Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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Chris C said:
Hey LJ, please thank BP for me. They finally settled with me and paid me off.
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I'm glad to hear that! If it's any small consolation, the prevailing mood in the UK is one of intense embarrassment about the way BP handled the whole Gulf of Mexico situation, and that Hayward in particular behaved like a complete idiot. Corporate governance of our larger companies has got a lot better over the past couple of decades, and BP's large institutional shareholders were pretty quick to ensure that there were wholesale management and systems changes at BP after this fiasco.
 
Dan O. said:
Yes, I found that list too after making the post.


Interesting difference here. In Amanda and Raffaele's case the police were making regular press releases including outright lies but in this side case they don't even print the defendant's names even after conviction.
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If they print names the information can be confirmed or not. If they dont print names they can hide behind anonymous source. As in this case, anonymous police informant told them. Must have been Curatolo, they probably ran across him when he was in court for getting arrested for being the local heroin park bench kingpin.
 
LondonJohn said:
I'm glad to hear that! If it's any small consolation, the prevailing mood in the UK is one of intense embarrassment about the way BP handled the whole Gulf of Mexico situation, and that Hayward in particular behaved like a complete idiot. Corporate governance of our larger companies has got a lot better over the past couple of decades, and BP's large institutional shareholders were pretty quick to ensure that there were wholesale management and systems changes at BP after this fiasco.
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I personally have felt they handled it real well. Dont believe everything you hear, I worked offshore. No American company would have acted as fast as bp. American Politics was the real problem.
 
Chris C said:
I personally have felt they handled it real well. Dont believe everything you hear, I worked offshore. No American company would have acted as fast as bp. American Politics was the real problem.
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I was more referring to the way that BP - through Hayward - tried to downplay the issue as a "drop in the ocean", and the way it tried hard to shift blame to the subcontractor companies. Also, Hayward's decision to go yachting in the middle of it all was utterly inane. I agree that the actual post-accident actions got themselves sorted out fairly fast and efficiently, and it's also to BP's credit that they launched a proper, accountable internal investigation into the matter very quickly. But be in little doubt that Hayward would have been very loathe to go, had it not been for a few private dinners with some of BP's largest institutional investors.....

Anyhow, we now most definitely ARE off topic, soooo......... :)
 
CDHost said:
Kevin --

This sounds like a very strong argument. But dow do we rule out she ate some food when she got home? That the food in her stomach was not from the 6:30 meal but from a later meal?
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I'm going to point to this question, and the prompt and accurate answers it received, the next time someone here or elsewhere tries to overstate my importance in this discussion.

Lots of people here know exactly what's going on.
 
On another forum someone suggested, I think quite sensibly, that Curatolo being discredited might even be good for the prosecution. The reason being, Curatolo giving Amanda and Raffaele an alibi for the 21:30-22:30 period has turned into a bit of an albatross around the prosecution's neck. It has certainly made the lives of pro-guilt posters trying to construct a coherent pro-guilt narrative a lot more difficult having to include an hour or more of pointless standing around in a plaza in theories that try to keep the faith in Curatolo.

If Curatolo is written off as a fantasising junkie who led the poor police astray with his wild stories, and you help yourself to the convenient assumption that some reason will be found to entirely discount the computer forensic evidence placing Knox and Sollecito at home, that opens up the whole night for imaginary evil shenanigans.

If so we can add another as-yet-unconfirmable hypothesis to our collection of as-yet-unconfirmable hypotheses about Curatolo's drug charges, that the prosecution have had him charged to provide themselves with a good excuse to distance themselves from his testimony and go for a totally different timeline to the one they presented in the original trial.

In that scenario it's going to be interesting to see how fast the internet guilter community can switch gears from arguing that Curatolo is the second coming of sweet baby Jesus Christ and that his testimony is both unimpeachable and accurate to the minute, to conforming with the new prosecution narrative that he's a filthy drug-dealing bum who made it all up to get attention. I won't pat myself on the back until this actually happens, nor will I pat myself very hard because I'm not certain that is what's going to happen, but I think it's very plausible that Mignini will throw Curatolo under the bus and move rapidly away.
 
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Some posts moved to AAH

Keep it civil from now on.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Gaspode
 
I love people with uncommon sense.

The evidence locker grows more empty each day as the number of people that could go to jail increases.
 
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Gotta go run and clean but Chris, London and MaryH thanks for the quick reply and good info on the question regarding a 2nd meal. Makes perfect sense and certainly is a very damning piece of evidence.
 
Mary_H said:
The belief is Meredith was attacked almost immediately upon arriving home. She seems to have been interrupted in the course of the nightly phone call she made to her mother; she did not remove her wet laundry from the washing machine; and Draca established that the blood on Meredith's jacket shows that she was still wearing it when she was knifed.
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Hi Mary H, Chris C, and others,
I was just watching 'High Noon' again, an old black+white cowboy movie from back in 1952 wherein the clock winds down to noon, the train comes in and Will Kane must head out to battle Frank Miller and his gang. And a whole lot goes down in the 1+1/2 hour timeframe from when Kane 1st hears that Miller is coming at High Noon...

In a similiar time frame as the movie, Rudy Guede says he was at Meredith Kercher's apartment about 8:30 or so, and then left her place after 10:00pm

What was he doing in her apartment for so long?
It does appear that Meredith was attacked right after arriving home. If the attack escalated quickly, it was finshed just as fast, I would imagine. And in my humble opinion, afterwards Rudy should have left the scene and walked or ran away, fast.

Besides drinking orange juice, cleaning himself up and dropping the kids off at the pool,
what was Rudy Guede doing in Meredith Kercher's apartment for so long?:confused:
Raping Meredith?

Being an innocentisti, well I would luv to see another pro-innocence believer post a speculative timeline laying out what what they believe to be the exact times that Rudy Guede did anything and everything in the 1 to 1+1/2 hours he was in Meredith Kercher's apartment that night she had her life brutally ended...

Thanks for any replies,
RWVBWL

PS-Thanks for the laugh, guys+gals, your earlier exchange today was too funny...
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=197280
Too bad we all can't get together in person to eat, drink and shoot the feces about this horrible, bloody murder case we are interested in. If I sometimes come off the wrong way, well I do better in person.
Some of you guys might find me a bit off the wall, so to say.
BUT I gotta tell ya, after being diagnosed with a rare tumor called Recurrent Respiratory Papallomatosis back in 2003, and dealing for a short time* with doctors that were speaking to me about Chemo, Radiation and a Hole in my Throat, I'm happy to be still be alive, and, as many of my friends know, speaking!
Peace, RW

*No health insurance + I have a rare desease...
Hmmm...
 
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Chris C said:
I honestly believe there is little doubt that Guede killed Meredith. However, he could still go free thanks to all the mistakes the prosecution seems to have made. I honestly think that if Knox/Sollecito get set free, Rudy will get a retrial at the bare min. The evidence presented against him was part of a group murder involving Knox/Sollecito. If they walk free, Guede's conviction is flawed. Plus to top it off, all the mistakes with evidence gathering and the police working with blinders on could set Guede free. If Rudy gets put on the stand at Knox/Sollecito's appeal, i bet you he will say Knox/Sollecito had nothing to do with the murder. Since his conviction was affirmed at his appeals, his fate is now directly tied to Knox/Sollecito's fate.
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I highly doubt this, because any ruling that absolves Knox and Sollecito will almost certainly indict Guede as the sole culprit. As for the various commentators who have made the suggestion that the courts judging Knox and Sollecito are somehow bound by the previous decisions concerning Guede (with at least one newspaper headline even calling the confirmation of Guede's conviction a "setback" for Knox), I plainly don't think they have any idea what they're talking about. Knox and Sollecito's defense is based on the assumption that Guede is guilty; and obviously, there was no defense of Knox and Sollecito presented during the proceedings against Guede. For e.g. the Hellmann court to cite the verdict against Guede in its decision would be a patent violation of Knox and Sollecito's rights to (their own) fair trial. Are we to believe that Guede's election of the fast-track option somehow entailed depriving Knox and Sollecito of their entitlement to the presumption of innocence?

However: in preparation for writing this response, I finally read the motivation document from Guede's Appello trial, hoping to support my view by citing passages that showed how the authors (Giovanni Borsini and Maria Rita Belardi) were careful to concern themselves only with the case against Guede, considered independently of the case against Knox and Sollecito. Instead, I regret to say, I'm almost entirely unable to do that. In fact, my disappointment extends further: the Borsini/Belardi report may be the worst motivation I've yet seen. In its carelessness, impatience, closed-mindedness, utter lack of critical thinking, and judgemental tone, it rivals and perhaps exceeds the reports of Micheli and Massei/Cristiani, with its brevity (at 59 pages) being the only dimension on which it can be considered superior to those documents. (Although at least its main thesis -- that Guede was involved in Kercher's death -- is actually true, which is more than can be said for the work of Massei and Cristiani!)

My estimate of the chances of Knox and Sollecito's aquittal at the Corte d'Assise d'Appello has now decreased from 60% to 55%, due to the hit that my confidence in the higher quality of appeal judges (versus their first-level counterparts) has taken.
 
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komponisto said:
I highly doubt this, because any ruling that absolves Knox and Sollecito will almost certainly indict Guede as the sole culprit. As for the various commentators who have made the suggestion that the courts judging Knox and Sollecito are somehow bound by the previous decisions concerning Guede (with at least one newspaper headline even calling the confirmation of Guede's conviction a "setback" for Knox), I plainly don't think they have any idea what they're talking about. Knox and Sollecito's defense is based on the assumption that Guede is guilty; and obviously, there was no defense of Knox and Sollecito presented during the proceedings against Guede. For e.g. the Hellmann court to cite the verdict against Guede in its decision would be a patent violation of Knox and Sollecito's rights to (their own) fair trial. Are we to believe that Guede's election of the fast-track option somehow entailed depriving Knox and Sollecito of their entitlement to the presumption of innocence?

However: in preparation for writing this response, I finally read the motivation document from Guede's Appello trial, hoping to support my view by citing passages that showed how the authors (Borsini and Belardi) were careful to concern themselves only with the case against Guede, considered independently of the case against Knox and Sollecito. Instead, I regret to say, I'm almost entirely unable to do that. In fact, my disappointment extends further: the Borsini/Belardi report may be the worst motivation I've yet seen. In its carelessness, impatience, closed-mindedness, utter lack of critical thinking, and judgemental tone, it rivals and perhaps exceeds the reports of Micheli and Massei/Cristiani, with its brevity (at 59 pages) being the only dimension on which it can be considered superior to those documents. (Although at least its main thesis -- that Guede was involved in Kercher's death -- is actually true, which is more than can be said for the work of Massei and Cristiani!)

My estimate of the chances of Knox and Sollecito's aquittal at the Corte d'Assise d'Appello has now decreased from 60% to 55%, due to the hit that my confidence in the higher quality of appeal judges (versus their first-level counterparts) has taken.
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Every now and then someone runs the talking point "Who are these so-called rationalists to position themselves as better thinkers than professional judges and prosecutors? What hubris!".

Moving along from the question of whether some rationalists actually do spend their professional lives honing their critical thinking, research and analysis skills (PMF still think I'm a school inspector or something), I think it's quite evident that, as my sig file says, thinking properly is a skill that requires specific training and the judges we are dealing with in this case just don't have that training. They might be very smart people in an IQ test sense, but their verbal reasoning skills and epistemological basics are sorely lacking.

I suspect a large part of the problem is that the appeals mechanism is a terribly slow and ineffective way of giving these people feedback on the quality of their work, so that there's just no good mechanism for them to learn from their mistakes and get better. Also of course if the large majority of defendants are guilty it makes it even harder for them to get proper feedback to correct their cognitive errors because as long as you find everyone guilty you'll be right by default almost all of the time.
 
Chris C said:
The real question you should be wondering, is what kinda enviroment has it been stored in for 3 years. I wonder if they got a big ole magnet sitting beside it.
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Its not in a clean room. Which means you have humans shedding about a gram a day of dander which is attracting dust mites which are walking on the drive platters. They aren't wearing clean clothes if they are doing things like that so they are carrying microscopic levels of all sorts of noxious chemicals from the cars that passed them on their way to work.... You aren't going to be able to get that dust off. Now imagine you try and rotate that filthy platter at 5400 or 7200 RPM, which is about twice as fast as inside your car engine.

Most drives are magnetically shielded. The magnet would be have been preferable.
 
LondonJohn said:
Interesting reading from today's Sindie:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...nox-is-a-victim-of-italian-pride-2185628.html
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Hi LondonJohn,
Thanks for that article link!
I am bumping the story forward,
so to say, for anyone who has not seen it to check it out!

Strangely, I do not recall reading any recent stories writen by intelligent, well respected people
that believe in the guilty verdicts against Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox. Where are they?
Hmmm...
RWVBWL
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
Every now and then someone runs the talking point "Who are these so-called rationalists to position themselves as better thinkers than professional judges and prosecutors? What hubris!".
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And indeed, it was this very "sin" that rendered yours truly PNG at PMF.

Moving along from the question of whether some rationalists actually do spend their professional lives honing their critical thinking, research and analysis skills (PMF still think I'm a school inspector or something), I think it's quite evident that, as my sig file says, thinking properly is a skill that requires specific training and the judges we are dealing with in this case just don't have that training. They might be very smart people in an IQ test sense, but their verbal reasoning skills and epistemological basics are sorely lacking.
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In all honesty, I have serious doubts about even that. In many cases their ability to imagine alternative scenarios, hypotheses, or points of view outside of some very narrow set seems too limited to put them in what I would consider the high-IQ category.

And I must say that, whatever the deficiencies of their verbal skills (Massei and Cristiani are skilled practitioners of the art of fancy wording, for all that their organization and proofreading could use some work), their strengths are not to be found in the quantitative arena, either (as the "95% confidence" fiasco regarding the digestion time issue shows).

ETA: By the way I'm a huge fan of your sig file; it belongs in a "Rationality Quotes" thread on Less Wrong if it hasn't shown up there already.
 
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