We were talking about how much evidence, not what the impact of that evidence might be on the case. A single hair belonging to a known serial killer would be strong evidence. The question being addressed was how much evidence (as in the quantity) one would have to leave at the scene.
Yes, yes. The fact remains that it's
unlikely any murder resembling that theorised by the prosecution could be committed with two of the three participants leaving no trace.
I'm not quite sure that is what anybody is doing. Again you seem to be taking a small, or at least relatively small, part of the case and demanding that it contain, in isolation, proof beyond reasonable doubt. For the hundredth time... why?
I'm getting tired of trying to explain this kind of reasoning, since it's so consistently and creatively misunderstood by the-community-formerly-known-as-guilters. Possibly this is because it's a difficult idea for laypeople and they don't make the effort to try to understand it, and possibly it's because if they understood logic and probability they wouldn't be members of the-community-formerly-known-as-guilters in the first place.
One last time then.
If Ted is guilty if and only if A
and B are true, then to convict Ted you need to have proof beyond reasonable doubt of A
and B.
If Ted is guilty if and only if A
or B are true, then to convict Ted you need to have proof beyond reasonable doubt that (A or B) is true.
For Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito to be guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher a number of independently unlikely things all need to be true. They need to have been physically present (unlikely due to computer evidence), there needs to have been a staged break-in, there needs to have been a clean-up, they need to have left no trace of a clean-up nor trace in the murder room and so on. These are neither redundant nor optional, so a rational person needs to see proof beyond reasonably doubt of each of these propositions before they can even conceivably conclude that the probability of them being guilty rises to the level of proof beyond reasonable doubt.
If you're thinking "No fair! You can do that to prove any murderer should be found not guilty, by arbitrarily deciding that you need proof beyond reasonable doubt of every little thing!" then you haven't understood what I have just wrote and you need to think about it some more.
I'm glad you brought this up as, had things not gotten sidetracked into the Monster of Florence I had intended to being it up. My recollection though is different to yours. How was my original attempt "justifiably dismissed". I do not recall very much in the way of decisive or constructive criticism. There was one post that suggested I had not taken into account the homeless guy's testimony. I pointed out that I didn't need to. Dan O I think then posted a version of my narrative with everything about Amanda or Raffaele being involved crossed out. Could you explain what criticisms of the original narrative I failed to address.
The second time I mentioned the narrative Dan O again made fun without actually engaging with it. There was one poster who seemed to feel I was saying that Amanda and Raffaele thought Meredith was overreacting to being stabbed. I explained that this wasn't the case, and really, if we are trying to imagine scenarios where they are involved rather than trying to deny that such can exist I don't see why it was necessary for me to explain this as all of you have imaginations perfectly well up to the task. Halides I think complained that Amanda and Raffaele would have called the police. I made an attempt to address this at the time, but got no response. For myself, I think that if we insist that Amanda and Raffaele are the sorts of people who would definately immediately call the police and accept whatever heat went with that, I think we are essentially insisting that they are innocent and then demanding a guilty scenario be constructed that symultaneously contains the assumption that they are innocent.
This doesn't cut any ice around here.
If you can't come up with anything that makes sense, you can't just say "You all should use your imaginations and come up with it for me, I'm sure it's easy". If it's easy, do it.
Similarly if you can't come up with any scenario that doesn't immediately fall apart when someone asks "Why wouldn't they just call the police?", rather than demand that we give you a freebie and pretend that they wouldn't call the police, you should either come up with a story that doesn't fall apart at that point
or admit you have no such story.
Were they previously harmless? You surely mean something along the lines of "never convicted of anything", no? Hadn't both their parents expressed some kind of generalized concern for their behaviour? And by saying "stranger" you are exagerating the remoteness of their association with Guede.
Neither of them had any hint in their substantiated histories of violent, antisocial behaviour. I'm not playing the "convicted" game with you.
Rudy Guede was as far as anyone can establish known only by sight to Amanda and totally unknown to Raffaele Sollecito, so I scarcely think that I am exaggerating anything by terming him a "stranger". People in the-community-formerly-known-as-guilters have in the past speculated that they were secretly known to each other but zero evidence of this has ever emerged, so I think it's safe to dismiss it as wishful thinking.
It probably isn't very likely a priori, but unprecedented? Have University students never failed to phone the police when they should have? Not one has ever been involved in, say, a hit and run? What aspect of the case are you saying is unique. as I've said umpteen times, if you insist on every aspect of the case having been done all together somewhere else before you are clearly asking the impossible and falling victim to the sharpshooter fallacy. Please find me an example of a burglar who breaks in through a first floor window, is surprised, sexually assaults and then murders the occupant leaving a **** in the toilet and bloody fingerprints on the walls, flees, only to hang around town for a couple of days, the leaves the country only to contact friends immediately revealing his location.
Since nobody is doing that you are bashing a straw man of your own creation.
This might distract you from the fact that normal, sane university students with absolutely no history of violent crime never or virtually never gang up with a stranger to murder their flatmates for no reason, and hence that such an extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence. However it's not distracting anyone else.
It isn't a chain. The knife, the bra clasp, the interrogation, etc. etc. don't all have to be true, nor do any of them individually have to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt.
Those three aren't vital links in the chain, no, but then again I never said they were. You just made that up now and implicitly attributed it to me.
