How would you know?
Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case
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How would you know?
You've conflated cross-examination by a lawyer with interrogation by a police officer.
My point is that Sollecito, like Knox, had a 'brush with the law'/ engaged in antisocial conduct/ used street drugs before the homicide.
Viewed in light of his penchant for collecting knives and viewing animal porn, his use of street drugs militates strongly in favor of the notion that Sollectio was NOT an unlikely candidate for participation in a depraved act.
As for John Douglas apparently believing Knox and the boyfriend are innocent-let's face it, in this case you don't nearly need to be a world renowned criminal profiler to figure out that something's rotten in Italy.
Anyone with a bit of common sense- and without an axe to grind- should recognize how problematic is the claim that that those two people would have been involved in this crime.
I take it, then, that you reject the description of Derek as (inter alia) "shy" in the link provided?
In his PBS interviews, did he not seem rather shy/ sensitive/ meek to you (relative to the example of a 'rogue interrogator' given by the retired NY police officer, that is)?
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Kevin_Lowe
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You're teaching your grandmother how to suck one very limited and specific kind of egg. Which is very seasonal I suppose, if you are sucking it with other egg nog ingredients, but not useful on that basis.
A rational person is capable of evaluating logical relationships between facts and claims. They can tell when A implies B, or A is true if and only if B, or if A gives some mild reason to be inclined to think B but is far from conclusive.
A rational person doesn't, as I said earlier, necessarily look at a room full of horse crap and conclude that the crap is proof beyond reasonable doubt that there must be a horse in there, just because there is so much horse crap in the room. You could make that argument using your methods - horse crap corroborates the existence of a horse, there is an awful lot of horse crap, which makes an awful lot of corroboration, hence it's nigh certain there is a horse in there, right?
This inability to see logical relationships leads to foolishness like the Stefan Kiszko conviction. The police, using a cognitive methodology which I suspect was not unlike yours, seem to have thought "He had pron, that's -1 point. He was creepy, that's -1 point. He cracked under interrogation and gave a laughably false story, that's -200 points. With that and the other few thousand pages of evidence he's got -2356 points. He also can't produce sperm and the killer left sperm on the victim's body... hmm... fair play to him, that's worth +20 points. So he's still on -2336 points and he's guilty".
A rational person would see the real logical relationship between those claims and using the same facts would say "The killer could produce sperm and Stefan Kiszko could not produce sperm. Hence Stefan Kiszko is not the killer and the rest of the evidence is immediately rendered irrelevant".
capealadin
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Oh? You're an expert on case law concerning the nature of the RD standard and its application to the totality of the evidence?
Do tell.
RoseMontague
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I thought his analogy made a lot of sense, certainly more than your counter argument (which I have yet to see).
babycondor
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Agreed. Similar techniques could be employed in both.
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Chris_Halkides
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Tice; confession link
treehorn,
I recollect that he seemed shy, although some time has elapsed since I viewed this program. Being shy connotes something milder than being extremely introverted.
Yesterday Kaosium provided a fascinating link to an article on the subject of confessions and how juries perceive them, in response to one of your questions. I hope that you have had a chance to digest it.
treehorn,
I recollect that he seemed shy, although some time has elapsed since I viewed this program. Being shy connotes something milder than being extremely introverted.
Yesterday Kaosium provided a fascinating link to an article on the subject of confessions and how juries perceive them, in response to one of your questions. I hope that you have had a chance to digest it.
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katy_did
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I think perhaps the information you've been reading is a little outdated:
The same expert notes three vulnerability factors with regard to personality: 1) suggestibility; 2) a high trust in authority; 3) lack of confidence. Amanda certainly meets the criteria for 2) (her handwritten note is proof enough of that), although the other two are more difficult to assess in the context of the interrogation. It might be worth noting, though, that when during her testimony Comodi told her she made a call to her mother at 12 'before anything had happened', she never suspects Comodi is misleading her, but presumes she must indeed have made a call at 12. It doesn't occur to her to doubt what Comodi says.
There are also situational factors related to the interrogation which can make a false confession from the suspect more likely: for example, interrogations late at night, and in a language in which the suspect isn't fluent, both heighten the risk of a false confession. Certain manipulative police tactics can have the same effect with specific regard to coerced-internalized false confessions: for instance, lying to the suspect and telling her you have hard evidence she was at the crime scene, and then giving her a reason why she might not remember being there. According to Amanda's testimony, this is exactly what happened in her case. That she was young, in a foreign country, and distant from the emotional support of friends and family are still more risk factors.
Gudjonsson also notes:
Clearly, a safeguard that wasn't in place for Amanda (if we are to believe the police's scarcely believable claim that they recorded everything but the key interrogation).
All in all, it's a whole lot more complicated than 'only extreme introverts and the mentally defective make false confessions'.
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This is why I think lie detector tests should be given to all involved in the interrogation. Otherwise ther is no accountability. After all it was them that failed to record the interrogation.
And I have yet to see YOUR counter argument in respect of Knox's "ticket."
Before you work on that, however, perhaps you could share your understanding of Kevin's "analogy" with us:
1) Which parts of the fact pattern in this case are analogous to the "crap" (to borrow his phrase)?
2) Which parts of the fact pattern in this case are analogous to the "horse"?
I have no doubt.
That's just it - I'm trying to get a sense of what a psychologist means by "extreme introversion."
To the extent that it may be a 'relative' term, it's worth noting that all of the men interviewed struck me as quite shy/ mild-mannered relative to the 'rogue interrogator'.
The Court noted (at p. 61 of the translation) that Sollecito was considered "taciturn, shy, introverted..." by the college educators that felt compelled to "activate a monitoring" on Sollecito after being "shocked" by his taste for "hard-core" animal porn.
Perhaps, then, it could be argued that Sollecito may be a fit for the 'introvert' category...
Knox, on the other hand, is a problem - her courtroom performance on the stand (and off) was anything but 'meek'...
PS I've yet to check the link, but will.
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Mary_H
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No doubt the best a profiler can do is rely on a combination of experience (as you say) and statistical correlations based on research. It's not any worse than any other form of psychology in that sense, because people will never be 100% predictable.
Someone familiar with the research is probably more efficient at ruling out certain time-wasting approaches, too. As halides1 pointed out some time ago, there are no data that support the belief that a woman would be more likely to cover her victim than a man would be.
Mary_H
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