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Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case
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That is so funny! We just saw three major interviews with Mignini - CNN, Bob Graham and Rolling Stone - and he now says it is not his place to comment?
Massei, not Mignini.
(Though I would like to hear Mignini's comments.)
Draca
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Massei, not Mignini.
(Though I would like to hear Mignini's comments.)
Oops. I would LOVE to hear an interview with Massei !
Why didn't you allow the independent DNA testing during the first trial?
It seems they are innocent, how does it feel to have been so wrong?
Is there any legitimate reason not to have tested the semen stain?
Stefanoni was caught obfuscating the truth in court, why didn't that make her work suspect?
Did you really not see the problems presented in the crime scene evidence collection videos?
What's wrong with you anyway, what kind of judge would allow this?
Chris_Halkides
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Meredith's DNA versus Raffaele's DNA on the clasp
Rolfe,
Even if one accepts the validity of argument that the amount of DNA present is a strong indicator of how that DNA was deposited, there is an elephant in the room for the pro-guilt community: Meredith's DNA is 6-10 fold more abundant than Raffaele's. If Raffaele's DNA being more abundant than the unattributed DNA (a complex point that I have already touched upon yesterday) is significant, then why is the difference in quantity between Meredith's and his DNA not also significant? I asked this question many times on the first thread, and I was never satisfied with any answer that I received.
However, I think that the quantity of DNA transferred is dependent on many factors, such as the last time one washed one's hands, etc. I don't have a good citation handy at the moment, but I don't know any DNA scientist who feels otherwise.
Rolfe,
Even if one accepts the validity of argument that the amount of DNA present is a strong indicator of how that DNA was deposited, there is an elephant in the room for the pro-guilt community: Meredith's DNA is 6-10 fold more abundant than Raffaele's. If Raffaele's DNA being more abundant than the unattributed DNA (a complex point that I have already touched upon yesterday) is significant, then why is the difference in quantity between Meredith's and his DNA not also significant? I asked this question many times on the first thread, and I was never satisfied with any answer that I received.
However, I think that the quantity of DNA transferred is dependent on many factors, such as the last time one washed one's hands, etc. I don't have a good citation handy at the moment, but I don't know any DNA scientist who feels otherwise.
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katy_did
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The two police experts who examined the phone records apparently didn't have access to the phone memories, so they didn't pick up on the aborted calls; it was only the defence expert who did. I guess the question is whether anyone thought to verify the phone clock. It's almost unbelievable that they didn't, yet somehow less unbelievable in this case than it would ordinarily be! I don't recall this being addressed in Massei at all. My phone clock/date is manually set, incidentally (a pain, as I have to reset it every time I take out the battery). That's the case for every phone I've had.
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Rolfe
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Well, if Meredith was wearing the bra, I'd have thought her DNA would be the most abundant, whatever else was there - unless there's something about this I'm not getting.
Rolfe.
Rolfe.
Did you miss the part about "her lawyers" being the ones suing?
I still don't like this, at all. The idea that a court in Italy can decide what movies Hollywood is allowed to make or what is allowed on the internet is obscene to me. I think that sort of sublime arrogance needs to be rectified posthaste. With extreme prejudice.
I would expect Meredith's DNA would be the most abundant as she was wearing the bra, likely for multiple times before washing it.
Eta: I see Rolfe answered the same.
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Rolfe, did you join at PMF? It's a very very large board, loads of threads from way back when, and all the arguments for guilt have been made there in much detail. It's actually impressive in and of itself and anyone convinced of guilt generally posts there.
Some of their members have come here in the past to argue but usually end up going back there as home base. There have been many heated debates on earlier versions of this thread between long time guilters and long time innocenters but not so much in the past few months.
Some of their members have come here in the past to argue but usually end up going back there as home base. There have been many heated debates on earlier versions of this thread between long time guilters and long time innocenters but not so much in the past few months.
Chris_Halkides
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the amount of DNA deposited depends upon many factors
Rolfe and Danceme,
In the journal Nature, 387, p. 767 (1997), R. van Oorschot and M. Jones wrote, "Objects handled by many individuals all produced profiles with multiple alleles of varying intensity. To determine the effect of multiple handlers, we exchanged polypropylene tubes between individuals (2 or 3, 10 min each) with different genotypes. Although the material left by the last holder was usually present on the tube, that of previous holders was also retrieved to varying extents. The strongest profile obtained was not always that of the person who last held the object, but was dependent on the individual. We regularly observed profiles of previous holders of a tube from swabs of hands involved in these exchanges, showing that in some cases material from which DNA can be retrieved is transferred from object to hand (secondary transfer).”
Suzanna Ryan wrote, “Through studies by Ladd, et al and others, many in the forensic community believe that some individuals just naturally shed more cells when handling an item (‘good’ shedders) than others (‘poor’ shedders). Other factors including the substrate being handled (rougher items collect more DNA), the time since the individual last washed their hands, how nervous the person is (nervousness can lead to increased sweating), and how often they touch their mouth, eyes, hair, face or other body parts (thus gathering DNA on their hands) play a heavy role in whether a DNA profile will be obtained through simply touching an item.”
I would be hesitant to say that Meredith's DNA would always be expected to be highest in quantity.
Rolfe and Danceme,
In the journal Nature, 387, p. 767 (1997), R. van Oorschot and M. Jones wrote, "Objects handled by many individuals all produced profiles with multiple alleles of varying intensity. To determine the effect of multiple handlers, we exchanged polypropylene tubes between individuals (2 or 3, 10 min each) with different genotypes. Although the material left by the last holder was usually present on the tube, that of previous holders was also retrieved to varying extents. The strongest profile obtained was not always that of the person who last held the object, but was dependent on the individual. We regularly observed profiles of previous holders of a tube from swabs of hands involved in these exchanges, showing that in some cases material from which DNA can be retrieved is transferred from object to hand (secondary transfer).”
Suzanna Ryan wrote, “Through studies by Ladd, et al and others, many in the forensic community believe that some individuals just naturally shed more cells when handling an item (‘good’ shedders) than others (‘poor’ shedders). Other factors including the substrate being handled (rougher items collect more DNA), the time since the individual last washed their hands, how nervous the person is (nervousness can lead to increased sweating), and how often they touch their mouth, eyes, hair, face or other body parts (thus gathering DNA on their hands) play a heavy role in whether a DNA profile will be obtained through simply touching an item.”
I would be hesitant to say that Meredith's DNA would always be expected to be highest in quantity.
Mainly because most of the guilters were waiting for the DNA results to confirm stefanoni's results. Whats going to happen if the knife and clasp get tossed? Will the prosecution then agree with the defense and ask the court to test the possible semen stain? After all they would need new evidence against Sollecito/Knox.
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Hampikian recalls Maresca
http://www.lanazione.it/umbria/cronaca/2011/07/01/535966-omicidio_meredith.shtml
http://www.lanazione.it/umbria/cronaca/2011/07/01/535966-omicidio_meredith.shtml
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Chris_Halkides
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Secondary transfer vs. primary transfer
Danceme and Rolfe,
"One study performed by Lowe, et al, was designed to highlight a "worst case" scenario and involved two individuals. The first was determined to be a poor shedder and the second a good shedder. These two shook hands for one minute. The poor shedder had washed their hands immediately prior to the experiment whereas the good shedder had not. After shaking hands the poor shedder held a sterile plastic tube for 10 seconds. The tube was then swabbed and tested for the presence of DNA. This experiment was performed on two sets of good shedder/poor shedder pairs. Surprisingly, in one of the pairs, only the good shedder's DNA was obtained from the plastic tube, with no evidence of a mixture including the poor shedder!" Link here.
Based on this study as described also by Suzanna Ryan, I would conclude that one cannot determine whether DNA deposition were primary or secondary solely on the basis of the amount of DNA that was recovered.
Danceme and Rolfe,
"One study performed by Lowe, et al, was designed to highlight a "worst case" scenario and involved two individuals. The first was determined to be a poor shedder and the second a good shedder. These two shook hands for one minute. The poor shedder had washed their hands immediately prior to the experiment whereas the good shedder had not. After shaking hands the poor shedder held a sterile plastic tube for 10 seconds. The tube was then swabbed and tested for the presence of DNA. This experiment was performed on two sets of good shedder/poor shedder pairs. Surprisingly, in one of the pairs, only the good shedder's DNA was obtained from the plastic tube, with no evidence of a mixture including the poor shedder!" Link here.
Based on this study as described also by Suzanna Ryan, I would conclude that one cannot determine whether DNA deposition were primary or secondary solely on the basis of the amount of DNA that was recovered.
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Dan O.
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More information being withheld from the experts! I'm shocked
I looked closely at that section of the Massei Report and the one connection that should have linked the network time with the phone's time was the last connection at 22.13.29. However, for this connection we get only
The Wind [phone record] printouts register that (but the data is absent in the mobile
phone’s memory)
4. at 22.13.29 hours a GPRS connection (to the Internet) lasting 9 seconds
phone’s memory)
4. at 22.13.29 hours a GPRS connection (to the Internet) lasting 9 seconds
So from the records at hand, we haven't got any indication that the phones internal clock is anywhere close to accurate. These could be calls from months ago before Meredith came to Italy. Or, since this phone would be Meredith's primary timepiece, she would have just reset the time a few days earlier with the Daylight Savings Time change.
The readout of the phones memory was copied to the court record so it should be available to resolve this issue.
Katody Matrass
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It becomes somewhat complicated.
So far we have Amanda leaving Raffaele around 21:00 to go to the cottage. There she witnesses a shocking, horrible, nightmarish crime. In the meantime Raffaele after watching Amelie on his own entertains himself for a while with some cartoons. Then he learns about the crime at some moment yet decides not to call the police but instead works together with Amanda to clean up and alter the gruesome crime scene. I imagine both of them must be in a state of unthinkable shock and trauma by then, considering the reality in the murder room.
What is it then, that motivates them to act so completely irrationally yet methodically?
What exactly have they cleaned in the corridor and bathroom and what was their purpose in it?
How did they clean up knox's bloody foot prints in the corridor without cleaning up Guede's bloody shoe prints?
What did they clean in the bathroom?
What did they clean in the kitchen?
How did they stage the break in?
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Strangely the obvious followup question only now occurred to me: why on Earth wasn't this part of the "physiology" of the trial that he conducted?
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Kevin_Lowe
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This specific judgment strikes me as curious.
If you put 100 innocent women like Amanda in her situation (told the police have incontrovertible proof she witnessed a murder and that she has repressed memories of this event, confronted with a text from a specific associate which is presented as evidence of her link to he crime) how many do you think would crack and fall victim to an internalised false statement?
If you put 100 women like Amanda who were guilty in some vague way of being involved in covering up a murder in the same situation, how many do you think would crack and accuse the associate the police wanted them to finger?
What do you base those estimates on?
What's the ratio of the first number to the second number?
In analytic philosophy one of the canonical logical fallacies is the "argument from incredulity". It goes "I don't find A credible, therefore A is most likely false" or even "...therefore A is false".
It's a fallacy for two reasons. Firstly because sometimes incredible things do happen - with six billion people on the planet, billion-to-one flukes happen to six people every day - and secondly because people are capable of having poorly calibrated senses of what is credible. For example, people not familiar with cases like the Norfolk Four or the scientific literature on internalised false statements might find the idea that people would give an internalised false statement incredible when in fact it's no more incredible than a fakir walking on hot coals.
For me, the presence in the house of a person with an established criminal history of throwing rocks through second-storey windows and climbing in, in order to roam around with a knife, steal and excrete is explained satisfactorily by the broken window, the murder victim, the stolen property and the excretions left behind. I would want to see some really extraordinary evidence casting doubt on that explanation before I seriously entertained alternative theories.
The availability heuristic makes us think that things we can easily access examples of in our brains are common, and things we can't easily access examples of are uncommon. This can very easily lead us badly astray.
For example are there more words starting with R, or more words whose third letter is R? Most people who have not been prompted with an explanation of the availability heuristic will go for the first option, because they can easily access lots of words that start with R. In fact there are more words whose third letter is R.
You can access one example of an unprovoked knife attack, so it seems plausible to you that there was an unprovoked knife attack. However the criminological fact is that there has never been a case that parallels the Massei/Mignini theory of the Kercher murder. It's a wildly implausible theory.
Young housemates with no history of violence just don't gang up with random near-strangers to stab their housemates to death, help them rape the housemate as they die and clean up afterwards. I don't pretend to have access to any kind of deep, universal psychological theory that explains why this never happens but the brute fact is that it never happens. Or if it ever happened, it only happened this once.
This is the standard defence mantra for retracting any inconvenient previous statements made to the police. It must be part of the lawyers' bar exam.
If you think this through, this isn't evidence either way.
This is factually incorrect, as others have explained.
Rhea
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There is a white version …
http://perugiamurderfile.org/viewtopic.php?style=6&f=1&t=375&view=unread#unread
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