Actually, Mary, I'm not at all surprised that the issue of Raffaele's admissions has not loomed large on this board. It confirms a predisposition to ignore or gloss over some very problematic aspects of the case.
A very problematic aspect of the case would be some kind of hard evidence at the scene of the crime implicating Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito. However there isn't any apart from the DNA evidence currently under review.
A moderately problematic aspect of the case would be some kind of evidence conflicting with Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito's alibi. However there isn't any apart from the testimony of Curatolo which is also going to undergo review.
False statements made under conditions which we know are likely to provoke false statements from vulnerable subjects prove nothing one way or the other, and so cannot reasonably be described as "very problematic".
Amanda's alleged accomplice, her lover, tells the police that, contrary to what the two of them have been saying for days, she went to Le Chic the night in question. On what line of reasoning does this not go directly to the issue of where Amanda was that night, and what she was up to? It destroys her alibi and credibility.
What kind of logic is this?
Amanda Knox's alibi is supported by the computer evidence, and by the fact that she claimed watching Stardust as her alibi
before the police erased the relevant metadata and then destroyed the hard drive for good measure.
You can point to Raffaele's repudiation of his admissions, which plays right into the question "Was he lying when he said this, or lying when he said that?" In the absence of persuasive evidence that the admissions were involuntary, the jury will go with them. I have heard no such evidence--only speculation, conjecture and wishful thinking. This sort of thing is not admissible in any court I've ever heard of. Now, if there's reason to believe that the prosecution, in Amanda's case, can't point to Raf's admissions, please enlighten me.
Sorry to seem flippant to you, LondonJohn, but when you've heard dozens of complaints of coercion and maltreatment, they tend to lose their emotive impact.
What has emotional impact got to do with it?
It is proven, scientific fact that people come out with false statements some of the time under certain conditions.
Whether those conditions were present in these cases is impossible to determine with complete certainty, because the tapes of the interrogations turn out to be another vital piece of evidence which the police lost/destroyed/forgot.
You can call me a cynic, but when the accused tell the police their alibi and
then the police not only fail to check it but in fact make a thorough job of destroying the evidence that could falsify or verify that alibi, I tend to think it more likely than not that the accused were telling the truth. When the accused claim that they were assaulted, told that they had false memories and so on and the police can't come up with the tapes of those interrogations (but
only those) then once again I think it more likely than not that the accused were telling the truth.
If we are talking about "very problematic" aspects of the case, you might want to talk about what happened to the Stardust metadata and the hard drive it came on. You might want to talk about what happened to the tapes of the most important interrogations/interviews/whateveryouwant in the investigation. You might want to talk about the the ostentatiously filmed collection of the bra clasp combined with the failure to test the stain on the pillow under Meredith's body, at a time when the prosecution desperately needed something against Raffaele. Those all strike me as very problematic aspects of the way this investigation was conducted.
A cognitive error that humans are very prone to is privileging folk-psychological guesswork like "I don't think an innocent person would do that! I sure don't think I would do that!" over hard scientific facts like computer records of human interaction or mobile phone calls, or properly collected and used forensic evidence. When our ancestors were killing each other in Africa all we had to rely on was that kind of folk-psychological guesswork. However now we live in a vastly more knowledgeable and powerful society where relying on folk-psychological guesswork to solve crimes is as pitifully foolish as praying to the Rain God when you could turn on a hose, or doing the Buffalo Dance when you could walk to the supermarket.
The fact is that your folk-psychological guesswork can very easily be totally wrong. Once you accept that and look at the good evidence, the solution to the puzzle of Meredith Kercher's murder falls out very easily.
