The Massei/Mignini Conspiracy Theory

[Dan O.]

the list of unsubstantiated claims in this thread continues:
[table=head;sort=2]Poster|Post|Claim
stilicho|618|The forensics investigators had already finished with Filomena's window. It was not the point of entry; the front door was.
stilicho|618|They took pictures and examined the ground below her window. It was not disturbed and there was no evidence that anyone had scaled the wall.
[/table]

 

[Draca]

do you want a linky?

Did you know that your robust ally Bruce Fisher ™ is about to be censured for his wacky tactics at Wikipedia? Has he shared that with you? Do you want a linky?

I guess that didn't work out the way you were hoping.

 

[Bruce Fischer]

Did you know that your robust ally Bruce Fisher ™ is about to be censured for his wacky tactics at Wikipedia? Has he shared that with you? Do you want a linky?

Just a quick note; the administrators at Wikipedia sided with me on this dispute. I don't know why people like Stilicho are so concerned about Bruce Fisher.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Just a quick note; the administrators at Wikipedia sided with me on this dispute. I don't know why people like Stilicho are so concerned about Bruce Fisher.

I suspect it comes down to the fact that a handful of core guilters are seriously creepy people who stalk and harass the pro-innocence posters they can identify, and they have given rise to a culture where stalking and personal attacks are seen as morally tolerable and even clever by the PMF/TMJK communities. Call it a little moral blind spot they have.

As Voltaire said (more or less), those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

 

[PhantomWolf]

The forensics investigators had already finished with Filomena's window. It was not the point of entry; the front door was.

What was the evidence for this and how does the entry pont being the front door meant that AK, RS, and PD were the killers? Could Meredith not have opened the door to the killer(s) herself?

They took pictures and examined the ground below her window. It was not disturbed and there was no evidence that anyone had scaled the wall. That part was simple.

Do you have links to these photos?

Not to me. There was a woman who disappeared from her home in a city where I lived a few years ago. The police told everyone they had solved the case when they discovered her car about 5 km away. They hadn't solved it. It took about another year before they caught the guy and it was through an undercover investigation resulting in a confession.

I don't see how this applies, unless you are saying that the police have a habit of lying to the press about things. If this is correct, how can we trust anything they say?

It's common knowledge but there are several skilled lawyers posting at the PMF. You can simply ask them yourself or, if you don't trust people on the internet (good call!), ask your own attorney.

I'm not a member of PMF (where ever that is) and there are lawyers about this board, I didn't ask them for evidence, I asked you.

A witness places you at the scene of a crime and your alibi is not directly creditable. Your cell phone pings show you're near the scene of the crime. Yep, you're busted.

If that was all it took to put people in jail, then I'm surprised there aren't a lot more people there. Can you show that this is all that is required? Can you also show that the police had the "cell phone pings" from Raffaele's phone at the time of the arrest. Thanks.

 

[michellesings]

Originally Posted by banquetbear View Post

1. Amanda initially claimed not to have been at the crime scene when Meredith was murdered.
2. Amanda then admitted to being at the crime scene and claimed Patrick was the murderer. 3. If the second claim was true, then Amanda had initially lied to police.
4. This is obviously suspicious, would you not agree?





Are you claiming that Amanda never accused Patrick?

Do you think it possible that Meredith Kercher, in her struggle for her very life might have pulled the hair of the offender? It was the hair of a black man.
Along with the hair of a black man, the police see a text in English from her Black boss.
PLUS, the language confusion of "See ya later, good night" on her text with what Italians think of as a literal "I will see you in a while".
This is just plain logic.

 

[stilicho]

I don't see how this applies, unless you are saying that the police have a habit of lying to the press about things. If this is correct, how can we trust anything they say?

I usually don't. The police have a habit of trying to calm fears when a group of vicious sex killers are loose in your city. The fears themselves are statistically unfounded. The chance that your roommate and her friends are going to sexually assault you, stab you in the throat, and leave you to die are very small. Regardless, communities tend to react to such violent crimes by acting out of fear rather than calm.

Part of the job of a police spokesman is to change the atmosphere from one of fear (which may lead to vigilantism) to trust.

I'm not a member of PMF (where ever that is) and there are lawyers about this board, I didn't ask them for evidence, I asked you.

You shouldn't get your legal advice from people on internet forums.

If that was all it took to put people in jail, then I'm surprised there aren't a lot more people there. Can you show that this is all that is required? Can you also show that the police had the "cell phone pings" from Raffaele's phone at the time of the arrest. Thanks.

That's easy. It's what happened to Patrick Lumumba in Perugia on the morning of 06 NOV 2007. He was identified as the killer by a witness, was unable to provide an alibi directly, and his phone records were examined by investigators.

I think it's wrong and so do you so there's no disagreement between us. The police ought to have known by then that Amanda Knox is a liar.

The other stuff you want to know about the examination of the scene is all being debated endlessly at the interminable thread. This is the Conspiracy Theories sub-forum where Kevin_Lowe gets to explain how it wasn't due process that landed Amanda Knox in prison but some kind of undocumented conspiracy involving the prosecutors, two dozen judges, a police lab in Rome, the Kerchers' lawyer, Sophie Purton, and Filomena Romanelli. Among others.

That's the real story here.

 

[platonov]

You keep saying this, and since I'm not going to search through 45K posts to find it, can you please provide the evidence of this. Thank you.

No. I'm not your mommy, and anyway this is the CT forum

If you don't know anything about the case why are you posting here ?

... as opposed to the Cartwheel thread - thats the natural home for questions such as yours
and arguments where knowledge of the case is in inverse porportion to belief in innocence.

 

[bri1]

Internalised false confessions were being discussed here 11 months ago (May 2010).
I have only been postin on JREF since the beginning of 2011, but I've always thought that Amanda's statements indicated some kind of false memory, which is one of the ways confessions become internalised. I've been familiar with both concepts a while. My area of study is the philosophy of psychology (just finishing my PhD at the a top-ten uni in the UK), not 'just' or only an internet sleuth, thanks.
(BTW I think that we are doing something more than 'internet sleuthing' here. Trials are held publicy for a reason, and that's so they can be scrutinised by the public as a failsafe against bias and corruption. I believe we are fulfilling an important social function here, one that should've been partly filled by the media, but the media have in the past in this case abdicated this responsibility, preferring superficial and salacious coverage to sell more copies, making our participation all the more important. The media is catching up a bit at this point).
The trouble is with suggesting that Amanda's lawyers should've presented evidence related to internalised false confessions in court, is that the Supreme Court ruled that the statements from 5th 6th Nov could not be used in the criminal proceedings, because Amanda was not represented during the interrogation. The statements were snuck in through the civil case, but the thing about that is that the defence couldn't then address the statements directly.
I think my strategy, if I'd have been part of the defense team, would've been different. If these statements were to be presented to the judge / jury as part of the civil case, then they will be 'contaminated' by it anyway, and you might as well allow them into the criminal trial so that they could, in open court:
1. Really get into the issue of why the interrogation (at least past the point where Amanda is declared a suspect) was not recorded.
2. Have some expert testimoney from a world renowned psychologist to educate the judge / jury / public about what IFC is. This would at least mean people (such as yourself) couldn't refer to these statements as 'lies' as straighforwardly as you do.

As to the police and their attitude:
a)What evidence do you have that the police didn't give two hoots about what actually happened in the cottage that night? Because they used techniques in the interrogation that are shown to have counter-productive effects (if your aim is to get to the truth). Because they didn't change their theory when new evidence came to light.
b) Was it only this crime they didn't care about? I think they cared about the crime. I think that the police were genuinely upset and enraged about what happened to Meredith. I just think their response to this crime was not objective, and they are extremely ignorant. They're ignorant of confirmation bias, the uselessness of 'eye-witness' testimony, they're ignorant of the damage that 'suggestive' and dishonest interrogation techniques can do, they're ignorant of the literature that says that human beings (including law enforcement professionals) can't really spot lies- in tests they don't score much better than chance, they're ignorant of the fact that grief and shock effect people in different ways.
c) Do you have any other evidence that this particular police department doesn't give a hoot about any other particular crime? Well, how about Toto and his heroin dealing?

In terms of your 'argument' that this statement (below) isn't true:
Their attitude was 'let's see how many charges we can pin on anyone, no matter how they were involved and what they actually did'.
Can anyone help me out with a list of criminal charges that were brought against Amanda?
There would've been a lesser offense (failure to...) if they'd been going by the 'evidence' of those statements of 5th /6th Nov.

 

[platonov]

Dem' eyetalian lawyers are dummies - I'd a showed em'

Internalised false confessions were being discussed here 11 months ago (May 2010).
I have only been postin on JREF since the beginning of 2011, but I've always thought that Amanda's statements indicated some kind of false memory, which is one of the ways confessions become internalised. I've been familiar with both concepts a while. My area of study is the philosophy of psychology (just finishing my PhD at the a top-ten uni in the UK), not 'just' or only an internet sleuth, thanks.
(BTW I think that we are doing something more than 'internet sleuthing' here. Trials are held publicy for a reason, and that's so they can be scrutinised by the public as a failsafe against bias and corruption. I believe we are fulfilling an important social function here, one that should've been partly filled by the media, but the media have in the past in this case abdicated this responsibility, preferring superficial and salacious coverage to sell more copies, making our participation all the more important. The media is catching up a bit at this point).
The trouble is with suggesting that Amanda's lawyers should've presented evidence related to internalised false confessions in court, is that the Supreme Court ruled that the statements from 5th 6th Nov could not be used in the criminal proceedings, because Amanda was not represented during the interrogation. The statements were snuck in through the civil case, but the thing about that is that the defence couldn't then address the statements directly.
I think my strategy, if I'd have been part of the defense team, would've been different. If these statements were to be presented to the judge / jury as part of the civil case, then they will be 'contaminated' by it anyway, and you might as well allow them into the criminal trial so that they could, in open court:
1. Really get into the issue of why the interrogation (at least past the point where Amanda is declared a suspect) was not recorded.
2. Have some expert testimoney from a world renowned psychologist to educate the judge / jury / public about what IFC is. This would at least mean people (such as yourself) couldn't refer to these statements as 'lies' as straighforwardly as you do.

As to the police and their attitude:
a)What evidence do you have that the police didn't give two hoots about what actually happened in the cottage that night? Because they used techniques in the interrogation that are shown to have counter-productive effects (if your aim is to get to the truth). Because they didn't change their theory when new evidence came to light.
b) Was it only this crime they didn't care about? I think they cared about the crime. I think that the police were genuinely upset and enraged about what happened to Meredith. I just think their response to this crime was not objective, and they are extremely ignorant. They're ignorant of confirmation bias, the uselessness of 'eye-witness' testimony, they're ignorant of the damage that 'suggestive' and dishonest interrogation techniques can do, they're ignorant of the literature that says that human beings (including law enforcement professionals) can't really spot lies- in tests they don't score much better than chance, they're ignorant of the fact that grief and shock effect people in different ways.
c) Do you have any other evidence that this particular police department doesn't give a hoot about any other particular crime? Well, how about Toto and his heroin dealing?

In terms of your 'argument' that this statement (below) isn't true:
Their attitude was 'let's see how many charges we can pin on anyone, no matter how they were involved and what they actually did'.

False [ & False] - the prosecution were inhibited (on the main charge) by the ruling the defence sought, the defence themselves were not.

Its really not a complex issue but casts doubt on the soundness of your advice on defence strategy.

You may wish to revisit the Q I posed here and come up with an answer in light of this.

Can anyone help me out with a list of criminal charges that were brought against Amanda?
There would've been a lesser offense (failure to...) if they'd been going by the 'evidence' of those statements of 5th /6th Nov.

So much for internet sleuthing and public scrutiny - these charges and convictions are a matter of public record.
There wasn't for obvious reasons but there was a lesser charge and conviction related to the false accusation, again a matter of public record.

I repeat ....
If you don't know anything about the case why are you posting here ? ... as opposed to the Cartwheel thread.

Unless you wish to posit a conspiracy theory - Do you ?

 

[RoseMontague]

No. I'm not your mommy, and anyway this is the CT forum

If you don't know anything about the case why are you posting here ?

... as opposed to the Cartwheel thread - thats the natural home for questions such as yours
and arguments where knowledge of the case is in inverse porportion to belief in innocence.

Platonov, I am not certain what an inverse porportion is, maybe I lack your knowledge of porportionismnistic tendencies on the part of mindless drones. It does seem to me that your post was intended to be a bit insulting not only to a new poster to the subject but as well as many that have been following the case much longer.

 

[Matthew Best]

I have engaged with you several times and I did your arithmetic and came to the same conclusion you did: Meredith was slain some time around 20:00 to 20:30 based on your stomach contents analysis. You think Sophie Purton dragged her body back to her room and locked the door to it.

I think you may have misunderstood Lowe's conclusion!

 

[Katody Matrass]

They took pictures and examined the ground below her window. It was not disturbed and there was no evidence that anyone had scaled the wall. That part was simple.

I'm afraid you just made this up. It is well known there were no forensic examination of "the ground below". Where are those pictures? Where are they even referenced?

 

[platonov]

Platonov, I am not certain what an inverse porportion is, maybe I lack your knowledge of porportionismnistic tendencies on the part of mindless drones. It does seem to me that your post was intended to be a bit insulting not only to a new poster to the subject but as well as many that have been following the case much longer.

Not at all, good Sir.

It was a lighthearted response to a Q concerning a very basic element* of the case and a reminder that that the cartwheel thread is thataway ---->

If you wish to assist Phantom Wolf by all means do so - you are well aware of the issue under discussion I hope - as opposed to falsely accusing me of something or other.
In any case you are in no position to throw stones having brought up the issue of retrocausality again in the full knowledge that its upsetting to Dan O

* rather like jumping into a long running 911 thread and after making several long posts suddenly demanding to know what the term 'twin towers' refers to - a 'no towers' theory if you will.

 

[Matthew Best]

This response is disporportional.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I have engaged with you several times and I did your arithmetic and came to the same conclusion you did: Meredith was slain some time around 20:00 to 20:30 based on your stomach contents analysis. You think Sophie Purton dragged her body back to her room and locked the door to it.

Sophie is "the real murder [sic]".

I don't know why the nitwits still listen to you but they do.

This was in Bizarro World, I take it? Currently we are mostly focusing on what happened in the real world.

 

[LondonJohn]

I have engaged with you several times and I did your arithmetic and came to the same conclusion you did: Meredith was slain some time around 20:00 to 20:30 based on your stomach contents analysis. You think Sophie Purton dragged her body back to her room and locked the door to it.

Sophie is "the real murder [sic]".

I don't know why the nitwits still listen to you but they do.

Now then.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Stilicho would never try to deliberately mislead people on this whole "Time of Death using stomach/intestine autopsy findings" issue. I can therefore only conclude that he doesn't have even a rudimentary grasp of conditional statistical analysis, since these two (deliberate misleading or sheer lack of understanding) are the only two possibilities at play here.

So, with that in mind, I will now attempt to explain as simply as possible to Stilicho where he's making a mistake in his "analysis":

To start with, we have a bell curve which has been experimentally defined, which indicates t(lag)* times for healthy adults eating sample solid meals (info on this bell curve can be found in the previous incarnations of this thread).

In short, the bell curve indicates that the average t(lag) time to be around 80-90 minutes, with the 25% and 75% points on the curve lying at around 65 and 102.0 min respectively.

Now, here's the important bit (for Stilicho's benefit, I will bold it).

We know that Meredith started her last meal by around 6.30pm (and BTW t(lag) is always measured from the start of the meal, not the end, for reasons that should be obvious).

IF THIS WAS ALL THE INFORMATION WE KNEW, then we could assign the following rough probabilities to Meredith's time of death, using the known bell curve data:

a) Prob that she died between 6.30pm and 9.00pm: 95% (approx)
b) Prob that she died between 9.00pm and 10.00pm: 4.8% (approx)
c) Prob that she died between 10.00pm and 11.00pm: 0.17% (approx)
d) Prob that she died later than 11.00pm: 0.03% (approx)

So Stilicho would be correct in his conclusion that Meredith statistically most likely died before 9pm, if this was the only information we had at hand to help us.

BUT........ we DO have another piece of information - a piece that's incredibly important and helpful in our calculations - and it's this:

WE KNOW THAT MEREDITH DID NOT DIE BEFORE 9.00PM

So now we have a nested conditional probability to calculate:

Given that we know Meredith started her last meal at around 6.30pm, and GIVEN THAT WE KNOW SHE DID NOT DIE BEFORE 9.00PM, what are the relative probabilities now? They are as follows:

a) Prob that she died between 6.30pm and 9.00pm: 0%
b) Prob that she died between 9.00pm and 10.00pm: 96% (approx)
c) Prob that she died between 10.00pm and 11.00pm: 3.4% (approx)
d) Prob that she died later than 11.00pm: 0.6% (approx)

See how, by including the conditional information that Meredith was definitely not dead before 9.00pm, we can correctly calculate the probabilities of her death at various time periods after 9.00pm? It's a fairly simple area of maths, but perhaps some people are less numerate than others in this field...

*t(lag) can be used as a proxy for the time at which food starts to leave the stomach and pass into the duodenum.

 

[babycondor]

I suspect it comes down to the fact that a handful of core guilters are seriously creepy people who stalk and harass the pro-innocence posters they can identify, and they have given rise to a culture where stalking and personal attacks are seen as morally tolerable and even clever by the PMF/TMJK communities. Call it a little moral blind spot they have.

As Voltaire said (more or less), those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire also said “It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.”

 

[RoseMontague]

Originally Posted by stilicho View Post
They took pictures and examined the ground below her window. It was not disturbed and there was no evidence that anyone had scaled the wall. That part was simple.

I'm afraid you just made this up. It is well known there were no forensic examination of "the ground below". Where are those pictures? Where are they even referenced?

The pictures are with the pictures of all that glass on top of the clothes. What is clear is that the cops did a poor job of securing the crime scene as well as their examination and recording of it. Why look for glass below when they already immediately decided that the break-in was staged. The area below was used as a smoking section for the cops from the few photos I have seen of it.

But there is photographic evidence that someone scaled the wall as shown in Hendry's examination of the photographic evidence available. It was simple, but the cops did not take the simple route with this one.

 

[platonov]

I dont know about that but you would definitely save a quarter

<snip>

a) Prob that she died between 6.30pm and 9.00pm: 0%
b) Prob that she died between 9.00pm and 10.00pm: 96% (approx)
c) Prob that she died between 10.00pm and 11.00pm: 3.4% (approx)
d) Prob that she died later than 11.00pm: 0.6% (approx)[/B]

See how, by including the conditional information that Meredith was definitely not dead before 9.00pm, we can correctly calculate the probabilities of her death at various time periods after 9.00pm? It's a fairly simple area of maths, but perhaps some people are less numerate than others in this field...
*t(lag) can be used as a proxy for the time at which food starts to leave the stomach and pass into the duodenum.

Now then. Now then. Now then.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Stilicho LondonJohn would never try to deliberately mislead people on this whole "Time of Death using stomach/intestine autopsy findings" issue. I can therefore only conclude that he doesn't have even a rudimentary grasp of conditional statistical analysis, since these two (deliberate misleading or sheer lack of understanding) are the only two possibilities at play here.

Well there is a third possibility, the 'literature' has been falsified in the interim - A NEW Conspiracy theory !!!

Previously you posted ad nauseum and at great length that there was a probability of 99.9% that ToD was before 9.20 & 98 % before 9.00.

See Link Link & previous posts.

Now suddenly its b) Prob that she died between 9.00pm and 10.00pm: 96% (approx)

We had a previous funnier example of this kind of 'numeracy' - here

The 'I dont know about that but you would definitely save a quarter' episode.


Perhaps you would like to check your stats or 'the literature' again
['foolish consistency' and all that]