Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[loverofzion]

I honestly don't think that the 'It's not Raffaele's DNA, or if it is then it's planted' defense is going to find much traction.

Finally, a voice of reason!

 

[katy_did]

I've tried to say this twice already: the entire point is what do the ones and zeros amount to? If it shows some credible activity then it's massive for Raffaele. But the problem as I've pointed out is directly contradicting direct testimony from Amanda, direct evidence from Raffaele's ISP that there's no internet activity, direct evidence that it's not audio or visual media being played (VLC and iTunes generate event log data either side of the 8 and half hour gap quite happily) and his girlfriend says he's in the kitchen for what three quarters of an hour and making love to her on the bed and falling asleep together in the bed. And yet you want to jury to believe he's constantly interacting with the computer every six minutes or something for nine hours?

Doing what????

He's not on the web, he's not using music or film, there's no event logs from any application at all, just an unsubstantiated "ones and zeros". So back at you; what do the one and zeros actually denote? It better be bloody good because I can't for the life of me think what one does for 9 hours at a laptop without the web, without music, without video, without applications and when your girlfriend says you are elsewhere.

Can you not see why this looks like a massive problem?

How about: they were listening to music from CDs? That would have left no trace on the system, and a music CD was taken from Raffaele's computer by the postal police. Or: they were watching films or listening to music files of which the dates were subsequently modified, either during the four days before their arrest, or as being among the 520+ files whose date was altered at the time the computer was confiscated and used by the police. If they watched Stardust, we wouldn't be able to tell. Or: Raffaele was downloading music/movie files and kept moving the mouse to check on their progress. All that's needed for the screensaver to switch off is for someone to move the mouse, there would be no need for any files to be opened at all.

Now your turn: why do you think the screensaver was never active for more than six minutes up until 6:30? The defence say that from the computer records it was never deactivated.

 

[tronic]

Another perplexing issue for me was Amanda explaining to the Postal Police that it was not unusual for Meredith to lock her bedroom door (contradicted by Filomena), yet Raffaele had tried forcing the door and I believe Amanda tried looking into Meredith's room from the balcony. Amanda's comment is contradicted by hers and Raffaele's actions prior to the police arriving.

AK/RS in explanation to the police ended up fabricating their stories separately ... there are multiple multiple inconsistancies in their accounts. That cannot be blamed on memory lapse or drugs because where they account they are accounting specific scenarios (temporally and in relation to people and objects) .. RS also told Kate Mansey the journalist that he was at a party with Knox on the night Meredith Kercher was killed. That was only his first disproved alibi. Problems arise in their testimony where they relate specific instances/actions. It may have been better for them both to say they didn't remember ANYTHING about that night -- like I say when they did account there are multiple GLARING deficiencies. It is the greater part of the case against Knox/Sollecito other than the DNA/witness evidence. RS stayed off the stand because this situation would have only got worse when cross examined against Knox's testimony. They tried, but they didn't manage to get their story straight in the limited amount of time before they were arrested due to the mass of information required to be rehearsed/fixed. They had no idea what regions the police would focus on. Police ripped their fabrications apart - it didn't take much time. The Knox/Sollecito parties of defense don't want their full testimonies out there because they are so damaging.

 

[katy_did]

Once again: that the perpetrator was an African man; that there were plural attackers; that there was a sexual assault; and that she (amanda) knew the positioning of the body at death WITHOUT being able to see into the room.

Didn't she say the body was found in the wardrobe with a foot sticking out? Do you know of some evidence that shows the body was originally in the wardrobe with a foot sticking out...?

 

[katy_did]

As the author of that Less Wrong post, I can confirm that I don't personally know Kevin -- though I have very much enjoyed his comments, including this one.

In general, actually, I'm much more favorably impressed with the quality of discussion about this case here than I was when I lurked a year ago. So either my memory is uncharitable (in which case, apologies!) or things have improved considerably (in which case, well done!).

As anyone who's seen me elsewhere (under this username) will be aware, I am a strong, unapologetic innocentista with regard to Knox and Sollecito.

Welcome komponisto. Good to see you here; I've enjoyed your posts over at Less Wrong and elsewhere. I like the way they think at LW, even if I am still trying to wrap my head around Bayes' theorem. LOL. This place is a bit more, um, hospitable and conducive to discussion than some of the other forums in which you might have discussed the case.

 

[komponisto]

Welcome komponisto. Good to see you here; I've enjoyed your posts over at Less Wrong and elsewhere. I like the way they think at LW, even if I am still trying to wrap my head around Bayes' theorem. LOL. This place is a bit more, um, hospitable and conducive to discussion than some of the other forums in which you might have discussed the case.

Thanks! It does indeed look that way so far.

If you're interested in better understanding Bayes' theorem, check out my post on Less Wrong entitled "Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way)". It has pictures! (Unfortunately, I'm not yet able to post links here.)

 

[LondonJohn]

Didn't she say the body was found in the wardrobe with a foot sticking out? Do you know of some evidence that shows the body was originally in the wardrobe with a foot sticking out...?

Pfft we don't need to worry about little details like those! She quite obviously had information that she shouldn't have been privy to. Oh, wait, hang on......

 

[komponisto]

I honestly don't think that the 'It's not Raffaele's DNA, or if it is then it's planted' defense is going to find much traction.

(1) Contamination is not the same thing as planting.

(2) What is so hard to understand about there being more than one problem with a purported piece of evidence?

 

[LondonJohn]

AK/RS in explanation to the police ended up fabricating their stories separately ... there are multiple multiple inconsistancies in their accounts. That cannot be blamed on memory lapse or drugs because where they account they are accounting specific scenarios (temporally and in relation to people and objects) .. RS also told Kate Mansey the journalist that he was at a party with Knox on the night Meredith Kercher was killed. That was only his first disproved alibi. Problems arise in their testimony where they relate specific instances/actions. It may have been better for them both to say they didn't remember ANYTHING about that night -- like I say when they did account there are multiple GLARING deficiencies. It is the greater part of the case against Knox/Sollecito other than the DNA/witness evidence. RS stayed off the stand because this situation would have only got worse when cross examined against Knox's testimony. They tried, but they didn't manage to get their story straight in the limited amount of time before they were arrested due to the mass of information required to be rehearsed/fixed. They had no idea what regions the police would focus on. Police ripped their fabrications apart - it didn't take much time. The Knox/Sollecito parties of defense don't want their full testimonies out there because they are so damaging.

I wonder if the police or prosecutor ever requested Kate Mansey's tape recording of her interview with Sollecito........?

 

[RoseMontague]

Didn't she say the body was found in the wardrobe with a foot sticking out? Do you know of some evidence that shows the body was originally in the wardrobe with a foot sticking out...?

Yes, there is that. And of course the part where Raffaele said they were concerned because Meredith never locked her door. LOL.

As one poster pointed out before, it is almost as if the reporter interviewed someone other than Raffaele.

 

[LondonJohn]

Yes. Raf could hardly have pushed as it was not a strong door to open.
amada never looked from the blacony into Meredith's room as it would have been almost impossible to do.

Her claiming that she was panicked about F's door being open; yet saying nothing to the Postal Police about it when they arrived is , well , another red flag about amanda.

Knox never said that she looked into Meredith's room from the balcony. She said that she considered trying to do so, but that Sollecito pulled her back because he could see that it was an overly dangerous endeavour.

 

[RoseMontague]

(1) Contamination is not the same thing as planting.

(2) What is so hard to understand about there being more than one problem with a purported piece of evidence?

Welcome Komponisto.
Regarding the bra clasp, the first question should be if it is Raffaele's DNA on the clasp and then the question becomes how did it get there. The appeal points out that the first question is still in dispute. If you make the assumption that it is Raffaele's DNA then I see several possibilities.

1. The police theory of him handling the bra clasp is correct despite the fact that it makes no sense for him to even touch that piece of metal in normal removal or cutting it off and none of his DNA was found anywhere else on the bra, her clothes, on her, or in the room. I guess they seem to think that Raffaele is somehow assisting Rudy in the sexual part of the assault, for some strange reason that I still do not understand.

2. The DNA got there through contamination at the scene. This seems to be a good possibility based on the dirty gloves and of course dirty feet that they came in with from other parts of the flat (I believe they put their white foot covers on in the kitchen/living room area and then walked into Meredith's room, stepping several times on the area where they proceeded to drop the clasp before picking it up again). The fact that the clasp was left in there 44 days before retrieval and somehow moved from one spot to another next to a lot of other discarded items seems telling as well from the standpoint of possible contamination. The presence of other partial DNA profiles on the clasp is also significant from a possible contamination standpoint.

3. The DNA got there through contamination at the lab. This seems less likely than the supposed DNA on the knife blade.

4. The DNA was planted on the clasp, on top of the already existent DNA of Meredith and other unidentified partial profiles. After viewing the video of this bra clasp collection, they seem to me to act like they have made a great discovery and can even see Raffaele's DNA through close examination. Every time I watch this video I get the feeling that they somehow know in advance how important this piece of evidence is. The fact that it came on the heels of the discovery that the only piece of evidence they had that they thought was Raffaele's in Meredith's room (the bloody shoe-print on the pillow) turned out to be Rudy's instead is also suspicious.

 

[Moss]

If you have an alternative hypothesis you can back up, please present it.

Unsupported ridicule for someone else's hypothesis alone contributes little to the conversation.

You mean something like actually taking it at face value that he felt himself misrepresented? Not complicated enough?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

As the author of that Less Wrong post, I can confirm that I don't personally know Kevin -- though I have very much enjoyed his comments, including this one.

Thank you - that means something to me, coming from you.

In general, actually, I'm much more favorably impressed with the quality of discussion about this case here than I was when I lurked a year ago. So either my memory is uncharitable (in which case, apologies!) or things have improved considerably (in which case, well done!).

As anyone who's seen me elsewhere (under this username) will be aware, I am a strong, unapologetic innocentista with regard to Knox and Sollecito. Here are some things I'd be interested in discussing with anyone willing (not necessarily exhaustive):

- For any who believe that Knox and Sollecito are guilty: why? I mean this in a very specific sense: what is your ranking of the various pieces of evidence against them, in order from strongest to weakest? How much does each item move your opinion? What is the "tipping point", i.e. the smallest subset of evidence that nudges your probability of guilt over 50%? (Subset need not be unique, of course -- I'd just like an example of a minimal set of evidence that causes you to say "Okay, now that I know this, I think it's more likely than not that they were involved".)

I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but my belief based on the evidence available to me is that the people who believe that Knox and Sollecito are guilty are a self-selecting group of people who simply aren't capable of thinking this way, in much the same way that the people who believe in homeopathy are a self-selecting group of people who don't understand the scientific method.

That doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong, although I think it does mean that their wrongness is a safe Bayesian bet. It doesn't even mean they are worse-than-average people in any important sense. It does mean that you are not going to get an honest answer to your question though unless I am completely wrong.

I really, honestly, from the depths of my metaphorical soul wish that I was completely wrong and yearn to be proved completely wrong.

- For those who agree with me that AK & RS are innocent (or are willing to assume this for the sake of argument): what is the most likely explanation for the bra clasp DNA result? Is it the result of contamination at the scene, at the lab, or is it not actually Sollecito's DNA at all (as his appeal document maintains)? I can't say I have much of an opinion on this. Clearly it's a noisy result, and extremely weak evidence of guilt even if his DNA was actually on it. But I'm curious about the implications of Tagliabracci's disputing the match for several (but only a few) of the genetic loci. How likely is it that someone other than Sollecito would match his profile in 10 of the 16 loci examined? If you assume that there are on average, say, between 2 and 10 possible alleles at each locus, uniformly distributed among the population, with alleles being independent of each other (not sure how good these assumptions are!), then calculation suggests this is somewhat-to-extremely unlikely, making it perhaps a better assumption that Tagliabracci has erred in his analysis than that an infinitesimally improbable near-match has occurred. (Imagine selecting two 16-digit numbers at random and having them match in 10 of the digits; do this for both binary and decimal numbers to get the range of probabilities involved.) On the other hand, if this is right, Tagliabracci himself surely realizes this! And furthermore, I believe I read a comment from Halides earlier stating that Meredith matched Raffaele at 11 loci (!). So I have to admit to some confusion here (even if it is of little consequence on the main question of guilt).

This is a very hard problem to get a grip on.

The hypothesis that Stefanoni deliberately spiked the bra clasp with Raffaele's DNA is an extraordinary one which requires extraordinary evidence. The vast bulk of the time I do not think that forensic scientists deliberately frame people, so significant evidence is required to support the hypothesis that Stefanoni did so.

However there are a number of disturbing elements to the bra clasp story. The bra clasp was initially totally ignored despite its obvious relevance to the crime - someone at some stage was quite likely to have either attempted to open it, or to have gripped it while they cut away Meredith's bra, so it should have been collected and tested in the first instance. Yet it was not.

Then Stefanoni made a non-standard personal trip out to the murder house to seek additional evidence, when in the normal course of things Stefanoni would stay at home in the lab analysing what was sent to her. This trip was made at the time when the prosecution had nailed its colours to the mast by announcing that they knew Raffaele was guilty, but after their claimed footprint evidence had been humiliatingly debunked and when they had absolutely no forensic evidence at all to implicate Raffaele in the crime.

The bra clasp was found in a pile of rubbish where, as video evidence showed, it had somehow moved around after the crime scene was supposedly sealed. The bra clasp was carefully recorded as it was passed around with dirty gloves, placed on the floor again, and then picked up.

After all this the bra clasp is claimed to have some but not all of Raffaele's alleles on it, which even if all was above board would in most jurisdictions not be sufficiently strong evidence to be allowed into court.

Stefanoni also has form for misleading the court, failing to disclose test results, making false claims about forensic science, and conducting LCN DNA testing without understanding the required precautions against contamination. The lab at which she works claims never to have had a contamination incident despite not having proper controls in place, despite not having a contamination log to track incidents and despite not being certified at the time the tests took place.

I'm 99.9...9% sure Stefanoni is a poor forensic scientist. I'm 99.9...9% sure she either doesn't understand DNA forensics to a professionally competent level or is willing to lie to a court about the topic. I just don't know whether she spiked the bra clasp or not.

If she did it, I think she did it amateurishly (to be generous) or with room for plausible deniability (to be ungenerous). If she had wanted to present 100% certain evidence that Raffaele's DNA was on the bra clasp and had the opportunity for whatever dirty work she wanted she could have done that, rather than presenting the ambiguous result we have to work with. She could have spiked the bra clasp with Raffaele's reference sample and/or rerun the test until the results were unambiguous.

In the end this internal debate shouldn't matter. Unless a rational observer has p>0.95 at the very least that the result was not the result of deliberate misconduct forensic evidence shouldn't be taken to be true beyond reasonable doubt, and I'm a long way from p>0.95 that Stefanoni isn't bent.

Right now I'd say that I think it's perhaps 60% likely that Stefanoni consciously nudged the results by some means, 39.9...9% likely that she just ran the results until she got a result she liked because she's a poor scientist rather than a malignant one, and 0.0...1% likely that Raffaele's DNA got on the clasp because he handled her bra during the murder.

 

[RoseMontague]

You mean something like actually taking it at face value that he felt himself misrepresented? Not complicated enough?

No worries from me, Moss, as it was my hypothesis you are referring to, if I am not mistaken. Patrick's lawyer, if he was a decent sort should have advised Patrick after that article came out what could happen to him for making those type of accusations against the police, regardless of what he said was truth or not or if he was misrepresented in the article. I don't see it as a big leap for his lawyer to give him some sound advice and backtrack on the accusations attributed to him. Just my opinion.

 

[Moss]

No worries from me, Moss, as it was my hypothesis you are referring to, if I am not mistaken. Patrick's lawyer, if he was a decent sort should have advised Patrick after that article came out what could happen to him for making those type of accusations against the police, regardless of what he said was truth or not or if he was misrepresented in the article. I don't see it as a big leap for his lawyer to give him some sound advice and backtrack on the accusations attributed to him. Just my opinion.

Sounds reasonable. I'm not sure how facetious you were in the first formulation, but to me it sounded like you assumed he was put under police pressure. Which is a possibility. But I don't think we have much to work with when it comes to judging his motive.

 

[Alt+F4]

What's your alternative hypothesis for the ones and zeroes on Raffaele's hard drive? Gremlins? Fairies? Cosmic rays?

Kevin, there is no judicial system in the world that takes an unsubstantiated claim made by a lawyer and regards it is evidence. There is no proven evidence of anything on Raffaele's computer.

Perhaps you would like to live in a world where courts and juries are not necessary, just believe without question what the defense and prosecution says. In addition, your continued belief that "lawyers don't lie" is quite naive.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Amanda, Luca, Paola, and Raffaele

Erm, none. She was sitting with her flatmates prior to any questioning. The questions remain - how did she know her throat had been cut and why did she refer to multiple assailants - "bastards" plural? Why did Raffaele tell Kate Mansey two days later that Amanda had discovered the body and provide more details when we know that they were nowhere near the door and never saw the body at all?

SomeAlibi,

Some of your details are not correct. Amanda and Raffaele did talk to Luca and Paola before the questioning, in the car on the way to the Questura. They confirmed that Meredith was dead and that her throat had been slashed. So Amanda and Raffaele knew that before going in. Paola witnessed Amanda crying. Frank Sfarzo reconstructed the conversation:
R: Did they kill her?
L: Yes, they cut her throat.
R: With a knife?
L: No, with the bread.

Both Amanda and Raffaele were questioned BEFORE they entered the waiting room, sometime around 9-10 PM. (pp. 81-83, Murder in Italy). That's when they talked to Robyn Buttersworth, Sophie etc. Their court testimony confirms that. Amanda incorrectly said that the body had been found in the wardrobe with her foot sticking out. I also note in passing that Luca made a poor attempt at a joke. I would not mention it all, except that commenters sometimes question Amanda’s behavior on that occasion.

 

[Alt+F4]

I'm 99.9...9% sure Stefanoni is a poor forensic scientist. I'm 99.9...9% sure she either doesn't understand DNA forensics to a professionally competent level or is willing to lie to a court about the topic.

And you base this on....
1. Your personal expertise as a forensic scientist?
2. Years of working with Dr. Stefanoni on many cases?
or...
3. Stuff you read on the Internet?

Such hubris!

 

[Alt+F4]

Frank Sfarzo reconstructed the conversation:
R: Did they kill her?
L: Yes, they cut her throat.
R: With a knife?
L: No, with the bread.

Where did Frank get this "reconstruction"?