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Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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I've just noticed this rather extraordinary statement from "Maundy Gregory" (amidst a sea of nonsense and conjecture) in a piece he posted on TJMK:

But the decision yesterday can’t just be about a systematic problem. The automaticity of appeals in Italy may indeed favour defendants. But, surely, a guilty person ought to remain guilty regardless of how may re-trials are granted.
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http://www.truejustice.org/ee/index...derstanding_yesterdays_knox_sollecito_verdict


How can anyone even begin to have a rational debate with someone who makes such an embarrassingly boneheaded assertion (which even managed to include an unintentionally-amusing neologism)? Now that most of the pro-guilt commentators have no appeal to authority to cloak themselves in (a factor which is clearly causing considerable cognitive dissonance to them), their true lack of intellect and reason is being exposed rather cruelly.
 
duck

Micromegas said:
I'm saying there's a perfectly valid distinction. If you accuse someone else of a crime, that's not a confession.

Regardless of whether Knox just wanted to get out of the police station or whether the police "planted a false memory" in her, I blame the inhumane treatment she received from the Italian police for the false accusation of Lumumba. That still doesn't make it a confession.

-Mike
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Micromegas,

With due respect you are making a point that is not in contention: we are all agreed that a confession is a self-accusation and that accusing someone else is not, in and of itself, a confession. However, you tried to make something of the lack of a discussion of false accusations in the Saul Kassin passage you quoted. My first point is that the mechanisms that produces a false accusation is similar to the ones that produce a false confession. Therefore, your "duck" point is not valid, in my opinion. My second point is that many false confessions (most of the ones I can think of, offhand) are also accusations. My third point is that Knox's accusation was also an unwitting confession. However, I am not terribly wedded to this last point, and if you disagree, that is fine.
 
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Micromegas said:
I see it the exact same way.

But that doesn't make it a confession. Why is this point so difficult for people to admit?

-Mike
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It's much more complicated than the binary choice you are imposing upon others. The reality is that Knox's statements were both an accusation and a confession (I'll put to one side for now the issue of whether they were genuine statements, or improperly coerced false statements, because that's not important in the context of discussing the "confession vs accusation" issue).

Knox clearly made accusations against Lumumba, and accusations that were obviously related to criminal conduct (i.e. that Lumumba killed Meredith). But Knox also made a number of confessions. She confessed that she was at the house at the time of the murder, and that by implication she neither tried to stop the murder nor made any attempt to help Meredith. Those are criminal offences. Through making this statement, Knox was also essentially confessing to having misled the police for some four days since the murder. That's obstruction of justice or perverting the course of justice, and it's also a criminal offence. And Knox's statements also laid her open to the possibility that she took Lumumba to the cottage in the knowledge that he intended to at the very least inflict a sexual assault upon Meredith. That's also a criminal offence.

Knox's statements in the early hours of 6th November 2007 amounted to an accusation and a confession.
 
LondonJohn said:
Knox clearly made accusations against Lumumba, and accusations that were obviously related to criminal conduct (i.e. that Lumumba killed Meredith). But Knox also made a number of confessions. She confessed that she was at the house at the time of the murder, and that by implication she neither tried to stop the murder nor made any attempt to help Meredith. Those are criminal offences. Through making this statement, Knox was also essentially confessing to having misled the police for some four days since the murder. That's obstruction of justice or perverting the course of justice, and it's also a criminal offence. And Knox's statements also laid her open to the possibility that she took Lumumba to the cottage in the knowledge that he intended to at the very least inflict a sexual assault upon Meredith. That's also a criminal offence.

Knox's statements in the early hours of 6th November 2007 amounted to an accusation and a confession.
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Okay, I have no problem with anything you've said here. And, as I said before, I believe Knox was innocent of Kercher's murder. I just want Knox's supporters to be honest about what she did. She signed a statement in which she accused Lumumba of Kercher's murder, while either overtly or implicitly confessing to a variety of offenses.

-Mike
 
Hellmann's interesting comments today (which in my view he should not have made) implied that he was critical of the various judges who preceded him (chiefly Matteini and Massei), rather than prosecutors. He also said that in his view Knox and Sollecito were correctly arrested initially.

And I would agree with him. I have long argued that it was in fact appropriate to have arrested Knox and Sollecito. There were significant factors that suggested that they might either have been directly involved, or at the very least they were covering something up. Many months ago, I explicitly argued that the very early part of the case was properly handled (outside of the interrogations of the 5th/6th November). In other words, I think that it was appropriate for Knox and Sollecito to have been placed into custody (although I don't think Lumumba should have been treated in the way he was treated), and I think that Matteini was probably correct to confirm their remand in the first court hearing on November 8th. But it's after this point that there should have been sufficient judicial oversight to reconsider the situation. The November 8th hearing contained a large number of prosecution allegations that were quickly discovered to be either untrue or unsubstantiated. Matteini chose to provisionally accept the prosecution case in that hearing - and he was probably correct to do so - but it very soon became apparent that the prosecution case was nowhere near as strong as the provisional case presented in that first court hearing. I personally think that Knox and Sollecito should have been released from custody before Christmas 2007, and that investigations should have continued while they remained at liberty. I think that if that had happened, it's highly likely that the case against them would have been assessed in a far more logical and methodical fashion, and it's unlikely that murder charges would ever have been brought against them at all.

But regardless of mistakes that might have been made in 2007 and 2008, it's long been clear to most rational thinkers that Massei made a huge number of critical mistakes when confronted with the case set before him for the first trial. My view is that he should have thrown the case out before a trial ever even started, but even failing that, he made a number of terrible rulings and decisions all the way through the trial (of course including the deliberation and verdict). I am glad that Hellmann appears to have no problem in assigning culpability to the judiciary where it is due, and I hope that this is addressed in much more detail in the motivations report.
 
the Answer..... lies in Viterbo

today some call it the unsolved mystery.... maybe partially unsolved.

We all know Rudy Raped and was a known, proven burglar.
We know the police made mistakes by focusing on the wrong suspects.

Did Rudy have an accomplice he hasnt named, Maybe not in the murder, maybe not in Merediths bedroom, but aware of the facts?

>Rudy was seen with someone the night of the murder. his friends didnt recognize.
>the dark colored car in the driveway at time of murder
>Alessandra Formicas testimony fitting the correct time
> a few prisoners hear Rudys prison yard chats
> During the original trial, Miss Knox's lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said fingerprints from other people had been found at the murder scene and never identified.

Luca Maroi has pressed charges against Rudy at closing for blaming his crime on Raffaele, per Perugia Shock. This will be an interesting trial to get the liar on the stand.

Finally the real murderer will be treated, and questioned, like the two innocent students were. I look forward to this charge moving forward.
 
LondonJohn said:
Well, no, technically that's not true.
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LJ, I completely agree with you regarding the criminal intent issue and the very limited nature of the sanction imposed on the AKs statements by the Italian Supreme Court (ISC).

Since I'm a little outside of the timely response cycle due to real life commitments and not having source documents at hand, I'll just ask you to verify the technical truthfulness of my core point.

1."The Italian Supreme Court ... found that Knox's human rights were violated because the police did not tell her of her legal rights, appoint her a lawyer or provide her an official interpreter and that her signed statement was inadmissible for Knox's and Sollecito's criminal trial." (From Wiki - Murder of MK)

2. The statement above means that the court made a finding of police/PM misconduct and imposed a sanction. Therefore, Machiavelli is untruthful when he asserts that there is no proof or even evidence of police/PM misconduct related to this case. Is he asserting that the police and PM were incompetant and unaware of that AK had legal rights or they had no duty to protect AKs human rights? If so, why did the ISC impose any sanction at all.

Many thanks for your time and work.
 
Micromegas said:
Okay, I have no problem with anything you've said here. And, as I said before, I believe Knox was innocent of Kercher's murder. I just want Knox's supporters to be honest about what she did. She signed a statement in which she accused Lumumba of Kercher's murder, while either overtly or implicitly confessing to a variety of offenses.

-Mike
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Yes. And this can open the door, also, to substituting Rudy for PL. It can begin a whole new train of reflection, where by way of this declension, pieces of the puzzle come back: the locked door, the duvet covering Meredith, the chilling scream heard (perhaps Amanda finding Meredith, realizing what Guede had done?) - and before you know it, you are understanding some of Mignini's initial suspicions. I guess nothing is simple here.
 
LondonJohn said:
It's much more complicated than the binary choice you are imposing upon others. The reality is that Knox's statements were both an accusation and a confession (I'll put to one side for now the issue of whether they were genuine statements, or improperly coerced false statements, because that's not important in the context of discussing the "confession vs accusation" issue).

Knox clearly made accusations against Lumumba, and accusations that were obviously related to criminal conduct (i.e. that Lumumba killed Meredith). But Knox also made a number of confessions. She confessed that she was at the house at the time of the murder, and that by implication she neither tried to stop the murder nor made any attempt to help Meredith. Those are criminal offences. Through making this statement, Knox was also essentially confessing to having misled the police for some four days since the murder. That's obstruction of justice or perverting the course of justice, and it's also a criminal offence. And Knox's statements also laid her open to the possibility that she took Lumumba to the cottage in the knowledge that he intended to at the very least inflict a sexual assault upon Meredith. That's also a criminal offence.

Knox's statements in the early hours of 6th November 2007 amounted to an accusation and a confession.
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Now we've really gone into the semantic weeds. The "confession" was never a confession in the normal sense of the word in the context it was used in. This has been known to anybody with a little knowledge of the case for a long time and to my mind has never been disputed.

Micromegas has asserted that people who believed Knox was innocent were not candid or informed on this point. That was completely contrary to my experience. When I discussed the "confession" I put it in quotes to indicate that I thought there was a special definition of confession being used.

As to the substantive issue of how Knox came to accuse Lumumba, do we know? I have seen lots of speculation, much of it that seems plausible to me, but without recordings of the interrogations it seems like we are pretty much limited to informed speculation. My own thought here is Knox believed the police claim that they had solid evidence against Lumumba and she in her somewhat confused state agreed to help the police with their case against Lumumba by making that false accusation. The next day, after some sleep and the recovery of her common sense she backed away from that idea.

As to the substantive issue of whether police can force false accusations with the same techniques that they use to force false confessions: That seems obvious to me and in the absence of some specific research that provided evidence that false accusations are substantially different than false confessions with regard to the ability of interrogators to force them I see no reason to think one is more possible than the other.
 
Micromegas said:
Okay, I have no problem with anything you've said here. And, as I said before, I believe Knox was innocent of Kercher's murder. I just want Knox's supporters to be honest about what she did. She signed a statement in which she accused Lumumba of Kercher's murder, while either overtly or implicitly confessing to a variety of offenses.

-Mike
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Cool. And I think that the vast majority of people here would not want to think that the label "Knox supporter" somehow implies an irrational desire to resolve every issue to a conclusion that paints Knox in the best possible light*. I would hope (and indeed I strongly believe) that most people here are far more interested in determining the truth behind things like the infamous "confession/accusation" than they are in finding a way to paint Knox in an innocent light. If the evidence led to a logical conclusion that Knox had indeed acted maliciously in her police interrogation of 5th/6th November, I think few of us would have any reservations whatsoever in accepting that conclusion. But all the evidence in fact suggests that what Knox said and wrote on that night was the product of an improperly coercive (and probably abusive) police interrogation, in which Knox was invited to believe that she had suppressed her memory (among many other improper coercion techniques).


* Personally, I would not like to even be termed a "Knox supporter" (or a "Sollecito supporter" for that matter). I have no emotional attachment to either individual - I have simply argued for acquittal (and likely innocence) of the pair based purely on an objective, disinterested assessment of all the available evidence.
 
They showed the despicable Nancy Grace on CNN this morning saying that she still believes she's GUILTY.
 
lionking said:
Who cares about him? This is clearly the Amanda Knox Victory Parade. Just have a look at the posts on her glorious homecoming.
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When will you admit that Raffaele was charged with the crimes for one reason and one reason only - to take away the alibi he afforded to AK.
BTW - The same alibi afforded to Filomena and Laura. All three girls had spent the night with their boyfriends.
 
I read somewhere that Knox reported that the police told her they had proof she was there with Lumumba, despite her not having any memory of it. The police told her she had memory loss and she began to believe she must have as at that point she completely trusted the police to be honest. Anyone know where I read that - I can't find the source now.
 
Micromegas said:
We're not talking about victims making false accusations, we're talking about someone who was trying to deflect suspicion away from herself with a false accusation. And not for nothing, but at least Hirsch's site makes the distinction between false accusations and false confessions, which you & others here seem unwilling to do.

-Mike
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How could we be talking about someone trying to deflect suspicion away from herself when she wasn't even being questioned as a suspect?

We all know how this went down. The Perugia police were having an informal tea party in which they invited their friends from Rome. Amanda was invited because she could do gymnastics and everybody likes girls that do gymnastics (except perhaps older girls that can't).

Somehow the informal talk about boys drifted to discussing the case and they were asking Amanda if she knew any of the boys that Meredith knew. Of course she told them about the boys downstairs and some of the other boys that had been to the house or had met Meredith. She adds (being precise as she knows these are police she is talking to):

One of these people is Patrik, a colored citizen who is about 1,70-1,75 cm tall, with braids, owner of the pub “Le Chic” located in Via Alessi and I know that he lives in the area near the roundabout of Porta Pesa. Tel. 393387195723, pub where I work twice a week on Mondays and on Thursdays, from 22.00 until about 2.00.​

Since it came up that she was supposed to be working that night, they ask why she didn't go to work. She says she got a text from her boss saying she didn't need to come to work. They ask to see the text and she says she deleted it. But they insist and ask to see the phone and she hands it over and perhaps takes another sip of her tea. It doesn't take these experts of modern technology long to find the reply message "see you later" which Amanda had tried to say in Italian since her boss didn't speak much english. The police in a good humor way replied "Ahh, so you were meeting someone, naughty naughty :)" but Amanda insists she wasn't meeting anyone. The police suggest that they play a game called "lets pretend we have a video tape of Amanda crossing the street to her cottage at 8:41". Amanda doesn't want to leave the party since the tea and cakes are good so goes along with the game. So who were you going to meet? There can be only one answer to this. It has to be the person that sent the text: Patrick. And the game goes on, they entered the cottage because of course there is that video. Amanda is saying that she doesn't remember any of this but now someone else has joined the party that happens to be an interpreter and helps Amanda continue the game by suggesting that maybe she was traumatized and that is why she can't remember. So form this point in the game they can only ask Amanda what could have happened since a traumatized person can't know what actually happened. Could Patrick have gone into Meredith's room? Yes. Did Meredith scream? I don't remember hearing any screams. How could you not hear her scream? Perhaps I had my hands over my ears.

Somewhere during this evening, Amanda forgets they were playing a game. After all, it's been a very stressful week and she was up early that morning for class and now it's well past midnight. Amanda is back at her cottage, she is traumatized, she is hearing screams, Meredith is screaming and Patrick is there. Now Amanda is screaming and Giobbi even hears her screaming down the hall in the control room where they normally operate the recording equipment: "He did it, He's bad he's bad!".

(epilog)

Hearing the commotion, other officers come into the room. Seeing Amanda crying, one turns to Rita Ficarra who is standing behind Amanda and asks "What's going on here? Did you hit her?" This is of course the way they play the game. A light whop on the back of the head sometimes helps people remember facts correctly. Amanda partially regains her composure and explains her outburst as "I confusedly remember that he killed her" (although what is Italian for confusedly? "vaguely" should be close enough).

The police explain that she startled the whole department with that scream and ask her to stick around for a little longer so she can sign the report that they now have to write up.
 
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Swimfish said:
LJ, I completely agree with you regarding the criminal intent issue and the very limited nature of the sanction imposed on the AKs statements by the Italian Supreme Court (ISC).

Since I'm a little outside of the timely response cycle due to real life commitments and not having source documents at hand, I'll just ask you to verify the technical truthfulness of my core point.

1."The Italian Supreme Court ... found that Knox's human rights were violated because the police did not tell her of her legal rights, appoint her a lawyer or provide her an official interpreter and that her signed statement was inadmissible for Knox's and Sollecito's criminal trial." (From Wiki - Murder of MK)

2. The statement above means that the court made a finding of police/PM misconduct and imposed a sanction. Therefore, Machiavelli is untruthful when he asserts that there is no proof or even evidence of police/PM misconduct related to this case. Is he asserting that the police and PM were incompetant and unaware of that AK had legal rights or they had no duty to protect AKs human rights? If so, why did the ISC impose any sanction at all.

Many thanks for your time and work.
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I think it's more nuanced than that. I think the wiki article about the case is incorrect in its overemphasis on "human rights breaches", and I don't think that the police or PM were ever officially censured.

There are two totally distinct questions here: 1) Did Knox make certain self-incriminating statements without having been read her rights or having access to a lawyer? 2) Did police and/or prosecutors act improperly in the commission of those statements.

Now, if (1) is true, it by no means follows that (2) is true. For example, suppose a workmate of yours went missing, and the police called you in to interview you as a matter of course (as they were doing with every one of your other work colleagues). Suppose that during the course of this routine police witness interview, you couldn't hold the truth back any longer and you broke down and confessed to the police that you had killed your workmate during an argument in the car park, and had driven his body to a remote location to dump it. If that happened, then your confession would not be allowed to be used against you in a subsequent trial. And the police would have no blame attached to them. But, incidentally, the police could use your confession as the basis of investigations. They could, for example, go to where you confessed to dumping the body, and find the victim your car's tyre tracks at the scene, and your DNA on the victim's throat. All of that evidence would be admissible against you at trial, even though it had stemmed from information contained within your inadmissible confession.

So the short answer is that Knox's "confession/accusation" statements of 1.45am and 5.45am were by definition inadmissible as evidence against her, since they were made without her being read her rights (1.45am) and without access to a lawyer (5.45am). but that doesn't automatically imply police/prosecutor misconduct. And I don't think that any such misconduct has as yet been identified or ruled upon. That may be an issue that needs to be addressed down the line though - especially if the criminal slander charge gets referred back to the appeal court.
 
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Dan O. said:
We all know how this went down.
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Yeah, we do. The police leaned on her hard for a long time. They wore her down, and for whatever reason she signed a statement that accused Lumumba of murdering Kercher.

No one has to make excuses for what Knox did. I'm of the opinion she was innocent of the murder. I believe the interrogation was inhumane and irresponsible. As far as the legal status of the slander case, I neither know nor care.

I just want to know why supposedly objective observers have a hard time admitting that Knox made a false accusation.

-Mike
 
Verklagekasper said:
There are so many people absolutely convinced she's innocent even though she has been lying all along about events of the evening and even accused an innocent man of murder (who was released because the police did their job, not because she retracted her accusasion).

You aren't too picky about the people you treat like rock stars, are you?

Well, please don't send any more students abroad. kthx
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"Lying" implies intent. False confessions, a well documented phenomena is not an intentional thing.

Innocence Project evidence ot false confessions
In about 25% of DNA exoneration cases, innocent defendants made incriminating statements, delivered outright confessions or pled guilty.
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The Psychology of False Confessions


Frontline: The Confessions, watch the full program
How could four men confess to a brutal crime that they didn't commit? Inside the incredible saga of the Norfolk Four -- a case that cracks open the justice system to reveal almost everything that goes wrong when innocent people get convicted.
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Frontline, Research & Studies



Micromegas said:
Okay, I have no problem with anything you've said here. And, as I said before, I believe Knox was innocent of Kercher's murder. I just want Knox's supporters to be honest about what she did. She signed a statement in which she accused Lumumba of Kercher's murder, while either overtly or implicitly confessing to a variety of offenses.

-Mike
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In what way are we being dishonest?
 
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