Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[LondonJohn]

She was in on it from the beginning, probably got an email calling in an old favor and she jumped to comply. The only logical thing to do is to seize her computers and examine her emails.

Given the occult connection she could be in a coven and he's the warlock so she would have to follow his orders.

The possibilities for speculation are endless.

Well, the possibilities for speculation are in fact fairly limited. Stefanoni worked in the Police Forensic Science unit's laboratory in Rome - some 85 miles away from Perugia. Every police force in the developed world (including Italy) has specialist crime scene examiners (in the UK, they are called SOCOs - scene of crime officers). They are usually not regular police officers, and usually haven't attended police colleges/academies. They are trained specifically and exclusively to identify and collect potential evidence at crime scenes. That's all. And there would have been plenty of such specialised individuals available in Perugia on 2nd November 2007.

Once the crime scene examiners have done their work, the evidence is then sent to laboratories (whether affiliated to the police force or independent); specialist lab analysts then examine the evidence, and they then communicate the results of their analysis to the relevant police team investigating the crime.

There are many good reasons for the separation of personnel identifying/collecting the evidence and those examining the evidence in laboratories: the main reason is that there are different skill-sets involved in each job. SOCOs get specially trained to do a specific task, and they also evolve their expertise through accumulated experience in the field. That's why they're the best people for the job. Another reason is that lab analysts are usually highly-trained (and are consequently fairly well-paid) scientists, whereas crime scene examiners do not need to have a rigorous scientific background (and are consequently less well-paid). It's therefore a bad allocation of resources to have a lab analyst performing a SOCO's job.

I can't think of any precedent in any police investigation anywhere in the developed world where the person who conducted the lab analysis had previously been part of the team collecting the evidence at the crime scene. Of course, it often happens in slick TV shows such as CSI, NCIS or Silent Witness, but this is for reasons of dramatic licence and character continuity rather than for reasons of accuracy. There's simply no reason whatsoever that a lab analyst from Rome should have been involved in collecting the forensic evidence from a murder scene in Perugia. The task should have been undertaken by specialised crime scene examiners, and the first that Stefanoni should have seen of the evidence is when it arrived on her lab bench.

I wonder what prior relationship (professional, but perhaps also personal) there was between Mignini and Stefanoni. I'm guessing that they had worked closely together before on other cases. And I also wonder whether there's any precedent in Italy (or any other country or that matter) for a laboratory analyst to be invited - and to accept the invitation - to participate in the collection of evidence from a crime scene. One might almost say: hmmmmmmmmmmmm........

 

[LondonJohn]

Draca's comment requires very careful reading.

Ahhhh yes! My bad (as "da kidz" would say). Time for an espresso! Time to do some real work as well, I suppose

 

[Fine]

A Digression

I suppose since Fine and Platonov are back with us it's time to get back to the point.
Do you guys have any coherent theory of the crime that fits with the facts as we now know them, which has Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito involved in Meredith Kercher's murder?

Michael's "rape prank"/"hazing" theory, if you missed it, turns out to have the problem that "rape pranks" in the relevant sense don't appear to exist, "hazing" outside of sporting and social groups victimising new in-group members doesn't appear to exist either, and the original "rape prank" rumour when run to ground turns out to be baseless and in addition to have no element of rape (or knives).

So if you want to run with that theory, you're going to need some evidence that "rape pranks", well, exist. Because as far as I can tell they don't. Google for yourself. As such calling it a "rape prank" theory appears to be no improvement over calling it a "****** if I know, it just happened" theory.

In the absence of any coherent theory, I submit that a rational person has to give a great deal of weight to the fact that the pro-innocence narrative has a simple, clear theory which explains all of the relevant facts satisfactorily.

Secondly, what do you think are the best pieces of evidence for the guilt of Knox and Sollecito? What would be a minimum set of evidence that would make you more than 50% certain that Knox and Sollecito murdered Meredith Kercher?

I further submit that if you hold X to be true, but cannot give a clear and coherent account of why you believe X to be true, then your belief in X is immediately shown to be irrational.

__________________________________

Kevin, your principle of rationality ---highlighted in yellow---can't be true. First, here's a trite counter-example:

Pink is more similar to red than to blue.

We all believe this, it's rational for us to believe this, and yet can any of us provide a "clear and coherent" reason for believing it?

Second, you clearly believe your principle of rationality, yet you've provided no "clear and coherent" reason to believe it. Indeed, it seems that your principle of rationality is so immediate, obvious, and fundamental (to you) that no "clear and coherent" reason can be given to support it. (Just like the similarity of pink to red.) In which case, if your principle were true,.... it would be irrational for you to believe that principle!

///

 

[LondonJohn]

__________________________________

Kevin, your principle of rationality ---highlighted in yellow---can't be true. First, here's a trite counter-example:

Pink is more similar to red than to blue.

We all believe this, it's rational for us to believe this, and yet can any of us provide a "clear and coherent" reason for believing it?
Second, you clearly believe your principle of rationality, yet you've provided no "clear and coherent" reason to believe it. Indeed, it seems that your principle of rationality is so immediate, obvious, and fundamental (to you) that no "clear and coherent" reason can be given to support it. (Just like the similarity of pink to red.) In which case, if your principle were true,.... it would be irrational for you to believe that principle!

///

Those of us with some scientific understanding can easily provide a "clear and coherent" reason to believe it. A simple spectrographic analysis of the way a pink filter treats white light - compared to the effect of red and blue filters on white light - would show that the wavelengths passed by the pink filter are far closer to those passed by the red filter than those passed by the blue filter.

And you've unwittingly supplied a good analogy for many of the discussion areas in this case. Areas of the case such as the time of death, the dynamics of the break-in, or most of the DNA "evidence", can be accorded a "clear and coherent" reason that is consistent with the "non-guilt" of Knox and Sollecito - simply through the correct application of known scientific or medical principles.

////

 

[quadraginta]

OT, but what do you make of the news that Misty Croslin was just sentenced to 25 years for selling drugs, worth a whopping $3900. Seems to me this is retribution by the good ole USA for her believed participation in the death of Hayleigh Cummings even if they couldn't prove it. Fair? It's just a year under the sentence Italy handed out for murder!

Not that it matters much, but Misty Crolin pled "no contest" to the seven counts against her, and was sentenced to the minimum which the state statutes allowed. This was her second go-round. She had already been sentenced to 25 years (also a minimum sentence for the charge and plea) in a neighboring county on an identical charge. A single charge in that earlier case.

The judge could have given her as much as 89 years, and could have ruled that they be served consecutively to the earlier conviction, but chose instead to configure her sentence to the least possible amount of time to be served that was permitted by law, given the statutory minimums. The 25 years is the total of all sentences being served concurrently.

There can be little question that the sting operation which resulted in her arrest and convictions was inspired by her complicity in the Haleigh Cummings case, and that some hope existed on the part of the local LE that 'shaking the tree' might lead to some progress related to that case, but the sting was a clean and legit one, merely taking advantage of a pattern of behavior she had been known for for quite a while, and the girl was unquestionably guilty of the offenses that she had been charged with.

Whether the sentence itself is appropriate to the crime is a separate conversation. Although in this particular instance the Haleigh Cummings case was almost certainly a factor in her arrest it could just as easily not have been, and with the same charges and plea she would have gotten at least the same sentence. The only difference is that she would not have been in the national media spotlight when it happened. She would have been just another nameless statistic in America's campaign of retribution against the evils of drug abuse ... the "War" rolleyes On Drugs.

Meanwhile, in other news, ex-Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was sentenced to 3 years out of a possible sentence which would have amounted to life for criminally subverting the political process in one of the nation's largest, most populous states, and arguably altering the political equilibrium of the entire country. Unlike Croslin he will remain out on bail while his appeals are pursued, a process which will likely continue until after Croslin is released, considering the legal and financial resources he can marshal.

 

[Dan O.]

__________________________________

Kevin, your principle of rationality ---highlighted in yellow---can't be true. First, here's a trite counter-example:

Pink is more similar to red than to blue

We all believe this, it's rational for us to believe this, and yet can any of us provide a "clear and coherent" reason for believing it?

You are obviously wrong because "Pink" and "Blue" both have 4 letters while "Red" only has 3.


"Now we see the violets inherent in the system"

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

__________________________________

Kevin, your principle of rationality ---highlighted in yellow---can't be true. First, here's a trite counter-example:

Pink is more similar to red than to blue.

We all believe this, it's rational for us to believe this, and yet can any of us provide a "clear and coherent" reason for believing it?

I did a huge double-take when I saw this, which is good for me. It's good to be surprised, because you learn things when your assumptions turn out to be totally wrong.

I didn't realise how big the gap in background knowledge and approach here was, and I'm glad I found out.

From my perspective I take it for granted that colours are neurological phenomena triggered by light of specific wavelengths stimulating the eye, and that there are all sorts of ways in which pink is more similar to red than blue which are so obvious that the idea someone didn't know about them completely blindsided me. The peak wavelength of pink light is more like that of red light than blue light, the neurological phenomena triggered by pink light are more like those triggered by red light than blue light, the energy content of pink light is more like that of red light than blue light and so on and on. This is all knowledge I take for granted.

If you didn't know all that, then maybe it would seem to you that there is no coherent reason why pink is more like red than blue, and perhaps you couldn't even say that your belief that pink is more like red than blue was a rational belief.

[Edited because something came out sounding meaner than I intended]. Believe it or not Fine, rationalists do have a clear and coherent reason for most of their beliefs, and if they don't they suspend their beliefs and/or seek out more evidence. That's what it is to be rational. It's a lifelong process of checking your beliefs, checking your facts and learning new things so you can have more clear and coherent beliefs about the universe which are "true" (although we use that word cautiously) or useful.

It's a scary thought, but it's one you need to think about: All of your beliefs that you do not have clear and coherent evidence for could be wrong!

Second, you clearly believe your principle of rationality, yet you've provided no "clear and coherent" reason to believe it. Indeed, it seems that your principle of rationality is so immediate, obvious, and fundamental (to you) that no "clear and coherent" reason can be given to support it. (Just like the similarity of pink to red.) In which case, if your principle were true,.... it would be irrational for you to believe that principle!

No I haven't, and I'm not going to.

"Believe only that which you have evidence for" is a starting point. An axiom, if you will. I don't have any proof for it.

Well, I sort of do. If you adopt that axiom you can split and fuse the atom, put a man on the moon, sent forum posts around the world virtually instantly, engineer the genes of plants, animals and bacteria and make a really nice espresso. It's the secret of ultimate power over the universe and I just gave it to you for free. Aren't I nice?

"Believe whatever makes you feel good" on the other hand can occasionally be useful for making stupider humans do what you want them to do, but in terms of finding out the truth about the universe it's a dead-end street.

 

[TomCH]

Of the many things that offend people about this case, the concept of being assumed guilty before being tried is one of the most offensive, especially to Americans.

There is no "concept of being assumed guilty before being tried" in Italy. That's just propaganda. Why do you make up such nonsense?

 

[Fuji]

Disingenuous seems to be an understatement on your part. Do you really not understand what a conditional statement is?

Kevin's complete statement which you quoted earlier was:

If she was deliberately lying and she deliberately produced a statement that had all the characteristics we would expect to see in an internalised false confession then she's not only far more knowledgeable about how police interrogations can go wrong than the vast majority of the public, but she's also a complete idiot because anyone who knows about the phenomenon of internalised false confessions knows that lots of people have spent a very long time in jail as a result of them.​

Notice the form of the statement:

If (hypothesis) then (conclusion)​

A statement of this form is false only when the hypothesis is true and the conclusion is false. By dropping the hypothesis and claiming that the conclusion alone was stated, you are being disingenuous.

No, I am not being disingenuous, and I resent your accusation of such.

His original assertion ("If she was deliberately lying and she deliberately produced a statement that had all the characteristics we would expect to see in an internalised false confession then she's not only far more knowledgeable about how police interrogations can go wrong than the vast majority of the public, but she's also a complete idiot because anyone who knows about the phenomenon of internalised false confessions knows that lots of people have spent a very long time in jail as a result of them.") can be roughly symbolized as:

if X, then P and not P
since P and not P cannot both be true, then X is false

The formulation "since P and not P cannot both be true" is conditionally valid only if P and not P are in fact the only possible consequents of the antecedent X. The very denial of the existence of any other possible values for X is precisely what is referred to by what is commonly known as a false dilemma:

"A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy, fallacy of false choice, black and white thinking or the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses) is a type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are additional options."

At no point in my reply to Kevin_Lowe did I "drop the hypothesis", as you term it.

Looking further into his original statement, I can actually find two grounds on which to deny his argument:

1) The consequent is an attempt to create a false dilemma (as previously noted).

2) I would also deny his antecedent out of hand, without even considering the consequent, because I think that his assertion "she [deliberately] produced a statement that had all the characteristics we would expect to see in an internalised false confession" is incorrect, as I detailed in my earlier, lengthy response to him. However, when I originally replied to him, I was being generous in granting him this boon for the sake of adequately exposing the other, more serious in my estimation, logical fallacy.

 

[Fuji]

Actually it's perfectly feasible to falsify claims of temporary amnesia. People's reaction times are different when they are dealing with things they are familiar with, and this is reliably detectable. This is how we know that people with "multiple personality disorder" who claim not to remember what their "alternate personalities" did are bunging it on.

Even granting that your (unsupported) claims are true, was such testing done in regards to Knox's statements?

The problem here is not that I am being disingenuous, whatever you may perceive, it's that you are using terms you don't understand. A false dilemma is not a contradiction. It's the argument that either A or B must be the case, when in fact there are valid alternatives other than A and B.

The argument you are trying to criticise, that a person would have to be a complete idiot to know about internalised false confessions well enough to fake one, and still fake one, still stands by the way. It's not a dilemma, false or otherwise, either. It's pointing out that the assumption that Knox somehow was an expert on internalised false confessions is self-defeating and hence of extremely low probability indeed.

I am being generous when I attribute your fallacious thinking to disingenuity. The only other alternative which I see is that you are unfamiliar with the structure of logical argumentation.

For more details, see my reply to Dan O.'s post above.

So what? If the orange-headed duck is the least likely of the three kinds of duck at my local pond to see, and I see a duck with a big orange head, then it's still an orange-headed duck.

The fact that these confessions do not happen every day is neither here nor there if it walks and quacks like the relevant kind of duck.

Now here you are clearly being disingenuous and in violation of one of the central tenets of scientific skepticism:

"Scientific skeptics do not assert that unusual claims should be automatically rejected out of hand on a priori grounds - rather they argue that claims of paranormal or anomalous phenomena should be critically examined and that extraordinary claims would require extraordinary evidence in their favor before they could be accepted as having validity."

You have repeatedly ridiculed the theories of motivation and modus operandi advanced by the prosecution, Massei, and various posters supporting the court's verdict, going so far as as to say that they should be rejected out-of-hand merely because you view them as highly unlikely (you have used the word "unprecedented" on several occasions). And yet, your own pet theory regarding Knox's statements is supposed to stand unchallenged, even though you ackowledge its highly infrequent occurrence? I do not find your selective application of skepticism logically compelling.

Secondly while you claim that you have evidence that Knox's statement does not fit the profile of an internalised false statement, it turns out you don't. Thats because it does indeed fit the profile of an internalised false statement.

No, it does not.

Again, returning to yesterday's citation of Leo:

"To convince the suspect that it is plausible, and likely, that he committed the crime, the interrogators must supply him with a reason that satisfactorily explains how he could have done it without remembering it. This is the second step in the psychological process that leads to a persuaded false confession... The suspect can only be persuaded to accept responsibility for the crime if he regards one of the interrogators’ explanations for his alleged amnesia as plausible."

What was Knox's reason that satisfactorily explained how she could have done it without remembering it? Mind you - I am not asking here for your own personal conjecture. You can only use what she has actually said and/or written on the record.

 

[Matthew Best]

The interesting thing about pink (or magenta) is that it doesn't actually exist as a single wavelength of light, so it can't be said to "have a wavelength". I assume Fine chose "pink" for that very reason.

 

[Fuji]

I believe her argument here (at this point in time) is that the police convinced her that she had been traumatized by the murder and persuaded her to make a false accusation, the real trauma was coming from the cops and she buckled under the pressure from the cops not the trauma of having been in the kitchen during a murder.

You are conflating two separate elements here:

1) Knox purportedly making her statements as a result of police coercion.
2) The source of Knox's selective amnesia which would permit her to even tentatively accept the police's alleged version of events in the first place.

The arguments I have seen that Amanda accused Patrick to throw the cops off track makes no sense as she was just giving the cops the track the cops were pushing for. She made herself an accessory and also dropped Raffaele's alibi confirmation by doing so so it was an especially dumb way to throw the cops off track if that was her intention.

It can certainly make sense if you allow for the possibilty that she was a desparate, stupid liar.

 

[Matthew Best]

What was Knox's reason that satisfactorily explained how she could have done it without remembering it? Mind you - I am not asking here for your own personal conjecture. You can only use what she has actually said and/or written on the record.

This would all be so much easier if we could examine the transcript of the interrogation, or better yet, see the video recording of it, wouldn't it?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

No, I am not being disingenuous, and I resent your accusation of such.

His original propsition ("If she was deliberately lying and she deliberately produced a statement that had all the characteristics we would expect to see in an internalised false confession then she's not only far more knowledgeable about how police interrogations can go wrong than the vast majority of the public, but she's also a complete idiot because anyone who knows about the phenomenon of internalised false confessions knows that lots of people have spent a very long time in jail as a result of them.") can be roughly symbolized as:

if X, then P and not P
since P and not P cannot both be true, then X is false

Oh gawd, the danger of a very little knowledge...

This is just wrong. You've made two different things P. Let me help you out here.

X = Knox was deliberately lying and she deliberately produced a statement that had all the characteristics we would expect to see in an internalised false confession.
P = Knox is far more knowledgeable about how police interrogations can go wrong than the vast majority of the public, and hence knows that internalised false confessions get people long prison sentences.
Q = Knox is a complete, barking idiot.

X -> P&Q

P and Q are not mutually exclusive, hence you can't call them P and -P.

If you want to set the actual argument I made in formal notation you need a bit more than first year content to do it and I'm sure it would bore and annoy non-mathematical readers so I will skip it. In informal terms the argument would be "If X is true then P and Q must also be true, but Q is very improbable, especially if P is true. Hence X is also very improbable".

The formulation "since P and not P cannot both be true" is conditionally valid only if P and not P are in fact the only possible consequents of the antecedent X. The very denial of the existence of any other possible values for X is precisely what is referred to by what is commonly known as a false dilemma:

"A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy, fallacy of false choice, black and white thinking or the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses) is a type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are additional options."

At no point in my reply to Kevin_Lowe did I "drop the hypothesis", as you term it.

I won't bother pulling this apart in detail, it all falls over as soon as you get the initial equation right anyway.

Looking further into his original statement, I can actually find two grounds on which to deny his argument:

1) The consequent is an attempt to create a false dilemma (as previously noted).

As previously noted, you evidently lack the ability to correctly identify a false dilemma in the first place.

2) I would also deny his antecedent out of hand, without even considering the consequent, because I think that his assertion "she [deliberately] produced a statement that had all the characteristics we would expect to see in an internalised false confession" is incorrect, as I detailed in my earlier, lengthy response to him. However, when I originally replied to him, I was being generous in granting him this boon for the sake of adequately exposing the other, more serious in my estimation, logical fallacy.

No you didn't. You have not posted one scrap of evidence that her statement was not exactly what we would expect of an internalised false statement. This is because you have no such evidence, which in turn is because her statement as "internalised false statement" written all over it.

What you tried to do was resurrect the mole that Amanda Knox didn't fit the profile of the kind of person who would give an internalised false statement. However that mole was already hammered down: Knox was indeed the type, and moreover people who aren't the type can and do make internalised false statements sometimes.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Now here you are clearly being disingenuous and in violation of one of the central tenets of scientific skepticism:

"Scientific skeptics do not assert that unusual claims should be automatically rejected out of hand on a priori grounds - rather they argue that claims of paranormal or anomalous phenomena should be critically examined and that extraordinary claims would require extraordinary evidence in their favor before they could be accepted as having validity."

You have repeatedly ridiculed the theories of motivation and modus operandi advanced by the prosecution, Massei, and various posters supporting the court's verdict, going so far as as to say that they should be rejected out-of-hand merely because you view them as highly unlikely (you have used the word "unprecedented" on several occasions). And yet, your own pet theory regarding Knox's statements is supposed to stand unchallenged, even though you ackowledge its highly infrequent occurrence? I do not find your selective application of skepticism logically compelling.

This is like having an argument with someone who doesn't know the meaning of most of the words they are using, but won't admit that their lack of language skills is a problem.

Improbable claims require proportionately strong evidence, okay? However proportionately strong evidence is not impossible to find, or even that hard in some cases. If there is only a one in a thousand chance of seeing an orange-headed duck at my local pond, but I get clear video footage of an orange-headed duck, boom, claim supported. The p=0.001 chance of me having seen a duck (knowing nothing at all except that I went to the pond) is now a p=0.99 or similar chance, depending on how likely you think I am to have gone to extraordinary lengths to have faked the footage.

The claim that I can fly like Superman is p=so-close-to-bugger-all-who-cares, but if I did a few laps around the city a rational person would believe that too.

So saying "Well, internalised false confessions aren't that common, therefore you can't be a skeptic and think this is an internalised false confession" is manifestly foolish. If I knew absolutely nothing about the case except that Knox confessed, and I knew no details about the confession, yes it would be an unsupported belief. If I know a lot about it, then it can be (and is) a thoroughly supported belief.

Further you are trying to compare apples to oranges. Internalised false confessions are rare but there are no shortage of documented examples. That makes them orders of magnitude more likely than Mignini's theory which is, as you say, unprecedented.

Lastly, you need to bear in mind that this is a court case where the prosecution has the burden of providing proof beyond reasonable doubt. If the best you can say about the prosecution case is that it's possible but wildly unlikely, it can't support a justified conviction. You need at least p>0.9, even if your standards for a conviction are Lionking low.

No, it does not.

Again, returning to yesterday's citation of Leo:

"To convince the suspect that it is plausible, and likely, that he committed the crime, the interrogators must supply him with a reason that satisfactorily explains how he could have done it without remembering it. This is the second step in the psychological process that leads to a persuaded false confession... The suspect can only be persuaded to accept responsibility for the crime if he regards one of the interrogators’ explanations for his alleged amnesia as plausible."

What was Knox's reason that satisfactorily explained how she could have done it without remembering it? Mind you - I am not asking here for your own personal conjecture. You can only use what she has actually said and/or written on the record.

We already said this - the police told her that the trauma of the event gave her amnesia. It's a common pop psychological idea that this can happen, hence quite likely to be satisfactory to Amanda in the relevant sense if delivered by an authority figure. What's the problem?

 

[Dan O.]

At no point in my reply to Kevin_Lowe did I "drop the hypothesis", as you term it.

How can we have a constructive debate if you are just going to lie? In the section of your post that I was replying to, you said:

This is a disingenuous distortion of your original statement, which said in part:

"...she's not only far more knowledgeable about how police interrogations can go wrong than the vast majority of the public, but she's also a complete idiot..."

 

[RoseMontague]

It can certainly make sense if you allow for the possibilty that she was a desparate, stupid liar.

I don't think you have been following my posts very carefully if you don't think I allow for these possibilities. I believe there is a strong possibility that this is an internalized false accusation but I don't accept it as proven. I have also indicated my belief that Amanda was extremely stupid when it came to her dealings with police. The fact that she did not get a lawyer when it was obvious that the police considered her more than a witness is one example and her tendency to believe what the police said was the truth is another.

I also believe she lied on at least one occasion, certainly there are other examples of the errors in times and sequences of events and forgetfulness of things that could be lies as well.

I also believe that she was desperate and confused and frightened by the treatment she was receiving in the interrogation leading to her statements and she may have believed the cops when they told her she could go home if she just told them what they wanted to hear. She had no intention of throwing the cops off track by doing so, she simply wanted to go home in this scenario.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is the statements she gave were not the truth and the police should have easily and immediately recognized that there was a good chance that her statements regarding Patrick were false for the reasons I have outlined several times previously.

The area in which we disagree seems to me to be the fact that you think she gave this false statement because she was hiding her involvement in a murder. I see no evidence of that with these statements. What the statements prove is that she made some false statements.

 

[Amazer]

Filomena's window was chosen because it was the most logical point of entry for the perpetrator at the time. Claiming otherwise has no evidentiary value because if it is illogical for an actual break-in, it is illogical for a staged break-in.

You don't think that the different aims for either the actual break in or the staged break in might influence the choice? Is not possible that what is illogical for one, might actually be logical for the other?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You don't think that the different aims for either the actual break in or the staged break in might influence the choice? Is not possible that what is illogical for one, might actually be logical for the other?

Just Asking Questions, Amazer?

One of the stock arguments that the break-in must have been staged has been something like (and I emphasise for the benefit of those with amazingly or perhaps strategically poor reading comprehension skills that I claim to be quoting no particular person) "It's soooooo obvious that no real burglar would break in that way, I can tell from my armchair with some carefully selected pictures that don't give a correct sense of scale that Knox and Sollecito staged the break-in!".

That particular argument is directly self-defeating, which I think was Dan O.'s point, because if it was that obvious then nobody would have staged it that way either.

Massei's arguments were slightly different but equally inane: He expressed incredulity about the idea that a burglar would open the shutters, go get a rock, throw it through the window and then climb up, seeing it all as far too much work or something. He uncritically accepted the word of the police that there was no sign of climbing, and ignored the photos showing what could easily be scuff-marks on the wall, what could easily be fresh brickwork where a nail might have been knocked out, and what could easily be whitewash from the wall on objects on the floor of Filomena's room.

Massei never, as far as I can tell with a quick look, tried out the argument that a real burglar would have used the back door. That appears to be a bit of guilter fanfic that never appeared in the official theory.

 

[Kestrel]

Massei's arguments were slightly different but equally inane: He expressed incredulity about the idea that a burglar would open the shutters, go get a rock, throw it through the window and then climb up, seeing it all as far too much work or something. He uncritically accepted the word of the police that there was no sign of climbing, and ignored the photos showing what could easily be scuff-marks on the wall, what could easily be fresh brickwork where a nail might have been knocked out, and what could easily be whitewash from the wall on objects on the floor of Filomena's room.

Massei took the word of a Postal Police officer that the burglary was staged. The same officer who claimed to have arrived before the defendants called the police and claimed to have not entered Meredith's room after the door was forced open.