague]

That depends. I'd say she doesn't positively assert his innocence, in the sense that she would be lying if he turned out to be involved. She can't really do that without providing him with an alibi, or admitting that she was present during the crime. Since she doesn't do either, she is not positively asserting his innocence.

What she does do is unequivocally cease to assert that he is involved and make it clear that she does not believe he is involved. One problem with this is that she does it in a perfectly straight forward way, in contrast with her statements to the authorities.

I fail to see what all this argument about her saying on not saying that Patrick is innocent is about. There seems to be some nonsense fear that it's a trap and that if it's admitted that she told her mother he didn't do it, somebody will jump up and shout "AH! But how could she know, unless she was there". This is such nonsense it's not worth considering.

As far as I'm concerned she makes a strong assertion (she's lying if it's false) to her mother that she has no reason to believe Patrick is the killer and a weak assertion that he isn't the killer (she's not lying if it's false).

Is this acceptable, Mary?

This makes sense to me. It is a similar issue with the break in. How could she know if the break in was real or staged without being present as it was happening? One thing about false confessions that makes them believable is that the one who is confessing provides details of the crime that only someone there would know and in many cases it is later shown that they were provided these details by the cops in the questions they were asking.

Her accusation against Patrick is very vague, the only detail she provided that could be considered this way is the scream and in my mind, that is not shown to be conclusively proven. The cops should have looked at this and considered the very real possibility that this statement was not true simply because it was so lacking in detail. katy_did has shown that she was pressed for additional information (my opinion) and her additional statement provided little in the way of additional detail.

 

[shuttlt]

Is that untrue about the food and water, as well as the bathroom breaks? I thought I saw a post a week ago or so about it, sourced to Candace Dempsey's book. Something about 'not being treated as a person' until she signed something?

Technically it is probably true, but it is mendacious to use it in the way that it's used. She got to the police station at 10:15pm having just had dinner. Raffaele went off to be interrogated. She hung out in the waiting room with access to a food, water and toilets. She did her homework, her legs got stiff, she did some cartwheels, she answered some questions from the police in the waiting room. She then went off to the interrogation room once the Raffaele had dropped her in it in his interrogation.

How long must that have taken? Half an hour seems very short to me, but some people I've argued with place her going into the interrogation room at 10:45pm. I'd have thought quite a bit later, but OK. That's a three hour interrogation. I'm sorry, but building an argument based on not being able to get to the coffee machine for at the absolute outside three hours is nonsense.

Was it even really three hours? Not that it impacts the timing, but she herself says that it didn't start to get intense until the early hours of the morning. A 10:45pm start time is optimistic. Once she had said what she said there was presumably some time taken finishing up... typing up her statement, reading her statement, signing her statement.... Myself, I think two hours withjout food, water and toilets is a better guess.

Is it really unusual for an interrogation to last a couple of hours and not have sandwiches laid on?

The next morning she was taken to have breakfast when the canteen opened. So, she didn't miss any meals.

I figure a veteran FBI agent has some insight, being as he's actually done this sort of thing and knows how crime scenes are read and how interrogations are conducted, what is there to be deeply suspicious of? I think he's more valuable as a global resource, as for the numbers he probably can't know any better than you or I for sure, but there's two stories on it and he's more suspicious of the prosecution, so he goes with the other one. I don't recall him putting it quite like that last time I saw him on TV, but he didn't get much time in that segment.

I'll watch one of hs interviews on YouTube and give him another chance.

Three hours in that environment is enough, though considering what they had waiting for her I wouldn't think she got much time to do cartwheels.

I'm sure it was tough, but all the talk about being denied food and water is a mendatious lie being used to sex up the argument. As to the waiting for he thing... She did her homework until her legs got tired, then there is also the cartwheels and a bit of light questioning in the waiting room. Certainly it is true that at the trial it came out that there was an intention to bring both of them in and question them together, equally it is true that Amanda wasnsn't aware they she was supposed to come and that they didn't in fact take her to be questioned at the same time as Raffaele.

That's how many were eligible for the original calunnia charge, though initially there was eight and they seemed to think four more could join. It had the preliminary hearing recently and it got put off until spring. Steve Moore thinks it was a two at a time thing for the most part, and that would seem like a rational way to do it.

I agree with Steve Moore. 30 people conducting an interrogation beggers belief. None the less I was assurred by Bruce that he had documentary proof. At best it's a reminder about taking people's word for what evidence they won't show you demonstrates.

I don't think they expected it to be thrown out by the Supreme Court! I can't imagine that was part of their plan.

That kind of evidence wouldn't normally be accepted. If she was a witness it can't normally be used against her, if she was a suspect then the police shouldn't have been interrogating her and it couldn't be used anyway. Why would they expect it to be allowed? If one is inclined to be suspicious of their motives, then presumably the point of getting Mignini in would be to try and get her to repeat some of it in a way that had some hope of being admissable. If only they had known that all they needed was to leave writing materials in her cell, they need not have bothered waking him.

It seems they taped about everything else,

What everything did they tape? Did they tape the interview/interrogation with Raffaele? Did they tape their previous interviews? Did they tape the interviews with the Fillomina? I know they taped the wire taps, but that is somewhat different.

and I don't understand how they could expect her to sign something if they weren't taping it,

What is the connection between the signing and the taping?

after all her Italian was pretty marginal.

Was it? In any case, there was an interpreter.

How did they produce the statement she signed without one? I wouldn't imagine it was from memory.

They wrote it out, went over it with her, she agreed to it, she signed it, they signed it. It's not a transcript of the interrogation that she signed. In any case, if it was, and it was based on a recording, they would be doing well to get it typed up, agreed and signed in the time it took. That again would cut down the time of the interrogation to, what, an hour? Less?

One thing I've been wondering, with the number of cops in the interrogation public record, there being 3-3:00 hours of questioning at least, and the whole thing ending with her signing something after she said she was cuffed, can you think of a probable scenario where it wasn't taped that isn't suspicious?

Oh, it's not great at all that it wasn't taped - by the way do we actually have something asserted in court, or by one of the lawyers that it wasn't, I can't remember. Perhaps it is suspicious. It depends on normal practice in Perugia. I've certainly not seen any evidence that the other interviews in this case were taped. Perhaps they were and I missed it.

I never quite got what was the deal here either. She said at one point, on the stand I think, they told her it would go worse for her if she insisted on one. I ran across a 'heads-up' travel guide for Canadians, I believe, that noted that due to Italy's very formal laws on legal representation the police will say that they tried to call one but they hadn't answered or that they'd be better off without one. I guess that figures, if the police want to get to do any real questioning outside the basics they're not going to get much with a lawyer there.

Sure, but this is what Amanda says. If we start assuming the her word is trustworthy, or not trustworthy, then we are beginning to let our conclusions about guilt or innocence seep into our reasoning about the case.

They show this stuff on TV in Italy! I found that outrageous myself, some fifteen hours of that recent murder was televised in Italy, and Barbara Nadeau wrote an article recently about Amanda always unhappy when she sees them on TV because she's never seen hers.

Bad stuff get's telivised in the US as well (no idea where you're from). It's been mentioned before about TV shows laughing about footage of police interviews and prison visits. The footage of the body that Raffaele's family got in trouble for leaking is also a low point.

Can you imagine being in jail and watching police interrogations on TV? I wonder if they make them watch them as part of their punishment?

I doubt it, but in any case, this wouldn't be perculiar to Italy.

 

[Mary_H]

This makes sense to me. It is a similar issue with the break in. How could she know if the break in was real or staged without being present as it was happening? One thing about false confessions that makes them believable is that the one who is confessing provides details of the crime that only someone there would know and in many cases it is later shown that they were provided these details by the cops in the questions they were asking.

Her accusation against Patrick is very vague, the only detail she provided that could be considered this way is the scream and in my mind, that is not shown to be conclusively proven. The cops should have looked at this and considered the very real possibility that this statement was not true simply because it was so lacking in detail. katy_did has shown that she was pressed for additional information (my opinion) and her additional statement provided little in the way of additional detail.

Recently, someone (I'm sorry I can't remember who it was or even how to look it up) made an excellent point about how the police stopped the questioning once they got Amanda to agree to the basics, and that this doesn't make any sense at all since there was so much more to know and so much more they could have questioned Amanda about. The cops were heavy on persuasion and light on curiosity.

 

[Mary_H]

<snip>
That kind of evidence wouldn't normally be accepted. If she was a witness it can't normally be used against her, if she was a suspect then the police shouldn't have been interrogating her and it couldn't be used anyway. Why would they expect it to be allowed? If one is inclined to be suspicious of their motives, then presumably the point of getting Mignini in would be to try and get her to repeat some of it in a way that had some hope of being admissable. If only they had known that all they needed was to leave writing materials in her cell, they need not have bothered waking him.<snip>

You must have missed our discussion earlier today about there being no evidence that Mignini was woken up or summoned to the station.

I think they expected it to be allowed because they are not used to being questioned about their methods. They probably interrogate a lot of people without attorneys and usually get away with it, because the suspects are indigent or don't have a strong enough support system to follow up on things.

At the time Mignini took the second statement from Amanda, she was not in a cell; she was still in the police station, although I don't think we know whether she was in the interrogation room or the waiting room.

 

[shuttlt]

Stefanoni from the forensic polce tested the kitchen knife by repeatedly cranking up the machine's sensitivity, beyond recommended levels. It multiple times returned a TOO LOW result. This info was kept secret for most of the trial. No other piece of evidence was tested in such a way. The knife was collected "by intuition" from kitchen drawer in Sollecito's (another) apartment, well after the arrests, while the police was desperately in need of some evidence to keep the defendants jailed. It's very likely some contamination (or worse) took place.

It should be pointed out that the knife that was picked by "intuition" was the only one in the draw that could have been involved in the murder, unless one supposes ordinary table knives might have been used. There may have been other knives in the kitchen, but if there are nobody has a photo.

As for contamination, is it very likely? That depends a lot I would have thought about what you believe the odds are of the knife being involved in the crime. Ones expectation about the outcome of what Steffanoni did would not be to find DNA connected with the crime on an innocent knife. Perhaps contamination unconnected with the crime wouldn't be a huge surprise, but contamination connected with the crime doesn't seem to be high on the list of expected outcomes.

Actually phone records don't show any turning off of the phones, just inactivity. There was no simultaneous turning on: RS phone received a text message early in the morning, while AK's connected much later, after noon.

No. It is not inactivity, the phones were uncontactable by the network. They were either switched off at more or less the same time, or were placed together in an as yet undetected black spot in Raffaele's apartment.

 

[shuttlt]

Say a person has five partial fingerprints in the crime room. The probability of the fingerprints belonging to the suspect would be additive, in some way. I mean each fingerprint would increase the probability that the suspect was in the room. Guede left multiple DNA samples in the murder room. The probability that he was in the room increases with every DNA sample found.

Yes.

Suppose a person left a trail of evidence to the murder scene. Suppose that there was a knife found in the home of the suspect. To prove it was used in the crime would require a comparison of the knife size to the size of the wounds. Expert testimony would be required. DNA samples on the knife would be part of the proof. It would have to be proved the knife was at the murder scene. See, all the evidence in a trail of evidence would be in series and would be not additive, but multiplied. Each probability less than one decreases the likelyhood that the suspected murder weapon is the actual murder weapon.

I disagree that you would HAVE TO prove that the knife was at the murder scene, unless you mean as a consequence of the DNA evidence. The evidence does weaken though, as you say, the more things that have to be true for the claim it is trying to prove to be true. Having said that, what are the probabilities here?

Then of course there is more than one piece of evidence, which are additive and none of them have to be in and of themselves particularly solid.

Guede's evidence is VERY solid.
Amanda's evidence is VERY slight.
[/QUOTE]

 

[Chris_Halkides]

just wondering

Good for you.

lionking,

What would make you change your mind about this case? If the question sounds familiar, it is because you asked a version of it yourself.

 

[lionking]

lionking,

What would make you change your mind about this case? If the question sounds familiar, it is because you asked a version of it yourself.

I wish someone would run a book on "halides1 will ask me a question unrelated to my last post". I would become rich very quickly.

As I have said more than once, I reserve the right to post here, on topic (unlike some others) while complying with the MA, whether it meets the expectations of other posters or not.

 

[shuttlt]

Secondly, once you accept the earlier time of death then Nara becomes irrelevant and Curatolo is either irrelevant or actually proves that Amanda and Raffaele are innocent. If you abandon Curatolo entirely Amanda and Raffaele have an uncontested alibi for the actual time of death, and if you don't abandon Curatolo then Curatolo is their alibi witness.

An alibi, that is supported solely by the accused isn't an alibi. It's not having an alibi.

Without Curatolo to contradict their alibi we have evidence that the prosecution accepted at their first trial that Amanda and Raffaele were at home until 21:10. We have defence documents to show that someone opened a Naruto file at 21:26, which if watched would run until 21:49. We have the fact that Amanda and Raffaele claimed to have watched Stardust after that, and that they made this claim before the police destroyed the evidence that could have proved or disproved this alibi. We also have defence documents that purport to show that Raffaele's computer was in use throughout the entire time from Meredith's earliest possible time of death (21:05 or so) to the latest possible time of death (maybe 22:00) and even on past the pants-on-head irrational Massei time of death (23:30).

Running times don't matter, only human interaction matters. As for the Stardust thing. It's crap for Amanda and Raffaele, but it isn't an alibi and we don't know what time it would have turned out they actually watched it, if indeed they did. For a long time I hoped that the data was recoverable, but my recent reading indicates that this possibility is theory only.

To set against that alibi evidence we have exactly nothing from the prosecution in terms of time-sensitive evidence that proves that they were in the murder house around the time of death. They have luminol results that could have gotten there any time and are ambiguous to boot, they have DNA on a bra clasp and a knife that could have gotten there any time and were not handled satisfactorily to boot, but nothing that contradicts the alibi evidence except Curatolo, who (as I said earlier) exonerates Knox and Sollecito if you believe him.

They don't need "time sensitive evidence". Nice to have, but they don't need it. All they need is to prove involvement in the murder. It doesn't really matter when the murder happened, so long as they can prove involvement.

The problem with coming up with a pro-guilt story is, as I said, the reasons for the murder taking place will necessarily not pass the "sniff test" because they will be many thousands to one, if not twns or hundreds of thousands to one against. Also we do not agree on the facts of the case that this theory is supposed to fit. If it is supposed to agree with the facts as agreed with the pro-innocence people then I suspect coming up with a narrative will be hard work. It isn't even really necessary to fit all the evidence in the prosecution case.

Here is a one out of a thousand stories that might have happened:

Meredith let's Rudy in. Things are fine at first, but very quickly go down hill. Amanda and Raffaele turn up (for one of a hundred reasons). Meredith wants to call the police an get Rudy arrested for sexual assault. Amanda and Raffaele try to calm things down, maybe they think she's over reacting. Meredith is hysterical and has to be restrained to prevent her calling the cops and is now accusing Amanda and Raffaele who are now convinced that she is over reacting. Rudy restrains Meredith while Amanda and Raffaele discuss what the heck they're going to do. Meredith breaks free, runs for the phone in her room and the whole thing ends with Rudy and a knife in Merediths room. After that, Rudy leaves, Amanda and Raffaele decide that the best thing to do is cover up what little evidence of them there is, make it look like somebody broke in and hope for the best. Between Amanda and Raffaele entering the house and the murder is only 20 minutes.

Again the odds of this being what happened are low, and the prior probability of these events occuring and a million to one against. If it wasn't an incredibly unlikely event kids would be getting murdered all over the place.

 

[shuttlt]

Thank you for digging that up, John, along with the cite about police practices regarding lawyers.

What could possibly have been the reason Rudy Guede's sentence wasn't appealed? The convicted him of murder, yet he still pretended he wasn't involved and tried to place himself in a failed heroic role even. Is that really 'remorse?'

If it is permissible for the prosecution to appeal the fast track sentence maybe it's just that Rudy hadn't pissed off the prosecutor 1% as much as the other two did. If you ran a public campaign against a US prosecutor in the way that has been done in this case I would have thought there would be similar consequences. Perhaps it's not fair, but I don't think it would be wildly shocking.

 

[shuttlt]

People make this argument primarily to censure Amanda and her mother. They want to maintain that both Amanda and her mother knew Patrick was innocent, did nothing to get him out of prison, and therefore are bad people. The many reasons why this is an unsupportable claim have been repeated here a number of times.

This I disagree with. Her statements were private (or so she thought) are unambiguous, her statements to the police are not. This isn't to say that they would have necessarily released Patrick, but she wasn't prepared to make a strong assertion to the police that her "confession" was false. What she instead did was to try to weaken it without committing herself to any new position. Is Amanda saying her "confession" was true? No. Is she saying it was false? No. She leaves her options open. With her mother she simply says that it was false.