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Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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Moss,

I felt that your points about the layout of the police station were reasonable. Given the fact that they recorded prior telephone call(s} made by Ms. Knox and at least one conversation between Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito, do you find it odd that they would not choose to record the interrogation? Do you buy any of the various explanations ILE put forth for not recording them?
Surely, by definition a bugged call is recorded? It's not as if you can jot down a summary and get the people making the call to sign it. Plus, you don't know when the bugged conversation is going to happen, what if the people who should be listening are at lunch or something. The recording of the bugged conversations keeps being used as an example or how they recorded everything, it was a silly example a year ago and it's a silly one now.
 
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I must have missed a point here. What was the prosecution's excuse for how the bra clasp moved across the floor? Ater all it was a sealed crime scene correct?
 
Surely, by definition a bugged call is recorded? It's not as if you can jot down a summary and get the people making the call to sign it. The recording of the bugged conversations keeps being used as an example or how they recorded everything, it was a silly example a year ago and it's a silly one now.

Mignini admitted recording other interviews including Laura's and Filomena's.
 
Moss,

I felt that your points about the layout of the police station were reasonable. Given the fact that they recorded prior telephone call(s} made by Ms. Knox and at least one conversation between Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito, do you find it odd that they would not choose to record the interrogation? Do you buy any of the various explanations ILE put forth for not recording them?

I have to admit that I do not recall any of those explanations. So I'm a bit at a loss to actually judge them.
Maybe I'm thinking in rather simplistic terms, but it seems pretty logical to record the phone calls as you may need to listen repeatedly to correctly understand/transcribe them while you can always ask again during an interview.
 
I must have missed a point here. What was the prosecution's excuse for how the bra clasp moved across the floor? Ater all it was a sealed crime scene correct?

I think I recall someone mentioning rats, but that could have been me, hard to remember exactly.
 
Juicy quotes? Rightly embittered? Again, pretty ambiguous. There's been so much spin about Amanda in either direction that I honestly don't give two tucks on... wait, I shouldn't quote Transmetropolitan here.
Suffice to say that I found it pretty interesting that the victim received remarkably less attention either way. I mean: she isn't mentioned in the title of this thread nor in the tags. But well, I said that way back and even then the case seems to fall and hang with Amanda Knox for good or ill.

It was a phenomena, altogether unexpected I think, a bizarre fusion of police 'leaks,' tabloid imagination, and the naivety of kinda an uninhibited hippy chick. I imagine she would rather have done with much less of that attention, and now perhaps the police might have preferred they hadn't helped fuel it by giving her that fake aids test and then 'leaking' her diary to the tabloids as that attention will likely lead to her freedom eventually.

I heard the kinky black hair story a few times. I wonder where it actually originates. What I find slightly curious: why would that embarrass the police? If it had been found it might have been another piece of evidence against Rudy.

They hardly needed it. They left things like his DNA on the purse at the scene originally because they thought they had all they needed. As for where the story came from, they told the press, and why would they want to remind anyone at court they originally thought it had been Patrick's and arrested him on that score, when they wanted to scapegoat Amanda completely?


Maybe he is indeed still pissed. It happens. I'm not sure if your notion that the whole manner in which his name came into play (which I as indicated in my post before find ambiguous) excuses her in his eyes. I suppose that really depends on the individual.

It could have occurred to him that regardless of what she said under any circumstances the police might just have checked his alibi before arresting him, or for that matter released him long before when oodles and scads of people came forward to proffer an alibi within days of his arrest. If not, he's being irrational, and mindless vengeance is subject to scrutiny, and perhaps someone should tell him he might be subject to humiliation in the end. He's done all he could to damn a girl publicly with an non-sequestered jury for what the police did when that girl is facing 'life' in prison now.


I for one am not sure if I would ever stop being angry with someone that implicated me in a crime I had nothing to do with. I know it's hard to resist authorities (Milgram experiment et al pretty much show how hard it is), but then again I do hold my acquaintances and myself to the standard to do the right thing. Even if it gets me into trouble.

Heh, I was going to post a page the other day on the Milgram experiment, but demurred as I was going to apply it to the police following orders and thought it might be over-the-top and I didn't want to run into accusations of Goodwin's law. :p

I think there's studies more relevant to Amanda's situation that have been posted the past few days. I posted one to Treehorn about two days ago, and I noticed Halides1 and Katy_Did posted a couple too.

I am as of yet undecided whether or not they have been involved.
There are some things that might imply they were and some that imply they weren't.

I tend to enjoy the notion that they may be innocent but acted in such a manner that led the police to suspect them. (Or to put it bluntly: They were young, stupid and knackered. And accidentally managed to push all the wrong buttons when it comes to the instincts of policemen.)
Therefore I'm trying to neither condemn nor champion them. I just can't make up my mind either way.

I did quite a lot of reading on it from including the Massei Report and being...unimpressed I decided to try to piece together an argument for guilt--and couldn't do it. Thus I finally registered to see if anyone else could, and no one wanted to try. Then I found out what the 'rest of' the evidence entailed when SomeAlibi first registered and my final questions were answered.

I found the biggest hurdle to overcome for me mentally was the idea that the police could botch something this badly, get it through a court, and any of them think they'd ever get away with it. Your mileage may vary.


There are still things that I think are quite counterproductive, for example allegations of a police conspiracy that even involves Patrick. There just does not seem to be enough evidence of that either that does not need a lot of speculation on the motives of the police. I think I have repeatedly asked: how much of this is playing it by the standard procedure? I've yet to see the baseline from which this case supposedly deviates.

I kinda know what you mean, when I first read the whole sordid stories of the bra clasp and the 'murder weapon' my thought was 'That's impossible! Why would anyone try to pretend that they'd ever even try to bring that into court, let alone get the court to accept it! What a bizarre exaggeration that must be!

Except it wasn't. I didn't believe a top policeman would ever say on TV that they didn't need evidence to tell guilt, that they could just study behavior and that they tacked up a picture of Amanda Knox next to convicted mafioso--a year before they even charged her with a crime. I'd seen a short youtube clip but I figured it had to be out of context, and thus a detriment to making an argument for innocence. I was kinda flabbergasted to find out that really happened.

I guess I finally figured: what would you expect to get if gathering evidence of innocent people, and then somehow it got through court because the media had basically convinced everyone she had to be guilty for reasons that turned out to be entirely untrue, and 'evidence' that didn't actually exist?

I think the 'conspiracy' here is pretending that three people who barely knew each other raped and murdered a girl for no reason, then one flees the country while the other two discover it the next day and call the police. There's no evidence of the two of them and forensics indicates there could have been no clean up in the murder room.

Keep in mind the police arrested three people before they even knew the results of the forensics. They arrested them on the basis of information that turned to be untrue and putting the screws to a girl for about fifteen hours in four days before getting her to 'vaguely remember' something that 'matched what they knew happened'---but turned out to be entirely untrue.


See above for part of the answer for this. You view it as an attempt at slander. His motive may be that he still feels wronged by her. We can only guess. I'm not sure which guess could be remotely correct.
The "confession" was relevant to his case. Should it have been left out? Why? I can understand that the timing worked against her, but it was her own writing that made her look bad, not something arbitrary.

I dunno, what's the point of having things 'inadmissible' then? The idea is you stop the police from taking the liberties they did with Amanda Knox, then pretending they 'never taped' the big interrogation session when they taped just about everything else. That way the police aren't supposed to be able to intimidate someone into saying what they want to hear, even getting them to believe it for a while, then convicting them on that basis.



I have tried to follow the arguments about them as time permits and read up on some points. But I still get the feeling that I lack the general knowledge to put what I read in context. That's why I'm glad that there are more experts weighing in on them. My hope is that this clarifies some points. But I suspect it will end up as it has ended here. Diametrically opposite opinions on the validity which for my lay understanding are hard to judge.

Yeah, I know, especially when the debate between them is generally less cordial than the Israel/PLO 'discussion.' It is just a bizarre phenomena, which is why it fascinates me so! :)
 
the equipment must have been in good working order

Surely, by definition a bugged call is recorded? It's not as if you can jot down a summary and get the people making the call to sign it. Plus, you don't know when the bugged conversation is going to happen, what if the people who should be listening are at lunch or something. The recording of the bugged conversations keeps being used as an example or how they recorded everything, it was a silly example a year ago and it's a silly one now.

shuttlt,

I am going to squelch my desire to tell you what I find silly (at least temporarily). However, you are ignoring the fact that ILE recorded Raffaele and Amanda talking to each other in the police station. To the best of my knowledge this occurred in an interrogation room on or about 3 November. So I guess the equipment worked.
 
It was a phenomena, altogether unexpected I think, a bizarre fusion of police 'leaks,' tabloid imagination, and the naivety of kinda an uninhibited hippy chick. I imagine she would rather have done with much less of that attention, and now perhaps the police might have preferred they hadn't helped fuel it by giving her that fake aids test and then 'leaking' her diary to the tabloids as that attention will likely lead to her freedom eventually.
Amanda's team were responsible for leaking chunks of the diary remarkably early. There are small badly translated snippets before that, but Amanda's team was involved in this very early as well. Something like three weeks after the last diary entry there is a UK reporter saying that sources close to Amanda have released another chunk of the diary.
 
they were not easy to understand

I have to admit that I do not recall any of those explanations. So I'm a bit at a loss to actually judge them.
Maybe I'm thinking in rather simplistic terms, but it seems pretty logical to record the phone calls as you may need to listen repeatedly to correctly understand/transcribe them while you can always ask again during an interview.

Moss,

IIRC, ILE had a tough time transcribing and/or understanding the conversation between Raffaele and Amanda. Given that experience, you would think that they would want to record the interview so that they could go over it as many times as they wanted.

One of the explanations was that they were so involved with arresting Patrick that they overlooked recording the interview. That does not explain anything that happened prior to Amanda's false accusation, IMHO.
 
shuttlt,

I am going to squelch my desire to tell you what I find silly (at least temporarily). However, you are ignoring the fact that ILE recorded Raffaele and Amanda talking to each other in the police station. To the best of my knowledge this occurred in an interrogation room on or about 3 November. So I guess the equipment worked.
I don't dispute the equipment worked. I just think that taped phone calls are a very bad example, as are secretly recorded conversations. As has been pointed out, they can't stop the conversation and say "sorry, we didn't catch that", or "could you hold on, the guy taking the notes as popped to the loo" and all the other reasons previously given. Other interviews and interrogations being recorded, or not recorded are what is interesting.
 
juries, police deception, and false confessions

To all,

Kasium provided a link to an article, "Police deception during interrogation and its surprising influence on jurors' perceptions of confession evidence." The authors are Forrest and Woody, but the pdf file format is "secured," which apparently means that one cannot copy and paste text. It is a good read, however.
 
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I hope this isn't that you can't imagine a situation where Amanda is guilty of something.
If she was involved, presumably she was lying about her involvement the whole time. She probably would have lied about where she was, what she was doing and when quite a bit. I'm sure there are other things she would have lied about as well, were she involved.

If she wasn't involved, she could still have lied about stuff at an earlier stage for whatever stupid reasons made it feel sensible at the time. Who knows?

I have to go with the evidence, and that tells me she couldn't have been in that room hacking away at anyone, and the police trying to put her there with that absurd knife makes me awfully suspicious of them. However, it could be that was just contamination or a secondary transfer--which incidentally would make more sense of police behavior too--and they decided to use it because they had nothing else, and she might have been complicit in something else.

She could have been standing in the doorway, or perhaps cowering outside the room as in her 'vision.'

However that leaves questions I just can't come up with answers for that don't sound absurd:

Why did she go take a shower, come back to get Raffaele, then have him call the police?

Why didn't she just rat out Rudy?

How come it took them so damn long to get what they did out of her, and why did it turn out to be entirely untrue--when they said it 'matched?'

How come Rudy didn't just string them both up by their short-n-curlies when he found out they'd been arrested for his crime? If he was there, and knew Amanda and Raffaele was, with a decent lie he might have walked, and he was known for being a shameless liar according to his foster dad. Instead he comes back with something about a left-handed stranger.

That's just off the top of my head, there's more. All the silly little 'inconsistencies' some find with the timeline for innocence are nothing compared to what you have to try to explain if she's actually guilty of something.

I know, I've tried to do this. You have fun! :)
 
I wonder if Patrick knows that the way he was implicated by Amanda was through the police insisting they knew she had met up with him that night over misinterpretation of the text and when that didn't work, insisting she was traumatized and simply didn't remember, then giving her a storyline that she agreed with out of desperation.
Whatever happened the night she accused Patrick- and amanda herself didn't claim then she was abused or coerced- the fact still remains that she had two whole weeks during which he was in jail when she might have offered to correct her "mistaken" accusation.
She was bugged telling her mother of his innocence during this time.
 
I don't dispute the equipment worked. I just think that taped phone calls are a very bad example, as are secretly recorded conversations. As has been pointed out, they can't stop the conversation and say "sorry, we didn't catch that", or "could you hold on, the guy taking the notes as popped to the loo" and all the other reasons previously given. Other interviews and interrogations being recorded, or not recorded are what is interesting.

Here is the quote regarding what was recorded and what was not.



You didn’t record it?

No. I usually do when for example I am in my office. I recorded the declarations of her roommates and of the witnesses. But that night, we were at the police station, there was agitation, and we had to go and arrest Lumumba, who had just been accused by Amanda. Lumumba was later cleared thanks to me

http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php...s_doug_preston_looking_increasingly_incompet/

I thought his claim about clearing Patrick was amusing.
 
The collection of liquids? OK. It does not say anything about taking other objects if the sample is transportable. If it isn't it says get a sample from the "stain" and one from somwhere unstained. The material was supposed to be in the scratch on the knife. Why not swab the scratch and elsewhere on the knife?

I wasn't talking about the knife there.

Is this and Steve Moore all injusticeinperugia have managed to find? Surely something comfirming what people keep claiming, that other items not believed to be associated with the crime are routinely taken to act as controls.

They're taken as they could also be the murder weapon. That knife couldn't have caused all the wounds, even if they didn't realize that when collecting it, leaving at least one more knife in the drawer is just...unexplainable.

That's why I wonder if they didn't tell Raffaele in the interrogation that they found a knife at his place with Meredith's DNA on it, and he came up with a story about pricking Meredith with a kitchen knife and they had him describe it. Speculation to be sure, but just taking that one knife makes FBI guys who done investigations, collected evidence, and who are paid to be suspicious, well, suspicious.
;)
 
Why did she go take a shower, come back to get Raffaele, then have him call the police?
People with something to hide do sometimes turn up to the crimescene, contact police and so on. I don't see that them calling the police is important, the shower perhaps more so. The traditional PMF explanation would be in order to control the crime scene and make sure to be the first ones to tell the police what was out of place. Also, presumably being there would be good from a forensic point of view.

Why didn't she just rat out Rudy?
And say what? Admitting to having been there and seen Patrick commit the murder got her locked up, would saying "actually I've been protecting Rudy" have gotten her off? Would she be believed? If you mean blame Rudy immediately, perhaps she hoped she wouldn't have to admit to anything at all, and then each moment they didn't tell the truth made it harder to do so.

How come it took them so damn long to get what they did out of her, and why did it turn out to be entirely untrue--when they said it 'matched?'
Presumably she didn't want to admit to having been there. When she was forced to she went with the story that took the least input from her and the minumum of dealing with the real events.

How come Rudy didn't just string them both up by their short-n-curlies when he found out they'd been arrested for his crime? If he was there, and knew Amanda and Raffaele was, with a decent lie he might have walked, and he was known for being a shameless liar according to his foster dad. Instead he comes back with something about a left-handed stranger.
If this could have worked, why couldn't he have done it anyway and walked? Amanda and Raffaele were already in trouble by the time he had to commit himself to a story.

I greatly appreciate you engaging with this.
 
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I wasn't talking about the knife there.
Fair enough.

They're taken as they could also be the murder weapon. That knife couldn't have caused all the wounds, even if they didn't realize that when collecting it, leaving at least one more knife in the drawer is just...unexplainable.
The picture of the draw shown by Charlie months back shows no other sharp knives in the draw. Has another one come to light? People always used to talk as if there were many knives and the mystery was why the police chose that one. Charlie's picture confused that narrative a little.

That's why I wonder if they didn't tell Raffaele in the interrogation that they found a knife at his place with Meredith's DNA on it, and he came up with a story about pricking Meredith with a kitchen knife and they had him describe it.
I don't get you. They pretended to have been to his place and found a knife and he came up with the story. Days later they go to his place and find the knife and so he writes the story down, failing to mention anywhere that they had told him about the knife before, so to him the news was old when he wrote the story?
 
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