Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[smkovalinksy]

I think you make some very good points. And they tie back to the key of this, or any other case -- the evidence needs to make sense and fit into a logical narrative, not just be random. So one small finding of DNA by itself, not backed by other logical evidence, should not convict someone. I agree that any DNA of Amanda or Raff in that cottage is not out of place, although we cannot say the same about Guede. I think that is why the police made such a big deal about the knife, even though the findings were created in a dubious way, because Meredith had never been to Raff's place. But it is still possible her DNA made it over there, although less likely.

I also think you have a good point about Amanda's "confession". If she was involved, why did she tell a story that makes no sense, and does not fit any of the evidence? Why did she not say Rudy did it all? That would have been the thing to do if she was involved, but wanted to deflect attention from herself. Or, if she is really this calculating liar/killer, blame it on Raff and Rudy! "They made me go over there, and I was cowering in the kitchen while they did this terrible crime!" I know Raff was her boyfriend, but she knew him less than two weeks, if she was really what the prosecutors and guilters say she is, she could have easily turned on him as well.

This was always my impression and intuition as well. From her words, I always believed the polizia had suggested Patrick to Amanda, and that in her confusion she was being compliant. I had always figured if she were half as callous and guilty as many would deem her, that she would have pointed the finger at RS and RG for immunity. She did not, because she did not know RG was there , and knew she and RS were not there.

 

[Poppy1016]

This is my opinion of how the case went. First, Mignini made up his wild theory of what. happened. Next was confirmation bias, to find evidence that would confirm Mignini's nutty theory. After the theory was soundly discredited, the face saving began, not only from the Perugia justice system but from the pro guilt people.
No one can reasonably defend the guilty verdict of the first trial after all the evidence that has come to the forefront.
I believe that many who seem to stubbornly continue with their guilt arguement, are nothing more than debators, not caring at all about the real story. They can't really believe their molehill and ignore the mountain of evidence pointing towards innocense. And they cannot at the very least deny reasonable duobt.
They are innocent in my opinion.

 

[Antony]

interesting thought.

Antonio made a statement/post a long time ago that there was two ways to solve a crime...one is to gather evidence and it leads to the criminal, and the second was to choose the criminal and gather evidence against them.

your comment would support the latter.

If "Antonio" is me, this sounds a bit like my reference to "solving a crime the easy way" - which, to me, accounts for almost all miscarriages of justice. Elsewhere AmyStrange (Dave) refers to the "fact" that 60% of murder culprits are known to the victim - and then points out that this is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if the police target their investigation on this basis.

When I first heard about this case, almost the first information I had was that Amanda lived in the same house as Meredith, and that she and Raffaele had been present at the scene when the crime was discovered. After that, I needed some pretty unambiguous evidence of guilt to convince me that this wasn't a travesty - needless to say, no such evidence ever came out of the discussions.

(I've been reading this thread with interest since the hearings began again, but like many I suspect, I haven't been able to keep up with the sheer volume of it.)

 

[shuttlt]

ETA: of course, if you mean that she should have said wasn't true was that she was in the other room and Patrick and Meredith went into her bedroom and she heard her scream,

Naturally that. I don't think anybody has ever complained that she didn't assert that she knew for sure he wasn't the killer. The issue has always been plainly asserting that her statement was definately plucked from an imagined nothing.

then I agree with you, but her recant pretty much alludes to this and I also agree that she should have been more succinct, but unless you have been in her situation before, than it's way too easy to say this or that in foresight. It's obvious to me that she is book smart but not street smart...

Perhaps she isn't street smart. I'm not making a moral judgement about her. I just think it's unfortunate that she alludes to what se said being made up nonsense without actually completely burning her bridges and committing herself to that position.

 

[JREF2010]

In the case of the girls' cottage, there was an almost adjacent base station at Piazza Lupattelli, which has a direct line of sight to the cottage and is only around 150m from the cottage by line of sight. By contrast, the Strada Ponte Rio Monte La Guardia base station is outside Perugia, in the hilly area near Sig.ra Lana's house (where the handsets were found the following day), and around 1000-1200m from the cottage. Any signal received from this base station at the cottage would have been weaker than the signal from the Piazza Lupattelli base station by many orders of magnitude.

Therefore, everything else being equal, Meredith's handset would virtually always have connected to the Piazza Lupattelli base station rather than the much further-away Strada Ponte Rio base station. The only practical way in which a handset at the cottage would choose to connect to the much further-away base station would be if the Piazza Lupattelli base station was either faulty at that moment or was full to capacity. It would be easy to have interrogated network traffic records to check this, but I'm guessing that it's too late to do so now.

The important point, though, is that in this instance, it's simply not sufficient to say that just because a handset inside the cottage (or on the driveway of the cottage) was capable of seeing a signal from the Strada Ponte Rio base station, this is somehow good evidence that this is where the handset was. It's far, far more likely that the handset was en route to Sig.ra Lana's house when it connected to this base station. It would also be instructive to see a fuller history of which base stations Meredith's UK handset connected to while she was in the cottage. I suspect that virtually all of the connections would have been to the Piazza Lupattelli base station, since it was very near and with a direct line of sight. I further suspect that none of the connections was to the distant Strada Ponte Rio base station.

Incidentally, we are fortunate to be able to attach a particular level of certainty to the base station connectivity in this instance. This is because the cottage was a stand-alone building with a direct line of sight to a nearby base station. This is in stark contrast to Sollecito's apartment, which was buried in a jumble of four-storey buildings and narrow streets, where cellular connectivity can be a lottery depending on signal reflections, interferences and shadows. That's why it's hard to pin down a direct 1-to-1 relationship between Sollecito's apartment and any one particular base station, while it is eminently possible to do so for the girls' cottage due to its very different position and topography.

I didn't know it was the same base station as where the cells were found, thats interesting.

I agree more data points and precision would help, of course.

But as I see it this data is stronger than the prosecutions "proof" which is Nara. Just thinking of a preview to the closing.

That's kind of my view on this, its either Nara(PG) or CellTower(PI).

What else is there to attempt a ToD, except for the stomach content argument, what else is there to go on?

Will Hellman see the cell tower mistakes? How Massei's report incorrectly says one tower proves Amanda is a liar, then in several other sections says the same tower is a good tower for Raffaeles?

As I read it, the cell tower connection of Patrick text to Amandas cell was at least one of the top three accusations, that she is a liar.
They asked her several times in the trial "where were you when you got the text from Patrick?"

She says Raffaeles...they say Liar! and pull the cell tower log point.

Its another damning point against her I dont think the Defense defended fully.

I'm not even sure if I've got a real strong belief on this point either?

 

[JREF2010]

If "Antonio" is me, this sounds a bit like my reference to "solving a crime the easy way" - which, to me, accounts for almost all miscarriages of justice. Elsewhere AmyStrange (Dave) refers to the "fact" that 60% of murder culprits are known to the victim - and then points out that this is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if the police target their investigation on this basis.

When I first heard about this case, almost the first information I had was that Amanda lived in the same house as Meredith, and that she and Raffaele had been present at the scene when the crime was discovered. After that, I needed some pretty unambiguous evidence of guilt to convince me that this wasn't a travesty - needless to say, no such evidence ever came out of the discussions.

(I've been reading this thread with interest since the hearings began again, but like many I suspect, I haven't been able to keep up with the sheer volume of it.)

yes, your post a long time ago, excuse my poor spelling...

 

[smkovalinksy]

If "Antonio" is me, this sounds a bit like my reference to "solving a crime the easy way" - which, to me, accounts for almost all miscarriages of justice. Elsewhere AmyStrange (Dave) refers to the "fact" that 60% of murder culprits are known to the victim - and then points out that this is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if the police target their investigation on this basis.

When I first heard about this case, almost the first information I had was that Amanda lived in the same house as Meredith, and that she and Raffaele had been present at the scene when the crime was discovered. After that, I needed some pretty unambiguous evidence of guilt to convince me that this wasn't a travesty - needless to say, no such evidence ever came out of the discussions.

(I've been reading this thread with interest since the hearings began again, but like many I suspect, I haven't been able to keep up with the sheer volume of it.)

I agree with your starting point, and I have always wondered if RS and AK had gone away for the weekend, and Guede had been caught, if there ever would have been any suspicion whatsoever that they were in any way involved....I also think Amanda is fortunate that her parents and family have been so loving and supportive. I am sure if I had been in her situation, my family would have told me that they trusted Mignini, and were sure I did it....

 

[AmyStrange]

All good points...

Naturally that. I don't think anybody has ever complained that she didn't assert that she knew for sure he wasn't the killer. The issue has always been plainly asserting that her statement was definately plucked from an imagined nothing.

Perhaps she isn't street smart. I'm not making a moral judgement about her. I just think it's unfortunate that she alludes to what se said being made up nonsense without actually completely burning her bridges and committing herself to that position.

-

Shuttlt,

but I do have one question (to you or anyone else who may know). Was her recant originally written in English or Italian? If it was originally written in Italian and then translated into English, or if she originally wrote it in English than it was translated into Italian and than back into English; both cases might explain the ambiguity,

Dave

 

[shuttlt]

I've been following shuttlt's musing for awhile now, and I'd like to express my appreciation for his efforts.

It's nice to be appreciated.

I have tried to form an opinion about all this, but I am lazy and developing an understanding of the facts well enough to form my own independent opinion has been beyond the effort I have been willing to expend.

I think it takes a heck of a lot of effort to get a view of this case that isn't dependent on trusting particular sources. There are issues on both sides that seem wrong to me and yet they get trotted out over and over. Perhaps it isn't enough to upset the overall thrust of the argument, but there are loads of issues that people on one or the other side regard as finished and tied up with a bow that I feel aren't resolved at all. The TOD stuff seems like the easiest way of reducing the issue to a managable amount.

Despite this, I have formed a strong opinion that RS and AK are innocent. Not just that there was insufficient evidence to convict them, I believe that it is almost provable that they are innocent. But I am afraid that some combination of group bias and confirmation bias is driving my conclusions. The fact is I tend to identify with regular JREF posters and I tend to respect their analysis so if a majority of JREF posters who I respect think RS and AK are innocent and they manage to put together a few words that indicate what their thinking is I am predisposed to accept their thinking. shuttlt doesn't seem to be as susceptible to that kind of thing as I am, so my congratulations to shuttlt on his ability to maintain his objectivity.

How long have you been reading the thread? For a long while the majority JREF view seemed pro-guilt. Almost all of the original posters have long since abandoned the thread.

But I am having a hard time seeing what facts shuttlt is relying on to support his views. It seems like the DNA evidence has been shown to have no probative value as to their guilt, the time of death argument seems to be very strong evidence of their innocence, the witnesses against them have been shown to have been unreliable and probably wrong. And of course the nature of the crime proposed, especially for two people that had just recently met and for two people who had not a hint of anything like this in their past seems wildly unlikely.

Partly my reasons for not committing are that I remember when it seemed like most of the posters believed in guilt on basically the same evidence. There has been some undermining of the evidence since those days, but I don't think it's enough to explain the total shift in opinion.

Against this there is a "confession" and the fact that the Italian authorities brought this prosecution and presumably they have a more detailed understanding of the facts than any of us can have and they went forward with the prosecution.

True.

However, the "confession" is hardly a confession by my standards. I think it is exactly the kind of thing I might have said, especially when I was younger, given hours of police interrogation and my willingness to consider odd possibilities in my effort to reconcile what seemed like irreconcilable facts.

How many hours?

And information is now available that there are issues with the Italian authorities, particularly the prosecutor and the lead forensic investigator. Apparently the prosecutor has a history of prosecuting people based on weird theories and it was this prosecutor that included in his summation evidence from graphologists about the defendants personality.

OK. Try and find a basis for his history of prosecuting people based on weird theories beyond what Preston says. if he's got a "history" of it, I take it it's more than one other case? If you have a view about the monster of florence I take it that's taken on trust as to how bad it makes Mignini look, he really is only a footnote in the case after all? Are people saying that Mignini has a history of this because it's true, or because they think it ought to be/might be true/would be convenient if it were true.

This is also the prosecutor that has been convicted of illegally using the powers of his office to harass an individual and is facing the possibility of serving jail time for his crime.

This may be true, but I wouldn't say I know the truth about it any more than with this case. From what I can see Italians seem to be very keen on filing charges against one another. There's certainly a lot of politics muddled up with it, though the charges may very well be justified.

 

[shuttlt]

-

Shuttlt,

but I do have one question (to you or anyone else who may know). Was her recant originally written in English or Italian? If it was originally written in Italian and then translated into English, or if she originally wrote it in English than it was translated into Italian and than back into English; both cases might explain the ambiguity,

Dave

The early releases from the diaries suffered from that when they were coming out via the police, that isn't the explanation here.

 

[shuttlt]

I also think you have a good point about Amanda's "confession". If she was involved, why did she tell a story that makes no sense, and does not fit any of the evidence?

I would imagine it's quite hard to make up a lie on the spot while being questioned by police when you don't know what evidence they have or what your accomplice may or may not have told them. Unless she was very well prepared, she may surely have been winging it.

Why did she not say Rudy did it all? That would have been the thing to do if she was involved, but wanted to deflect attention from herself. Or, if she is really this calculating liar/killer, blame it on Raff and Rudy! "They made me go over there, and I was cowering in the kitchen while they did this terrible crime!" I know Raff was her boyfriend, but she knew him less than two weeks, if she was really what the prosecutors and guilters say she is, she could have easily turned on him as well.

Who knows what she might have thought (assuming guilt of course) Raf or Rudy might have said had she done so. Perhaps one or other of them would know where the real knife was with her prints on it. Perhaps Raf knew where the bloody clothes were hidden. Perhaps a whole lot of things. It doesn't even have to make that much sense given the pressure she would have been under. I would find it difficult as hell to come up with a clever lie under the circumstances.

 

[Kaosium]

I think this is again starting to be a longer explanation than it needs to be. There is a risk that people will not believe the whole induced-false-memory thing. Again, if you're confident that they will believe it, then fine, otherwise this explanation will leave them feeling that they're being lied to.

I think their strategy (in court) was more along these lines, actually. Amanda took far too much blame for being abused in my opinion and seeing her apologize again after the first one was ignored and another demanded for two years and then to have it rejected was nauseating. I'm not much interested in what the best legal strategy would be or would have been, I'm more interested in the truth of what happened, and I suspect the actual truth of the matter is at this point Patrick Lumumba owes Amanda a huge apology for his tireless efforts to defame her and the attempts to assist the prosecution, in court in out, in having her imprisoned for life.

Oh, and scooping up every last dime of what she got for having her sexual history spread to tabloids worldwide after it now seems it was a policeman dressed as a doctor that told her she had tested positive for AIDS, suggestive of their attempt to garner a real confession when one considers all the rest of the pressures put on her at the time, not the least was the whole 'soulless' smear that put 70k Euros of the Daily Mail's money into Patrick's pocket, with another 10k coming from Italian media.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree. It's perfectly possible for her to retract everything she said completely and straightforwardly without making any kind of positive statement about whether Patrick was or was not involved unless her explanation is so long and rambling that it is left unclear quite what she is asserting.

How could she retract it "completely and straightforwardly" if she didn't know it wasn't true? That was her problem, the police convinced her she might have 'repressed' the memory and she didn't know which memories were real for certain and she made that quite clear in her note directly after the arrest. For that matter the 'vaguely' and 'confusedly' in the statements themselves ought to have been a big hint.

What you're asking for her to do is be able to read minds and employ clairvoyance, and all of it is irrelevant to the fact that the prosecution went into court before Matteini on the Eighth not only with those statements in hand, but also a 'witness' to the bar being closed, 'evidence' he was near the crime scene from his phone records, the text message she sent to him right before the murder actually occurred, 'evidence' that his till didn't show receipts until 10:29 PM though he 'claimed' to have been there since 6 PM, an 'admission' that there was only one person in his bar, (all those alibis must be lies! Or did Patrick 'lie' about his alibi? ) he called him a friend but only knew the name 'Usi' and not a phone number, and that evidence placing him at the scene was not insubstantial--I think they were having fun with footprints here if I recall correctly.

Shuttlt, it didn't make a damn bit of difference what Amanda said after they arrested Patrick, they're not going to wait for her permission if they think he should be released. They're not going to release him with all the rest of their 'evidence' just because she 'changes her story' another time and says he's not involved! They already said she 'changed her story three times' and they called her a 'compulsive liar' when she did say she was at her house all night and never left, obviously at that point not being able to say she saw Patrick there!

Whatever makes you think that if that wasn't 'complete and straightforward' enough, anything else would suffice? They'd keep Patrick in jail another ten days or so anyway, even after grilling that professor for seven hours trying to break his alibi.

Fine. Then I would keep as far away from the topic in the court as possible.

That raises an interesting question as to what extent it could come up at this point, I don't think it's really up to the defense though. I recall reading Pacelli or whatever his name is, Patrick's lawyer, has been in court, but not a peep about what has happened with that calunnia charge.

The problem is if it plays as lying about the lie. Perhaps that's not how this court will read it.

Actually, anything but the truth is more damning when you consider the permutations. She can't help that it's difficult to explain what can happen in that situation, but there's that note which explains exactly what her state of mind was directly after the interrogation. Whether the court reaches the correct conclusion is something no one here can affect, so why not actually try to figure out the truth?

 

[JREF2010]

In general though, I find the contradictory views that different people can hold about essentially the same facts interesting.

There's no shortage of the contradictory views in this case... you'll have many interesting and opposing views at closing, no doubt.

 

[JREF2010]

As I saw on PMF that they were discussing Knox not wearing a bra,

To each their own, but thanks for reminding me why I don't read that site anymore.

 

[shuttlt]

How could she retract it "completely and straightforwardly" if she didn't know it wasn't true? That was her problem, the police convinced her she might have 'repressed' the memory and she didn't know which memories were real for certain and she made that quite clear in her note directly after the arrest. For that matter the 'vaguely' and 'confusedly' in the statements themselves ought to have been a big hint.

Fine. This is part of the case where I am a guilter.

What you're asking for her to do is be able to read minds and employ clairvoyance, and all of it is irrelevant to the fact that the prosecution went into court before Matteini on the Eighth not only with those statements in hand, but also a 'witness' to the bar being closed, 'evidence' he was near the crime scene from his phone records, the text message she sent to him right before the murder actually occurred, 'evidence' that his till didn't show receipts until 10:29 PM though he 'claimed' to have been there since 6 PM, an 'admission' that there was only one person in his bar, (all those alibis must be lies! Or did Patrick 'lie' about his alibi? ) he called him a friend but only knew the name 'Usi' and not a phone number, and that evidence placing him at the scene was not insubstantial--I think they were having fun with footprints here if I recall correctly.

Kaosium,

This is beyond silly. Nobody but pro-innocence posters ever talks about her being asked to assert that Patrick definately wasn't involved when she supposedly couldn't possibly know. It would make no sense for her to do so whether she's guilty or innocent. I think what people who support guilt feel is that Amanda was hedging. She retracted her statement just enough that, should evidence come to light to clear Patrick, she could say "well, I told you I thought what I said might well be false", but not enough that should no such evidence come to light that she could firm up on her certainty and remember more details if it was convenient to do so. Personally I like the explanation that she didn't feel able to say "what I told you was total nonsense", but said as much she dared. Later it felt like too much of a risk to say more.

Shuttlt, it didn't make a damn bit of difference what Amanda said after they arrested Patrick, they're not going to wait for her permission if they think he should be released. They're not going to release him with all the rest of their 'evidence' just because she 'changes her story' another time and says he's not involved! They already said she 'changed her story three times' and they called her a 'compulsive liar' when she did say she was at her house all night and never left, obviously at that point not being able to say she saw Patrick there!

I don't think that whether or not the police would have immediately released him is really the issue.

Whatever makes you think that if that wasn't 'complete and straightforward' enough, anything else would suffice? They'd keep Patrick in jail another ten days or so anyway, even after grilling that professor for seven hours trying to break his alibi.

I didn't claim a straight forward explanation would have resulted in Patrick's immediate release. I'm certain it wouldn't.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

dissonance

I think their strategy (in court) was more along these lines, actually. Amanda took far too much blame for being abused in my opinion and seeing her apologize again after the first one was ignored and another demanded for two years and then to have it rejected was nauseating.

Kaosium,

This whole comment is spot-on, though I might be a tad more sympathetic to Patrick than you are. I think he channeled his anger in the wrong direction, perhaps because he could not understand the dynamics of a false confession, and to change his mind now would bring about too much cognitive dissonance.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

particles in the hood

Well, ignoring the during the murder theory... it could have gotten there in a lot of ways. All of them seem to me very unlikely. Once you've excluded the "during the murder" one, one of the other possibilities must be it. I would go with somebody having been stupid, in a way that we aren't yet and probably will never be aware of, and contaminated them or contaminated them on purpose. Crazier and more unlikely things than airborne transmission happen every day.

shuttlt,

The whole point of my question was that you not ignore the murder possibility. It is easy to criticize commenters for their hypotheses on how the DNA evidence came about, but the pro-guilt viewpoint does not improve the situation. One just generates a hypothesis that makes even less sense than airborne transmission, or what have you. BTW, if airborne transmission were unlikely, then there would be no point in positive air-flow hoods.

 

[JREF2010]

Does anyone happen to know where I could find links to Italian legal commentators who are proclaiming Knox and Sollecito are done for, as touched on in this post below???

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

I read that Ann Coulter it was horrific and very typical of someone who really has no detailed interest in the case...another "shock the ignorant" type article.

I doubt you'll ever find the secret source.

 

[shuttlt]

shuttlt,

The whole point of my question was that you not ignore the murder possibility. It is easy to criticize commenters for their hypotheses on how the DNA evidence came about, but the pro-guilt viewpoint does not improve the situation. One just generates a hypothesis that makes even less sense than airborne transmission, or what have you. BTW, if airborne transmission were unlikely, then there would be no point in positive air-flow hoods.

I'm still not clear on the scope of the question. Purely restricting things to the knife, the most likely way of getting the DNA on it, in my view, is by coming into contact with the owner of the DNA. Of course the question isn't restricted to just the knife and how likely or unlikely you think it is that the knife was involved in the murder is crucially important. I have no answer to give you on the wider question.

 

[shuttlt]

BTW, if airborne transmission were unlikely, then there would be no point in positive air-flow hoods.

Then why isn't the knife hopelessly contaminated with Raffaele's DNA? Surely there are degrees of unlikely?