Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Rolfe]

You're entitled to your opinion. I worked for Victoria Police for 7 years and the Justice Department for another 5. I don't accept that a large number people necessary to hide the truth in this case would close ranks for over four years. Without a leak. Without an anonymous disclosure to the press. a superhuman achievement for those not outstandingly intelligent.

I don't exclude the possibility that the mindset in Australia should be an example to us all. I know next to nothing about the Australian reputation for miscarriages of justice.

Sadly, what I have described is situation normal for both Scotland and England, and there is a shedload of evidence to substantiate that. My reading suggests it's pretty much SOP in the USA as well. I don't find it in the least surprising to realise it's also rampant in Italy.

Rolfe.

 

[LondonJohn]

But if the evidence is so obvious, as you and others claim, why are they sticking to their story? Are they just stupid? Is the conspiracy that strong? Or is the truth not quite as obvious as you portray on this thread?

It's never crossed your mind that people don't like being shown to be incompetent? This is true of someone packing paperclips - let alone someone charged with upholding law and order and solving serious crimes.

The fact is that the police/prosecutors were under huge pressure to solve this crime from the 2nd November onwards. This pressure was caused by a number of factors: the high-profile and grisly nature of the murder; the international dimensions to it (and the consequent presence of the international media, which in turn further piqued the interest of the Italian media); the apparent fact that students were deserting Perugia in large numbers in fear for their safety; and the fact that the Perugia police/prosecutors had demonstrably bungled their investigation into the murder of and Italian student almost exactly a year previously (and had been severely criticised as a result).

It's abundantly clear that the police and prosecutors thought they'd "solved the crime" by the evening of November 5th. The way in which they interrogated Knox and Sollecito in the following hours, coupled with the statements made by Perugia Police Chief de Felice the following day, are a clear indication of this. There was an almost audible exhalation of relief from police and prosecutors on the 6th November (coupled with unseemly levels of triumphalism), which reflected the following thinking on behalf of police/prosecutors: "See! You (the public and the media) can have confidence in our investigative skills and competence! We solved the crime in less than four days, using all our skill, judgement and resources! People of Perugia can sleep well in their beds again, confident that the law enforcement community is easily up to the task of protecting them and identifying anyone committing serious criminal acts."

But the police/prosecutors soon discovered that they hadn't solved the crime. It turned out that their belief in Lumumba's involvement (which they had formulated long before they convinced Knox to name Lumumba as the murderer) was incorrect, that there was essentially no evidence linking Knox or Sollecito to the murder, and that there was in fact solid evidence (a bloody hand print in Meredith's room, that was compared to police print databases) placing another person altogether - Rudy Guede - at the scene of the murder. Suddenly, the police and prosecutors were looking as if they had totally bungled the initial investigation, and that they had incorrectly rushed to an early judgement.

Faced with this situation, the police/prosecutors obviously decided that the best strategy to adopt (i.e. the one that made them look the least incompetent) was the following: 1) Simply substitute Guede for Lumumba in the original narrative, and claim that it was Knox who deviously led them in the wrong direction over the identity of the "third man"; 2) Claim that it was dogged police work that had exonerated Lumumba - even though it was no thanks to the police that a Swiss professor travelled to Perugia under his own initiative to provide Lumumba with a solid alibi; 3) tailor their interpretation of the scant evidence to support the Knox/Sollecito/Guede 3-way assault; and 4) Try a number of often-ludicrous motivation theories to try to explain why these three people - who barely knew each other - would have teamed up to brutally kill the housemate of one of the alleged perpetrators (ranging from satanic rituals, through to sex-games-gone-wrong, through to some sort extreme jealousy towards the victim).

And that's how it happened. No conspiracy. just a strong desire to be shown to be competent and efficient (and, more importantly, not to be exposed as incompetent, inefficient and not fit-for-purpose). It can be explained simply though basic human nature - particularly when egotistical, arrogant, power-hungry individuals are involved.

 

[PhantomWolf]

You're entitled to your opinion. I worked for Victoria Police for 7 years and the Justice Department for another 5. I don't accept that a large number people necessary to hide the truth in this case would close ranks for over four years. Without a leak. Without an anonymous disclosure to the press. a superhuman achievement for those not outstandingly intelligent.

See this is where I find it strange LK, having being in the police then you have to know what happened in Queensland in the 1980's, you have to know about the likes of the Lindy Chamberlind case, and yet here you are claiming those sorts of things couldn't possibly exist. That seems strange to me.

 

[lionking]

See this is where I find it strange LK, having being in the police then you have to know what happened in Queensland in the 1980's, you have to know about the likes of the Lindy Chamberlind case, and yet here you are claiming those sorts of things couldn't possibly exist. That seems strange to me.

Did I deny these cases? There were whistleblowers galore. Why is there not one single one here, in one of Italy's most high profile cases for many years?

 

[bucketoftea]

Originally Posted by davefoc View Post
I just looked at the "True Justice For Meredith Kercher" site apparently produced by Meredith Kercher's father, John Kercher linked to above.
TJMK is not run by Meredith's family, but rather by a man named Peter Quennell, who has no connection to them.

RoseM:
Yes, I have disputed Mr. Kercher's list of evidence on several occasions, including here. His list reads like a list prepared by The Machine.

Diocletus:
It's kind of incredible, really. What he lists is debunked, wrong, or not incriminating.

RoseM:
Mr Kercher seems like an intelligent man, and yet he includes manga comics and ritualism as among the reasons for guilt. He is searching for justification and denying reality, in my opinion.

* * *
You know perfectly well who runs TJMK, Rose. Peter Quennell, not John Kercher.

Why don't you all give it a rest? It's repulsive to me that the Kerchers name is at the end of dirty fingers here. You disgust.(imo)

 

[PhantomWolf]

Did I deny these cases? There were whistleblowers galore. Why is there not one single one here, in one of Italy's most high profile cases for many years?

Really? Who was blowing the whistle on the prosecution case being fabricated and make of junk while Lindy Chamberlind was in jail for 4 years?

Come over the Tasman, who in the police or prosecution was blowing the whistle on the faked evidence against Arthur Allen Thomas while he was in jail wrongfully convicted of a double homicide?

Who was blowing the whistle and proving the level corruption in the Queensland police in the decade before Phil Dickie and then the Fizgerald Inquiry blew the whole can of worms open?

 

[PhantomWolf]

-double post-

 

[Kaosium]

Thanks for the link. I have read all 48 pages and I now have a better understanding of the issue.

This is a great example of what I was referring to regarding the smear. This part right here:

Meredith and Amanda reportedly did not hit it off in those first few months, despite both being enrolled at the same Universitá per Stranieri (“University for Foreigners”).Meredith complained to her father that Amanda was messy, partied too much and had numerous romantic partners whom the roommates were not exactly pleased with running into unexpectedly at breakfast. Indeed, it seems that Amanda relished what reports describe as “new-found beauty”,

Comes from this cite:

“Amanda arrived only a week ago and she already has a boyfriend,” Meredith dryly informed her father, John Kercher, a freelance journalist who often works for the daily Mirror. Actually, Meredith told her tight circle of British friends, Amanda had acquired several boyfriends in succession.

This is untrue. Amanda listed her sexual partners in prison when she was told she was HIV positive, to figure out how she might have been 'infected.' She had only one other than Raffaele who she met six days before the murder, Daniel DeLuca who she knew for one night. They leaked her diary to the press and didn't seem to notice how many of the names were American, so they said she had seven lovers in Italy in the three months she was there:

In the diary Knox, who called herself Foxy Knoxy, lists seven lovers she had in Italy. She said she was told by prison doctors that she has a sexually transmitted disease and wonders who she got it from.

She's bawling in prison writing in her diary how she's afraid to die, and they're taking what the cops gave them and smearing it all over everywhere to defame her character. The false positive rate for HIV tests is minimal. They keep her hanging on this for two weeks. Vae victis.

This was by no means Meredith’s only complaint. There are rumors of anger over the rent money,

Rudy Guede's lie if I recall correctly, she had thousands in the bank and thousands more at home.

and she found Amanda sloppy about her personal habits. Meredith’s close friends also found Amanda a bit odd. “Amanda’s behavior always struck me as strange,” one of these friends would later tell police. “The first time I met her we were eating in a restaurant, when all of a sudden she began to sing in a loud voice. It was very strange and out of place.”

Hippy-chick, doesn't flush the urine to save water for the good of the planet and does offbeat stuff like sing in public. They're all over my hometown too, which has a University the same size as U-Wash and Perugia, 40k or so. Take some tofu to a tye-dye down on State Street and you'll have a dozen sniffing at in within the hour. I know the type, mostly interesting, sometimes annoying, and utterly harmless.

 

[Diocletus]

You're entitled to your opinion. I worked for Victoria Police for 7 years and the Justice Department for another 5. I don't accept that a large number people necessary to hide the truth in this case would close ranks for over four years. Without a leak. Without an anonymous disclosure to the press. a superhuman achievement for those not outstandingly intelligent.

They're not "hiding" the truth in the sense that they actually know the truth and are trying to cover it with a veneer of BS. They're just collectively wrong about what happened, and each is doing his/her little part to keep the dream alive. A little lie here about what I did in the lab, a little lie there about when we got to the crime scene, a little leak here to highlight our superior investigation skills, a few inconvenient pieces of evidence go missing . . . and ta-da! They look guilty!

And really, it appears to be the culture here that once the die is cast, nobody is going to back down from what they've said. That said, I'll bet that some of the fringe players know at this point that these people are innocent. But even those fringe players might only be aware of, in isolation, a seemingly minor infraction or two, so why go to all the trouble of being a whistleblower? That would make living in Perugia very difficult.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Southern style forensic fraud

The time of death is contested. Let's see what the appeal makes of it. What I don't accept, as I have said many times, is a massive conspiracy of police, forensic scientists, prosecutors and possibly judges necessary for the innocentisti narrative to pan out.

Lionking,

I disagree with your premise. I don't think that a massive conspiracy is needed. Consider the Stubbs case and the fradulant work of a dentist, Dr. Michael West. I see prosecutors protecting bad convictions because they are afraid to lose any convictions at all. That's unethical, but it is not a conspiracy.

 

[Antony]

Originally Posted by davefoc View Post
I just looked at the "True Justice For Meredith Kercher" site apparently produced by Meredith Kercher's father, John Kercher linked to above.
TJMK is not run by Meredith's family, but rather by a man named Peter Quennell, who has no connection to them.

RoseM:
Yes, I have disputed Mr. Kercher's list of evidence on several occasions, including here. His list reads like a list prepared by The Machine.

Diocletus:
It's kind of incredible, really. What he lists is debunked, wrong, or not incriminating.

RoseM:
Mr Kercher seems like an intelligent man, and yet he includes manga comics and ritualism as among the reasons for guilt. He is searching for justification and denying reality, in my opinion.

* * *
You know perfectly well who runs TJMK, Rose. Peter Quennell, not John Kercher.

Why don't you all give it a rest? It's repulsive to me that the Kerchers name is at the end of dirty fingers here. You disgust.(imo)

Save your disgust for those who use emotional blackmail in an attempt to suppress the truth about what really happened to Meredith - including the likes of Peter Quennell, whose "tribute site" (the parodically-named "True Justice") is plastered with pictures of her.

It's John Kercher, not the Knox/Sollecito supporters, who has tried to keep Meredith's personality in the discussion. Regrettably, he has backed a loser by taking the side of the prosecution against 2 of Meredith's friends, instead of asking the real questions about how the investigation into her death was so screwed-up. Sympathy for his family tragedy does not entitle him to put his name to falsehoods against Amanda and Raffaele.

 

[LondonJohn]

Did I deny these cases? There were whistleblowers galore. Why is there not one single one here, in one of Italy's most high profile cases for many years?

Lindy Chamberlain's baby disappeared in August 1980. She was convicted of the murder in October 1982. She had her first appeal against the conviction denied in February 1984. New evidence (in the form of the baby's matinee jacket, partially-buried near a dingo lair) was discovered in February 1986, which led directly to Chamberlain's release pending a second appeal. A new investigation into the incident started in early 1987. Chamberlain's conviction was finally quashed in September 1988.

So how and when did "whistleblowers galore" intervene in this case to Mrs Chamberlain's benefit? All I see is a woman languishing in jail for several years, during which she had an appeal denied, then new evidence emerging which (together with advances in DNA testing which showed that the substance found in Lindy's car was almost certainly not the baby's blood) led to her acquittal after a second appeal. But maybe you can educate me further as to how "whistleblowers galore" exposed police malpractice in this case.

 

[Diocletus]

Originally Posted by davefoc View Post
I just looked at the "True Justice For Meredith Kercher" site apparently produced by Meredith Kercher's father, John Kercher linked to above.
TJMK is not run by Meredith's family, but rather by a man named Peter Quennell, who has no connection to them.

RoseM:
Yes, I have disputed Mr. Kercher's list of evidence on several occasions, including here. His list reads like a list prepared by The Machine.

Diocletus:
It's kind of incredible, really. What he lists is debunked, wrong, or not incriminating.

RoseM:
Mr Kercher seems like an intelligent man, and yet he includes manga comics and ritualism as among the reasons for guilt. He is searching for justification and denying reality, in my opinion.

* * *
You know perfectly well who runs TJMK, Rose. Peter Quennell, not John Kercher.

Why don't you all give it a rest? It's repulsive to me that the Kerchers name is at the end of dirty fingers here. You disgust.(imo)

I thought the forensics police were the ones with the dirty fingers??? I even saw a picture of those dirty fingers.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that what I read was a comment saying that Kercher does not run Quennelle's website. Then folks just went on to debunk the BS list of other evidence that Kercher ginned up for his tabloid. If he doesn't want people to engage in such exercises then he wouldn't be putting the BS out there in the first place. So why, really, are you "disgusted". Because people have the nerve to disagree with John Kercher? He's wrong.

PS. There's a new thread just for crybabies.

 

[LondonJohn]

Originally Posted by davefoc View Post
I just looked at the "True Justice For Meredith Kercher" site apparently produced by Meredith Kercher's father, John Kercher linked to above.
TJMK is not run by Meredith's family, but rather by a man named Peter Quennell, who has no connection to them.

RoseM:
Yes, I have disputed Mr. Kercher's list of evidence on several occasions, including here. His list reads like a list prepared by The Machine.

Diocletus:
It's kind of incredible, really. What he lists is debunked, wrong, or not incriminating.

RoseM:
Mr Kercher seems like an intelligent man, and yet he includes manga comics and ritualism as among the reasons for guilt. He is searching for justification and denying reality, in my opinion.

* * *
You know perfectly well who runs TJMK, Rose. Peter Quennell, not John Kercher.

Why don't you all give it a rest? It's repulsive to me that the Kerchers name is at the end of dirty fingers here. You disgust.(imo)

Where was Rose suggesting that John Kercher had anything to do with TJMK? I think you're misunderstanding what Rose meant. Rose was referring to an article written by John Kercher in the Sunday Times (a respected UK national broadsheet Sunday title). Here is the article - taken from the TJMK reproduction of it, since the Sunday Times now sits behind a paywall:

http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php...irl_meredith_was_funny_clever_and_extremely_/

In the article, Mr Kercher gives a list of reasons why he thinks Knox and Sollecito are guilty of his daughter's murder, all of which are based on highly-contested (or even debunked) prosecution evidence. He also makes the following reference to Sollecito's like of manga comics:

The prosecutor was criticised for mentioning this, but she was killed on the eve of the Day of the Dead, November 2. Sollecito was said to have Japanese manga comics that described the rape and killing of female vampires. Meredith had been dressed as a vampire to celebrate Hallowe’en.

To my mind, this is an utterly outrageous and inappropriate thing for Mr Kercher to be writing. Of course he has a certain licence to express his feelings, as the father of a girl who was brutally murdered. But I think he should have thought a lot more about what he was writing before he submitted this article to a major national newspaper. I hope he will look back on parts of it with considerable regret.

 

[Antony]

Really? Who was blowing the whistle on the prosecution case being fabricated and make of junk while Lindy Chamberlind was in jail for 4 years?

Come over the Tasman, who in the police or prosecution was blowing the whistle on the faked evidence against Arthur Allen Thomas while he was in jail wrongfully convicted of a double homicide?

Who was blowing the whistle and proving the level corruption in the Queensland police in the decade before Phil Dickie and then the Fizgerald Inquiry blew the whole can of worms open?

Not only that, but the Perugia police and prosecution have shown themselves willing to engage in harassment and intimidation against anyone speaking out against them: charging Amanda and her parents with slander merely for giving her side of what happened to her during interrogation; arresting Frank Sfarzo and trying to get him committed as a mental patient; and raiding the offices of the court-appointed consultants - among other travesties.

Just imagine what they would do to one of their own number who broke ranks and leaked what has really gone on behind the doors of their offices.

 

[CoulsdonUK]

Given that so much has been written about it, I am looking forward to see whether time of death will be argued to the same level of detail that I have read here or any of the other evidence Hellman hasn’t allowed for review so far, I look forward to closing arguments.

If Raffaele and Amanda were to lose their appeal would that mean an automatic increase to their sentence?

 

[Rolfe]

I followed a link from Wikipedia in an effort to find out more about the Lindy Chamberlain case. It led me to this - Scientists in the Dock: lawyers, scientists and the prosecution of offenders. It's said to be a personal view, and it's certainly personal and quite superficial. It does refer to the great problem of forensic scientists who think they're working for the prosecution.

What I found highly amusing was that the Maguire Seven case was used as an example of that problem, with forensic scientists falsifying results and sexing-up their conclusions to support the prosecution case. He then goes on to a very brief treatment of the Pan Am 103 case, as an example of the great work scientists did and got it right.

Hel-lo?? It was the same guys, you idiot. Of course he missed out all the stuff about how the lab notes in the latter case were loose-leaf, and there was evidence of pages having been inserted retrospectively. These notes could have been falsified every which way to Tuesday, and the only wonder is that they made such a hash of it at one point that it actually showed.

The Maguire Seven acquittal rested to a large extent on examination of the proper lab notebooks that were used at the time showing a lot of exculpatory evidence that had never been shown to the defence or the court. When did the lab stop using proper notebooks (which make it very difficult to add or remove pages without this being obvious)? Er, after the Maguire Seven difficulty....

So there we have an example of great scientific standards in a completely different jurisdiction. It can happen anywhere.

Rolfe.

 

[Diocletus]

Given that so much has been written about it, I am looking forward to see whether time of death will be argued to the same level of detail that I have read here or any of the other evidence Hellman hasn’t allowed for review so far, I look forward to closing arguments.

If Raffaele and Amanda were to lose their appeal would that mean an automatic increase to their sentence?

I don't know if it needs to be. The case is to easy to get rid of at this point:

1. The defendants argue that they were at Raffael's apartment all night, and there is evidence that they were there (Amanda's testimony, Popovic, computer activity).

2. Is there any actual evidence that necessarily places them at the cottage that night? Anytime? Nope.
a. Bra clasp/Kitchen knife--not reliable.
b. Bloody footprint--could be many people, including Rudy.
c. Amanda DNA in her own bathroom--could have been put there any old time.
d. Luminol footprints--could have been anybody, anytime, in any substance.

3. Caso chiuso.

 

[komponisto]

If Raffaele and Amanda were to lose their appeal would that mean an automatic increase to their sentence?

No. It could even be reduced, à la Rudy.

 

[CoulsdonUK]

No. It could even be reduced, à la Rudy.

I am not sure about that, if you recall the prosecution didn’t appeal against Guede’s sentence and of course he opted for the fast track process, whilst Raffaele and Amanda’s opted for a full trial and the prosecution has appealed against their sentences.