Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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Machiavelli said:
But the arrest of Lumumba does not really matter. Because if they hadn't arrest him, she would be guilty of calunnia nonetheless, also for her written note. You don't need a "solid" accusation, you don't need evidence usable in court, in order to have a calunnia. A false accusation may be any kind of false statement placing false evidence of any kind. Even a false memory with no "name" clearly indicated, a memory about an unknown in the place of Patrick, would have been a crime (not calunnia, but a crime of a similar kind). Any false evidence given maliciously, anything which that may open a false track of investigation, is a crime. Any false track given maliciously containing a name is a calunnia. Also the "blood on Raffaele's hands" would be a calunnia, if he was not guilty.
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I stepped in a dog turd on the way to work this morning. Was that a calunnia?
 
Diocletus said:
I think this whole thing is YOUR fault, Machiavelli. YOU should have filed a complaint when the police roughed you up. But you didn't and nothing changed. So, the cops felt like they could smack Amanda Knox around with impunity. Now all of Italy is embarrassed. Shame!
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It is quite obvious that if she had filed a formal complaint of police abuse, the guilters would dismiss it as a lie anyway.

And since there is conveniently no tape of the interrogation, Mignini would probably have charged her with another count of calumnia, and probably other false reporting crimes as well. After all, he threatened to charge her parents for repeating her claim that she was hit, and he has a history of filing vindictive charges with no basis.
 
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Machiavelli said:
However, some things are different.
One person who assaulted Meredith was holding a knife. And Meredith was not only suffocated and stabbed, but also suffered a sexual violence. And, she was also stripped of her clothes by force, and they were stripped off in a peculiar way.
She was also found in the same room where she was killed.
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In English, the passive tense is disfavored, so allow me to help you with this:

Rudy who assaulted Meredith was holding a knife. And he not only suffocated and stabbed her, but he also sexually assaulted her. And, he also stripped her of her clothes by force, and he stripped them off in a peculiar way [ed: this probably happened before the sexual assault]. And he left her in the same room where he killed her.

There. That's better.
 
Machiavelli said:
Also the "blood on Raffaele's hands" would be a calunnia, if he was not guilty.
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But a court has said he didn't do the crime. If Knox's conviction makes her a proven liar, then Raffaele's acquittal, which was explicitly on the basis of not having committed the crime, makes him a proven non-murderer. I think you just committed calumnia. But if I'm wrong, I guess that means I committed calumnia in accusing you of committing calumnia. Maybe this calumnia law is a bad idea...
 
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Machiavelli said:
Even a false memory with no "name" clearly indicated, a memory about an unknown in the place of Patrick, would have been a crime (not calunnia, but a crime of a similar kind). Any false evidence given maliciously, anything which that may open a false track of investigation, is a crime. Any false track given maliciously containing a name is a calunnia. Also the "blood on Raffaele's hands" would be a calunnia, if he was not guilty.
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That's all well and good, but what kind of crime is it when the police hit a suspect? And then, if that hitting causes a false accusation, have the police calunniaed. I think they have.
 
katy_did said:
Wow, I didn't remember how clear Massei was on the multiple attacker issue (or non-issue). Looking back on the closing arguments and the appeal in general, one of the interesting things about them is the way that the prosecution tried to shape not only the trial, but also the acquittal, once they realized it was inevitable. So Mignini introduced the idea of a multi-million dollar PR campaign (lifted straight from PMF & TJMK!) into his closing argument, not for the benefit of the jury - they knew they'd lost the case anyway - but for the media, to try and condition how the acquittal would be received. And it worked!


Even a pretty reputable news organization like the BBC included the line about Amanda's parents launching a "massive PR campaign" in their coverage of the appeal verdict. And so a case which began with hugely prejudicial media coverage against the defendants, making it impossible for them to get a fair trial in the first court, was somehow turned into an acquittal supposedly influenced by American media coverage! Utterly crazy, and yet very skilled manipulation of the facts by Mignini.
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I think the idea of the 'massive PR Campaign' was actually initiated by Mignini himself, starting with criticism he received from Douglas Preston and then American media outlets. To a kook like him any criticism coming at him would probably seem conspiratorial, in part because he's no doubt unfamiliar with an adversarial press. The benefit of having 'moderator' powers with 'bannings' the like of criminal charges, and 'yellow cards' as defamation suits as befitting an 'incorruptible' prosecutor in Italy.

After that PMF seemed expand on it, placing each of the interlopers in the conspiracy somehow, starting with the Paul Ciolino story, coming up with 'connections' if they could. I recall PG at one point claiming the day or so after the arrest that she thought the response from th family sounded like a 'press release,' justifying in her mind one reason for getting interested in the case if I recall correctly.


katy_did said:
I think the multiple attacker theory is another example of the prosecution trying to shape how people see the acquittal. Rather than asking whether the police got it wrong in charging multiple people with the crime, it's assumed the police got it partly right by charging multiple people, but wrong in who those people were! (or actually, right, since underlying the question "Who were the others...?" is the implication that those others were Amanda and Raffaele, who got away with it). And yet no convincing evidence that there were multiple attackers is ever cited, often no evidence is mentioned at all: instead the usual argument is that the Supreme Court said it must be so, and so it is. Never mind that Rudy had an abbreviated trial, and so the information the SC had access to was much more limited than the information Hellmann's court had access to. The Supreme Court said it must be so, and the Supreme Court creates reality, apparently.
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I think this is another case of them creating their own 'evidence.' They charge three people, thus they must find evidence of three people at the scene. Of course they don't, but they can sure find 'experts' to say that it is 'compatible' i.e. possible with a multiple attacker scenario, even though they are forced to admit that it's also compatible with a single attacker. Then they look for reasons it might be so, just like with the 'staged' break-in, finding reasons it might be so, then pretending it must be so.

katy_did said:
Where some kind of evidence is cited, it's usually the number of injuries, and the idea that Meredith couldn't have been restrained by the wrists and stabbed by the same person. For some reason the obvious possibility that these different injuries happened at different times doesn't seem to be considered! For comparison, the trial of Vincent Tabak for the murder of Jo Yeates is ongoing at the moment: she suffered 43 injuries, there were marks on her wrists suggesting she had been pinned down, and she had been strangled.

Using the logic applied to the Kercher case, we'd have to conclude that more than one person was involved here too, or else one person with six hands. How could he pin her down and strangle her at the same time, as well as causing all the other injuries? And yet only one person is charged with her murder.

No one has ever put forward any convincing case that there were multiple attackers; the argument that Meredith couldn't have been restrained by the wrists and stabbed by one person is as nonsensical as arguing that Jo Yeates couldn't have been restrained by the wrists and strangled by one person. Of course, it can't be ruled out that there were more people present, given the poor handling of the crime scene, but no positive evidence exists to suggest there were.
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Very true, sometimes the narrow-mindedness of the prosecution argument is breathtaking. It's like they can't even see other possibilities, no matter how obvious they are. The glass on top of the clothes is a classic example, there's numerous ways glass could get on top of clothes, if there even was, but think of how many times we've heard it during the course of this debate.


katy_did said:
I think the problem is the police had the wrong theory to begin with, and charges ("complicity to commit murder") were laid based on the faulty theory. I'm not sure how that can be resolved, but it seems more like a legal problem than anything else; the least sensible way to resolve it would be to assume there must have been multiple people involved based on the theory these police - these police - came up with at the very start of the case. Yet somehow, Mignini and Maresca have managed to make this the dominant view. Again, utterly crazy.
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I think it's more a case of them finding 'evidence' to match the number of people they arrested. I don't think they even intended to put Raffaele at the scene until they thought the shoe-treads matched, and even for a while after that they may have thought that happened after the murder, perhaps even the next day.
 
RWVBWL said:
Hi Draca,
I've heard that Amanda's friend Madison is a photographer.
Why doesn't Amanda and Family let her shoot some shots and then sell 'em to the media that is hounding for photo's?

That way the Family, and Madison too, can benefit.
Just an idea...
RW
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Is Maddie still in Italy?
 
Machiavelli said:
She could have filled a complaint in any case.
She did in fact complain of the hitting immediately after. Nobody prevented her from doing that.
Idependently from how seriously others would investigate the police, the judge (and the prosecutor) would have had her claim.

She could actually have retracted her false accusation even without accusing the cops, merely stating she had lied because she was scared.

Had she done any of these things, I would have considered the possibility that she was not guilty of a malicious calunnia against Patrick.
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Complaining of duress is a retraction. Saying "I made those statements under duress" is disowning the statements. That's besides the fact the statements themselves repeatedly disown their content.

She did do those things.
 
Freddy said:
It is quite obvious that if she had filed a formal complaint of police abuse, the guilters would dismiss it as a lie anyway.

And since there is conveniently no tape of the interrogation, Mignini would probably have charged her with another count of calumnia, and probably other false reporting crimes as well. After all, he threatened to charge her parents for repeating her claim that she was hit, and he has a history of filing vindictive charges with no basis.
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What do you mean by "would have". When she complained Mignini did charge her and her parents and went for an additional six years, based on the theory that since the cops said they didn't do it obviously they didn't.
 
RoseMontague said:
As Yummi has pointed out at dot org it seems the SC did actually deny a change of venue in the Scazzi case in contrast to the article posted earlier. Unbelievable.

http://albatros-volandocontrovento.blogspot.com/2011/10/sarah-scazzi-mentre-la-cassazione.html
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Why do they even have the change of venue if they won't offer it in this case? That's just strange. They won't do it for Amanda, they won't do it for this girl, and frankly with the media attention Mignini got in Florence and the sort of people he pissed off from an entirely objective standpoint I would have thought that would be a fair judgment as well, regardless of how much I think the little slug needed to be stomped anyway.

It's kind of like when I was going through the Spader case and I'm thinking to myself 'if you haven't executed anyone in NH since the thirties and you're not going to fry this kid, why don't you just get rid of it?' I dunno just how much more repellent a case has to be than that one, don't look into it unless you have a barf bag handy!
 
RWVBWL said:
Hey AmyStrange,
I don't think so, I thought I saw a photo of her too in line at the airport when everyone left.

If Madison shot a photo of Amanda Knox doin' a cartwheel,
I bet the tabloids would go nutso...
:D
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it would be like giving them the...

not nice,
but it would be funny,

Dave
 
Hi AmyStrange,
The other day you asked about Antonio "Toto" Curatolo,
and I dug up a few links for ya.

From what I know, Toto had testified in a murder trial in 2001, was busted selling drugs in 2003, but for some reason he was not jailed. I don't have the info on the 2nd murder trial that he testified in, but I do recall reading about it. Strangely, it was only at the end of last year, 2010, that Curatolo was finally sent to prison for dealing. IIRC, I've read that he dealt in cocaine and heroin, and that he was high on heroin the night he says that he saw Amanda and Raffaele...

Here's 2 links:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101015182717/http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html

See:
April 18, 2008
Toto Witness

From Frank Sfarzo:
"After all he's an expert witness. Already in 2001 he testified against a a Tunisian (who allegely killed his girl by the swimming pool) and he got him condemned."

A couple of other old Perugia Shock posts about Toto are here:

See:
April 4, 2008
You Too Witness
+
http://web.archive.org/web/20101015182429/http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

See:
3/29/2009
Super Fake Witness

Take it easy,
RW
 
RWVBWL said:
Hey AmyStrange,
I don't think so, I thought I saw a photo of her too in line at the airport when everyone left.

If Madison shot a photo of Amanda Knox doin' a cartwheel,
I bet the tabloids would go nutso...
:D
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on second thought,

wait until the whole case is done
and then sell exclusives to the first cartwheel.
millions

and just give the money to the "Univ for Foreigners" in Perugia and set up an annual grant or scholarship kind of trust in Meredith's name.
 
RWVBWL said:
Hi AmyStrange,
The other day you asked about Antonio "Toto" Curatolo,
and I dug up a few links for ya.

From what I know, Toto had testified in a murder trial in 2001, was busted selling drugs in 2003, but for some reason he was not jailed. I don't have the info on the 2nd murder trial that he testified in, but I do recall reading about it. Strangely, it was only at the end of last year, 2010, that Curatolo was finally sent to prison for dealing. IIRC, I've read that he dealt in cocaine and heroin, and that he was high on heroin the night he says that he saw Amanda and Raffaele...

Here's 2 links:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101015182717/http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html

See:
April 18, 2008
Toto Witness

From Frank Sfarzo:
"After all he's an expert witness. Already in 2001 he testified against a a Tunisian (who allegely killed his girl by the swimming pool) and he got him condemned."

A couple of other old Perugia Shock posts about Toto are here:

See:
April 4, 2008
You Too Witness
+
http://web.archive.org/web/20101015182429/http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

See:
3/29/2009
Super Fake Witness

Take it easy,
RW
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That's exactly what I'm looking for.

Thank you RW.

I bow at your feet in humble gratitude

you know in a macho manly kind of way
or whatever

I'm just tired and all the mental gymnastics you have to go through while reading here doesn't help

it is funny though
 
Question: There's been a lot of discussion about Amanda's interrogation, but little about Raffaele's. I have never understood how he got into his situation. Amanda was a naive coed in an unfamiliar country, but Raffaele was the son of a wealthy, prominent doctor. He surely would have known something about Mignini and local police procedures, and his dad would surely have told his son something like "Don't say a word until I get down there with our lawyer." Raffaele might have been intimidated by the cops, but he likely would have felt some security from his family status. So why wasn't he smarter? Also, did the cops tape any interrogations with Raffaele or Rudy, or did they "forget" about them too?
 
Hi all,
I still learn of new tidbits of info in this case we've been discussng.

Digging into some of Frank Sfarzo's old posts a moment ago,
I found out that on Sunday, Nov 4, they went out with a friend and watched a soccer game. A soccer game? I'd never even heard of this.

In my mind, what with all of the police questioning that they had been going thru, any guilty person involved in a murder would have been extremely paranoid when dealing with the police. If guilty, shouldn't they have spent the time alone together rehashin' their alibi's, instead of watching a soccer match? Yet 2 days after Meredith was found dead, A+R go watch a soccer game. Hmmm....

Heck, the next morning, Amanda even went back to school!
Who goes back to class after a holiday weekend when you killed your housemate?

Later on that evening, they then went out to nearby friend of Raffaele's to have dinner with, trying to regain a sense of normalcy, I believe that it was. And even got high...

All the while, these 2 still made themselves available for further police questioning, even when they were stoned(!) and for some reason did not lawyer up. Hardly the actions of 2 young people who participated in their 1st murder, in my humble opinion.

I'm so glad that they are free!:)
See ya, RW
 
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Bob001 said:
Question: There's been a lot of discussion about Amanda's interrogation, but little about Raffaele's. I have never understood how he got into his situation. Amanda was a naive coed in an unfamiliar country, but Raffaele was the son of a wealthy, prominent doctor. He surely would have known something about Mignini and local police procedures, and his dad would surely have told his son something like "Don't say a word until I get down there with our lawyer." Raffaele might have been intimidated by the cops, but he likely would have felt some security from his family status. So why wasn't he smarter? Also, did the cops tape any interrogations with Raffaele or Rudy, or did they "forget" about them too?
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Hi Bob001,
Good points, I've wondered that too.
Maybe we'll get some answers sometime soon...

There's some good info on Raff in those 2 links I posted above, which only cover March 2009 and April 2008. Frank Sfarzo is THE MAN! Have a look, heck there's even a post on Raff's porn collection, which I might have to quote from as Skeptical Bystander at PMF was talking crap again...

Speakin' of crap,
I recall reading a few recent questions here about the toilet once again.
I thought that it was you that did post a PooReport link or something like that, correct? It showed the toilets in Italy, and helped explain to me how they worked. Any chance you still have it without me diggin' it up?
Thanks,
RW


PS - Regarding the feces that Rudy Guede left.
Amanda did not seem to have noticed a strong stench from Filomena and Laura's bathroom, so Rudy must have left his crap the night before.
I write of this because IIRC, Amanda, after showering and 1st seein' Rudy's turds, went and got Raffaele and returned, and didn't see the feces again. She thought it possible that a person had been there inside the house while she had showered. But if Rudy had been recently been there that morning, wouldn't his poop have stunk?
 
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