Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[bobc]

I'd have thought that if Sollecito were devious and cunning enough to have altered system files on his Mac to make it look like there had been human interaction for most of the night, then he'd have been pretty vocal about this issue once he was accused of involvement.

In contrast, his slightly confused demeanour regarding his whereabouts on the night of 1st/2nd November would suggest that either a) Sollecito is a mastermind, who changed the system files but then "played dumb" about evidence which he knew might exculpate him; or b) Sollecito never altered the files, and may indeed not even have known about the existence of those files which may now prove crucial to his defence.

b) may well be more likely, but coming up with a contradictory alibi at this stage is not likely to help with the view that Sollecito is not a reliable witness.

 

[LondonJohn]

But no different to the pro-Knox supporters who inhabit sites that discuss this thread, as well as PMF, TJMK. By discuss, I mean "throw mud" at their opponents

What do you mean by "Pro-Knox"?

And I'm somewhat surprised that you haven't spotted the asymmetry in the relative rights of reply available between the various forums which discuss this case.....

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Nonsense. The four criteria you enumerated ("vagueness, conformity with the police narrative she had been fed, total lack of information which she had not picked up from police, retraction after some time to recover") are all also qualitites I would expect in a statement from someone desperately lying in a misguided attempt to escape from a police interrogation.

Really?

I would expect a liar to concoct a story that at least hung together. "I was at my house, but I don't remember how I got there, then there was a murder but I didn't see it, and then I was home and I don't remember how I got home" is a dreamlike, illogical story.

Compare it to Rudy's painstaking, step-by-step fairy story intended to explain all of the evidence he thought he left at the murder house for an immediately relevant contrast.

Liars have to be concerned with plausibility. Amanda's statement is nonsensical, and reflects her own deep confusion as to whether her own memory can be trusted any more. I think you'd only come up with it if you were honestly reporting a highly disordered mental state.

You are simultaneously attributing mutually contradictory qualities to Knox in attempt to portray the unlikelihood of Knox being a liar. In doing so, you are attempting to create a false dilemma, in which the possibility of her being knowledgeable about some aspects of police interrogation (e.g. "be as vague and noncommittal as possible") while being ignorant of others (e.g. "if you place yourself at the scene of a crime, you can very well become a suspect") is not actually logically precluded.

No. "Either Amanda Knox knew a lot about internalised false confessions, or she did not" is not a false dilemma. The vast majority of the population knows nothing about the phenomenon, and you need to know a fair bit about it to accurately fake the kind of confession produced under such circumstances. I'd wager that even most of the people vaguely aware that the Norfolk Four made false confessions, for example, couldn't fake the kind of false confession you would have expected them to make.

The candidate third alternative you are proposing to attempt to break the dilemma is just the one I mocked earlier as "Amanda decided to lie and then just by an amazing coincidence produced something that looks exactly like an internalised false confession". If it's a coincidence it's one heck of a coincidence.

"Wildly implausible"? I do not think so. She could just as well be (in her words) a "stupid liar".

But if so why the characteristic dreamlike properties, and the immediate retraction?

I find it telling that the priniciple of Occam's Razor is invoked quite frequently by those arguing for Knox's innocence with regards to the alleged motive, the staged break-in, and many other aspects of the crime scene and investigation, and yet it is hastily discarded when not to do so would be inconvenient for their position.

The simplest explanation is NOT that she produced a "true" false confession/accusation, but rather that she is a liar.

Can you explain your reasoning on that claim? I think you're completely misapplying Occam's Razor.

I would have thought that the simplest explanation for a statement produced under conditions that can produce internalised false statements, that has distinctive characteristics indicative of an internalised false statement, is that it is an internalised false statement.

Whereas the idea that she cracked under interrogation, or rather kind of half-cracked, decided to make up a lie to get a break, and made an impossible, dream-like lie which she knew would be rapidly falsified, which just by an amazing coincidence happened to look exactly like an internalised false statement but wasn't, is unnecessarily complicated. It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, but it's actually an albatross that panicked and in its panic just amazingly happened to walk and quack exactly like a duck.

Then again I've said all this before and you keep giving this mole CPR, so maybe we need a new approach.


Okay, ignore all that's gone before - it's for the peanut gallery and the rationalists. Let's approach this from a new direction. What's your evidence that an innocent Amanda would not have "cracked" in exactly the same way under exactly the same treatment, and made exactly the same sort of statement to get a break?

If you're going to say "Well obviously only guilty people crack and confess!" we're going to point straight back to the Norfolk Four, Stefan Kiszko and other iconic false confession cases that prove the opposite. Maybe guilt is a bit of extra psychological strain, and maybe it isn't, but innocent people crack just the same as guilty ones under enough pressure as has been shown already.

So what's your evidence that an innocent Amanda would not have "cracked" in exactly the same way under exactly the same treatment?

 

[LondonJohn]

b) may well be more likely, but coming up with a contradictory alibi at this stage is not likely to help with the view that Sollecito is not a reliable witness.

Does that make him a murderer with sexual elements, beyond a reasonable doubt?

I long ago came to the conclusion that Knox and Sollecito both made mistakes and errors of judgement in the way they dealt with the police following the murder. I think that a combination of naivety and stupidity led to both of them doing and saying things that came back to haunt them. But I don't judge their behaviour in this regard as indicative of their culpability in Meredith Kercher's murder.

 

[Katody Matrass]

b) may well be more likely, but coming up with a contradictory alibi at this stage is not likely to help with the view that Sollecito is not a reliable witness.

By contradictory you mean that it contradicts actually what?

We don't know what exactly is in the papers the defense submitted. We don't know what will come out of any serious expert analysis of the hard disk, if the court asks for such. I'd say at best there's evidence that movies and music had been being played on the macbook up to the wee hours of the morning.

I don't think it would contradict the story of spending the night together or sleeping together.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

It's basically true, on Windows and other systems file times can be set to anything you want. I have written code to alter file times, it is basic stuff. It would be easy to write some code to make it look like no file had been accessed in a certain time period to hide activity, or alternatively to set file times to make it look like a person was present during a time period. It's also easy to inject mouse or keyboard messages to fake human activity, if one wished.

"Easy" is a relative term. Having studied a little computer science at the tertiary level, in my limited experience the courses taught focused entirely on teaching you abstract coding skills and spent no time at all on ways to mess with OS-specific functions like time stamps.

Of course some computer science students are self-starting "hackers" who delight in knowing every nuance of the software they work on and how to mess with it, but the majority (again in my limited experience) were there to learn job-related skills, get a degree and get a job.

The fact that Raffaele was studying CS certainly makes it more likely he was competent enough to forge all the relevant metadata to present a consistent illusion of computer activity on the night of the crime, but I would be surprised if more than one in a hundred CS students could do that on short notice.

(Of course for the police just wiping all that inconvenient metadata out is considerably easier and safer that faking it would have been for Raffaele. You just mess with every file he used in the relevant time frame and hey presto, the evidence is destroyed, and since this is Perugia you will probably get a medal for sterling police work rather than an internal investigation to find out who destroyed reams of vital data in a high-profile murder inquiry).

"Injecting mouse or keyboard messages to fake human activity" might similarly be easy if you know how to do it, but again I think most undergrad CS students would not know how to do it and unless Meredith's murder was premeditated (and nobody has seriously argued that it was as far as I am aware) Raffaele can't have set up some such message injector in advance.

The error logs the appeal team have published are a different story however. They seem as a matter of fact to be a very obscure part of the operating system, seeing as absolutely none of the original court team and absolutely none of the enthusiastic amateurs on either side of the internet debate had any idea these things existed until the appeal brought them up. Knowing that they existed and how to spoof them is, I feel safe in saying, not something that Raffaele was likely to have known. I think you'd probably have to go looking inside the Apple corporation staff to find a pool of people likely to know about that file and likely to know enough about it to be able to convincingly falsify it on short notice.

 

[tsig]

Indeed. Kompominsto somehow believes that 10% doubt of one juror leads to 10% incorrect convictions.

Yes, the more evidence and the more jurors vote guilty the more chance of innocence.

ETA: Saw your earlier post so no reply expected.

 

[Justinian2]

I was helping a lawyer with a case last week and he told me "Never write anything when you can meet someone in person; you're too good at being interactive with people to waste the opportunity to meet them in person"

One of the problems with forums is that the immediate interpersonal interaction is missing. Without hearing the tone of voice or seeing the person's expression, it is hard to adjust what you are saying so that (s)he understands.

Well, anyway, I am being blasted on the PMF with their typically unwitty ad hominem attacks. But I'm in real good company!

 

[Dan O.]

Is there any tamper-proof (or nearly so) file on the mac? I am wondering about Raffaele's appeal.

There is no such thing as "tamper proof". But there is tamper evidence. Just like a crime scene, pieces of evidence don't exist in isolation but as part of a system that obeys certain rules in its evolution. All of the evidence will be consistent with the true chain of events. It's possible to stage a subset of the evidence to be consistent with an alternate chain of events but only if the resolution that the evidence is examined at is restricted.

In the computer forensics, there are the obvious time stamps on the files and those would be the first place to look to establish timing of events. As we have seen, there can also be system specific time stamps such as the spotlight metadata and the system logs. Interactions with external servers can be logged by those servers or intermediaries (as with HTTP in Italy). At finer levels, even the allocation of blocks to files forms an indication of the order and timing of the file writing events. If all of these pieces of evidence don't line up with a single chain of events, there is evidence of tampering (or at least misunderstanding the evidence).

 

[komponisto]

What does probability theory- do you claim to understand said theory?- have to do with belief in the pair's guilt?

Probability theory is the mathematically precise way to talk about reasoning under uncertainty: notions such as belief, inference, and evidence. It's a language that allows us to formally express and prove principles of rationality such as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", "the simplest explanation is the best", and so on.

(In the special case where all inferences are 100% certain, probability theory reduces to plain old deductive logic.)

Whenever you use evidence to arrive at a belief, you are intuitively performing a probability calculation. Doing this correctly -- that is, in a way that reliably outputs beliefs that match the actual state of the world -- is a skill that some people are (natively) better at than others, but which (one hopes) can be learned.

(No human is perfect at this, but some people have been able to considerably improve their scores.)

 

[komponisto]

Great report! Yes, this case swings on the probability of the staged break-in theory.

In one direction: if the staged break-in theory is true, then the pair are almost certainly guilty of murder. I wouldn't endorse the converse (if they are guilty, they staged a break-in) with anything like the same confidence.

You gave as reason for the staged break-in the following:

However, if Guede climbed on the metal window bars he could have taken the rock out of his back pack and smashed it through the window slowly enough for a percentage of the glass to fall straight down. If he knew the house was empty, he would want the best chance of entering. A ten foot rock throw would have given the possibility of missing the window entirely.

It's worth clarifying that this is Massei and Cristiani speaking, not me.

 

[komponisto]

komponisto, I just reread the section in Massei about the break-in, and although I need to study it more thoroughly, all I see are the same kind of unsubstantiated arguments from incredulity that Massei uses throughout the whole report. Plus, he engages in some inconsistent reasoning when he points out a number of times that Rudy had shown no interest in Meredith, but then says that Meredith would have been motivated to prevent Rudy from making a move on her. If he hadn't shown any interest in her, why would she be worried about that?

In my opinion, the most compelling argument is simply that Rudy himself was a burglar, and so staging a burglary wouldn't serve to deflect suspicion from him. The other arguments are less important, though I still mostly believe them: I don't think it's very likely that Meredith would have let someone like Rudy in voluntarily, for example.

Interesting, though, is the fact that M&C don't seem to appreciate the difference in importance of these arguments, which reflects their general inability to tell the difference between strong evidence and weak evidence (evident in so many other places in the document).

 

[komponisto]

Indeed. Kompominsto somehow believes that 10% doubt of one juror leads to 10% incorrect convictions.

Your understanding of my posts is no more accurate than your spelling of my username.

 

[simper]

Does that make him a murderer with sexual elements, beyond a reasonable doubt?

I long ago came to the conclusion that Knox and Sollecito both made mistakes and errors of judgement in the way they dealt with the police following the murder. I think that a combination of naivety and stupidity led to both of them doing and saying things that came back to haunt them. But I don't judge their behaviour in this regard as indicative of their culpability in Meredith Kercher's murder.

Its also possible that they brought the victim and the murderer together as some kind of joke without any idea of the ultimate consequences.

 

[RWVBWL]

I was helping a lawyer with a case last week and he told me "Never write anything when you can meet someone in person; you're too good at being interactive with people to waste the opportunity to meet them in person"

One of the problems with forums is that the immediate interpersonal interaction is missing. Without hearing the tone of voice or seeing the person's expression, it is hard to adjust what you are saying so that (s)he understands.
Well, anyway, I am being blasted on the PMF with their typically unwitty ad hominem attacks. But I'm in real good company!

Hey Justinan2,
I can totally see your point, gosh, it is so much easier to convey what you mean in person instead of by these letters on my computer keyboard.
I noticed that I too was being lambasted elswhere on the web for posting some of my life's experiences that have given me a bit more input about this tragic case we discuss. You know what, NOT everyone grew up the same way, thank goodness!

Heck, I have even had someone write that I am a parasitic pervert here on JREF...
All I gotta say is that it ain't my DNA that was left inside Meredith Kercher as she lay dying. And it never would have been!

Esh, this same person says that I even photographed 4 people havin' consensual fun, NOT!
I simply was a slight voyeur, as a few others were too that evening. No narcotics were used either, as these person mistakenly states, just some people drinking and smokin' some good kronic. Funny though, none of the people involved are of the violent, murderous type whatsoever, though they might have played a prank or two before, such as drawing all over a passed-out-from-too-much-to-drink buddy using permanent markers, hahaha!
But the scenerio I saw that night, with the dynamics of movement in the room between 4 individuals in a state of undress and consensual intimacy helped give me knowledge that Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox were not even in Meredith Kercher's bedroom that night. And they did not do any "Magical Mr.Mistoffelees" cleanup either...

I guess some pro-guilt community members also got mad at me, the parasitic pervert, because a woman friend I know showed me a coupla video clips that amused her. These were of the same type that Raffaele Sollecito had apparently viewed before. Funny thing is though, she too is not a violent, murderous type...

It seems like some even got their chonies in a wad and split the scene, so to say because I guess, Mary H suggested that some of the personal stories I write of that have helped guide me to my current opinion of Raffaele and Amanda's innocence of any involvement whatsoever in this bloody murder we discuss outta be in compiled into a book, ala 'Bukowski,' Notes of a Dirty old Man, I suppose...

Speaking of books, I noticed that InJustice in Perugia is coming out on Jan. 20,
written by fellow JREF member Mr. Bruce Fisher!
I dig the cover, it is a beauty! Have a look:
http://injusticeinperugia.com/Injusticebook.html
I for one can not wait to read this, I am sure it will give the real deal on what went down in Perugia, Italy...

But I wonder why Michael and the pro-guilt community at PMF do not write an updated book also?
Take it easy, Justinian2!
Peace to the rest of you, on both sides...
RWVBWL

 

[Dan O.]

The error logs the appeal team have published are a different story however. They seem as a matter of fact to be a very obscure part of the operating system, seeing as absolutely none of the original court team and absolutely none of the enthusiastic amateurs on either side of the internet debate had any idea these things existed until the appeal brought them up. Knowing that they existed and how to spoof them is, I feel safe in saying, not something that Raffaele was likely to have known. I think you'd probably have to go looking inside the Apple corporation staff to find a pool of people likely to know about that file and likely to know enough about it to be able to convincingly falsify it on short notice.

The existence of the log files themselves are very well known. The records within those log files have time stamps and are in time order so finding the set of records that were created during a specific time period is itself trivial. The difficulty came in establishing the meaning of specific messages that indicated human interaction and not an automated process.

Even if Raffaele knew about this file and how to forge the records, he would need elevated privileges to modify the file. Granting himself those privileges would be logged in /var/log/secure.log and /var/log/system.log. The existence of these records would be a big red flag so they need to be covered up. These other system log files are easy enough to find too. But how do you know that you didn't miss something? How about the utmp file?! That is quite literally the "last" file that someone trying to cover their tracks would think of. It's also a binary file so editing it isn't going to be easy and it's buffered so the record of excursion into sudo territory may be scattered in system memory and you can't flush it out without doing something else that leaves traces of suspicion.

 

[loverofzion]

Really?

I would expect a liar to concoct a story that at least hung together. "I was at my house, but I don't remember how I got there, then there was a murder but I didn't see it, and then I was home and I don't remember how I got home" is a dreamlike, illogical story.

Compare it to Rudy's painstaking, step-by-step fairy story intended to explain all of the evidence he thought he left at the murder house for an immediately relevant contrast.

Liars have to be concerned with plausibility. Amanda's statement is nonsensical, and reflects her own deep confusion as to whether her own memory can be trusted any more. I think you'd only come up with it if you were honestly reporting a highly disordered mental state.



No. "Either Amanda Knox knew a lot about internalised false confessions, or she did not" is not a false dilemma. The vast majority of the population knows nothing about the phenomenon, and you need to know a fair bit about it to accurately fake the kind of confession produced under such circumstances. I'd wager that even most of the people vaguely aware that the Norfolk Four made false confessions, for example, couldn't fake the kind of false confession you would have expected them to make.

The candidate third alternative you are proposing to attempt to break the dilemma is just the one I mocked earlier as "Amanda decided to lie and then just by an amazing coincidence produced something that looks exactly like an internalised false confession". If it's a coincidence it's one heck of a coincidence.



But if so why the characteristic dreamlike properties, and the immediate retraction?



Can you explain your reasoning on that claim? I think you're completely misapplying Occam's Razor.

I would have thought that the simplest explanation for a statement produced under conditions that can produce internalised false statements, that has distinctive characteristics indicative of an internalised false statement, is that it is an internalised false statement.

Whereas the idea that she cracked under interrogation, or rather kind of half-cracked, decided to make up a lie to get a break, and made an impossible, dream-like lie which she knew would be rapidly falsified, which just by an amazing coincidence happened to look exactly like an internalised false statement but wasn't, is unnecessarily complicated. It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, but it's actually an albatross that panicked and in its panic just amazingly happened to walk and quack exactly like a duck.

Then again I've said all this before and you keep giving this mole CPR, so maybe we need a new approach.


Okay, ignore all that's gone before - it's for the peanut gallery and the rationalists. Let's approach this from a new direction. What's your evidence that an innocent Amanda would not have "cracked" in exactly the same way under exactly the same treatment, and made exactly the same sort of statement to get a break?

If you're going to say "Well obviously only guilty people crack and confess!" we're going to point straight back to the Norfolk Four, Stefan Kiszko and other iconic false confession cases that prove the opposite. Maybe guilt is a bit of extra psychological strain, and maybe it isn't, but innocent people crack just the same as guilty ones under enough pressure as has been shown already.

So what's your evidence that an innocent Amanda would not have "cracked" in exactly the same way under exactly the same treatment?

Amanda LIED after raf stopped giving her an alibi (wasn't sure if she hadn't gone out between 9 and 1). Coming up with Parick's name-whether because she had had a text from him or for any other reason- was the act of a desperate young woman in a highly stressful situation.
There was no premediation about offering Patrick's name as the killer, therefore it was a poorly planned lie and one that did not stand up to scrutiny.

She did not retract her confession immediately , either. She actually wrote it once again.

sop cut this nonsense about a false internalized confession.
The girl was a stupid liar, and that's the simple truth of it.

 

[loverofzion]

Its also possible that they brought the victim and the murderer together as some kind of joke without any idea of the ultimate consequences.

The Massei report claimed that it was NOT a premeditated murder; therefore they bringing the victim and the murderer together appears to have been the beginning of that terrible night for the three equally culpable murderers.

 

[loverofzion]

In my opinion, the most compelling argument is simply that Rudy himself was a burglar, and so staging a burglary wouldn't serve to deflect suspicion from him. The other arguments are less important, though I still mostly believe them: I don't think it's very likely that Meredith would have let someone like Rudy in voluntarily, for example.

Interesting, though, is the fact that M&C don't seem to appreciate the difference in importance of these arguments, which reflects their general inability to tell the difference between strong evidence and weak evidence (evident in so many other places in the document).

What motivation would Rudy have to stage a break in?
And why then do his footprints lead him directly out of Meredith's room and out the door of the cottage?

 

[loverofzion]

By contradictory you mean that it contradicts actually what?

We don't know what exactly is in the papers the defense submitted. We don't know what will come out of any serious expert analysis of the hard disk, if the court asks for such. I'd say at best there's evidence that movies and music had been being played on the macbook up to the wee hours of the morning.

I don't think it would contradict the story of spending the night together or sleeping together.

Well then it doesn't do much in the way of their defense then does it.