Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[shuttlt]

I think it's extremely unlikely that Amanda's stomach would not have started to pass food along to her duodenum by 10pm, never mind later. You have to remember the specific circumstances. Amanda was a healthy young woman with no reason to suspect delayed intestinal transit. Immediately after her meal she sat down to watch a film, which is very conducive to uninterrupted digestion. If she'd gone out jogging it might have been a different matter.

Nine o'clock is perfectly reasonable, but much more than that and it starts to become special pleading.

Rolfe.

One expert said 3-4 hours. That gives 9:30pm to 10:30pm. Where is the special pleading? She also went for a walk.

 

[pilot padron]

Where do I come into this particular discussion? I think your excitement might be making you all confused about who wrote what.

And as another reminder, I'm not a communications engineer. That's the academic discipline I read for my first degree. It is not, however, my profession. Now, per haps you'll please excuse me for five minutes while I go and parse a cup of tea.

You flatter yourself to ass u me that anything in my argument referred solely to you.

 

[jhunter1163]

Folks, don't make me put on my mod hat. I thought I had been quite clear that I have only passing familiarity with this case. I've expressed my opinion above and will not comment further. Do let's strive for civility and keep to discussing the case, and not each other. Thank you all for your anticipated cooperation.

 

[Mary_H]

Your post specifically said their lives were exemplary before their arrests. They used drugs (to what extent we really don't know), but other than that their lives were no different than most undergraduate college students. They weren't exemplary, and that has no bearing on their guilt or innocence.

Yes, my post said their lives were exemplary before their arrests. The point of my post was to object to Rolfe's impression that Amanda is "not entirely mentally/emotionally stable...;" it was not about the question of her guilt or innocence.

The fact that millions of people lead exemplary lives doesn't make their lives any less exemplary. For instance, everyone who is ethical is an example to those who are not ethical; there are millions of both "persuasions." . I would call Amanda and Raffaele's lives exemplary when compared to Rudy's, wouldn't you?

Using drugs is not something I agree with, and I don't endorse it as exemplary behavior, but I think reality has gotten to a point where so many people use drugs and still maintain otherwise normal lives that I'm not sure we can really consider them aberrant, except in extreme cases.

Thank you but there was nothing exemplary or extraordinary about my marriage. I just married the person I loved. The exemplary acts were done by those who, for years, never gave up the fight for same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.

To me, your courage is exemplary and your choices are extraordinary.

 

[LondonJohn]

I think it's extremely unlikely that Amanda's Meredith's stomach would not have started to pass food along to her duodenum by 10pm, never mind later. You have to remember the specific circumstances. Amanda Meredith was a healthy young woman with no reason to suspect delayed intestinal transit. Immediately after her meal she sat down to watch a film, which is very conducive to uninterrupted digestion. If she'd gone out jogging it might have been a different matter.

Nine o'clock is perfectly reasonable, but much more than that and it starts to become special pleading.

Rolfe.

Once again, you're absolutely right. But I fear you're banging your head against a brick wall. There are those of us who have taken the time and effort to research this area properly, and who have come to exactly the same conclusions as you have. And there appear to be those who - either willfully, or because they simply have low comprehension skills - are unable to understand or recognise this argument.

 

[LondonJohn]

You flatter yourself to ass u me that anything in my argument referred solely to you.

Who said anything about "solely"? Certainly not me.

At what time on November 1st 2007 do you think Meredith Kercher died?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

citations available upon request

Wow! She worked for this man for a whole two months! Still don't see anything here about her being exemplary. How was she so much more wonderful than any other 20-year old? As your link, any comment about his take on Marriot's spin?

There is a good bit of silliness in the article about a million dollar PR campaign. I don't take that seriously in the slightest degree. What I do take seriously (indeed what I think is almost impossible to overestimate in importance) is the testimony (not meaning necessarily at a trial) of people who knew Amanda and Raffaele before they were incarcerated, even if for only a few weeks. Sharon Swanson, one of the most perceptive of the reporters to cover the Duke lacrosse case and a former social worker, said words to the effect, "It is pretty difficult to hide who you really are for eight hours."

The people who knew David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligman personally (their dorm mates, guidance counselors, coaches, etc.), knew that they could not be rapists. When the whole DL case imploded, they had the quiet satisfaction of being right, while senior reporters from mainstream media said words to the effect, "The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong," thus proving that some people cannot learn. The people who know Amanda and Raffaele personally will have this same satisfaction when the combination of cell phone records, digestive tract data, and computer logs are fully appreciated to show that Meredith had died while they were at Raffaele's flat. MOO.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Charlie, not Bruce

When did the appeals court refute it?

BTW, might I ask, halides1 suggested in another post that you think the appeals court will uphold the convictions but the pair will be released at a future time. Is this your assessment of the appeal? If so, do you think they will be released after review by the Italian Supreme Court?

Alt+F4,

I said what I thought Charlie Wilkes believed, not what I thought Bruce believed.

 

[Katody Matrass]

How has Amanda's handling of it been extraordinary? Now her family, what they have managed to achieve, that is extraordinary. It reminds me of the parents of Madeleine McCann in a lot of ways.

Interesting that you mention them. Not so long ago I saw this and noticed curious similarities in Kate's McCann treatment by the foreign police:

Mrs McCann said the police told her they "didn't believe" her version of events and that she would get a more lenient sentence if she confessed to having killed Madeleine and buried her body: "I felt I was being bullied, and I suppose I was. My denials, answers and pleas fell on deaf ears. This was their theory and they wanted to shoehorn me into it," she said.

She added: "I assumed the tactics were deliberate - knock her off balance by telling her that her daughter is dead and get her to confess. They tried to convince me I'd had a blackout - 'a loss of memory episode', they called it."

 

[LondonJohn]

One expert said 3-4 hours. That gives 9:30pm to 10:30pm. Where is the special pleading? She also went for a walk.

That expert is (in my opinion) wrong: in fact, he is contradicted by other experts - notably the police's own forensic pathologist, who performed the autopsy on Meredith - who placed the time at 2-3 hours.

As I said, I think that all the experts were taking a bit of a general stab (no pun intended) at estimating this time, since ToD was not originally thought to be an important issue. I think that if you were to ask the same pathologists to do some specific research and talk to professional colleagues, then come back with a more detailed estimate of the ToD from the stomach/intestinal contents, they would all place 3 hours as the upper limit.

Lastly, Meredith did indeed "go for a walk" - but that walk started at around 8.45pm, over two hours after the pizza meal. During the intervening two hours, all the testimony suggests that Meredith was predominantly sedentary and relaxed (which, as Rolfe points out, are ideal conditions for optimum digestion). Furthermore, the walk itself only lasted some 10 minutes, and by all accounts was not vigorous or stressful. So it, too, would have had very little effect upon the digestive process.

 

[shuttlt]

In fact, the evidence suggests that 2.5 hours is already reasonably rare (maybe in 1 in 50 cases). Since we know that Meredith started her last meal by 6.30pm, and that she was still alive at just before 9pm, she must have been one of that 1 in 50. but for her to still been alive with no food present in her duodenum at 10pm, she would have had to have been 1 in around 2,000. And for that time to be 10.30pm, she would have had to be around 1 in 20,000.

OK, the steps of this dance are coming back to me now. I'd been puzzled by the 2-3/3-4 hour figure and the my memory that even the pro-innocence position had her stomach contents at the upper bound.

Given that we know she is at least in the 1/50 group, the odds of there being something a little unusual about her digestion are increased. 1/250 people who make it to 9pm make it to 10:30pm. Presumably the curve is exponential with a long tail?

I remember these figures coming up ages ago. Did Halides first find them? You don't have a link to the study this comes from do you?

 

[lane99]

...Well, I'm not the expert. However I've read a good number of posts taking it as read that it was essential to push the time of death as late as 11.30 in order to implicate Amanda...

Bit of a misapprehension here, perhaps.

I'm not the expert, either. But essentially the prosecution needs to push the time of death- not necessarily to 11:30pm- but past about 9:30pm in order to avoid being contradicted by documentary evidence (in this instance, computer records) regarding the whereabouts of the couple.

Anytime after 9:30 puts us in a grey area where definitive evidence of computer use which may have formerly existed has been compromised by investigators' bungled attempts at analyzing the computers.

 

[shuttlt]

That expert is (in my opinion) wrong: in fact, he is contradicted by other experts - notably the police's own forensic pathologist, who performed the autopsy on Meredith - who placed the time at 2-3 hours.

Yes, that's where I got the 2-3 hours.

 

[Fine]

Now we need to get the Idaho team to go throw a 9 lb rock at the second floor window of 7 via della Pergola and then step on the grate and climb in through the window (oh open the shutters before throwing the rock of course).

_____________________

And why didn't the Idaho Team perform a demonstration asking some of the Boise State female students to volunteer their bras, off their backs, for DNA examination? If the results demonstrated innocent---secondary or tertiary--- transfer of male DNA to the girls' bras, the results might have exonerated Raffaele. (What the results might have said about Greg Hampikian's extracurricular interests is another matter.)

///

 

[shuttlt]

Interesting that you mention them. Not so long ago I saw this and noticed curious similarities in Kate's McCann treatment by the foreign police:

Mrs McCann said the police told her they "didn't believe" her version of events and that she would get a more lenient sentence if she confessed to having killed Madeleine and buried her body: "I felt I was being bullied, and I suppose I was. My denials, answers and pleas fell on deaf ears. This was their theory and they wanted to shoehorn me into it," she said.

She added: "I assumed the tactics were deliberate - knock her off balance by telling her that her daughter is dead and get her to confess. They tried to convince me I'd had a blackout - 'a loss of memory episode', they called it."

 

[Alt+F4]

Alt+F4,

Here is a link to a reprint of a story by Richard Stagliano.

Upon reading this article again something caught my eye. Both Anne Bremner in that article and Rocco Girlanda in his letter to the President of Italy refer to Martin Luther King, Jr. as Martin Luther King then write the same quote. The folks at FOA should really fact check their talking points before passing them on to their Italian colleagues.

Halides1, do you also know in this link that you gave us the author refers to Anne Bremner as a "sharpened Crudelia Demon"?

 

[Kaosium]

Wow! She worked for this man for a whole two months! Still don't see anything here about her being exemplary. How was she so much more wonderful than any other 20-year old? As for your link, any comment about his take on Marriot's spin?

What do you suppose that actually means?

 

[Alt+F4]

Alt+F4,

I said what I thought Charlie Wilkes believed, not what I thought Bruce believed.

Sorry, yes. I mistaked Bruce for Charlie.

 

[CoulsdonUK]

Interesting that you mention them. Not so long ago I saw this and noticed curious similarities in Kate's McCann treatment by the foreign police:

Mrs McCann said the police told her they "didn't believe" her version of events and that she would get a more lenient sentence if she confessed to having killed Madeleine and buried her body: "I felt I was being bullied, and I suppose I was. My denials, answers and pleas fell on deaf ears. This was their theory and they wanted to shoehorn me into it," she said.

She added: "I assumed the tactics were deliberate - knock her off balance by telling her that her daughter is dead and get her to confess. They tried to convince me I'd had a blackout - 'a loss of memory episode', they called it."

I wonder where Mrs McCann would be now if she had a false memory episode or if the McCann’s didn’t have witnesses corroborating their movements on the evening that Madelaine was taken.

 

[Kaosium]

_____________________

And why didn't the Idaho Team perform a demonstration asking some of the Boise State female students to volunteer their bras, off their backs, for DNA examination? If the results demonstrated innocent---secondary or tertiary--- transfer of male DNA to the girls' bras, the results might have exonerated Raffaele. (What the results might have said about Greg Hampikian's extracurricular interests is another matter.)

///

LOL!!!!

That was Comodi that did that in court, wasn't it?