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Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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Kaosium said:
Thank you for posting that, Withnail, where did you find it? I saw it in my initial round of googling but tried to find it for someone else a little while back and spent about an hour in a fruitless attempt.
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As usual, it was found on the well respected site, Perugia Murder File.
 
capealadin said:
I wouldn't think too highly of my Doctors, if they gave an answer. There is too much criteria to be met, and it's an *inexact science* at best.
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Hi CapeAladin,
I can understand your point, as I did Stilicho's too.
But just ask your doc!
What if they said the answer was 5-6 hours?!?
Ask and post it, share it with us!
Don't be afraid to be right,
or wrong...
Thanks,
RWVBWL

PS-CapeAladin,
This photograph in my avatar was shot yesterday mornin' at Sunset and PCH. You know where it's at.
I was looking towards Santa Monica as the sun arose and a plane was gettin' ready to land at LAX.
Gorgeous sunrise happenin', while you were gettin' some shuteye for a coupla hours.
If you ever wanna meet an Innocentisti, well I'm there a lot.
Look and you will find me!
Peace, RW
 
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Honestly, RW, I think you should drop this. Doctors are busy people, and, although I'm not afraid of being right or wrong, I wouldn't like looking stupid. So much criteria must be met, it's an inexact science, and there are so many variables.

And then, of course, how could he give an answer, when he didn't attend the Autopsy, or have the report. The court accepted the findings, and we shall have to see if the Defence disputes the findings in the Appeal. Until then, the question is moot.
 
RWVBWL said:
Hi Solange305, CapeAladin, and other colpevolisti,

Did you ever ask your doctor the question:
"How long does it take for the stomach to start and to finish emptying."
Treehorn is waiting for a family get together, since his brothers are too busy, and Stilicho, well he doesn't want to...

How's about it? Ask your doctor! Prove Halides1, LondonJohn and Kevin Lowe wrong!
As I am self employed and do not have a doctor, I can not ask.
But if I did, I would've hit him/her up a long time ago!
So I will ask a few different doctor friends when I see them surfing sometime, hopefully soon.

I await your response gals, and guys too!
Thanks,:)
RWVBWL
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OK, if you insist : it could be done but a general practitioner wouldnt suffice - Presumably for a professional opinion on the output of Kevin Lowe, London John or halides1 I need to find a medic whose specialty is focused on the ulterior portion of the lower gastrointestinal tract.
 
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A presenter on Italian tv tonight discussing the appeal Salvo Sottile concluded that, during the process Raffaele lawyers will present new evidence and new witnesses and that there will be surprises

Possible surprises
1)One of the police officers who refused to take part in the calumnia trial,takes the stand to testify that Amanda was hit on the back of the head during her interogation and the prosecution are lying about not taping the interogations

2)Proof of computer activity between 21.00 and midnight on the night of the murder

3)Proof that it is not Raffaele's dna on the braclasp

Surprises from the prosecution

1)Proof that they would recognise the truth if it jumped up and bit them on the neck
 
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quadraginta said:
This is where Kevin Lowe should swoop down and complain vociferously about the use of an argument from incredulity.

Oh, wait. That's only a fallacy when it is used to cast doubt on Knox's innocence.

Never mind.
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Life's too short to play both sides of the game just to make it a challenge for myself, and you seem to be doing a good job on this point.

I think the important points about the knife are that the substance tested was not blood, the test could not be replicated, the precautions needed for safe LCN DNA testing were not in place and Stefanoni kept testing until she got the result she wanted. Under those circumstances a false positive seems like the clearly indicated conclusion, and given that the knife is no longer relevant.

I think it's a fair point that the police "verbal" that they smelled bleach in Raffaele's house was ill-chosen since if he had indeed cleaned the knife with bleach then it is nigh impossible that a picogram-sized patch of Meredith's flesh on the side of the knife would have escaped contact with the bleach solution, and there was nothing else in Raffaele's apartment that was candidate for a crime-related bleaching. However if we dismiss the bleach claim as a coincidence or a verbal, the defendants could have cleaned it without bleach.
 
Matthew Best said:
The Italian justice system never runs out of stuff to amaze me. I imagine this is incredibly unlikely to actually transpire, but it still seems strange.
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There are only around 20 possible court days (Saturdays)
between now and 4 June 2011.
If the judge decides on a full review of the forensics, the re-examination of witnesses, calling of new witnesses etc.,then it's not so long.
 
Fuji said:
Perhaps to a pedant, my statement "there is no way for anyone other than AK & RS to know if any items of their clothing are missing" could be construed as "nonsense". However, within the context of the ongoing discussion, it should be rather apparent that I was referring to clothing whose existence was not already established through photographic or testimonial means as to have been in the possession of AK or RS at a time shortly before Meredith's murder. These items of clothing existed, and neither you nor anyone else besides AK & RS can have anything substantive to say about their quantity or quality. As such, my original assertion remains logically irrefutable.
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This reminds me of the wonderful Proofs of P article.

"Zabludowski has insinuated that my thesis that p is false, on the basis of alleged counterexamples. But these so- called "counterexamples" depend on construing my thesis that p in a way that it was obviously not intended -- for I intended my thesis to have no counterexamples. Therefore p."

I can only respond to what you actually post, not to a different and unfalsifiable argument that you wish you posted.

In any case the point remains uncontested that the police did try to identify clothes Amanda and Raffaele might have been wearing and disposed of and failed to find any that could not be accounted for. That does not make it impossible for them to be guilty, but it's one more piece of evidence that should be there and is not.

I'm not sure if it's "cute", but it certainly is ironic that in attempting to dismiss my accusation of special pleading, you proceed to introduce yet another case of special pleading.

You state that "Rudy had a fortnight to dispose of his bloody clothes... Raffaele and Amanda did not". However, as you are well aware, the amount of time it would actually take to dispose of clothing would be a trivially small fraction of a 2-week period. In fact, all three defendants had ample time to dispose of incriminating clothing. You emphasize Rudy's fortnight of opportunity in an attempt to obscure the weakness of your argument and the double standard employed (yet again).
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"Special pleading" is not a term you wheel out every time that someone you are debating with differentiates between two things that are actually different. You have to establish that the other person has claimed a general rule, and then made up a special exception to that rule.

It's a slam-dunk that Rudy had time to dispose of his bloody clothes and knife - he had two weeks during which he was unaccounted for and unsought, travelling over a large distance. Those items could have been dumped in garbage bins all over Italy.

Amanda and Raffaele would have faced substantially greater problems. They were in Perugia, if they were seen disposing of clothing or knives they would have been screwed, the area around the murder scene and their houses would doubtless have been searched, their wardrobes were inventoried with a view to establishing if anything was missing, and yet absolutely no evidence has ever emerged that they disposed of a single shirt or shoe.

These two cases are substantially different. However you are free to try to state what general rule I am arguing for and what special exemption I am pleading for.

You have no evidence at all that RG wore gloves. None. In fact,the crime scene itself and the genetic indicators RG left behind all indicate that RG was not wearing gloves. You are only hypothesizing the existence of these gloves because you see it as an element that supports the "genuine break-in theory", not because you have any evidentiary reason for doing so.
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Yet again we have a pro-guilt poster who seems to think that gloves are stapled on... you are aware, are you not, that gloves are removable? And that people do remove them do do things like wipe their backsides, get clothing off an unwilling person or use a knife (depending on the glove it can be quite awkward to try to cut things with gloves on as I have discovered while camping).

There is no direct evidence that Rudy wore gloves - it's just an uncontroversial hypothesis that fits the available facts and is consistent with what burglars do.

For that matter there's no direct evidence Rudy did not wear gloves. This is why I consider the "Rudy left no DNA or fingerprints in Filomena's room, therefore the break-in was staged" particularly weak - it relies absolutely on the convenient assumption that Rudy did not wear gloves, and was completely unaware that it might be a bad idea for a housebreaker to rummage through people's stuff ungloved.
 
shuttlt said:
Blood contains little in the way of DNA. The idea is that the DNA is from flesh stuck in a crevice in the knife. The limits of detection are different for blood and DNA. Then there is the question of the sensitivity of the tests and the size of the sample for each test. There is no test for "no blood" afterall.
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The test for blood was more sensitive than the test for DNA, so whatever the sample was it wasn't blood. I've seen guilters try out the hypothesis that it was a blood-free chunk of Meredith's flesh or something, but it's a bit of a reach to hypothesise that whatever it was it got there without blood also being there, if it got there when the knife was used to stab Meredith.

I think it's, to be very cautious, substantially more likely than not based on the tests that whatever Stefanoni was testing, it was not blood or flesh.

Depends how you bleach it. What was the dilution? Was it submerged, if so, for how long? This has been discussed at length.
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We are talking about picograms of material here. I can't imagine any scenario where DNA in it survives immersion in bleach, any more than I can imagine a picogram of sugar not dissolving in a cup of hot tea.
 
capealadin said:
For Truethat: May I suggest reading the Judge's report? You can download it at Perugia Murder file. It is comprehensive, over 400 pages.
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Thank you but I know I don't have time to read it. I just am a little befuddled at why this is such a huge issue to people.

It seems to me that Americans are used to "reasonable doubt" defenses but the Italian system didn't work that way and so they are crying foul.

What I would suggest is the girl might be nuts and incredibly stupid about all the information that came pouring out of her mouth.

I don't know anyone who would admit to killing someone or being around someone who killed someone if they weren't there. I don't buy the theory that the authorities bullied her into a confession.

Take a look at this guy

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/16/48hours/main1322783.shtml

His friend "dreamed" of killing someone and then said his friend helped him. There was absolutely no forensic evidence to tie either kid to the crime.

Both were sentenced and Ryan Ferguson swore relentlessly that he was innocent. Years later his friend confessed he lied about Ryan's involvement.

Take the Azaria Chamberlain case, her mother swore she had nothing to do with it.

So why is this girl who is freaking out sitting in a police interrogation room for 15 hours changing story after story and then even confessing to know something about the crime, without asking for a break or a lawyer. She has stated she asked for a lawyer so she knew to do that. Why not call her parents immediately and wait for their arrival.

I just don't believe people will confess to something they know nothing about.

So that really leads me to believe she knows something, she's just not saying really what it is, maybe she was drugged out her mind when it went down but you don't say you know something when you don't.
 
quadraginta said:
But ... but ...but ...

All the witnesses to all of these things are the selfsame conspirators who teamed up to railroad Knox and Sollecito. Why is their reputation suddenly so sterling when it is useful to support what you want it to?

You have no one's word but theirs that there was a fingerprint found at all.
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This is true as far as it goes. The fingerprint evidence has not been contested and I have not looked into it in the slightest.

However I imagine that the fingerprint was photographed at the scene and the photographs entered into evidence at his trial, that the fingerprints were circulated to the wider Italian police force in electronic format before Rudy was picked up, and that falsifying all this a fortnight after the event would be very difficult at best and require a TARDIS at worst, depending on the exact details of what was distributed when.

If I'm wrong and you can show us that this evidence would have been easily falsifiable, and sketch out at least some kind of motive for the police to do so, go for it.

Somehow I don't think you'll do so however, given Rudy's own testimony about how that bloody fingerprint got there.

I think you are pulling a leaf from Fuji's book and inexpertly trying to gin up a claim that we are engaging in special pleading, without really understanding what you are doing or thinking your argument through.

Between the autonomous DNA zooming around the apartment, the bumbling investigators smearing every conceivable surface against every other conceivable surface, and the subservient lab minions working at Mignini's diabolical command they could have found anyone's DNA they wanted to anywhere they wanted to, and announced it whenever they felt like it.

At least, that's the impression I've gotten.
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I'm not responsible for the impressions you decide to get.
 
Solange305 said:
Well, according to some posters here, it's perfectly normal for witnesses to get mixed up on details. For example, Curatolo being mistaken about buses being there that night means he is lying about everything, but Raffaele and Amanda having conflicting accounts about Filomena's door is ok because witnesses are often honestly mistaken about such details. That is one of the examples of special pleading Ive seen here. Im not saying every argument towards innocence is special pleading, it's not. But it is thrown in here and there, and maybe both sides are guilty of it, I think we should all try do less of it.
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It's just a fact that witnesses are very imperfect, far more so than most people who haven't studied the issue believe.

However if everything about Curatolo's evidence was kosher except for the buses I think we'd look more leniently on him. His late arrival with his evidence, his previous history of coming forward with convenient evidence for the police, the fact that his story meshes perfectly with the Massei/Mignini time of death which turned out to be a ridiculous contrivance combined with the bus issue are all significant strikes against him even before it turned out that the computer evidence looks likely to completely contradict him.

There's also a huge difference between arguing that inaccuracies in your testimony mean you are unreliable, and arguing that inaccuracies in your testimony mean that you are a murderer. Nobody's arguing that because Curatolo got the buses wrong that therefore he must be hiding something and therefore he must have murdered Meredith Kercher.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
It's a slam-dunk that Rudy had time to dispose of his bloody clothes and knife - he had two weeks during which he was unaccounted for and unsought, travelling over a large distance. Those items could have been dumped in garbage bins all over Italy.
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"It's a slam-dunk" that Knox and Sollecito had all night to toss their bloody clothes, gloves, rags, pen knife, etc., into a dumpster. It's not a 2 week process.

Indeed, Guede would not/ could not know how long he had to dispose of his bloody apparel, and aside from racist stereotypes about laziness/ "drifting", why on earth would Guede wait 2 WEEKS to take out his trash if it contained evidence that could hang him?!

Unless I've missed a finding that Guede has an IQ under 70, it's highly probable that he disposed of his bloody clothes at least as quickly as his accomplices did.
 
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Solange305 said:
So, if its as easy as just going to the literature, why do we have experts testifying, or shoot, why do we have experts at all? Why not just have lawyers printing out the "literature" and passing it around to the jury? I don't think its as clearcut as you make it seem. Not to mention, is there not literature out there that says that TOD shouldnt be determined by stomach contents?
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All sorts of reasons. For one, the court system is somewhat archaic and places a ridiculous amount of weight on the verbal testimony of supposed experts. In clear-cut cases there's no real reason why you should need a tenured university professor to front up and say that no, it's just not possible that five and a half hours after eating a small-to-moderate sized meal of pizza and crumble that a normal, healthy young woman would have all of that food still in her stomach in a partially-undigested state.

That said, the court system also very prudently demands the best possible evidence. So rather than allowing lawyers to just cite a paper themselves, they require someone whose job it is to be current on the literature to get up and say it just in case there are some extenuating circumstances or other special considerations that only professionals would know about.

However if you read the Massei report they cited no such circumstances, and nobody has had any luck finding any relevant ones in the literature. It's also evidence that some of the opinions given simply cannot be reconciled with the literature, which should be highly embarrassing for the "experts" so contradicted. It's their job to be consistent with the literature and if they are not up to date they should not be testifying.
 
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