Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Rolfe]

Well for me it’s not the case of blindly accepting anything more the fact that a sovereign western democracy has the right to administer justice according to its own laws.

Point of information. Actually, it doesn't. Italy is a member of the EU and as such is subject to the European Convention on Human Rights. As Scotland has found to its cost recently, this absolutely limits "the right to administer justice according to its own laws".

I'm no expert, but discussing this case in the context of the ECHR might be an interesting exercise.

Rolfe.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

a game changer for me

Do you think if the clasp had been collected on the first day and it had had no several profiles on it, then Bongiorno would say "OK, we have lost, let's go home."?

bolint,

Not with the stomach/duodenum contents evidence being what it is. That changed my perspective on the case. Would you be so good as to summarize your position on the loss of the meta data? I did not entirely follow the point you were making. Thanks.

 

[Rolfe]

I still think the defense has been pretty bad during this case. Are they restricted in their time heavily to make their case?

I think they're quite restricted by the calumny legislation, actually.

Rolfe.

 

[Ammonitida]

The short version: it twists the facts. More specifically....



There are also far fewer cases in which multiple assailants are arrested, even allowing for a false accusation of this nature. It was also used to arrest her, and termed a 'confession' so it's not like she was simply 'fingering an innocent person.' Raffaele was stoned when he was 'interviewed' by ILE, and likely got mixed up with what day was which, his colorful terminology notwithstanding.



There is a drop of blood, or more exactly the trace of a smear of blood on the faucet, if you look really close you can see it here:

[qimg]http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/4179/akbloodtapofsink.jpg[/qimg]

It's not particularly notable in the crime scene videos under normal light where it's featured at almost exactly 3:00, 4:00 and then 4:32.

There's a better picture under bright lights that shows it better, but I can't seem to find it. Perhaps Pilot can help me out.

Amanda testified the bathroom was 'clean' when she left, not that the trace of a blood smear wasn't there. It could easily have been missed, and those familiar with college student ideas on cleanliness might describe the bathroom in those crime scene videos themselves as 'clean' or at least 'mostly clean' anyway!

It was probably from her earring adventure which had bleed a few days before the murder, and went unnoticed as it wasn't obvious. It isn't mixed with anything and Massei makes the point that it is coagulated and 'separate morphically' from the other drops found in the sink.



[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=597&pictureid=3970[/qimg]

Take a look at them, and also at what the stain itself is. It's a partial print on a fuzzy bathmat with potentially uneven distribution of weight and a certain amount of 'spread' from the surface contacted. That perfect 'measurements' even could apply is dubious, although I suppose one could find places in both of them that 'match' to 'millimetre precision'--but it wouldn't mean much.

Irony defined is trying to pretend that a lack of contextual cues from Rudy as to how his footprint got there is therefore 'evidence' of it being the only residue of Raffaele being involved in the murder. Rudy was there, he got into blood, he washed it up--none of that is contested. The only trace of Raffaele ever being in the cottage is the cigarette butt, now that the DNA is exposed. Thus trying to explain how Raffaele got into that blood, what happened to the rest of the traces of it, and how it fits into a theory of the murder requires even more incredulity than the argument presented.



They're all just as crappy as these are, if not more so.

It's rather clear that Rudy's footprint morphology is more consistent with the bathmat print than Sollecito's is. Look at the bathmat print and note the smooth curvature of the area just below the big toe. It almost forms a circle or oval half. Now look at the corresponding area of Rudy's print. It also has a very smooth curvature -- quite similar to the one observed on the bathmat. Contrast that with Sollecito's which has a more irregular shape. Further, note how in Sollecito's print, the area that connects the big toe to the rest of the foot doesn't appear at all while in the bathmat print it does appear. The ink print of Rudy also shows the same area connecting the big toe and foot. Another similarity is in the shape of the big toe itself. Sollecito's big toe has a very distinctive morphology in that it forms a semi-trianglular shape. Rudy's big toe is a more average shape which is also true of the imprint seen on the bathmat. Only the area just beneath where the other smaller toes would have appeared is more consistent with Sollecito's print (due to the two "humps").

I have no idea what that poster was on about regarding the "8 of 10 points of measurements matching Sollecito's foot".

 

[Katody Matrass]

Fact 1. Raffaele claimed using his computer for hours, including web browisng.
Fact 2. There should be traces of this activity if someone had worked on the computer.

Let's see your best critical thinking . Why did he falsely claim something so easily verifiable?

Fact 3. Not a single trace has been found even by the defence that anybody was working on that computer between 21:26 to 24:00.

This is simply not true, bolint.

 

[NewtonTrino]

I think they're quite restricted by the calumny legislation, actually.

Rolfe.

I suppose that's possible.

This case has really underscored to me how valuable real free speech is.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

ECHR and precautionary detention

Point of information. Actually, it doesn't. Italy is a member of the EU and as such is subject to the European Convention on Human Rights. As Scotland has found to its cost recently, this absolutely limits "the right to administer justice according to its own laws".

I'm no expert, but discussing this case in the context of the ECHR might be an interesting exercise.

Rolfe.

Rolfe,

I am no expert, either, but I have given a link to Benjamin Sayagh's manuscript before. It only covers precautionary detention, however.

 

[Rolfe]

I think the reason we are hearing all the ridiculous guilter talking points in the prosecution case is that our old friend Yummi or Machavelli on some sites, today admitted that he speaks directly with Mignini...I’m not a good searcher but I came across it on someone’s link (I think Surfin, Sharkin Randys) over to PMS...errrrr ... PMF.

I find that assertion creditable because all the prosecutions talking points closely follow the odd path of “logic” used at both PMF and TJMK. Right down to the silly jet and death sentence in USA claims…I actually think Mignini has gone so far off track that he has lost it! He is using the guilter sites and the likes of geniuses like Yummi, Kermit, Pervert Quinell, and Miss Piggy Ganong…Start looking at the arguments and comparing….It all fits…

That's actually something that's occurred to me quite forcefully over the past few days. There seems to be some sort of incestuous relationship between PMF.org (at least) and the prosecution.

My take on this is that the posters at that site have taken it upon themselves to contact the prosecution to proffer their expertise. After all, look how often, if one of us mentions a strong point in favour of innocence, someone will jump into the thread and demand to know if we have contacted the defence team to inform them about this. The implication seems to be that if we haven't, then we're phonies.

Of course, we imagine that the defence will also have taken note of obvious points in their favour. And indeed they seem to have done, as regards the most prominent of the points we have been discussing such as the duodenum contents. We also suspect that any such approach which wasn't offering genuinely new evidence would be met with an exasperated "bugger off, amateur".

However, the PMFers speak openly of contacting the prosecution team. And the impression I'm getting is that Mignini has not been saying "bugger off amateurs". I think he's latched on to that and related sites, and the guilter community, and essentially picked what passes for their brains for a lot of his strategy. That might explain why so much of his "argument" was nothing but character assassination, why he slavishly followed some of their more outrageous assumptions and errors (such as "mixed blood", and that C&V could be mocked and dismissed), and why a lot of it sounded so damn familiar.

Then of course the PMFers seize on this as justification for their point of view, see, the prosecution has come to the same view of these issues.

Time will tell whether any of this added up to an effective approach, I suppose.

Rolfe.

 

[Caper]

I am trying to come up with a list... large list... of bullet point questions I can use to reply on various news sites I read.

1)Why were Amanda's and Raffaele's computer harddrives destroyed?
2)Why did they find Rudy's DNA and blood all over the room (blood and hair) and not find a thing from Amanda and her boyfriend?

I know I can come up with a list of about 30... i want some help. There are some good posters here.

 

[Minadin]

http://abc.go.com/watch/2020/SH559026/VD55145930/2020-930-amanda-knox-appeal

Very good thus far. Nice photography of Perugia; nice clips of Mr. Preston and Frank Sfarzo, getting to Mignini and Monster of Florence connection.

They blurred out the man-region of Michelangelo's David in the segment on Florence. Wow.

 

[Kaosium]

Why? She would still have the option "the police planted it".

Most cases they probably don't do it on camera, to the extent of putting on a three-stooges skit the day after their shoeprint 'evidence' against Raffaele was exposed. Then providing to the court undocumented and incorrect data and conclusions, refusing mightily to reveal the electronic data files to the very end. Did the experts ever even get them?

 

[Ammonitida]

I am trying to come up with a list... large list... of bullet point questions I can use to reply on various news sites I read.

1)Why were Amanda's and Raffaele's computer harddrives destroyed?
2)Why did they find Rudy's DNA and blood all over the room (blood and hair) and not find a thing from Amanda and her boyfriend?

I know I can come up with a list of about 30... i want some help. There are some good posters here.

2) I don't think they found his hair or his blood at the crime scene. But they did find his fingerprint, palm print, and shoeprints there, all made in Meredith's blood. As for why AK and RS didn't leave behind any such evidence, the pro-innocence side takes the most logical position that it's because they were simply never there during the murder. Guilters, on the other hand, are fond of the "clean-up" conspiracy theory which has both Amanda and Sollecito cleaning around all of Rudy's DNA and bloody prints -- erasing all of theirs and amazingly leaving only his behind (with one highly disputed exception). Then after such an impressive effort to frame Rudy as the sole murderer of Meredith, Amanda makes a bizarre mistake and points the finger at a man she knows to be innocent, in effect implicating herself despite all the trouble they went through to frame someone else (who they knew was there and had left a truckload of evidence behind).

 

[lowriderrsa]

Is this critical thinking at its best?



Let's start with the computer evidence. But don't run away.

Fact 1. Raffaele claimed using his computer for hours, including web browisng.
Fact 2. There should be traces of this activity if someone had worked on the computer.
Fact 3. Not a single trace has been found even by the defence that anybody was working on that computer between 21:26 to 24:00.

That is the naked truth.

You must have a solid refutation, come on, bring it on.

Hi Bolint

I enjoy your posts. You seem to bring a plausible and unique way of thinking to this specific thread. I had a simmilar interaction with somebody on Twitter the other day regarding alibi. When I quoted a few things I was accused of making things up and not anything was heard from that person since.

Now with regards to Raf's alibi, it's actually quite impossible to refute your statements above. Those very same facts are mirrored in Raf's appeal. There may be additional information that has since come to the fore, so I stand corrected. At the same time I'm thinking that it's quite difficult to prove that Raffaele was actually the one sitting at the computer. But we have a time of 9:26PM, that seems to be agreed on by most. So I concede to your suggestion that the alibi is not rock-solid.

So between 9:26PM and 10:20PM (when calls were made from Meredith's cell, which both the defence and the prosecution now agree was made by the killer) we have a period of opportunity. We do however have other factors which come into play, that being that Raffaele wasn't very close to the murder scene and would've had to drive there. We also have a time of death, based on the autopsy, which fits into a time frame estimated to be between 9PM and 10PM.

So in conclusion, there is an alibi, followed by a short period of time which technically can be labeled as a period of opportunity, but has external factors that makes it improbable for Raffaele to have taken advantage of it.

 

[Dan O.]

Is this critical thinking at its best?



Let's start with the computer evidence. But don't run away.

Fact 1. Raffaele claimed using his computer for hours, including web browisng.
Fact 2. There should be traces of this activity if someone had worked on the computer.
Fact 3. Not a single trace has been found even by the defence that anybody was working on that computer between 21:26 to 24:00.

That is the naked truth.

You must have a solid refutation, come on, bring it on.

Your claims are empty. Where are the references?

Have you noticed how the prosecutions goal posts keep moving? Their "experts" originally claimed the last activity was at 21:10 with the closing of Amelie. This is reported from the trial:

The Pm asked to find human interaction between 6 pm of the November 1 and 8 am of the 2nd. A perfect range.
Indeed with Encase they find that at 18:27 a VLC file is called to work: it's the opening of The Fabulous World of Amelie Poulain. Through the operating system they read the last script in the cache: at 21:10 an interaction with the fabulous world. So we can assume that it was the closing of that movie. After that nothing until a VLC crash at 5:32 am. Someone tried to open a multimedia file. It must have been a song since right after that crash Itune is successfully used to hear some music.

The prosecution called them on their conclusion by pointing out Naruto. Here is what Frank reported from the trial:

What claimed by Bongiorno, that there was an interaction with Naruto at 21:26 simply it wasn't true according to the postal police, otherwise they would have found it.

So is the prosecutions expert lying their little asses off in court of are they truly that incompetent?!


And what happened after midnight to cause the goal post to move on that end; There is that 4 second connection to Apple at 00:58 of Nov. 2nd which the defense experts discovered but should have been bloody obvious to the prosecution since this activity was recorded by Raffaele's ISP and the prosecution had those records. More lying through their teeth or did they just overlook it?

The defense claims in a written addendum to the Raffaele's appeal that there is evidence of screensaver activity throughout the night with the final activation of the screensaver at 06:22 on Nov. 2nd. In the filing they specified exactly where this evidence was found in sufficient detail that the prosecution would be able to verify the facts using the copy of Raffaele's hard drive that they have (presuming that the postals haven't already fried it). The defense asked that this evidence be reviewed by an independent expert appointed by the court which would preclude the prosecutions standard comeback "if it was there we would have found it". The court has decided that it doesn't need to review this evidence. It has not been refuted.


So there you have it. Hours of computer activity including web access. You haven't supported your claim of what Raffaele said. You even shifted the goal posts by creating a time constraint that was not part of Raffaele's claimed statement. And on top of that, what is claimed that he said appears to in fact be the truth.

 

[smkovalinksy]

They blurred out the man-region of Michelangelo's David in the segment on Florence. Wow.

Kind of defeats the purpose of the statue....typical American stupidity......

 

[Rolfe]

That "Rolfe" character comes with an added bonus that any defense lawyer would love: Contempt for the victim.

When I looked in on JLOL the other day, the (alleged) cow doctor was actually bemoaning expressions of sympathy/ empathy in respect of Meredith and her grieving family - even claimed to be 'nauseated' by it.

That's a special kind of ********** up. Gotta get her on the panel. (I figure it's not just low grades that has her working on cows instead of humans, it's her smoldering misanthropy.)

http://perugiamurderfile.org/viewto...765d544761614f2ceee2676793&start=3000#p102653

It seems, for the PMF crew, that anything other than unquestioning adoration of Meredith as some sort of cross between Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa speaks of "contempt for the victim".

(Also seems not only not to realise that the grades necessary to get into vet college are at least as high as the grades necessary to get into medical college.)

There seems to be no way to soften the hurt that will be caused to the Kerchers, if and when Knox and Sollecito are acquitted. They've bought too deep into Mignini and Maresca. I think this treatment of innocent victims is at least as heinous as the gross vilification of the Knox and Mellas families. They're being used for their tearjerker shock effect, and damn the consequences for them.

If the police had done their job in the first place and correctly identified Rudy as the surprised burglar turned rapist and murderer, their situation would still have been terrible, but they might have been heading towards some sort of closure by now. Instead they're being used as pawns in a power-play by an Italian lawyer. Disgusting.

Rolfe.

 

[platonov]

Are the Italian judges made of stronger stuff than Diamond Joe Quimby.

<snip>

Given all that you stated above, if Hellmann has, on live TV, a confirmation of the convictions, he has just publicly endorsed, to a worldwide audience, all of the points you have listed, and then some. And he has ignored the massive amounts of doubt in the case presented against a young man and woman, and will be sending them back to jail. So a guilty verdict is not ony an endorsement of these ideas as OK, it is also giving a great big public finger to the people who have raised these issues as blatently unfair to the defendants.

Although that would probably go over fine for most in Italy, Hellmann has to know that the Knox family and her other supporters are not going away, and are going to get even louder and more persistant, and work to enlist the help of ever higher authorities in the US and elsewhere. At this point, the lack of evidence in this case has come to the attention of a lot more people than before, and it is not going to be possible to cover it up.

<snip>

For some reason this reminds me of the Simpsons

Quimby: Are those morons getting dumber or just louder?

Assistant: [checks his clipboard] Dumber, sir.

In this case 'both' seems to be the plan if the appeal is not successful.

But joking [or idle threats] aside what is plan B for the Foakers.
Are the 101st MAM ready to spring into action.

I see the putative team leader is already 'in country' but his cover may have been blown.

As covert ops go surely a mistake - to insult the 'evil doers' before shooting them may work in the movies but IRL forewarned is forearmed. No ??

 

[Grinder]

Raf's was a five - ten minute walk to Amanda's cottage.

 

[smkovalinksy]

http://perugiamurderfile.org/viewto...765d544761614f2ceee2676793&start=3000#p102653

It seems, for the PMF crew, that anything other than unquestioning adoration of Meredith as some sort of cross between Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa speaks of "contempt for the victim".

(Also seems not only not to realise that the grades necessary to get into vet college are at least as high as the grades necessary to get into medical college.)

There seems to be no way to soften the hurt that will be caused to the Kerchers, if and when Knox and Sollecito are acquitted. They've bought too deep into Mignini and Maresca. I think this treatment of innocent victims is at least as heinous as the gross vilification of the Knox and Mellas families. They're being used for their tearjerker shock effect, and damn the consequences for them.

If the police had done their job in the first place and correctly identified Rudy as the surprised burglar turned rapist and murderer, their situation would still have been terrible, but they might have been heading towards some sort of closure by now. Instead they're being used as pawns in a power-play by an Italian lawyer. Disgusting.

Rolfe.

Yes: All true, all disgusting. But let us neither forget how the minds of the intelligent pmf-ers themselves have also been penetrated; that those who would champion the Kerchers in their exploitation are themselves exploited: through cracks in the psyches of persons whose reason and logic could not withstand the siren-call of a seductive theory, the wedge was driven in; so much so, that now, one gets things such as this from PMF:

There isn't a Knox booster left with an IQ over 70 that's still asserting that she's "innocent" - the best they can do (with a straight face) is argue that the RD standard can't be satisfied.



Exactly.

There are those who comment, and don't know the details of available evidence, and their commentary appears as though their IQ would be less than 70. Then there are those where it probably is indeed, less than 70.

What I don't understand, is the people that appear to be well-educated, who know the details of the evidence available, and believe in Amanda's innocence. These people would be more believable if they would argue for the disjointed bits and pieces of reasonable doubt, rather than for her complete innocence.

Surely, not all of them do it for pecuniary motives nor for motives regarding infamy? What would possess many reasonably intelligent people (a judge, journalists, lawyers) to become swallowed up in the innocence fairy tale?

Do you think there could be a human element that has nothing to do with money or fame? Perhaps the development of a relationship with the Knox/Mellas family after listening to their plight, and consequently sympathizing with them? That this human bond could negate skills of logical reasoning?

If the latter is so, then I'm a bit nervous about any jury. However, the great thing about the Italian system, is that there are 2 experienced judges on the jury that (one would think) have excellent reasoning skills that could hopefully, influence the others, at least with using skills of logical reason.

 

[Grinder]

I hope Amanda strait forwardly says I didn't kill Meredith, I didn't help kill Meredith, I wasn't there the night she was killed, I didn't have anything to do with a break-in, I didn't have anything to do with her murder.

I only did one thing wrong and that was not to resist the police the night of my statement.