Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[loverofzion]

Aren't you kinda starting out with the presumption of guilt, there, and then using that presumption as evidence of guilt? If they're not guilty, Amanda is probably just telling the truth about the mop (what she says is supported by the leak in the pipes at Raffaele's place, after all). It certainly makes little sense in a pro-guilt narrative, which is why implausible mop-switching theories have to be invented to explain it.

No. If one were to explore her storytelling , you would see that the mop has been over explained. Way too much emphasis was placed on it.
As for raf's leaking pipe, well that story underwent a few renditions too. Once it was they spilled some water, at another point it was a broken pipe.

It makes perfect sense in my pro guilt narrative. They HAD to clean up the messy crime scene, and they needed that mop.

 

[RoseMontague]

There really was a mop moving between the apartments? I had thought that that was a myth.

Oh, yes. Loverofzion is quite rather correct on that detail of Amanda's story and her emphasis on that pesky mop which gets top billing in her email to everyone. It was the first thing to make me suspicious and had me leaning towards guilt.

Amanda has a habit of trying to explain herself, endlessly and with embellishments and unnecessary explanations. I have come to believe the police had questioned her a lot about the mop story and she was eager to put it to rest. As in the case when she tries to do this with other things, she sometimes makes things worse.

 

[katy_did]

No. If one were to explore her storytelling , you would see that the mop has been over explained. Way too much emphasis was placed on it.
As for raf's leaking pipe, well that story underwent a few renditions too. Once it was they spilled some water, at another point it was a broken pipe.

It makes perfect sense in my pro guilt narrative. They HAD to clean up the messy crime scene, and they needed that mop.

Why did they need to take it to Raffaele's?

 

[loverofzion]

I'm not nitpicking, only clarifying. However, personally I think there is a bit of a difference between on the one hand Amanda recognizing Rudy by sight and exchanging a few words with him, and on the other Meredith, Rudy and Amanda all hanging out together on several occasions at the boys' house to smoke pot.

Well they definitely smoked pot together at least that once,also met up at the bar, so I'd call it more than just recognizing Rudy by sight.

 

[christianahannah]

loverofzion,

Fulcanelli was a major proponent of the shared laundry facility argument to explain how unidentified DNA came to be in the clasp. Do you think his argument was ignorant?

The shared laundry facility could be a reason for the unidentified DNA (partial profiles) on the clasp (if Tagliabracci's hypothesis is correct). I do not know of studies which have dealt with DNA transfer in washing machines, so I do not know how possible that is. There probably is a paper written on this, and if so, you can probably locate it better than me.

I don't know if we could apply the reason of shared laundry facilities for Raffaele's DNA being on the clasp.

In an interview with Frank Sfarzo Amanda was asked the question about using the washing machine on November 2. Amanda answered that she did not use the washing machine ever and preferred going to the laundromat where there was also a dryer. So it appears Amanda's clothes were not mixing with Meredith's clothes in the washing machine in the cottage.

http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

This is not court testimony, however, Frank is pretty reliable in what he reports so I believe this is a true account.

I look forward to the independent review on the bra clasp and the knife. I hope the experts will do a thorough job of examining all areas of the evidence, from collection, to testing and interpretation and will be able to answer the many questions concerning these two items to the satisfaction of all.

 

[LondonJohn]

Well not quite that sunny with the 4 girls.
Meredith's friends all testified that Meredith and they found amanda to be irritating, bringing home strange men to the cottage, not cleaning her share, etc etc. It is known that Merdith chose not to respond to amanda's invite to spend Halloween night together.

Is it?

At 19.00 (on Halloween night) she (Knox) texted Meredith to find out what she was doing for Halloween.........

Meredith responded to Amanda's text: "I have to go to a friend's house for dinner". Amanda persisted, almost desperate* to see Meredith: "What are you doing tonight? Do you want to meet up? Have you got a costume?" Meredith said that she was going to Le Chic and "maybe we'll see each other".

("Darkness Descending", p164)

Given that there are some directly quoted text messages (or portions of messages) quoted in that passage, I'd suggest that Meredith did indeed reply to both of Knox's texts that evening, and in civil (and certainly not unfriendly) tones. What's your source for your assertion that Meredith "chose not to respond"?

* Interesting description by the authors of their supposition of Knox's state of mind. Others might suppose that the second text sent by Knox was a fairly natural follow-up from the first text, to which Meredith had replied giving only her plans for the early evening (dinner with a friend), and that it in no way exhibits any signs of "desperation" on Knox's part.

 

[loverofzion]

Why did they need to take it to Raffaele's?

They didn't. They needed to take it to the cottage.
Raf's broken pipe, or water spilled, or whatever was just an excuse were anyone to see them carrying a mop across the city.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

You requested a medical definition

And this medical definition helps amanda- how?

loverofzion,

You asked for a medical definition at 3:28 PM. You may wish to review your own comments.

 

[LondonJohn]

No. If one were to explore her storytelling , you would see that the mop has been over explained. Way too much emphasis was placed on it.
As for raf's leaking pipe, well that story underwent a few renditions too. Once it was they spilled some water, at another point it was a broken pipe.

It makes perfect sense in my pro guilt narrative. They HAD to clean up the messy crime scene, and they needed that mop.

Which areas of the messy crime scene do you think they cleaned up using that mop?

 

[LondonJohn]

They didn't. They needed to take it to the cottage.
Raf's broken pipe, or water spilled, or whatever was just an excuse were anyone to see them carrying a mop across the city.

Erm....the mop was already at the cottage. There was no mop at Sollecito's apartment. The mop started and ended its journey at the cottage.

 

[katy_did]

They didn't. They needed to take it to the cottage.
Raf's broken pipe, or water spilled, or whatever was just an excuse were anyone to see them carrying a mop across the city.

So the mop was taken from Raffaele's flat to the cottage...? Since the water pipe was actually broken, did they break it themselves deliberately so it fit in with the story, or...?

 

[RoseMontague]

Why did they need to take it to Raffaele's?

katy_did,
Here is my original post on that whole pesky mop thingy:

Several things strike me as very curious about Amanda's email statement. One thing that interests me is the whole mop story. First she goes to great lenghts to let her friends and family know why she needed that mop. Here is the first quote:

the next morning I woke up
around 1030 and after grabbing my few things I left Raffael's
apartment and walked the five minute walk back to my house to once again take a shower and grab a change of clothes. i also needed to grab a mop because after dinner Raffael had spilled a lot of water on the floor of his kitchen by accident and didn't have a mop to clean it up.

A couple of comments. She evidently feels that the issue of the mop and her reason for needing a mop is very important to have explained. The spill itself happened in the Kitchen the night before and it was a lot of water. I am not sure how much is a lot but I suppose just for the sake of argument a couple of gallons at least would be a lot. I am not sure how you can spill that much water but anyway I concede I don't know. What I do know is that you don't really need a mop to soak up a water spill. Dry towels will do in an emergency because most people don't want a lot of water on their floor overnight where it might cause some damage to wood floors, furniture or drywall. You could even use a quilt or a blanket if need be. A mop is not neccessary, the water is not like he spilled a big pot of MamaMia sauce on the kitchen floor.

Anyway, I guess they just used a ferry the rest of the night and the next morning to get to their fridge because it was obviously not a big enough deal to use something other than a mop to get it up.

The other thing about water is that it is always going to spread, no floor is perfectly level, it will seep into cracks and be absorbed by other things it encounters and some of it is just going to evaporate and go away. In this case it still must have been a swimming pool sized disaster the next morning to still require a mop.

Next 'mop' quote, same email: I started feeling a little uncomfortable and so I grabbed the mop from out closet and lef the house, closing and locking the door that no one had come back through while i was in the shower, and I returned to Raffael's place. after we had used the mop to clean up the kitchen I told Raffael about what I had seen in the house over breakfast. The strange blood in the bathroom, the door wide open, the
**** left in the toilet.

OK, so she sees the blood all over the bathroom and crap in the toilet, Meredith doesn't answer her door so she feels uncomfortable like maybe something bad has happened so she grabs the mop goes running back to her boyfriends place and proceeds to mop up that awfully important water spill that only this mop can get up, then tells Raffael she thinks maybe something bad has happened over at her place.

 

[shuttlt]

Inference -- including judgements under uncertainty -- is governed by strict mathematical rules, whether you're intuitively aware of it or not. You can call this "logical processes of deduction" if you like, because Bayes' theorem is as "logical" as any other mathematical result.

You do not need to argue for the existence of beliefs that are generated by processes that don't tend to produce accurate beliefs; what you do need to argue is that any of Kevin's or my beliefs about this case actually fall into that category.

How do you use Bayes theorem to weigh up the competing claims about how Raffaele's supposed DNA got onto the bra-clasp? I would be very interested to hear you answer without resorting to any preconceived ideas you may have about what is likely, or not.

You are clearly trying to imply that (e.g.) Kevin's beliefs are overconfident;

I wasn't originaly arguing with Kevin and it seems to me that Kevin doesn't actually want to defend the point that I originally commented on, that one cannot remove our personal and individual beliefs, experiences, preconceptions (and so on) about the world from our arguments. I don't think this necessarily undermines anybodies argument to any great extent since as far as I'm concerned it's inevitable. Somehow, despite me having said otherwise my statements are getting interpreted as an attack. It seemed to me like I was stating a rather obvious and rather dull truth. I have no idea how this turned into so many posts.

you don't think that Kevin and other strong innocence believers have adequate justification for their (our) level of confidence.

That really wasn't what I was trying to argue. I do think that of course (to be honest I wonder the same thing about the strong guilt people), but that is outside the scope of my response to the original post in this digression.

That's what it comes down to. Yet, the only arguments that you've provided for this conclusion are that (1) a bunch of other people believe differently, and (2) there aren't scientific studies specifically covering the exact situations involved in the case. Both of these arguments are irrelevant: (1) is irrelevant because we don't think guilters' opinions are worth much as evidence, for reasons that we could go into but should frankly be obvious from their posts;

I know you don't. Equally the evil guilters don't believe the white knights of the Amanda-is-innocent group's opinions are worth anything either. Somehow it seems important to people to point at polls and say "the tide is turning in our favour" based on the number of people who post on the comments sections of web forums.

and (2) is irrelevant because we are able to offer specific arguments both for our conclusions and for our level of confidence in our conclusions, and hence if you want to object to our conclusions you have to object to our arguments, rather than demanding a specific kind of support (scientific studies on whatever narrow situation we're talking about) that we don't believe is necessary in the first place.

OK. Please argue without reference to any preconceived notion that you may have about what is and isn't likely that the DNA on the bra-clasp got their due to contamination unconnected with the crime. Not that it could, not that it is theoretically possible, but with a level of confidence that makes it a useful part of your argument.

Then you should be explaining what you find plausible and why.

That would sidetrack this particular argument. Let's stick to the point. Another time I will talk about what, if anything, I think is likely.

And yes, you do indeed have sufficient knowledge to provide such a list. If you have an opinion on the case (which, by the way, includes things like "0.1% probability of guilt is too low"), then you have reasons for that opinion. I'd like to know what those reasons are.

I'll gladly assign probabilities if you allow me error bars that are wide enough to make the exercise pointless.

 

[katy_did]

Well they definitely smoked pot together at least that once,also met up at the bar, so I'd call it more than just recognizing Rudy by sight.

They were all three (Rudy, Meredith and Amanda) at a party where pot was being smoked, but I'm not sure that's quite the same thing in its implications as they "smoked pot together". Also, I think it's misleading to say Amanda and Rudy "met up at the bar", when it was just that Rudy came to the bar where Amanda was working. Did she 'meet up' with all her customers?

I'm not saying they weren't acquainted at all, but I think (as with Meredith and Rudy) they were fairly distant acquaintances. They had probably encountered each other a couple of times, as friends of friends often do, but personally I think 'they knew each other' suggests a misleading degree of familiarity between them (saying they 'knew of each other' is probably more accurate, for both Amanda and Rudy, and Meredith and Rudy).

 

[babycondor]

Reading this topic for several weeks now, I've come to realize that I've stumbled into a surreal alternate universe populated by characters from Monty Python's Argument Clinic sketch and the Firesign Theater's "Everything You Know is Wrong" album.

 

[odeed]

The red colour in blood comes from the haemoglobin molecules in the red blood cells. Heat and detergent would most likely denature the haemoglobin protein chains, but the iron in the haemoglobin would then likely oxidise to a simple or complex form of iron oxide - better known as rust. And this is one of the reasons why old blood or washed blood can appear brown, rather than bright red, in colour: iron oxide is brown, as anyone who's ever owned a very old car will easily testify.....

Haemoglobin (Hb) outside the body is saturated with oxygen and met-Hb (Methemoglobin) is formed, which in turns denatures to hemichrome, the colour change of fresh blood (pink-red) to met-Hb and Hc (dark brown) causes the gradual colour change, nothing to do with iron oxidation. Scabs on scratches or cuts are a good example of this transform.

The amount of met-Hb (~1%) is controlled in the body by the protein cytochrome b5 protein, which reduces it to Hb.

 

[Chris C]

Amanda and raf had the entire night and into the next day at mid day to do the cleaning up.
Lack of time was never a factor there.
No one was home remember? The boys downstairs and the two Italian roommates were gone that night.
Plenty of time to stage and clean up unobserved.

So far the prosecution has a very, very strong case.

Actually according to Rudy someone was in the downstairs apartment when he left.

 

[RoseMontague]

Reading this topic for several weeks now, I've come to realize that I've stumbled into a surreal alternate universe populated by characters from Monty Python's Argument Clinic sketch and the Firesign Theater's "Everything You Know is Wrong" album.

We're glad you made it.

 

[katy_did]

katy_did,
Here is my original post on that whole pesky mop thingy:

Thanks Rose (LOL, a ferry? I'd forgotten how many annoyingly good points you made as a guilter [ETA: -ish sort of type] ).

I'd thought the e-mail was odd too, at first, till it occurred to me that it probably just reflected the questions she was being asked at the police station (which does suggest the police were zeroing in on Amanda and Raffaele and the mop even then, now I think about it).

I can understand the need for a mop after a leaking pipe spill, because even if most of the water had been cleaned up, you'd still be left with a residue on the floor. We had a water pipe burst at work last week, and even after the water had dried there were still those dirty 'tidemarks' (for want of a better term...) that it's easiest to clean with a mop. So it does make some kind of sense to me that they'd need a mop to clean it, especially if it was an ongoing leak every time the sink was used, as it sounds like it was.

What makes less sense to me is why they'd make up the mop story if they were guilty. Why bother, really, especially since (barring the bizarre mop-switching theory) there's no sign a mop was used to clean the crime scene? I'm hoping LoZ can enlighten me on that one, though.

 

[Chris C]

Well they definitely smoked pot together at least that once,also met up at the bar, so I'd call it more than just recognizing Rudy by sight.

Met up at what bar? And once again I see your playing games with the English language. (MET)

Knox and Rudy's encounter at the bar which both of them mentioned: Both said it was a chance encounter where RUDY saw her and approached her. Their encounter wasn't a meeting the way you are trying to emphasize. It was just him seeing her and approaching her. There was no meeting.