Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Kevin_Lowe]

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.

Almost right. Nearly there!

Odd behaviour around a crime scene should be disregarded if it is no more odd than the base rate. If totally innocent people scrutinised equally carefully would make an equal number of "odd" statements, then those "odd" statements are not evidence of guilt.

In any case, how can they be "involved" when the available evidence demonstrates clearly that they were at Raffaele's place when the murder happened, and there is absolutely no evidence that either of them ever conspired with the one person we do know was there at the time, Rudy Guede?

 

[Katody Matrass]

First statement is a bit vague.

If Amanda's involvement was just telling Guede to go visit Meredith then you throw away all the knife profiles, bra clasps, computer and phone records upfront. Does it mean you agree it is all bogus evidence?

As I posted earlier - lack of guilt of murder has stopped them breaking.

Why then lie, cover for Guede, or accuse other people instead? Why then not tell the truth when you have time served already?

The 'harsh' interrogations did produce implied involvement

What do you mean? Was Lumumba really involved?

 

[cuki777]

Calm down, Tony

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.

You are jumping to conclusions again. Because I am looking at significant events one at a time does not mean that I rest my position on RS's odd statement about the 'break-in'.

'The case is very simple'. It's possibly the most hotly disputed case in recent history. Do you ever look at Maundy Gregory's site? He strikes me as a sharp and thoughtful commentator yet he doesn't embrace your version of events.

 

[cuki777]

Almost right. Nearly there!

Odd behaviour around a crime scene should be disregarded if it is no more odd than the base rate. If totally innocent people scrutinised equally carefully would make an equal number of "odd" statements, then those "odd" statements are not evidence of guilt.

In any case, how can they be "involved" when the available evidence demonstrates clearly that they were at Raffaele's place when the murder happened, and there is absolutely no evidence that either of them ever conspired with the one person we do know was there at the time, Rudy Guede?

You set the oddness base rate a lot higher than me and most other human beings.

 

[Katody Matrass]

Disappointing.

 

[katy_did]

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.

Thanks for that. I'm puzzled though, didn't some of the actual blood stains (e.g. the marks on the wall) test negative with the TMB test? Just going from memory so I'd need to check it. If visible stains can test negative with TMB, then I wouldn't think it would be surprising that very diluted and invisible traces might also test negative. As I said though, I'd need to check on that one.

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.

I recall someone (might've been halides) saying that bleach evaporates quickly, so it seems unlikely they could've been made in a bleach-containing cleaner at any rate. But certainly the luminol hits at Raffaele's place tend to suggest getting a positive luminol reaction isn't that uncommon and that it definitely isn't specific to blood.

I think I need to read some more on this one. I've heard the arguments on the prints not being made in blood, based on the negative TMB test and the intensity of the light from the footprints (most likely increased by misapplication of the luminol, though) and they seem quite convincing. But how does that fit with visible blood stains testing negative with TMB?

 

[cuki777]

If Amanda's involvement was just telling Guede to go visit Meredith then you throw away all the knife profiles, bra clasps, computer and phone records upfront. Does it mean you agree it is all bogus evidence?


Why then lie, cover for Guede, or accuse other people instead? Why then not tell the truth when you have time served already?

What do you mean? Was Lumumba really involved?

That may have just been the beginning of the involvement. Covering up that involvement could bring in the forensics.

 

[komponisto]

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

This makes no sense as a reply to my post.

 

[cuki777]

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.

Finding your style a bit tabloid, Rolfe. My scenario may not hold up in your eyes but do I really strike you as a 'wild fantasy' sort of guy?

 

[Draca]

Raffaele had spent the night at his own house on the other side of the city with his girlfriend, Meredith's American flatmate Amanda Knox, 22.
He said: "It was a normal night. Meredith had gone out with one of her English friends and Amanda and I went to party with one of my friends."

Sunday Mirror 4th November 2011

A post on the Kate Mansey article:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6874058&postcount=3936

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

You set the oddness base rate a lot higher than me and most other human beings.

It's been said before that the most fundamental question of epistemology, and hence the one that it's most important you get right, is "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?".

You think you know that Raffaele and Amanda exhibited odd behaviour at a rate so far above the base rate that most human beings would think that it is evidence. Why do you think you know this?

Bear in mind that you have been exposed to data which has been carefully cherry-picked from everything these two people have done or said for four years, not to a representative sample of everything these people have done or said in four years.

 

[Mary_H]

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.

True. However, my belief that his comment was insignificant results from my knowledge that there is no additional evidence supporting a case for guilt against Raffaele.

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

True. Without being there and without tapes, I say that Amanda was pressured into implicating an innocent man. Without being there and without tapes, guilters say that Amanda was not pressured into implicating an innocent man. Each of us has the same amount of direct knowledge about what happened at the interrogations. However, there is a great deal of other factual evidence that points to the probability that Amanda was pressured into accusing Patrick. In fact, one needs to maintain a very strong bias toward guilt to continue to believe Amanda was not pressured.

To follow your line of reasoning from above, the fact that there are no tapes requires interpretation. Not only is it common practice to tape police interrogations but also Italian law requires that interrogations of suspects are taped. Even people without any bias would find it suspicious that there are no tapes.

 

[Mary_H]

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.

katy_did once mapped out how there was pretty much the same amount of evidence against Filomena as there was against Amanda, if one wanted to look at it with a guilt bias. katy, would you be able to direct us to that post?

 

[Kaosium]

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

Hi Cuki! Welcome to JREF.

I think you have it backwards though. Your involvement-o-meter requires you to take either the cops word as utterly authoritative and beyond question (regarding the interrogation) and ignore the notable discrepancies in it, the abuse to logic and plain common sense, and the fact the statements were thrown out by the Italian Supreme Court. Oh, and also the fact there's no tapes which is a violation of article 141-bis of the Italian code, that's not an argument for those skeptical of the police in this regard, quite the opposite actually.

Regarding the 'no theft' statement, again you must maintain with absolution that the only interpretation of that implicates Raffaele and Amanda in some kind of involvement in the crime. That would be ignoring the numerous scenarios where it is actually exculpatory to some limited degree or entirely meaningless either way. At the same time you must ignore with absolution the numerous indications that the cops messed up and that Mignini is a screwball who last made the news in Italy digging up corpses to check their pants sizes and haircuts in pursuit of a famous murder case almost twenty years cold.

As of his CNN interview this spring he still believes he was right in that endeavor. I can't help but wonder if the fact the body was underwater for some time before discovery and had been buried several years might explain why the pants size differed, and if he was actually interested in the truth of the matter before he dug up his second corpse he might have tried some DNA testing as that works too sometimes...

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

It's been said before that the most fundamental question of epistemology, and hence the one that it's most important you get right, is "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?".

You think you know that Raffaele and Amanda exhibited odd behaviour at a rate so far above the base rate that most human beings would think that it is evidence. Why do you think you know this?

That's an excellent question, one that touches the central problem I have encountered in debating those who believe Amanda and Raffaele are guilty.

These debating partners, for the most part, lack even the most rudimentary understanding of criminal investigations, police procedures, and the circumstances that give rise to wrongful convictions. But worse that that - they don't think they need to learn. They assume that common sense is an adequate basis for assessing how innocent vs. guilty suspects behave, whether innocent people falsely incriminate themselves when they are under pressure, etc.

I have posted this essay before, but this seems like a good time to post it again:

How do ordinary, innocent people behave when they stumble onto a crime scene? Following is an example from a murder that took place in Washington State.

Jerry Heimann was a 64-year-old man in Everett, Washington. He lived with his mother, who had Alzheimer's disease, as well as his mother's caregiver and her children, who lived in the basement. On April 13, 2001, the caregiver persuaded some friends of her teenage daughter to kill Jerry so they could loot his bank account. They stabbed and bludgeoned him to death, threw his body in the woods, loaded his furniture into a rented truck, and vacated the house after cleaning up the kitchen where they had attacked him. They left the old lady to fend for herself.

Jerry had prior reason to doubt the goodwill of his mother's caregiver. Just a week or two earlier, she had stolen $1,800 from him by forging a check. Jerry called his son Greg and told him about this, and Greg advised him to fire the caregiver, but Jerry did not do so. Nor did he call the police.

A few days after the murder, Greg and his wife flew in for a visit they had been planning for months. Jerry had said he would meet them at the airport, and they were expecting him. They waited for three hours before taking a cab to Jerry's house.

When they got there, the place was dark and no one seemed to be home. They looked around and managed to get in through a window. The first thing they noticed was that most of the furniture was gone. Then they found Jerry's mother, who was sitting in her wheelchair chewing on a piece of paper. She was hungry and dehydrated, and she had soiled her diapers. They got her cleaned up, fed, and put to bed. Then they got some groceries and prepared a meal for themselves in the kitchen. After dinner, they decided to call around to find out if anyone knew where he was. That was when they noticed that all the phones in the house had been unplugged and the answering machine had been disconnected.

Numerous phone calls produced no report of anyone having seen Jerry in the past week. By then it was well into the evening and the couple was tired after a long day, so they went to bed. Greg awoke at 3 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep, so he went downstairs to the kitchen. While he was sipping a cup of coffee, he suddenly noticed blood on the back of the chair next to him. In fact, there was quite a bit of blood spattered on it. Casting his eyes around the room, he noticed for the first time that there was blood on the walls, too. And there was blood running down the side of a trash can in the kitchen.

That was when Greg decided he should call the police... but, he didn't actually do so.

Instead he sat around until about 7:00 am, when he received a phone call from his mother, who lived in the area. She asked him to wait for her to get there before calling the police. So he did.

Shortly after 8:00 am, someone knocked on the door. It was a man from a government agency, Adult Protective Services. He had come to investigate an anonymous tip that the caregiver intended to harm Jerry Heimann. Greg described the situation to this individual, who immediately used his cell phone to call the police.

Why didn't Greg call the cops the minute he arrived at his father's house and found the furniture gone and the old lady in a state of neglect? Isn't that what any normal person would have done?

How could Greg and his wife prepare and eat dinner in a kitchen where there was blood spatter on the walls and furniture without even noticing it? And why, when he noticed the blood spatter, didn't Greg immediately call the police?

Anyone who sets out to analyze whether certain types of behavior are indicative of guilt should start by reading some crime stories to get a sense of what is "normal." The fact is that "normal" behavior is all over the map and very often seems ridiculously naive or clueless when viewed with the benefit of hindsight.

My source for the above is Mom said kill, a book by Burl Barer about the Heimann murder.

 

[JREF2010]

behavioral notes

A post on the Kate Mansey article:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6874058&postcount=3936

Interesting to read again.

>Kate Mansey>
It was around 1pm - just 24 hours since police found Meredith's bloody body in her student flat.
"The police have been speaking to me all yesterday and all this morning. I got out half an hour ago and then I met you, so it's very strange," he said.
Why did they need to speak to him for so long?
"They are asking everyone," he said. "Amanda is still with them - she's with the police now at the scene. They wanted her to show them something, I don't know what. I'm going to see her soon.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sunday-mirror/2007/11/04/italy-murder-details-emerge-98487-20058122/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sunday-mirror/2007/11/11/day-i-met-meredith-suspect-raffaele-98487-20092572/

Who is Kate Mansey and did she record this brief interview or was it jotted from memory , or scribed with a pen as they talked?

Email Nov 4- 3am
http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/email.html
Another interesting thing of the first few days, is in the Email, Amanda explains the calls of Nov 2 and they are before they return to the cottage, and the cell towers are Sector 3&9. This is corroborated by the cell data.(No Lies here)

And the cell tower info, shows 6qty more data that Sector 3&9 is from Raffaeles apartment. (Thats almost 10 data points now that Sector 3 is from Raffaelles Apartment).

And of course, with Sector 3 clarified more, it aligns to her receiving Patricks text at Raffales apartment.

The text arrived on the Sector 3, at 20:18, but the movie Amelie would have ended approx 20:29 (122min past 18:27 when it was started on the pc= 20:29).

So the movie is over at 20:29pm, then a glance at the cell phone, the text symbol is there, and at that moment reads the text from Patrick, then responds via text at 20:35pm to Patrick, from a cell tower serving Raffaeles apartment.

 

[Kaosium]

You are jumping to conclusions again. Because I am looking at significant events one at a time does not mean that I rest my position on RS's odd statement about the 'break-in'.

'The case is very simple'. It's possibly the most hotly disputed case in recent history. Do you ever look at Maundy Gregory's site? He strikes me as a sharp and thoughtful commentator yet he doesn't embrace your version of events.

Maundy Gregory seems bright until you realize it simply looks like he's cribbing from TJMK and because it's posted there it is reasonable proposition he can temporize. There's an understandable tendency for some to assume two highly polarized factions might both be wrong and the answer is somewhere in the middle, however in this case it's not a continuum like some see politics, it's an on/off proposition. Either they were involved, or they weren't. There's no 'in between' there. I started with the same assumption you appear to, it's an untenable position if facts, logic and plain old common sense matter to you.

That TJMK for so long refused (and still might as far as I know--I don't read there anymore it creeps me out) to acknowledge the case made in Massei is ridiculous does not make them 'reasonable' if they belated realize the conclusions and theories in the Massei Report are irrelevant to the appeal, and that nothing there was individually proven 'absolute,' in fact Hellmann put it quite succinctly as 'the only thing we know for sure is Meredith Kercher is dead' when he threw it in the dumpster. Just like Machiavelli, their Italian legal source and passionate believer in the guilt of Raffaele and Amanda, told them would happen when they were translating it.

With the plethora of information available at this stage of the game, if there are two completely opposite factions then one is either stupid, delusional, or lying. The question then becomes, which one is it? There ought to be a number of ways you can tell, the first being you cannot question the basic assumptions of PMF or TJMK, or for that matter at Maundy Gregory's site, as I and a number of people who post here can tell you. However you can post at IIP and even post questions to Charlie Wilkes or Bruce Fisher here or there even if you think them guilty.

Maundy Gregory hasn't realized that, and after he bought into (some of) the ridiculous obfuscation promoted by TJMK and PMF and chose to mock Frank Sfarzo when his blog was closed down and it revealed he was taken down and arrested in his home on trumped up charges I lost sympathy for him. It appears to me the sole purpose of his site is to talk down to people who know so much more than he and to dodge responses he can't come up with answers for because there's no 'middle ground' in a binary proposition. One side is right, one side is wrong. One side is searching for the actual truth of the matter, the other is trying to obscure it.

 

[Kaosium]

Thanks for that. I'm puzzled though, didn't some of the actual blood stains (e.g. the marks on the wall) test negative with the TMB test? Just going from memory so I'd need to check it. If visible stains can test negative with TMB, then I wouldn't think it would be surprising that very diluted and invisible traces might also test negative. As I said though, I'd need to check on that one.

I suspect you're thinking about the one on the pillow, and reason it might have have been visible and tested negative for blood might be because it wasn't actually blood. It could have been fake blood from her Halloween costume she didn't completely remove when she got home early that morning.

The odds of a false negative are in fact pretty low, which is why there's not a whole lot of literature about them. After all, it's not a confirmatory test for human blood anyway, even with a positive it has to go back to the lab. They use them because they're simple and can be done on-site and will generally eliminate the possibility of blood, if they didn't do that there would simply be no point to using them. However it was necessary to come up with something because they had to explain the negative TMB results after they were accidentally discovered. The thing is though, what they came up with doesn't work either, as the case in Massei relies upon the dilution to explain the negative TMB test:

But it must be noted that the negative result for blood does not necessarily indicate that no blood was present. The result may have been negative because there was not sufficient material to indicate the presence of blood. Dr. Gino stated that in her experience there is a probabilistic relation to the number of cases in which the blood test comes out positive or negative. The negative result was also partly a consequence of Dr. Stefanoni's choice to use most of the DNA to determine the individual profiles and only the remainder to attempt to determine the nature of the trace. Furthermore, since the traces revealed by Luminol ?? it becomes certain that the traces contained human DNA. The fluorescence ?? implies that the biological material (in which appears ?? human) was Luminol-positive.

Corruption (??) inherent to to the original. The point is Massei's case is disproven by the fact a negative TMB test due to dilution (which would also be the case if there 'wasn't enough left') isn't going to give off that bright glow.

I recall someone (might've been halides) saying that bleach evaporates quickly, so it seems unlikely they could've been made in a bleach-containing cleaner at any rate.

Simple bleach will at first completely interfere with the test as it is impossible to determine by simply eye-balling it whether it's blood or bleach. It's all bright blue. However given time (46 days is plenty) simple bleach will fade and just kinda looks milky. However that's hardly the only bathroom cleaner that can give off a luminol hit, and even standing bleach (like what might pool at the bottom of a shower) can have something happen to it which causes it not to fade.

The fact that the bleach effect fades isn't really relevant as that just means it's not simple bleach, it hardly eliminates all bleach containing cleaners as they might contain other chemicals that cause a similar effect and don't fade. There were just some bunnies and kittens who thought bringing up that paper that who tried to contend that eliminated all possibilities of bathroom cleaners solely because in that one instance it would have faded in 46 days. Did I mention bleach? That was just a brain-fart if I did.

But certainly the luminol hits at Raffaele's place tend to suggest getting a positive luminol reaction isn't that uncommon and that it definitely isn't specific to blood.

As I recall most were found in or around the bathroom too, suggesting even more so that bathroom cleaners that aren't simple bleach give off luminol hits.

I think I need to read some more on this one. I've heard the arguments on the prints not being made in blood, based on the negative TMB test and the intensity of the light from the footprints (most likely increased by misapplication of the luminol, though) and they seem quite convincing. But how does that fit with visible blood stains testing negative with TMB?

I am unfamiliar with how the over-application of luminol might have caused highly diluted stains to glow brighter, that doesn't make sense to me. The chemiluminescence is caused (in the case of blood) by the reagent catalyzing with the hemoglobin. The more diluted, the less hemoglobin no matter how much luminol is applied. Perhaps you are thinking of the excuse for why (most of) the footprints tested negative for DNA? That was due to claiming an over application of luminol destroyed the possibility of DNA testing. Meaning they wanted to get those pretty pictures and they kept applying the luminol to keep the glow going while they got the camera set up, each time removing DNA in the process, thus we're supposed to assume they might have recovered DNA had they not been so stupid about it? Personally I think that's an absolutely bizarre argument for them to make: 'give us a break, if we weren't such incompetent clowns we might have found DNA so you have to assume we did!'

At any rate, it doesn't really matter. Even if they had positive TMB and DNA tests, they didn't prove blood:

Confirmatory tests are then used to identify the specific biological material, which can then be typed.

The line between screening and identification is not always clear. For example, while examining the clothing of a suspect, a forensic biologist might visually locate a brown stain that presumptively tested positive for blood and was then DNA typed. The DNA type is found to match the victim. Knowing that the loci tested are higher primate specific, what conclusions can be drawn?

The only unqualified conclusion that can be offered is that the stain contains DNA that matches the victim. It has not been proven to be blood.

If asked “Could the results have arisen because the material tested was the blood of the victim?” then an answer of “Yes” is justified. However, it would be wrong to report that the material was human blood with a DNA type that matched the victim. The material was not subjected to confirmatory testing for blood or proven to be human in origin.

It's just a sad, pathetic excuse by Stefanoni, an attempt to baffle the court with BS as who'd believe she'd try to deceive them? Comodi can just say 'They could be turnip juice or blood, you decide.' The defense has to go through all this and puts the jury to sleep, think about it: who's still actually reading at this point? We put everyone else asleep long ago, as one must have the endurance of an elephant to wade through too much nonsense about luminol, TMB and confirmatory tests!

 

[RandyN]

You are jumping to conclusions again. Because I am looking at significant events one at a time does not mean that I rest my position on RS's odd statement about the 'break-in'.

'The case is very simple'. It's possibly the most hotly disputed case in recent history. Do you ever look at Maundy Gregory's site? He strikes me as a sharp and thoughtful commentator yet he doesn't embrace your version of events.

Beauty is in the eyes....

I find Maundy dull and one minded. As one might expect from someone who has little grasp on the known facts of this case.

You seem to want to play 20 questions until we get to Sept 5th or whatever.

Ok..Ill play...

I think RS comment "Nothing was taken" which he said twice I believe, is totally meaningless. More important for me is what the phone police tried to imply about who called whom and when they called.

If you really want to propose some kind of guilt for the two...thy this...What were the odd activities in the middle of the night or in the early morning at RS apartment? You know...who turned on music at 6AM and why? Who checked who’s phone for calls so early?
Did AK really take a shower that morning? Her hair does look a little messy...although its Nov ...a windy month and I know what the wind does to my hair.

Later in court you may see additional computer evidence...maybe. This evidence might show activity on the MacBook Pro until late that evening and into the early morning. What do you think that might be about?

Then we must consider AK meeting with PL outside her school after the murder...what about that? Were the police tailing her then? Did they have her phone tapped by then? Did they simply come across PL text message in AK phone...or did they put two and two together? The meeting and the message? And what does that all mean?

What is the truth about the bathmat boogie?

Why did AK lie to police about PL? Why did police lie to AK about PL? or about RS changing his alibi? Who lied about that?

Its pretty certain RS DNA is on the tiny metal part of the bra clasp. How do you suppose that got there? Did he do it? Can he fly? Can he erase his tracks in the blood? How do you pull (cut?) off this bra clasp and leave DNA only on this tiny metal place and none on the cloth part?

If the bathmat footprint is RS...than where is the negative image of that print when he first stepped in the wet blood?

Why does RG claim that MK screamed about 9:20 PM?

Why didn’t the broken down car people see or hear anything when Mignini claims a TOD of 11:30 and these people were clearly there during this time ?

What’s up with the toilet bomb threat? Coincidence?

Why doest Nara take her pills in the morning and thereby avoid the middle of the night arousals? Its BP medication...I know I take it...and it makes you pee...I take mine in the AM...Its crazy to take it at night. No doctor would ever recommend this ...why?

So now you are on the jury...do you have enough to keep these young people in jail for the next 25 years?

Do you think it strange that AK got an extra year for taking a knife to an unpremeditated murder ?

 

[bri1]

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.

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

I'm interested in you reasoning here, in characterising the 'totally innocent' position as similar to or the same as a religious approach.
I actually think anyone who allows for a reasonable possibility for guilt or any involvement is taking a 'religious' approach. Here's why: it follows the path of revelation, followed by faith. The truth is 'revealed' through the fact of the prosecution, the judgement of the court, and the Motivation document. Faith comes into play whenever exculpatory evidence comes to light, and the guilter has to reject the most straightforward, simple, and connected (to other bits of behaviour and scientific fact) theory in favour of an extremely unlikely and complicated one.
It reminds me of dinosaur fossils being considered a test of our faith.
The majority of pro-acquittal posters-who-are-also-convinced of innocence, have no text of revealed truth (a la the Massei document)- the C & V report wouldn't count, as it merely confirmed (by independent experts with no agenda) the conclusions that many of them came to on their own through extensive consideration of the evidence. The approach has been (on the most part) evidence and logic-led and this doesn't jibe with a 'religious' approach.
I think what you're implicitly doing here is comparing an almost radical skeptic position with a normal skeptic position. Pro-innocence positions are 'normally' skeptical- they withhold judgement until all the facts are considered impartially. Radical skepticism on the other hand requires one to consider all
logically-possible but extremely implausible theories, and requires one to keep them open as 'possibilities' unless they can be actively ruled out.
The first is a very good methodology, and is appropriate within the context of criminal proceedings. The latter is not.
I teach philosophy to undergrads and this is very difficult for them to grasp- one of the first topics on the syllabus is Descartes' 'evil demon' argument, a radically skeptic argument that has a very specific purpose in Descartes' methodological approach to metaphysics. After they learn this, they try and apply it to other philosophical topics, but in doing so forget it's instrumentality, and it's lack of productivity (in itself) in truth-seeking.