Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[LondonJohn]

There are studies that show it does better than chance?

I believe so, but I'll look up some references later: I am parsing a bath, and it is almost troped.

 

[JREF2010]

Is the data on the fried hard disks important? It's not as if, had the chocolate festival photo been available, the case would have been thrown out, is it? The unfortunate business with the police watching movies on his laptop is the real issue here, isn't it? Unlike the fried hard disks, that data is definitely gone for ever.

It is because the previous access time-stamp is possibly erased.

It also shows horrific attention to detail by the police who did this.

 

[shuttlt]

It is because the previous access time-stamp is possibly erased.

Almost certianly this will have been written to the same block as the original timestamp and gone forever. If he'd been using SUN's Oracle's ZFS filesystem all this might have been avoided.

 

[LondonJohn]

It is because the previous access time-stamp is possibly erased.

It also shows horrific attention to detail by the police who did this.

It gets even worse: there's apparently also cache evidence that the "crack" police used Sollecito's laptop to surf the net - primarily looking for online media reports about the case. It's gross unprofessionalism, as well as destruction of important evidence in the case of the movie access record.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Wayne Williams

I read the article. That's his opinion.


He may have never been "proved wrong", but what difference does that make given that profiling has never actually caught anyone and profiles seem to be reported post hoc as being accurate even if they are randomly assigned just like astrology.


I disagree with putting a criminal profiler forward as an authority as you did when criminal profiling itself is unvalidated and highly questionable. As for Mignini's claim, it sounds like the sort of stuff a criminal profiler would come out with, though they normally say "white male, mid 20s to early 30s" I think, rather than "female", but then they mainly deal with serial killers.

shuttlt,

Your answer above is problematic for at least two reasons. Mignini's claim has been discussed on these threads for a long time (more than a year, I would estimate). Yet you never came up with any citations to knock it down at that time, to the best of my recollection. From the article, "Once recovered, he continued on and helped nail Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murderer, tagging him as the first African-American serial killer." How do you square this with your claim that profiling has never caught anyone?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

When was the evidence collected?

I read the article. That's his opinion.

shuttlt,

Your failure to answer my actual question is noted. Moreover, the knife was collected on November 6th, and the luminol evidence and bra clasp date from 18 December, IIRC.

 

[Antony]

As I said, they were just the first ones to come to mind. I don't know that many murderers and the famous ones tend to be the nuttiest. Bonnie is undermined as an example by not having killed anyone. If one wanted, you could claim she was a nice girl before meeting Clyde. She wrote bad poetry and everything.

I did get 17,400 hits for 'killer AND "no previous history of violence""' though. I haven't searched through it very hard, but there's this quote:


http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/the-towel-that-trapped-a-killer-14097629.html

I haven't done very much reading on this case, I think there is a quote of somebody saying they thought he was a bit odd. Anyway, there's 17,000 and some urls to go through if it's a serious question.

Hardly an objective report - the Belfast Telegraph peppers its description of the crime with name-calling of the accused. They claim "She was murdered simply because she had complained about sicko Stevenson holding all-night drinking parties" - given the circumstances of the investigation as described, how could anyone possibly know this?

I would need some quite solid details of the tests carried out and the other evidence in order to be confident that this wasn't also a miscarriage of justice. It's not just the report that Stevenson had no history of violence that raises questions: this pensioner was murdered, and the police investigated the the occupant of the flat directly facing hers. Does anyone imagine that tracking down criminals is that easy? (Edgardo Giobbi, perhaps.)

Then there were the DNA tests, carried out on items taken from Stevenson and the murder victim in 1988, and stored for 20 years. They already knew who their suspect was when carrying out their tests, and the report says that they set out to find a match with Stevenson! And he continues to protest his innocence - no, every convicted criminal does not necessarily do that. In another report http://www.4ni.co.uk/northern_ireland_news.asp?id=63138 it seems he made no attempt to flee the jurisdiction after the murder.

There would seem to be many of the same questions over this case as there are over the Perugia case.

 

[shuttlt]

shuttlt,

Your answer above is problematic. Mignini's claim has been discussed on these threads for a long time (more than a year, I would estimate). Yet you never came up with any citations to knock it down at that time, to the best of my recollection.

I probably didn't. Criminal profiling didn't come up then, I happen to have read a few articles on it, I was interested in other things. But really, why is it my job to criticise everything uniformly? This is the same thing that homeopaths and chiropractors say - why pick holes in us when there are so many other things that you aren't picking holes in? It's the billy goats gruff argument.

From the article, "Once recovered, he continued on and helped nail Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murderer, tagging him as the first African-American serial killer." How do you square this with your claim that profiling has never caught anyone?

He says he "helped". I never said successful investigations hadn't employed profilers. Psychics have "helped" successful investigations also.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

covering a body

I probably didn't. Criminal profiling didn't come up then, I happen to have read a few articles on it, I was interested in other things. But really, why is it my job to criticise everything uniformly?

shuttlt,

Actually it did. I will judge your past and future contributions to this thread according to your answer above.

 

[shuttlt]

Antony,

I'm not about to start a discussion about whether or not somebody else was framed. Like I said, there are 17,400 urls to search through.

Trauma in childhood, but no history of violence prior to killing four people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Stayner
The police thought he looked innocent enough to initially discount him.

 

[shuttlt]

shuttlt,

Your failure to answer my actual question is noted. Moreover, the knife was collected on November 6th, and the luminol evidence and bra clasp date from 18 December, IIRC.

It's impossible to argue if we move from one topic to another before finishing the first one. If you're asking about Mignini's cod psychology, as a theory I wouldn't put much weight in it, all my criticism of profilers would apply equally well to it, as for whether it was significant in his thinking that seems to me like unresolvable speculation.

Can we cut the "blah, blah is noted" crap? Nobody says that in real life. For some reason people like to say that on web forums.

 

[shuttlt]

shuttlt,

Actually it did. I will judge your past and future contributions to this thread according to your answer above.

?

Halides, we've gotten on OK in the past, but I really don't care how you judge my contributions.

 

[Katody Matrass]

I read the article. That's his opinion.

Interestingly looks like this opinion is based on general experience with investigations, not profiling.

In both cases—West Memphis and Knox—the police allowed theory rather than evidence to direct their investigations, and that is always a fatal error.

What parts of it do you disagree with an why?

 

[Chris C]

Is the data on the fried hard disks important? It's not as if, had the chocolate festival photo been available, the case would have been thrown out, is it? The unfortunate business with the police watching movies on his laptop is the real issue here, isn't it? Unlike the fried hard disks, that data is definitely gone for ever.

Actually it is an issue. It was claimed that Knox and Meredith didn't like each other and had been arguing. Pictures of them going places together would prove other wise.

 

[shuttlt]

What parts of it do you disagree with an why?

I disagree with using him as a source of authority based on him being this famous criminal profiler. If it's the quote in isolation, without his authority behind it, I have no problem.

 

[shuttlt]

Actually it is an issue. It was claimed that Knox and Meredith didn't like each other and had been arguing. Pictures of them going places together would prove other wise.

I don't see that it would prove it. Their mutual friends and acquaintances would be better sources of information. People can smile for the photo.

 

[LondonJohn]

I don't see that it would prove it. Their mutual friends and acquaintances would be better sources of information. People can smile for the photo.

This is true. But in any case there's other evidence that Amanda and Meredith had some sort of friendship that went beyond mere acquaintance. They went together to the classical concert in late October at which Knox first met Sollecito*. And there is a documented series of friendly text messages between the two that was exchanged on Halloween night - the night before the murder.

Knox had told her family and friends that she and Meredith were friendly, and Meredith's English friends in Perugia stated that if Meredith wasn't with them, she hung out with Amanda. I suspect that Meredith's family might also have some evidence of the friendship between the two girls (emails, photos, phone calls), but that they are reluctant to present this evidence...

* although Meredith left half way through the concert, for reasons that have never been explained. I can only imagine the opprobrium that might have been heaped upon Knox if it had been she who had abandoned her friend half way through a concert, but there you go.

PS: following my bath, I am now enjoying a lovely meme of fresh mint tea

 

[Antony]

Antony,

I'm not about to start a discussion about whether or not somebody else was framed. Like I said, there are 17,400 urls to search through.

I didn't intend to start a discussion about that either, but of your first examples I would give you 0 out of 3: Shipman - murdered by poisoning, not violence; Bonnie Parker - you yourself say that she didn't personally kill anyone; and William Stevenson - possibly a contentious case.

Trauma in childhood, but no history of violence prior to killing four people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Stayner
The police thought he looked innocent enough to initially discount him.

The article describes a deeply disturbed individual, with other powerful indicators of propensity to murder, than simply an easy-to-understand violent outlook on life.

Look, in order to find a meaningful counter-example, we have to find cases of previously well-balanced people engaging in a murderous attack for no reason and with no warning - as Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are accused of doing. It's a tall order - which is the reason why the Perugia police, prosecutors and pro-guilt bloggers have gone to such lengths to paint a false picture of the 2 of them.

 

[LondonJohn]

I probably didn't. Criminal profiling didn't come up then, I happen to have read a few articles on it, I was interested in other things. But really, why is it my job to criticise everything uniformly? This is the same thing that homeopaths and chiropractors say - why pick holes in us when there are so many other things that you aren't picking holes in? It's the billy goats gruff argument.


He says he "helped". I never said successful investigations hadn't employed profilers. Psychics have "helped" successful investigations also.

That's the point though, surely. Offender profiling should only be used as a tool to help direct the investigation. The profile should never be used as any sort of evidence in itself. There's clear evidence that profiling can help police narrow down their search in certain types of crime. I also think that it's not a valid comparison to liken offender profiling with "psychic" predictions (which are demonstrably and clearly nonsense). Offender profiling is rooted not only in academic psychological research, but also in reviewing tens of thousands of previous offences against the known offenders.

As I've said before, offender profiling is very far from completely accurate - but even if its hit rate is only 50%, it's still a potentially useful tool, and far more beneficial than no tool at all. Ironically, in the case of Colin Stagg, the offender profile produced by Paul Britton was pretty accurate (it described the actual killer of Rachel Nickell, Robert Napper, as accurately as it described Colin Stagg). But the police became fixated on Stagg being the killer, and immediately stopped the search for other suspects fitting the profile in an all-out attempt to entrap Stagg. Had they used the profile to draw up a longer list of suspects - which likely would have included Napper as well as Stagg - they might well have found the murderer 15 years earlier than they did, and in the process they would have spared Stagg his legal and public vilification.

 

[Kaosium]

http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/funk58.html
Skeptic's Dictionary article claiming criminal profiling is just confirmation bias and post hoc rationalization.

And a version of Randi's classic astrology test:

From the same page as the previous quote.

and

I find it ironic you bring that up in a case where the head of the Scientific Polizia claimed they could tell Amanda Knox was guilty simply from observing her behavior for a few days and noting a few items that sound ridiculous as indications of a murderer in retrospect; to the extent that they'd mount her head on the wall a year before she'd been charged and they didn't find a trace of her in that room.

It does not invalidate what John Douglas and the FBI do however. What they use criminal profiling for is to try to use psychology and probability based on crime statistics to get an indication of what to look for in their suspect. Then they use tried and true forensic methods to evaluate physical evidence to confirm or deny whether they are on the right track or have a case against a specific person. Being as often initial clues are sparse, like for the unabomber, the possibility of errors--especially gross errors--is high and the good ones know that.

What Giobbi did is laughable, what John Douglas does is use every tool at his disposal to attempt to evaluate a crime and the criminal who committed it. He's damned good at it too, because he is rational enough to be able to falsify hypothesis and change profiles as new information is provided and old information invalidated.

Here's a more balanced article on the field. Incidentally I don't think simply looking at Amanda Knox or her history one can tell whether she committed the crime, that's what you need evidence for. You'll note in the short article that John Douglas also mentions the forensics, you also probably remember Steve Moore does the same thing, they evaluate all the information at their disposal.

What I find odd is those who look at Amanda Knox and her history and see a monster, that's just weird.