Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[HumanityBlues]

Comparing your situation with that of Amanda is a big problem. You knew the cops were bad, were prepared to be defiant and unyielding. Amanda trusted the cops, was trying to be helpful, and was betrayed, tricked, hit, denied a lawyer, and railroaded by a bunch of thugs.

He also lives in Italy and speaks perfect Italian (not that anyone would understand him in his native rambling tongue anyways, but that's another matter).

 

[RoseMontague]

He also lives in Italy and speaks perfect Italian (not that anyone would understand him in his native rambling tongue anyways, but that's another matter).

Good point. The biggest error on the part of Amanda's defense (in my opinion) was not to put more emphasis on the language and communication problems.

 

[Katody Matrass]

But the lack of recording is absolutely normal. This is no surprise.

I'm not arguing, you're the expert on Italian ways.

My position is that I have no positive bias towards police, and I just see in this case there is no possible claim about the police that could exhonerate Amanda. Moreover there is no claim of misconduct at all, and there is no serious possibility to consider any significant misconduct or corruption or conspiracy - in this particular case - and specifically there is no misconduct nor event (claimed by Knox, or speculated) that could cause nor justify Amanda's behaviour. Only her guilt can explain Amanda's behaviour.

Again, I don't want to argue about definitions. I'm sure your definitions of misconduct and corruption allow you to say that neither of it occurred.

What I want to say in a most straightforward way is that the cops hit Amanda on the head, yelled at her, lied to her and threatened her throughout the night, causing extreme stress, exhaustion etc. Call it and define it as you wish, you can call it Perugian hospitality. What I say is that was the direct cause of her false confession and lasting confusion.

 

[HumanityBlues]

Good point. The biggest error on the part of Amanda's defense (in my opinion) was not to put more emphasis on the language and communication problems.

Amanda should have been more like Machiavelli and she would've won over the police: "But you see officers, I am right because of a datum. But anyways, I am not interested in such things. I am innocent because I am right. There is no other explanation."

 

[Ammonitida]

But that was not severe torture. That was just harrassing. There were also forms of torture but that was in another barrack compound.
And you understood: my point is not standing torture. My point is what you claim.
A person under harassment doesn't develop false memories. May well lie when under threat, but immediately after the phisical threat is over tells the truth and claims having been mistreated, reporting all factual details.

It was more than just harassment. You know that. There was an interpreter who testified to using a coercive technique to extract memories from her. She was also told that there was hard evidence linking her to the murder. This mind ****** in combination with the harassment succeeded in breaking her -- creating not merely a false accusation, but an internalized false accusation. Internalized false confessions/accusations have the nice affect of preventing one from immediately telling the "truth". Only after the exoneration of Lumumba by the alibi could she then understand that those "blurred images" of Lumumba were just the scars of a traumatized mind.

Edited by Rat: 

Edited to properly mask profanity.

 

[Ammonitida]

Amanda should have been more like Machiavelli and she would've won over the police: "But you see officers, I am right because of a datum. But anyways, I am not interested in such things. I am innocent because I am right. There is no other explanation."

Good one.

 

[pipelineaudio]

I'd be willing to bet even if she is totally exonerated some will still feel 'justified' in hating her and thinking she's guilty. They'll find something to twist in order to maintain that belief, just as others have elsewhere as LJ recently noted. Even if they allow that she is innocent, some will think she still had some punishment coming, she didn't play the role others assigned to her, thus indicative to them of 'bad character.' She must admit her failings and beg forgiveness, for they never will, they have the genius of the crowd.

Its going on exactly that way here:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=88937&page=3

 

[CDHost]

I never said it wasn't "valid". I never mentioned the concept at all.
I said that I disagreed with CDhost when he explained he thought that phenomenon about Amanda's memory could be described related to the concepts of "constructed" and "social"; I disagrees as he implied that basic cognitive functions may depend on these concepts or social relations; and in fact I re-phrased my view on the point using the term "perception" of reality and avoiding the use of terms "social" and "construction" as I believe the do not belong to the topic. I purposely did not pick the exact CDhost's word for this reason, to avoid a mix with the topic of socially constructred reality. You picked back CDhost's wording instead.

The purpose of brainwashing techniques is to to eliminate the actual original memory that remains present. The purpose is to have that person consider it to be of little importance and view other things as more important. Amanda's statement contains frequent alusion to distancing herself from the scenerio she constructed with Patrick and the ears precisely because she did have those memories of not having been there.

In other words the goal is not to create a perfect false memory, which is difficult (but not impossible) but rather to just get her to start the process by repeating something questionable. Over time though people who tell a story often enough start to have memories of that story being true.

Had the police had her for weeks and not hours, they very easily could have gotten her to confess in detail and barely remember the real events.

 

[Kaosium]

Ok.
And I said that topic has not to do with the case.
I didn't say that you are ugly because you mentioned it, but since you addressed the concept, which itself may be valid, to avoid any confusion let's put in clear that has not to do with the case.


I think also CDhost's wording addressing a reality as a social construction, is inappropriate to the matter.
There are socially constructed realities (for example Amanda Knox is innocent and the police are bad, Berlusconi goes for minors). There are cases of brainwashing exploiting various techniques, but let's not confuse this with science fiction.

Your memory about that you were at home yesterday night, is not a social construction.
There isn't a known technique by which I can convince you to this memory against your will. There isn't even a method to convince oneself. There isn't a way by which you can be "convinced" by the fact that someone thinks that who has a uniform, if you are an average normal person.
And if a persuasion for any reason occurs, this is not limited in its effects to the kind of symptoms shown by Amanda Knox. When one suffers from a false memory, which is anyway rare and peculiar, its effect is permanent, and the person has no means to go back and to distinguish the wrong from the false memory any more. So if Amanda actually had a false memory, she could not claim any alibi.
It would be very interesting, from a scientific viewpoint, to know how and when she recovered her true memory and how she was able to distinguish it from the false one.

Her true memory was there all the time, it just had 'new ones' implanted by virtue of the police's incompetent techniques. It was also not complete, she had 'flashes' and they served as the bare bones of the scenario they had her walk through, 'helpfully' implanting more along the way. Also, they never actually convinced her of this, otherwise they wouldn't be so 'vague' and 'confused.' The cops probably didn't want those statements to look like garbage, but I suppose that's the best they could get from her.

A long time ago you and I had a discussion here, it was over why Rudy originally said Amanda wasn't there, and about his story. You were making an argument trying to explain your theory and I initially misunderstood why you and the cops would find it unbelievable, I thought you were saying that the description of the conditions that night didn't match what they would have been, namely that it was dark and he couldn't only see a shadowy figure. I started thinking about that, kinda like this, to determine if it should have been dark enough in the cottage he wouldn't have been able to see who it was, here it goes, stream of consciousness:

November 1st....~9PM....Norfolk=Gibraltar...map of Med visualized...Rome...a little above...like Wisconsin over Norfolk...close enough...last Halloween...last trick-or-treaters ~8Pm....very dark...night...lighting in cottage? that lamp...

Boom

Unbidden it came, a mental image of a dark shadowy figure in the hallway in a menacing pose like he's about to advance on me. I still have it, I can summon it at will and have a few times since when this subject has come up. It's just the same as any other mental image I have of other events I know happened, except I know this isn't real. From the context of the memory I associate you and Sherlock Holmes with it because that's who I was discussing that topic with at the time.

Another time Platonov was gleefully making fun of the fact I'd misunderstood what Massei's theory was on the breaking of the window. There were a flurry of posts from him, Juror, Sherlock Holmes, (hmmm....) Halides, et al and I was sitting here trying to picture it in my mind and...


Boom

I had a mental image of (myself!) throwing the rock through the window pulled inwards and bouncing the glass off the inner shutter. It too is still there, as real as any other mental image, but more like a dream in that it's without context and the associations are with that discussion.

If you read her statements and her note as well as her testimony I think something like that happened to her, she tried to imagine things and boom she saw Patrick at the BB courts, at the house, and her in the kitchen. Unlike myself in those examples above, she has reason to believe they might be true. The conditions have been created where they explain something the cops are adamant about, so she succumbs. Reading the statements and the note it appears what she is saying is that she was never sure of any of it, but the cops browbeat her into submission and she signed it. In her condition at the time she was vulnerable to it, they'd convinced her it was possible.

However Machiavelli, that's not the whole story, the most remarkable behavior demonstrated that night was not her signing those two statements, but the police then going to arrest Patrick on the basis of them. She probably had no idea that would happen, as it's such a bizarre sequence of events it has not been explained to this day, no matter how many times I bring it up.

They just wanted her to sign those statements, they wanted her 'ass on a pad' along with Patrick's so they could arrest both of them because they had other reasons to think them complicit in the murder. That's why Raffaele isn't interrogated about the murder, why they don't try to corroborate anything Amanda says with him, or even grill him like a cheese sandwich like they did Amanda. They didn't think at first he was involved in the murder part, perhaps they thought maybe he was just going along with his cuddle-muffin and might not even have known she'd 'done it.'

Who knows with certainty, but those statements were the lies of the police, they put the idea into her mind, they convinced her it was possible and they even typed up the nonsense for her to sign in a language she barely read at that point. That's all she did was sign them under pressure, what they did as a result of them is their own responsibility, and it's obvious they lied through their teeth about it, and Amanda right from the very beginning with the note tried to tell the truth. She isn't sure, she can summon those images, it doesn't make sense, she tries to puzzle it out in that note.

After a few days she figures it out and it fades, right about when that Sister came to her if I recall correctly. She realizes those 'flashes' were nothing but mental images she summoned, and now she's certain. Just as I am certain my mental images of the hallway and the breaking of the window are nothing but imagination.

They just convinced her of something that wasn't true, Amanda's problem was she tried to explain too much and too well and everyone just naturally assumed she was lying, no one would believe her. Her problem was she was too damned honest, and that's a bridge too far for even some of her supporters. Not that it matters.

 

[Justinian2]

But that was not severe torture. That was just harrassing. There were also forms of torture but that was in another barrack compound.
And you understood: my point is not standing torture. My point is what you claim.
A person under harassment doesn't develop false memories. May well lie when under threat, but immediately after the phisical threat is over tells the truth and claims having been mistreated, reporting all factual details.

In my own little encounter with the police they confused me totally WITHOUT even interrogating me. The police report they wrote switched which of the two officers involved did what. The police report also used testimony that was recorded inaccurately. I had to spend quite a bit of time dissecting the report before I reconstructed accurately what happened. I had to enter all the individual statements in a spread sheet and correlate the events with a couple of details everybody mentioned - even if their own memories were slightly twisted.

The time at which I grabbed the officer's wrist was important since it showed who started the struggle. I grabbed his wrist because he was spraying me with mace. He knew that. I knew that. We were in agreement. This, then, was the truth. Everybody else thought he grabbed my wrist or that he had a gun in his hand - which he did later (at the time of the arrest). The wrist grabbing may have been thought by some witnesses to be the handcuffing.

A very simple incident was totally confused and very hard to recall after everybody expressed their conflicting versions of the story.

The police have troubled and confused minds. They can, and do, confuse all -- all the time. Ok, John Douglas is excluded from that generalization as well as others of similar training and experience.

Anyway, everybody in my little incident had false memories except the two people that actually grappled and experienced each others strength and effort.

 

[CDHost]

As an aside another American who made a false confession in custody of foreign police was the most recent Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States John McCain. You can still see the video of John McCain from August 1968 confessing to all sorts of crimes he never committed, clearly indicating his motivation. This wasn't retracted until late 1973 months after his return to the United States.

 

[Kaosium]

Its going on exactly that way here:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=88937&page=3

Tell them Machiavelli, the most fervent proponent of Amanda and Raffaele's guilt said the Massei Report was irrelevant (or somesuch) before PMF was even done translating it.

I still wonder what might have happened had the new prosecution team tried to make a case they might have been able to win, and not stuck with Mignini's delusions. They could have done that you know, as Mignini himself admitted in the CNN interview, they didn't have to put Amanda or Raffaele in the murder room, they could have just tried to go for a lesser involvement.

 

[Fine]

How Amanda "escaped"...........

The Rosicrucians? Nope. The Knights of Columbus? Nope. The Freemasons? Nope. The good ol' CIA: Read More

///

 

[Justinian2]

How Amanda "escaped"...........

The Rosicrucians? Nope. The Knights of Columbus? Nope. The Freemasons? Nope. The good ol' CIA: Read More

///

I hope the translator is the cause of this jibberish"

The media pressure have been very strong but also have not been less diplomatic.

L'opinione pubblica americana aveva emesso da tempo un verdetto di assoluzione per la giovane concittadina, verdetto basato non sulla realtà processuale ma su un senso di appartenenza creato dai media americani.

The American public has long had issued a verdict of acquittal for his young compatriot, a verdict based not on reality but on a procedural sense of ownership created by the American media.

E sempre i media americani avevano molto insistito sulla cattiva qualità delle indagini italiane e sul sistema della giustizia italiana.

And the American media had always placed great emphasis on the poor quality of investigations on Italian and Italian justice system.

Ora le indagini sul caso Kercher non erano particolarmente complesse e secondo le nostre fonti sono state fatte bene.

Kercher now investigating the case were not particularly complex and according to our sources have been done well.

In quella casa c'erano tre persone oltre alla sfortunata studentessa uccisa e uno dei tre, che ha subito un percorso giudiziario a se stante, l'ivoriano Rudy Guede è già stato condannato per l'accaduto.

In that house there were three people besides the unfortunate student killed and one of the three, who suffered a judicial process in its own right

 

[HumanityBlues]

Reading PMFdotNET. It's hard to have vitriol for that site. I mean, they are ridiculously funny. Look at this post by their admin:

"A few may have noticed that I've been a little quiet these last couple of weeks. That wouldn't matter of course, whether I speak or not, were it not that I'm Administrator of the site. I needed a couple of days to absorb the verdict and immediate fallout..and then after that, observe and understand the change in the weather, how the wind was blowing. To understand it, you have to observe it and before you understand it it's not wise to talk about it and I don't like talking about anything beyond a superficial level unless I know what I'm talking about, or at least believe I do. So, for the past two weeks I've been standing back drinking everything in and assessing. I'm gutted about the verdict, most especially because I'm old fashioned and give a damn about values such as truth and justice which have nowadays been replaced by sound bites and spin. There is no substitute for truth and the moment we start believing there is, not only truth but what truth stands FOR is lost. And truth, stands for something important.

Numerous legends speak of the destruction of human kind. The most famous is the legend of Atlantis, swamped and buried by tidal waves and earthquakes. Exciting, scary and romantic stories that may or may not have some basis in truth. The real apocalyptic danger for us is not the destruction of mankind, but the destruction of humanity...or our concept of it. What will destroy the human race better then any wave, but in a less glamorous way, is our disposal of truth, ethics and morals. When humanity is sacrificed, there is no longer a human race. We won't go out with a bang, rather it'll just be a cancer and we'll be slowly eaten away, as is happening now. There's nothing glamorous about that kind of destruction. Envy Atlantis."

Brings a smile to my face. One of the funniest few paragraphs I've read during this case and that is saying a lot. What planet are these people from?

ETA: Might have to change my signature to "Numerous legends speak of the destruction of human kind". Classic.

 

[HumanityBlues]

How Amanda "escaped"...........

The Rosicrucians? Nope. The Knights of Columbus? Nope. The Freemasons? Nope. The good ol' CIA: Read More

///

Thank you fine. These articles are so funny because, after the guilty verdict, we read ad nauseum from guilters on this thread and elsewhere about how independent and impenetrable the Italian judiciary was to outside and governmental interference. Is that still the case now?

 

[GreyFox]

@ Machiavelli
I cant believe you would compare your experience and how you handled it as a man from Italy - to a young woman visiting your country from America. As if she should behave like you would. Ridiculous !
Whats more amazing is how your actually willing to admit she was probably slapped as though it's no big deal, let's just move on to how she acted afterwards.

Seem's to me at that point she had begun to learn her lesson in Italian Justice and was starting to accept the new truth she was being programed for. A few more slaps to the head and you could have gotten her to blame her parents for the murder.
If only they knew about Rudy they could have cut off her finger and made some real progress.
Bottom line: After the very first slap this meeting is over!! I don't care how you veiw her actions afterwards. Calling Rose ugly only reflects more on your ill behavior towards woman. You must not have any sisters/daughters to realize how we see this.

 

[lane99]

@ Machiavelli
I cant believe you would compare your experience and how you handled it as a man from Italy - to a young woman visiting your country from America. As if she should behave like you would. Ridiculous !...

Not to mention "his" experience is a fictitious delusion that never really even happened.

 

[JREF2010]

In my own little encounter with the police they confused me totally WITHOUT even interrogating me. The police report they wrote switched which of the two officers involved did what. The police report also used testimony that was recorded inaccurately. I had to spend quite a bit of time dissecting the report before I reconstructed accurately what happened. I had to enter all the individual statements in a spread sheet and correlate the events with a couple of details everybody mentioned - even if their own memories were slightly twisted.

The time at which I grabbed the officer's wrist was important since it showed who started the struggle. I grabbed his wrist because he was spraying me with mace. He knew that. I knew that. We were in agreement. This, then, was the truth. Everybody else thought he grabbed my wrist or that he had a gun in his hand - which he did later (at the time of the arrest). The wrist grabbing may have been thought by some witnesses to be the handcuffing.

A very simple incident was totally confused and very hard to recall after everybody expressed their conflicting versions of the story.

The police have troubled and confused minds. They can, and do, confuse all -- all the time. Ok, John Douglas is excluded from that generalization as well as others of similar training and experience.

Anyway, everybody in my little incident had false memories except the two people that actually grappled and experienced each others strength and effort.

yeah its a crazy police "secret" from years ago, becoming more in the open as time goes by. ..the interrogation. non-recorded tells you how transparent and honest it is.

a person only needs to keep asking.."why was it not recorded?" "where is the recording?"

these two questions keep the focus on the police/interrogators.
the guilters try to divert the attention away, with a thousand other thoughts and words, if one sticks to those two questions, its obvious the interrogation is a game of trickery and coercion.

Douglas Preston speaks in detail of his questioning with Migninni, and he was an older male, and it was extremely disturbing. A 20yr old yoga-hippie type girl who thinks she is helping these Italian police, then they turn on her is nothing but really bad police work, an ignorant approach to solving a crime.

Makes me wonder how many other innocents they've jailed due to forced-confessions from non-recorded interrogations?

 

[GreyFox]

One things for sure:You can bet there's no tape of it !!