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Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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Too funny

"Most important, however, is the change in Italian public opinion. Unlike in the U.S., where jurors are carefully screened for bias and sequestered during the proceedings, in Italy they are known as "civilian judges," and are free to hold preconceived opinions and to drink deeply from the media well. Indeed, in Knox's first trial, the jury foreman was a criminal lawyer whose firm had briefly participated in the investigation."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2036395,00.html#ixzz17nwjKbls
 
katy_did said:
According to the Corriere article Patrick was in Court, so it really was an apology directly to him (ETA: actually both articles say that Patrick was there, and that she spoke directly to him).
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Every indication I have is that the Kercher's lawyer left the courtroom for Amanda's statement. It is not directly stated that her statement is the reason he left.
 
Katody Matrass said:
Sure but it would be nice if you presented a scenario that have some plausibility. It would be nice if it was comprehensive enough to explain Meredith's strange phone logs. Or how they cleaned their DNA and traces, yet left Rudy's visible shoeprints intact. Or why they left Rudy's feces and pointed it out to the police, only to accuse Lumumba next. As you see we cannot escape the big picture :)


I have already shown that it is not illuminated. In fact it is also covered by trees and facing more away from the neighbouring buildings compared to the balcony.
Yes there were break-ins through the balcony. But you forgot that
1. The squatters or burglars had comfort of knowing no one is inside to surprise them.
2. The windows, including Filomena's were sealed shut by the police.

In fact the access through the balcony wouldn't be any easier for Rudy that through the window:
[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_427054d034e7392f76.jpg[/qimg]
If he would be surprised there by the tenants, his options to quickly get away were very limited.



As for your "sweater argument" I really can't see what your problem is. Filomena kept some clothing in a paper bag under the window. It was stuffed full, so she put some pieces on top of it. When the rock toppled that bag the clothing fell down, forming what is seen in the picture:
http://injusticeinperugia.org/hendry16.jpg
It's painfully obvious. And you're arguing that one sweater is a proof of "ransacking"?




That photo helped me to understand better why you have arrived at your convincements. Being unobservant had it's part in this :rolleyes:
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The entrance thought the balcony would be extremely easy and extremely safe compared to the entrance throught the window, I am not interested in convincing you if you want to believe the opposite if you decided otherwise.
I just warn you: your arguments will never work in making a neutral person change his mind.

I already know the window is illuminated, is set under the eyes of anyone on the road and anyone lookiong fro the parking lot, the rear balcony is dark and safe, climbing is easy, presence of a person on the balcony is not spotted by the level of the road, a presence of a person on the balcony is also not suspicious. I also se the diference between the alleged burglary and dynamic of the hundreds of real burglaries that investigators see. I consider your arguments on this point as utterly weak from the point of view of any neutral judge.
 
RoseMontague said:
It is true than there are many over estimated interrogation times coming from the innocent side some amounting to 50+ hours over a period of 5 days. However, to say a "few hours" does not really tell the story either. This is my guestimate on this:

2 Nov. We know that a group of them including Filomena and her boyfriend as well as Amanda and Raffaele were taken to the police station around 3:30PM and left about 3:00AM the following morning. I am going to guess about 4 hours of interrogation with Amanda at this time.

3 Nov. Amanda and Raffaele show up around 2PM and leave about 10PM. I'll go with about 4 hours on this one.

4 Nov. An intercepted call from Amanda indicates as she is waiting to be interviewed that she is already stressed and exhausted and that the police had already been shouting at her and in her words she felt she was being treated like a criminal. This one goes from around 3PM until 9PM and in another intercepted call she indicates she was interrogated for 5 hours.

5/6 Nov. It appears that she was interviewed starting around 10PM and gave her false accusation at 1:45AM. Let's go with 3 hours on this one. We have seen that she was pressed for more detail (due to the vagueness of her statement) and she gave an additional statement at 5:45. I am going to say just 1 hour on this one.

This puts my guess at about 17 hours total over 5 days of actual interrogation time. Google translation from Amanda's appeal:
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Thank you Rose! I've never been able to find anything like this, and always had trouble with the context of that e-mail she sent. It's one of the first things I saw when I got interested in this again in the fall. I couldn't find it anywhere else with a cursory search, so I ended right back where I saw it the first time. Now, on the second was she there until 5:30 AM and had to be back by 11:00 AM on the 3rd like it says in the e-mail--or was Amanda mistaken? At any rate her sleeping schedule appears to be off and the interviews got aggressive on the fourth, which I'd forgotten reading about it so long ago.

Blunting the impact of her curious statement was the interspersion of the dear Seamus O'Riley who still puts me in stitches with how seriously he takes his 'Statement Analysis' skills. It just reminds me how much I noticed the pseudo-psychologists freaked over Amanda when I was looking around. They had her hide tacked to the wall over the silliest stuff, it sounded just like the tabloid descriptions--which of course is all it was. Confirmation bias lead them all to the inescapable conclusion she was exactly what they wanted her to be. Funny how that works.

Click on the link above to perhaps get some insight into the mind of...someone other than Amanda Knox.
 
Mary_H said:
quadraginta said:
You're kidding, right?
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You didn't answer the questions.
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These questions?

Mary_H said:
Why do you suggest we have made allegations of some combination of corruption, malfeasance, incompetence or conspiracy without substantiation?

<snip>

What do you think we have accused Mignini, Giobbi, Stefanoni, the Keystone Kops and the Kangaroo Kourt of, that we have not been able to provide evidence for?
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This would be one of the more recent examples.

Mary_H said:
I believe the bra clasp was collected in the original collection of evidence in the week after the murder. When the shoe print evidence failed, Mignini told the investigative team to come up with some more evidence. They went through the stuff and found the bra clasp, which was ideal because it would link Raffaele to the sexual assault.

They took the bra clasp to the cottage and made the big production of "finding" it (do we have any videotapes of them also picking up and examining the two other items they took into custody that day?). Mignini then had Stefanoni manufacture some paperwork to make it look as if Raffaele's DNA had been found on the bra clasp.
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There are plenty more, of course.
 
Kaosium said:
Thank you Rose! I've never been able to find anything like this, and always had trouble with the context of that e-mail she sent. It's one of the first things I saw when I got interested in this again in the fall. I couldn't find it anywhere else with a cursory search, so I ended right back where I saw it the first time. Now, on the second was she there until 5:30 AM and had to be back by 11:00 AM on the 3rd like it says in the e-mail--or was Amanda mistaken? At any rate her sleeping schedule appears to be off and the interviews got aggressive on the fourth, which I'd forgotten reading about it so long ago.

Blunting the impact of her curious statement was the interspersion of the dear Seamus O'Riley who still puts me in stitches with how seriously he takes his 'Statement Analysis' skills. It just reminds me how much I noticed the pseudo-psychologists freaked over Amanda when I was looking around. They had her hide tacked to the wall over the silliest stuff, it sounded just like the tabloid descriptions--which of course is all it was. Confirmation bias lead them all to the inescapable conclusion she was exactly what they wanted her to be. Funny how that works.

Click on the link above to perhaps get some insight into the mind of...someone other than Amanda Knox.
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I believe she is referring to when they took her back to the flat and had her explain things at the crime scene. This questioning (not at the police station) is not included in my totals.
 
Kaosium said:
She looks healthier at any rate. Those pics I saw last week seemed to suggest she was wasting away. I suppose that's much better and endears more sympathy than the first time around, and perhaps again just a case of artistic license of the (Italian?) photographers.
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Sometimes the choice of a photo is a statement of opinion. Contrast the smiling pic posted at PMF. A picture can be used to make a statement. I do think the picture they posted of her laying her head on the lawyers shoulder is a good one but does not show her face. She does look a lot better than she did last month.
 
truethat said:
I am well aware of this phenomenom but I don't get the same sense in this case. I know all about eliciting false confessions.

However, she lied in her statements.
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What do you make of Knox's accusation of murder against her former boss? How does it fit in with your understanding of coerced confessions?
 
stilicho said:
What do you make of Knox's accusation of murder against her former boss? How does it fit in with your understanding of coerced confessions?
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It would seem to fit perfectly with the police's immediate incorrect assumption that Patrick had arranged with her and Raffaele to kill Meredith. They lied to Amanda saying they had hard evidence placing her and Patrick at the murder scene.

For reasons as yet unexplained the Perugia Police had real issues with Patrick. They came up with some cock and bull story about him changing his mobile to avoid being tracked, claimed his bar had been closed that night, and even when students testified he had been at work they still refused to release him until the professor from Switzerland had been interviewed. Then they destroyed his business by keeping it closed for months, claiming it was a 'crime scene'.
 
truethat said:
I am well aware of this phenomenom but I don't get the same sense in this case. I know all about eliciting false confessions.

However, she lied in her statements.

See it's one thing to say she just started making things up to "give them what they wanted to hear" in order to get out of a room, it's another thing to start changing your story right off the bat.

I'm a novice to all this and don't really take a position one way or the other, but I don't think her "coerced" statement is similar to other cases of coerced statements.

She started off with a lie. I watch a lot of 48 hours Mystery online, and the pattern of her behavior is very similar to the criminals that they have caught that actually did it. She starts off lying. Once they can tell her story is not adding up, (or for some experienced interrogators) then they begin to apply pressure.
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Where do you get the impression she started off lying?

What started the aggressive questioning which led to the 'confession' was that the police had misinterpreted a text message Amanda sent to her boss, Patrick, on the night of the 1st. She'd written 'See you later' (obviously meaning 'bye' in English) which - since she'd translated it into Italian, where it doesn't have the same colloquial meaning - the police thought meant she was going to meet him later that night.

When you say that the interrogators could tell her story wasn't adding up, you're right in a sense, but only because they misunderstood what she meant by the text message initially, and presumed it contradicted her story that she was at Raffaele's all night. In fact there was no contradiction between her claim to have stayed at his flat and the message she sent to Patrick.

I can understand where you're coming from in seeing the confession as showing her involvement in some way - when I first started reading about the case, that was probably the single biggest factor in making me think she was guilty of something at least, even if it was just covering up the crime. It was difficult to understand how someone could confess to being present during a murder if they weren't. Learning more about how these confessions come to be made, and particularly finding out that the police introduced Patrick's name to begin with, along with the obvious confusion in her handwritten statement, was what eventually led me to believe the confession was coerced. But it certainly wasn't a conclusion I came to straight away.
 
stilicho said:
What do you make of Knox's accusation of murder against her former boss? How does it fit in with your understanding of coerced confessions?
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What do you make of the judgment of the police in evaluating that statement and acting on it in a manner that will see the inside of yet another court in Europe?
 
Malkmus said:
This is exactly why everyone keeps citing other instances of people confessing to crimes they were never involved in and knew anything about.
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That post needs to be bookmarked for the next time someone claims that no one is saying false confessions never happen. I think a lot of people, even if they're aware in the abstract that false confessions are made, have a lot of trouble believing that it happened when it comes to any specific case (perhaps because they can't imagine that they could ever be led into making a false confession).
 
fecklessness/corruption in the abstract

katy_did said:
That post needs to be bookmarked for the next time someone claims that no one is saying false confessions never happen. I think a lot of people, even if they're aware in the abstract that false confessions are made, have a lot of trouble believing that it happened when it comes to any specific case (perhaps because they can't imagine that they could ever be led into making a false confession).
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katy_did,

That dichotomy (between what we believe in the abstract and what we believe in the specific) extends to the idea of police corruption or fecklessness. It was years after becoming a student of the DL case that I could finally bring myself to say aloud that Officer Gottlieb was an out-and-out liar who could have put three innocent men in prison for thirty years. It's a puzzle.
 
Dan O. said:
The interrogation process used in this and the Kercher case is flawed and produces bad results. Here it produced names of people that had alibies. There is no independent verification of the information obtained.

Put yourself in the place of one of those four. You have no alibi. Your friends have already confessed and fingered you as an accomplice. You have no alibi. With the other confessions pointing a finger at you, the jury of your peers (because they are just like you) will surely convict and the prosecutor says he is going to ask for the death penalty unless you confess and finger another accomplice. What are you going to do?
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I am certainly not going to make up a story. I'm really not going to do that.

There's another thing that really bothers me about the Knox case, people say that she said "See you later" in the text message and that the police misunderstood it.

Well its one thing to coerce a statement out of people when they all speak the same language but it seems a little weird to suggest it would work in this case. The other man that was interrogated by the guy was in fear and thought the interrogator was crazy.

If I saw someone drastically misunderstaning my statement I wouldn't continue the interview. I'd stop and not participate any more until someone was there to help me out.

The debunking of the lies seems a little weak to me. But again I'm still on the fence about it. Perhaps the most compelling part of the situation to me is what she did and said that morning.

First off she said that Kerscher was "missing" and I don't understand why if you came home and your flat mate had gone over friends the night before and you got to the house and the door was locked, what would raise concern? If it did raise concern with the burglery why would you go inside and take a shower?

Also why would you assume that your friend was missing? How did she know she even came home at all? Meredith was a friends house for dinner and a movie, why would Amanda not assume that she had spent the night at her friends house?


The fact that she came home and saw blood and an apparent break in and took a freaking shower and saw her friend door shut and assumed she was missing. I mean how do you guys explain that part? Is there some sort of explanation to that behavior?
 
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katy_did said:
Where do you get the impression she started off lying?

What started the aggressive questioning which led to the 'confession' was that the police had misinterpreted a text message Amanda sent to her boss, Patrick, on the night of the 1st. She'd written 'See you later' (obviously meaning 'bye' in English) which - since she'd translated it into Italian, where it doesn't have the same colloquial meaning - the police thought meant she was going to meet him later that night.

When you say that the interrogators could tell her story wasn't adding up, you're right in a sense, but only because they misunderstood what she meant by the text message initially, and presumed it contradicted her story that she was at Raffaele's all night. In fact there was no contradiction between her claim to have stayed at his flat and the message she sent to Patrick.

I can understand where you're coming from in seeing the confession as showing her involvement in some way - when I first started reading about the case, that was probably the single biggest factor in making me think she was guilty of something at least, even if it was just covering up the crime. It was difficult to understand how someone could confess to being present during a murder if they weren't. Learning more about how these confessions come to be made, and particularly finding out that the police introduced Patrick's name to begin with, along with the obvious confusion in her handwritten statement, was what eventually led me to believe the confession was coerced. But it certainly wasn't a conclusion I came to straight away.
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Do you have a copy of the hand written statement? I'd like to see that.


Here's a link to one I found, let me know if it is wrong

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1570225/Transcript-of-Amanda-Knoxs-note.html


Wow, I just read it. I was expecting some immature babble. This girls statement is written in a clear and organized way. For those of you who are saying she didn't "lie" right off the bat, well I can not understand why you would say that. Why didn't she remember what happened the night before? Why offer to go to a police station and offer whata help you can if you can't remember what happened? To me that is the lie, you don't remember. You don't remember if you had sex with Raffael? How can you not remember if you had sex with someone. The only explanation would be that she was on some sort of drug that is a lot stronger than pot.

Also she mentions that Raffael had blood on his hands etc. I'm sorry but this whole "I can't remember anything" to me sounds like a lie, that is what I'm sure it looked like to the police.
 
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Maresca

RoseMontague said:
Every indication I have is that the Kercher's lawyer left the courtroom for Amanda's statement. It is not directly stated that her statement is the reason he left.
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RoseMontague,

I am sure that Maresca left to make another statement to the press, no doubt explaining again how Italy is showing the world, and the U.S. how to do forensics. He said something very similar almost exactly one year ago, as Bob Graham reported.
 
halides1 said:
katy_did,

That dichotomy (between what we believe in the abstract and what we believe in the specific) extends to the idea of police corruption or fecklessness. It was years after becoming a student of the DL case that I could finally bring myself to say aloud that Officer Gottlieb was an out-and-out liar who could have put three innocent men in prison for thirty years. It's a puzzle.
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Very good point, Chris. Perhaps it's just we tend to think that if people are arrested the chances are they must've done something to warrant it, and that we want to believe the police are honourable and law-abiding (since, y'know, they're supposed to enforce the law!). I think the same issue applies to wrongful conviction cases in general. People accept they happen in theory, and in specific cases once the conviction has been overturned - but up until that point, there's a reluctance to believe it could have happened in any specific case.
 
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