Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Kevin_Lowe]

Again, the trial transcript contains the verbatim testimony of the actual witnessess. It contains every question asked to them by the defense and prosecution and every answer given by those witnessess.

You really believe that a journalist's report is the same thing as an actual transcript? Why is it that you don't want people to make up their minds about this trial based on what exactly happened at this trial? You seem to want folks to make their determination based on what you say.

I don't believe they are the same thing, but I do believe that Massei and Christiani made the best case for guilt they could out of the materials to hand, because no better materials have ever been brought forward - not by Mignini, not by Comodi, not by Maresca, not by any journalist, not by any PMF enthusiast.

Do you really honestly believe that there is better evidence hiding in the transcript, that they have all been forgetting to mention all this time?

No, your belief in their innocence is based on rumors, hearsay and gossip. Except for Amanda, you have no idea as to what the actual witnesses testified to. You have no access to the trial transcript, you base what you know on Google and biased reporting. What innocence group would take on a case without the transcript and only getting their information from the Internet?

I think if the official motivations report has been demolished the burden of proof is on the remaining lunatic fringe guilters to provide evidence for guilt if they want to be taken seriously.

It's the prosecution's job to provide proof beyond reasonable doubt, remember? Not to point to transcripts they have not read, and which they have absolutely no sane reason to believe contain anything whatsoever that will help them, and proclaim that the defendants must be guilty because something in there somewhere must be magical super-evidence that trumps the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

 

[bri1]

I don't believe they are the same thing, but I do believe that Massei and Christiani made the best case for guilt they could out of the materials to hand, because no better materials have ever been brought forward - not by Mignini, not by Comodi, not by Maresca, not by any journalist, not by any PMF enthusiast.

Do you really honestly believe that there is better evidence hiding in the transcript, that they have all been forgetting to mention all this time?



I think if the official motivations report has been demolished the burden of proof is on the remaining lunatic fringe guilters to provide evidence for guilt if they want to be taken seriously.

It's the prosecution's job to provide proof beyond reasonable doubt, remember? Not to point to transcripts they have not read, and which they have absolutely no sane reason to believe contain anything whatsoever that will help them, and proclaim that the defendants must be guilty because something in there somewhere must be magical super-evidence that trumps the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Kevin, I find the 'hidden evidence' argument really odd. The whole point of a motivation report is to allow some transparency in their system, to allow the public and other courts to scrutinise the decision and to describe what reasoning led the court to evaluate evidence in particular ways. It should mention any evidence that played a part in the decision (i.e. any important evidence relevant to the case). If it does not, then we have one of two things going on: it could be that Massei is incompetent- (he either hasn't understood the evidence itself and its probative value, or he hasn't understood the point of a motivation report)- or it could be that he has understood these things but for some reason wants to hide certain evidence (we would know this because such evidence is supposed to be discussed in the report).
So, I'd like to know what guilters who advance this argument think about this- Massei- incompetent or dishonest?

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Kevin, I find the 'hidden evidence' argument really odd. The whole point of a motivation report is to allow some transparency in their system, to allow the public and other courts to scrutinise the decision and to describe what reasoning led the court to evaluate evidence in particular ways. It should mention any evidence that played a part in the decision (i.e. any important evidence relevant to the case). If it does not, then we have one of two things going on: it could be that Massei is incompetent- (he either hasn't understood the evidence itself and its probative value, or he hasn't understood the point of a motivation report)- or it could be that he has understood these things but for some reason wants to hide certain evidence (we would know this because such evidence is supposed to be discussed in the report).
So, I'd like to know what guilters who advance this argument think about this- Massei- incompetent or dishonest?

That's a very good point.

I have to assume that Alt+F4 thinks he's well-meaning and got to nearly the right conclusion, but completely failed as a motivations writer.

Alt+F4, despite not having access to the transcripts, nonetheless has her own theory of the crime... I haven't quite figured that one out. Massei did have access to the transcripts and was there in court, so you'd think that Alt+F4 would duly kowtow to his narrative rather than make up her own. Oh well.

Anyway Massei, the poor darling, accidentally left all the best evidence out of the motivations, presumably. The probably includes the real and perfectly reasonable explanation for the trashed hard drives, the real and perfectly reasonable explanation for the overwriting of the Stardust metadata, the real and perfectly reasonable explanation for a healthy young woman having eaten a small to moderate meal of pizza with no stress or other known confounding conditions having a t(lag) of five hours, the reasons Curatolo was credible, the reasons Nara was credible, the reasons Quintavalle was credible, the real evidence for a staged break-in, the reasons why it was incriminating to find Amanda's DNA in her own home, the reasons why it was incriminating to find Amanda's DNA on the handle of a knife which had supposedly been thoroughly washed since the murder and so on and on.

A pity for the guilters he left all that out. It leaves them twisting in the wind a bit.

 

[Kaosium]

What makes you believe they are innocent when you haven't even read the actual trial testimony of those testified for and against them? What makes you believe one over the other when you don't even know what those people actually said? What are you basing your belief on?

There are accounts of what these people said reported through Candace Dempsey, Frank Sfarzo, Barbara Nadeau, Andrea Vogt, Nick Pisa, the AP reporter assigned, and most importantly Giancarlo Massei. There are no witnesses to the actual crime outside Rudy Guede, and no witnesses that testified to Amanda's actions that night other than herself, whose testimony is available, and the delusions of Curatolo.

The rest of the testimony is related to peripheral things, such as accounts of whether Amanda said Meredith always locked her door or not, technical explanations like what towers certain cellphones connected to, and explanations of the forensic evidence regarding the break in and the murder site. For the latter two the hard evidence in the form of videos, pictures, records, and the results of the DNA and other tests are available and can and have been analyzed by many people who weren't available in that courtroom and whose 'testimony' they never heard, in which case the information available to us far exceeds that which the jury was able to hear.

In addition, there are many aspects germane to the case that the jury was unable to see or hear, notably regarding the interrogation and 'investigation' as the former was thrown out by the Supreme Court and thus the two statements on the 'confession' were unavailable to the court, and the latter which was off limits outside the limited amount the cops wanted to testify to. The jury also wasn't able to evaluate that testimony with the knowledge that the prosecution would eventually admit to twelve police, not three, were involved in the interrogation, lending support to Amanda's testimony on this subject and casting doubt on the prosecution's.

I can understand what you're getting at, it would be superior in some regards were more information available, however I think you have overvalued just what additional insight could be gained from the raw testimony itself. Is it really that important to read in their own words that the prosecution asked where the Sergeant testifying for the defense on the break-in studied the ballistics of 'stone throwing?' Some of this is also entirely irrelevant in a sense, such as testimony on whether the Postal Police got there before Raffaele called 2-1-1 as it was decisively refuted by the defense, which is why it receives no mention at all in the Massei Motivations report.

I believe RS and RG are guilty of the actual murder and AK is guilty of tampering with evidence and being an accessory after the fact. Of course, since I haven't read the trial transcript this is only my opinion based on the information that is available to me. What I don't get is how folks can say they are absolutely certain that AK and RS are innocent when they are privy to only a very small amount of the evidence that was introduced at the trial.

I think you are operating under a mistaken assumption, notably that there is additional evidence of guilt that can be parsed from a reading of those transcripts. Considering that the most authoritative of the sources is, by design, biased as much as can be against Amanda and Raffaele, that is highly unlikely. What one is more likely to find in that additional information is what Massei didn't think relevant to the subject of their guilt, mainly things like how the prosecution didn't bother to inform anyone the blood tests on the luminol stains were negative until well into the trial. In other words what is 'missing' is the the exculpatory indications, not the incriminating ones.

Incidentally, where does that 10k number come from, and what specifically do you want to see from the case file that you believe has been denied you by the prosecution in their report?

 

[EGarrett]

I was on the internet, which consisted mostly of something called "newsgroups," during and immediately after the OJ Simpson case. You'd be surprised.

I used to post on usenet and BBS's regularly. Please don't assume that you know more than the person with whom you're speaking.

Somewhere, in some far-off corner of the intertubes, there is probably an alt.fan.oj-simpson thread still going on....

Yes. But I haven't seen ONE threadline stretch this long. And I don't know if it's clear how many replies 45,000 actually is. If there were 45 people in a giant flame war (which is extraordinarily rare, usually a thread has a small handful of people who drag it out), each of those people would have to post a thousand times, and even then they wouldn't have as many replies as this line of threads does.

According to this essay site on OJ and the Internet, alt.fan.oj-simpson, at its height during the trial "sometimes received several hundred posts per day."

From the White Bronco chase in June 1994, up to the verdict in October 1995, that's a time period of about 16 months. If the newsgroup averaged 100 posts per day for that whole time period, that's 48,000 posts...to the entire newsgroup. This is 45,000 over one continued thread. Even the insanity over OJ doesn't seem to outpace this.

 

[Kaosium]

Halides1

Sorry not a very good post on my part. The UK cases I mentioned involved those who I believe were also demonized in the media.

Incidentally, I don't think demonization was unique to this case, but the nature of it and and international distribution of it was. The photographs and videos released with her facial expressions consistently distorted caused a number of people to believe she was in fact an out of control sociopath who was incapable of acting normal. There are videos of Amanda on Youtube just sitting there in court doing nothing in an attempt to disprove the notion that she was this vaguely satanic vestige who would frequently break into displays not unlike how the girl acted in "The Exorcist."

The police played up to the press on this, notably during the testimony of Monica Napoleoni. It was then that the world first heard of the cartwheels, and in doing so she claimed it was in character with how she'd been acting in court. Those in the court didn't understand the reference as they saw a normal Amanda, but it fed to the perception in the tabloids that she was a grade-A whack-a-mole. It wasn't all done for the benefit of the jury, but for the ones consuming the reports of the trial.

It was a bizarre fusion of the police portrayal of her and the paparazzi and tabloids.

 

[Kaosium]

Are you suggesting that ToD is different between Raffaele and Amanda trial and the appeal?

Well, yeah! What makes you think they'll be able to get away with a ToD that defies science again? They might not even try to make the same case against them, especially if the bra clasp and 'murder knife' are thrown out.

 

[Kaosium]

I used to post on usenet and BBS's regularly. Please don't assume that you know more than the person with whom you're speaking.

Yes. But I haven't seen ONE threadline stretch this long. And I don't know if it's clear how many replies 45,000 actually is. If there were 45 people in a giant flame war (which is extraordinarily rare, usually a thread has a small handful of people who drag it out), each of those people would have to post a thousand times, and even then they wouldn't have as many replies as this line of threads does.

According to this essay site on OJ and the Internet, alt.fan.oj-simpson, at its height during the trial "sometimes received several hundred posts per day."

From the White Bronco chase in June 1994, up to the verdict in October 1995, that's a time period of about 16 months. If the newsgroup averaged 100 posts per day for that whole time period, that's 48,000 posts...to the entire newsgroup. This is 45,000 over one continued thread. Even the insanity over OJ doesn't seem to outpace this.

I wrote a long post trying to describe what I found when I went looking into what might have happened to this debate, because I found it as astonishing as you appear to. I don't know how much more reading you want to do about this subject, but here it is and coincidentally enough it was in response to a mention of the OJ trial.

 

[Alt+F4]

Do you really honestly believe that there is better evidence hiding in the transcript, that they have all been forgetting to mention all this time?

Why are you so opposed to folks being able to read the actual verbatim testimony of what the witnesses actually said so they can make up their own minds? Why do you want people to only believe hearsay off the Internet?

 

[Antony]

What makes you believe they are innocent when you haven't even read the actual trial testimony of those testified for and against them? What makes you believe one over the other when you don't even know what those people actually said? What are you basing your belief on?

I think these questions have been adequately answered, over and over again, by several people in this thread. There is no reason to think that the trial testimony contains information that is more compelling than the massive evidence of a solo attack by Rudy Guede, combined with massive evidence of police misconduct and lack of impartiality by the trial judge.

I believe RS and RG are guilty of the actual murder and AK is guilty of tampering with evidence and being an accessory after the fact. Of course, since I haven't read the trial transcript this is only my opinion based on the information that is available to me.

No it isn't. You have previously posted your 9 reasons for believing Amanda and Raffaele guilty, and it's clear your opinion is based on a couple of highly compromised pieces of DNA evidence, combined with a lot of malicious gossip. You've never attempted to explain why your 9 points lead to the detailed vision of the crime that you have, or that of the trial judge, or why your vision of the crime differs from his in the important respect of which of the accused made the fatal strikes with the knife (or knives).

What I don't get is how folks can say they are absolutely certain that AK and RS are innocent when they are privy to only a very small amount of the evidence that was introduced at the trial.

The simple answer is that the evidence brought to the trial is a load of tosh, has been shown to be a load of tosh, and there is a great deal of publicly available information proving that Amanda and Raffaele were arbitrarily targetted as suspects by a rogue police force who were completely out of their depth in the task of investigating this crime. The other answer, repeated by numerous other people here, is that the publicly-known prosecution case is bound to contain the strongest evidence for guilt, and the idea that there could be any uniquely compelling evidence in the transcripts that they have left out is frankly ridiculous. The same is true for the publicly-available Massei report.

The fact that you don't get it says more about you than it does about the case.

 

[jhunter1163]

I used to post on usenet and BBS's regularly. Please don't assume that you know more than the person with whom you're speaking.

Yes. But I haven't seen ONE threadline stretch this long. And I don't know if it's clear how many replies 45,000 actually is. If there were 45 people in a giant flame war (which is extraordinarily rare, usually a thread has a small handful of people who drag it out), each of those people would have to post a thousand times, and even then they wouldn't have as many replies as this line of threads does.

According to this essay site on OJ and the Internet, alt.fan.oj-simpson, at its height during the trial "sometimes received several hundred posts per day."

From the White Bronco chase in June 1994, up to the verdict in October 1995, that's a time period of about 16 months. If the newsgroup averaged 100 posts per day for that whole time period, that's 48,000 posts...to the entire newsgroup. This is 45,000 over one continued thread. Even the insanity over OJ doesn't seem to outpace this.

The media frenzy over the Simpson case dwarfed the Knox case. OJ was on the national news almost every day for a full year and a half. The Knox case, not so much.

 

[Alt+F4]

I think you are operating under a mistaken assumption, notably that there is additional evidence of guilt that can be parsed from a reading of those transcripts.

How would you know? You haven't read these transcripts either, so how do you know what they contain?

Incidentally, where does that 10k number come from, and what specifically do you want to see from the case file that you believe has been denied you by the prosecution in their report?

I don't know if it's true, but the 10K number has been reported in various media reports. If not 10K, it certainly is a large case file. I want to read what the witnesses actually said.

Do you think the Innocence Project would take on a case without first reading the trial transcript? Do you think they would be satisfied with only having what the media reported?

Garrett and Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, studied the transcripts of 137 trials in which prosecution forensic analysts testified, and the defendants were exonerated years later by post-conviction DNA testing.

The pair found that in 60 percent of those wrongful conviction cases, forensic analysts gave "invalid testimony that overstated the evidence," Garrett said.

These trial transcripts were fascinating to read, because in retrospect we know that all of the defendants were innocent," he said. "Yet few have looked at these records.

http://truthinjustice.org/invalid-science.htm

 

[Alt+F4]

There is no reason to think that the trial testimony contains information that is more compelling than the massive evidence of a solo attack by Rudy Guede, combined with massive evidence of police misconduct and lack of impartiality by the trial judge.

So what the actual witnesses said doesn't matter at all, got it.

In a past case, also involving DNA:

An independent review of the state's central crime laboratory, prompted by its botched DNA testing in a capital murder case involving a retarded defendant, found that the laboratory did not make technical errors in its handling of DNA in 123 other cases, Gov. Mark Warner's office said. But Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, said the review was deeply flawed because the panel did not review trial transcripts to determine whether laboratory analysts had distorted test results in sworn testimony.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E0DC1F31F934A2575AC0A9639C8B63

The simple answer is that the evidence brought to the trial is a load of tosh, has been shown to be a load of tosh,...

It's a load of tosh according to the Internet slueths and their super-duper Googling skills! In the real world where actual evidence and witness testimony is needed, nothing has been tossed out and the defendents remain in prison.

 

[Alt+F4]

...the reasons Nara was credible....

What, again was Nara Capezzali's testimony? What did she say, and I don't mean what those in the court room said she said, I mean what did she say, word-for-word? Oh, that's right you don't know.

 

[CoulsdonUK]

Incidentally, I don't think demonization was unique to this case, but the nature of it and and international distribution of it was. The photographs and videos released with her facial expressions consistently distorted caused a number of people to believe she was in fact an out of control sociopath who was incapable of acting normal. There are videos of Amanda on Youtube just sitting there in court doing nothing in an attempt to disprove the notion that she was this vaguely satanic vestige who would frequently break into displays not unlike how the girl acted in "The Exorcist."

The police played up to the press on this, notably during the testimony of Monica Napoleoni. It was then that the world first heard of the cartwheels, and in doing so she claimed it was in character with how she'd been acting in court. Those in the court didn't understand the reference as they saw a normal Amanda, but it fed to the perception in the tabloids that she was a grade-A whack-a-mole. It wasn't all done for the benefit of the jury, but for the ones consuming the reports of the trial.

It was a bizarre fusion of the police portrayal of her and the paparazzi and tabloids.

Well I think others have demonstrated that the tabloid media coverage of this case was not unusual, I believe Italians are use to sections of their media sensationalising their coverage in order to sell more newspapers or magazines. However, it is not possible to prove that this coverage actually had any bearing on the jury’s deliberations. In addition, the prosecutor and police were compelled to provide information of the ongoing investigation to magistrates in public hearings therefore, a lot of information was freely available to the media. I have lost count of the amount of times I have heard in other cases the phrase “sources close to the investigation say this or that”, it’s what the media do.

 

[Dan O.]

Look at that goalpost move. Now it isn't relevant what the judges wrote was the important testimony given in the court. Not it is the recorded transcripts of the testimonies that are all important. Of course, we can predict that if those transcripts became available and still did not support the theories of guilt that goal post would grow another set of legs and we would be told how it was necessary to be in court and hear the testimony directly in order to see into the eyes of the witnesses and deduce the truth.

Of course, I recognize this whole business about the transcripts is just a desperate attempt by those with an unsupported position to claim there is hidden information that proves their case.

 

[CoulsdonUK]

Antony

I think these questions have been adequately answered, over and over again, by several people in this thread. There is no reason to think that the trial testimony contains information that is more compelling than the massive evidence of a solo attack by Rudy Guede, combined with massive evidence of police misconduct and lack of impartiality by the trial judge.

Ignoring the SC ruling that Guede and others are responsible for Meredith’s murder, doesn’t alter the legal ruling by Italy’s highest court. I would speculate the ruling could have an impact on the appeal lay jury’s mindset; it is a fact that no one else has been arrested and sent to trial apart from Raffaele, Guede and Amanda.

Which police officers are under investigation or have been disciplined for misconduct?

 

[Chris C]

What, again was Nara Capezzali's testimony? What did she say, and I don't mean what those in the court room said she said, I mean what did she say, word-for-word? Oh, that's right you don't know.

Is this the new guilter defense? "Don't argue the evidence, just argue that pro innocence people don't have the trial transcripts so you don't know about the hidden information in them." It seems the pro guilt movement is moving away from the evidence and towards the legal proceedings instead. I guess this is a realization that there is no longer evidence to support guilt.

 

[Alt+F4]

...Don't argue the evidence...

Very funny, considering you don't even know what the evidence is, you only know what has been filtered and feed to you via the Internet.

You have no idea if Nara Capezzali heard a "bloodcurdling scream", a "prolonged scream" or just "a woman’s scream". All three versions were reported in the media. In addition Frank Sfarzo reported that:

She [Mrs. Capezzali] also claimed to have seen the next morning’s newspaper’s posters about Meredith’s crime. This wouldn’t be possible, since the news couldn’t have been in print yet. It was an inconsistency in her testimony.

Wow, if that's true it's a pretty big inconsistency yet no one other than him reported on this. Why? I understand that English isn't Frank's first language but when he write's "Meredith's crime" it's not accurate reporting.

But hey, if it makes you feel better to believe what others say, rather then what the actual person said, good for you. I have this bridge I'm selling in Brooklyn you might be intrested in. It's a great deal according to Frank Sfarzo and Barbie Nadeau. No, you can't actually see it, you'll have to take their word for it.

 

[babycondor]

What makes you believe they are innocent when you haven't even read the actual trial testimony of those testified for and against them? What makes you believe one over the other when you don't even know what those people actually said? What are you basing your belief on?
I believe RS and RG are guilty of the actual murder and AK is guilty of tampering with evidence and being an accessory after the fact. Of course, since I haven't read the trial transcript this is only my opinion based on the information that is available to me. What I don't get is how folks can say they are absolutely certain that AK and RS are innocent when they are privy to only a very small amount of the evidence that was introduced at the trial.

I base my belief on the presumption of innocence and on the evidence I have seen. I have reasonable doubt that they are guilty of the charges. If there is damning evidence in the trial transcripts that has not been made public, it is possible that my reasonable doubt could be erased. Until then, I presume them innocent.

I don't know how you can conclude that we (meaning the general public who have taken more than a casual interest in the case) have been privy to "only a small amount of the evidence." Do you have some way of calculating the total amount of evidence, compared to the amount that has been made public?