Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Antony]

Sorry for late reply - working.

To say 'there has been no theft' with such authority implies a) you know too much about the details of the break in b) you are trying to steer the police to look on this as an intruder not just a burglar

This is what is known as "confirmation bias": any random detail that can be highlighted as slightly odd is taken as "evidence" in support of your preconceptions.

It doesn't work like that. It's evidence first, conclusion according to evidence - not the other way round. The fact that the Perugia police began by arresting 3 people without any evidence, and then put all of their resources into manufacturing a case against 2 of them, doesn't validate the approach to the case.

You (and Sherlock), having seen that the case for the guilt of AK and RS no longer has any legs, seem just to be trying out the alternative accusation to see if it can be made to fit. The problem you have is the same as the guilters: in order for your view to have any substance, you have to describe a sequence of events with the "involvement" of AK and RS that matches the known facts. I don't see you doing that, any more than the guilters have done.

 

[tsig]

Still not going to explain how you think it's possible Knox and Sollecito managed to leave a murdered corpse with all her last meal still in her stomach and none in her duodenum?

It's not hard. You don't need any fancy medical degrees. Just common sense and a willingness to accept that some people with vested interests have been talking a lot of dreck about this.

Rolfe.

Kind of removes your veterinary credentials from the argument then.

 

[cuki777]

Maths

My position is the 'oddness' factor implies involvement, I am not saying it implies murder. You seem to be arguing that odd behaviour around a crime scene should be disregarded cos Hey, we all do odd things.

Sorry didn't answer your first point Kevin. My maths is now at its limit but I think it would be hard to find so many significant events in Filomena's life and I think the oddness factor of each would get lower and lower as you tries to find something interesting.

 

[cuki777]

Hi Antony

This is what is known as "confirmation bias": any random detail that can be highlighted as slightly odd is taken as "evidence" in support of your preconceptions.

It doesn't work like that. It's evidence first, conclusion according to evidence - not the other way round. The fact that the Perugia police began by arresting 3 people without any evidence, and then put all of their resources into manufacturing a case against 2 of them, doesn't validate the approach to the case.

You (and Sherlock), having seen that the case for the guilt of AK and RS no longer has any legs, seem just to be trying out the alternative accusation to see if it can be made to fit. The problem you have is the same as the guilters: in order for your view to have any substance, you have to describe a sequence of events with the "involvement" of AK and RS that matches the known facts. I don't see you doing that, any more than the guilters have done.

I have had this position for three years (and got banned from a guilter site for it) - perhaps a little 'confirmation bias' against someone who doesn't take your stance

 

[Katody Matrass]

Sorry for late reply - working.

No need to hurry

There's a lull before the final act in September. Besides, it's not like we're discussing some totally new arguments. All what was mentioned in recent posts - this thread went through a few times already.

To say 'there has been no theft' with such authority implies

I'm not sure what is that you mean by "such authority". Have you heard that phone call? The recording is available. IIRC Raffaele simply replies to the dispatcher's question - probably relaying what Amanda, who stood by during the call, was saying - that nothing was taken and the problem instead was the strange signs of entering, some blood and closed door.

a) you know too much about the details of the break in

No, it implies you know just what is readily noticeable - that valuables were left intact in full view.

b) you are trying to steer the police to look on this as an intruder not just a burglar

Not logical. Doesn't a burglar belong to a subclass of intruders? You probably meant "just an intruder, not a burglar". But why would they want to steer the police away from the burglary idea if they just staged a burglary? Makes no sense to me.

 

[Mary_H]

Thanks for Kate Mansey pointer. If someone lends a friend their dad's car with out asking and the friend gets drunk and runs someone over, yes you're 'involved' but no you are not guilty of the killing.

No, but you are guilty of lending your dad's car without asking; in other words, you are guilty of something. Likewise, in this case, anyone who says Amanda and Raffaele are "only" involved is still implying they are guilty of something, e.g. lying, covering up, staging, etc. My informed opinion is that they are not guilty of anything, not even of being stupid.

As I've said the total guilt or total innocent positions are akin to a religious approach.

Can you elaborate?

 

[Katody Matrass]

The shoe prints left by Guede show that he could have easily locked the door. No behind the back moves, no special techniques, just stepping out of the room and locking the door.

There is no proof that Amanda and Raffaele were there. None.

Exactly. There are a lot of mundane scenarios in which Guede locks the door to choose from before we try to build elaborate ones involving many people:

• Guede just locks the door and walks away.
• Guede walks back from the kitchen and locks the door - his traces were so faint by the time he got to the kitchen that the returning ones would go unnoticed.
• Guede leaves a few more traces by the door, but all the people crowding there trample and erase them, leading to Sherlock's confusion.
• Guede leaves a few more traces but the scientifica geniuses miss them and destroy them without noticing, leading to Sherlock's confusion.

etc.

 

[komponisto]

Thanks for the welcome.

I'm an Involvementer.

To

a) Be directly part of a bloody stabbing and sexual assault and not only leave no DNA but come a way with barely any injury and get rid of all blood stained clothes is very unlikely.

b) For neither AK or RS to 'crack' and 'spill the beans' despite external and internal pressure is also unlikely - they need a fundamental innocence-of-murder to cling onto.

but . . . well I've started itemising particular statements that don't ring true to me as a fellow human being.

You should be very skeptical of this kind of reasoning.

 

[Rolfe]

To clarify, I meant it was stupid of RS to let this slip and imply involvement not that he's a stupid person making nonsensical remarks.

But he was actually wrong. Stuff had been taken. Looks to me as if he was just one wound-up kid saying anything at all to break the tension.

Rolfe.

 

[cuki777]

Semantics

No, but you are guilty of lending your dad's car without asking; in other words, you are guilty of something. Likewise, in this case, anyone who says Amanda and Raffaele are "only" involved is still implying they are guilty of something, e.g. lying, covering up, staging, etc. My informed opinion is that they are not guilty of anything, not even of being stupid.



Can you elaborate?

Okay it's getting a bit word-splitting. 'Involved but not guilty of murder' is a big difference from 'Guilty of murder'. As my example implies lending dad's car is a quanum leap down form drunk-drive-killing.

The religious approach is we want you to agree mind, body, soul with us and any other version of events is a heresy.

 

[Rolfe]

No. It would just be nice if you stuck to the evidence, rather than dream up wild fantasies de novo of how you imagine they might still be involved when all the alleged evidence is evaporating.

Rolfe.

 

[Katody Matrass]

I think you deserve a scenario so . . . RG lives a few hundred yards from RS. If AK - as a 'prank' - saw him in the street and told him MK was alone and secretly fancied him she would feel terrible about the resulting catastrophe. I can't 'prove' this but this level of involvement fits with their behaviour.

Apart from the fact that we throw away all of the forensic evidence with it there is a problem with all such "some involvement" scenarios. It is very improbable that AK and RS would rather sit in jail for 30 years then tell the truth. It's very improbable that neither of them would break and tell the truth in the course of the initial harsh interrogations, arrests, and subsequent 4 years of jail. No it doesn't fit.

 

[cuki777]

Humans

You should be very skeptical of this kind of reasoning.

I'll stick with the silversmiths and bell-makers thanks

expression to ring true: From testing the quality of metal or glass by striking it and evaluating the sound made

 

[Katody Matrass]

In order to deny Amanda's lie they have to postulate everyone else's.

No need to postulate when the cops' lies are on record.

OTOH Where are the recordings of what Amanda said and what they did to her?

 

[Mary_H]

Okay it's getting a bit word-splitting. 'Involved but not guilty of murder' is a big difference from 'Guilty of murder'. As my example implies lending dad's car is a quanum leap down form drunk-drive-killing.

The religious approach is we want you to agree mind, body, soul with us and any other version of events is a heresy.

Let's look at it this way -- facts are facts. For example, grass is green. If someone insists that grass is red, does it take religious fervor to continue to believe grass is green?

 

[cuki777]

Apart from the fact that we throw away all of the forensic evidence with it there is a problem with all such "some involvement" scenarios. It is very improbable that AK and RS would rather sit in jail for 30 years then tell the truth. It's very improbable that neither of them would break and tell the truth in the course of the initial harsh interrogations, arrests, and subsequent 4 years of jail. No it doesn't fit.

First statement is a bit vague.

Oh what a tangled web we weave. When first we practice to deceive. - Sir Walter Scott When to tell the inconvenient truth is tricky.

As I posted earlier - lack of guilt of murder has stopped them breaking. The 'harsh' interrogations did produce implied involvement

 

[Kaosium]

I'd been thinking along the same lines, in terms of wondering whether the footprints would've been as bright as they were if they'd been made in highly diluted blood. I'm still not clear on that either way, but your theory of the pictures having been artificially brightened is an interesting one.

Here's a chart which shows how the intensity changes with the dilution of the blood. As you can see in this one, blood does give off a more radiant glow than most of the other substances which catalyze with the reagent luminol. That was what Stefanoni proclaimed as the 'reason' she could tell the footprints were blood even though they tested negative for blood with TMB, they'd been diluted below the threshold for TMB to detect. As you can see from the chart, that doesn't work, you're not going to get those bright pretty pictures if you're below the TMB detection level which can go as low as 1:1M (million) under lab conditions, though probably not that much out in the field.

Here's a picture (figure 7, page 89) to show the vast difference just going down to 1:10k (thousand) and this quote:

As expected, the lower the dilution factor, the lower the light intensity (Fig. 7). It is noteworthy to observe that for the highly diluted blood (1:10 000), light emission was still quantifiable (1 730 a.u.).

However if it isn't possible that this could've happened without being noticed, I wonder if misapplication of the luminol might've had the same effect? IIRC Garafano said the police had over-applied the luminol and that this explained the blurred nature of the prints.

(ETA: And I guess the camera settings for the photographs might have played a part as well?).

I just brought it up because this is the dead end of the luminol prints being blood argument. It occurred to me a while back that the last possibility of discovering what they really were--and thus completely disproving their involvement in the murder--might be that they were made by the bathmat shuffle and that's why they included a full luminol treatment of the floor when they 'rediscovered' the bra-clasp. However those wouldn't produce a glow of the intensity shown in the photos unless the police played with them, and I have no way of being able to tell if that happened, picture programs are a mystery to me. I suppose the defense must have checked that, thus it was just a thought that re-occurred to me when I saw the bathmat shuffle being brought up.

The blurring could also be caused by them tromping all over them booties or no, doing the forensics. At any rate it's highly unlikely they were blood, diluted or not, they were probably some cleaner in the bathroom and of course they might have happened at virtually anytime, they certainly didn't have to be simultaneous with each other. Just like there were a dozen or more luminol hits at Raffaele's that had nothing to do with the murder, just the results of all those metal, plant and certain chemical-based things that will light up luminol without them being blood. Even if they did play with the picture program still means there's 250 that can be found in common households alone in just this one study.

 

[cuki777]

Facts

Let's look at it this way -- facts are facts. For example, grass is green. If someone insists that grass is red, does it take religious fervor to continue to believe grass is green?

In itself, the fact that RS said 'there has been no theft' when he couldn't have known for sure still requires interpretaion. Your belief is he must have said this with no involvement in MK's death.

The fact is AK implicated an innocent man but your belief is she was pressurised into this - without you being there and with no tapes. So, in a way you are explaining why the grass only looks green but underneath it's actually red. Must change metaphors soon

 

[Rolfe]

When verbal statements are capable of both a guilty and an innocent interpretation, you have to go off and look at the actual evidence. You will get nowhere continuing to insist that you favour the guilty explanation.

If the best evidence you have is these self-same verbal statements that can be taken just as easily as being the statements of innocent people, where are you going to go?

Rolfe.

 

[Antony]

I have had this position for three years (and got banned from a guilter site for it) - perhaps a little 'confirmation bias' against someone who doesn't take your stance

All I can say is that if the best you can come up with after 3 years is "how did he know nothing had been taken?" then I'm not impressed. It's not evidence of anything, other than someone looking for wrongdoing were there is none. Your "involvementer" stance has even less substance than the "guilter" one; there is nothing to support it other than the false attraction of the middle ground.

The case is very simple: Rudy Guede broke in through Filomena's window intending to burgle the place but was interrupted by Meredith coming home. He then took it into his head to rape her at knife-point, but ended up fatally stabbing her. He then left in a hurry, taking only money and Meredith's phones - as things like laptops would be far too identifiable.

The only way Amanda and Raffaele were "involved" is that they were the first 2 people who came upon the scene the next day, and after some hesitation called the police. All of their supposedly "odd" behaviour and statements afterwards are simply the result of confusion, grief and anxiety - all the people who think they know how "innocent" people are supposed to react in a situation like that of extreme stress, are just talking nonsense.

The actions taken by the police and prosecution afterwards is where the case gets complicated, but even that has a clear interpretation in the light of other miscarriages of justice. This wouldn't be the first case in which police have wrongly arrested someone who happened to be at the scene when the crime was discovered, and then shown complete tunnel vision in centring the investigation around their initial hasty suspicions.

As for "taking a stance", I didn't do this at the beginning. I didn't choose to support the innocent side and then look for arguments to support it; I waited to see what the evidence was. Having said that, it didn't take me long to see that the pro-guilt side didn't have very much at all, apart from bleating "innocent people don't do that!" - the few items of actual evidence (the kitchen knife, the bra-clasp and Curatolo) were notably thin and implausible. AK and RS are neither killers nor "involved" - they were just unlucky to be the first people in the spotlights of a police force who had no idea how to conduct a murder investigation.