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Continuation Part 3 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

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I've only had a brief look at the PMF sites - I've no intention of registering; and it really is ghoulish the way they deify this image they have of Meredith.


It's not just the canonisation of Meredith, who seems to have been an ordinary girl who drank and smoked pot and slept with her Italian boyfriend just like Amanda was doing. And have you seen the baby pics they posted of her, and the near-worship extended to that icon? It's the hagiography of the Kercher family.

The Kerchers have suffered an appalling loss, but that doesn't make them saints. On the contrary, the way they are behaving at the moment is quite reprehensible in my view. But according to the PMF crowd, they are the most "gentle", "dignified" and so on people on the face of the earth. I'm afraid, having watched that live press conference from Perugia they gave on the day of the verdict, I didn't come away with a high opinion of them at all.

I suppose if it had been Amanda who had come home early and surprised Rudy and been murdered, and Meredith who raised the alarm and was falsely accused, we'd be seeing the exact mirror image. Amanda would be the saint, and Meredith the sex, drugs and alcohol obsessed "witch". And the Knox and Mellas families would be "gentle and dignified" (no matter how they behaved), and the Kerchers' peculiar physical appearance would be mocked and lampooned.

All the protagonists in this are ordinary people with ordinary faults and virtues. All of them have suffered to a greater or lesser extent. The roles could be shuffled as required. There's no great virtue or vice on any side.

Reading PMF is a bit of an education, in the anthropology field.

Rolfe.
 
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... The Kerchers have suffered an appalling loss, but that doesn't make them saints. On the contrary, the way they are behaving at the moment is quite reprehensible in my view. But according to the PMF crowd, they are the most "gentle", "dignified" and so on people on the face of the earth. I'm afraid, having watched that live press conference from Perugia they gave on the day of the verdict, I didn't come away with a high opinion of them at all.
...

This is the main reason I consider "victim-centred justice" to be very dubious, ethically speaking. The fact is that relatives of murder victims rarely behave very admirably when the person convicted of the killing successfully challenges that conviction. People like Cheryl Tooze are very rare.
 
On the DOT.net we are told Amanda can't sell her story because of Son of Sam laws.

Seriously, who ever took these people seriously? It's like they are self parodying at this point. I actually enjoy reading PMF on occasion now because they are so freaking funny.
 
I suppose if it had been Amanda who had come home early and surprised Rudy and been murdered, and Meredith who raised the alarm and was falsely accused, we'd be seeing the exact mirror image. Amanda would be the saint, and Meredith the sex, drugs and alcohol obsessed "witch". And the Knox and Mellas families would be "gentle and dignified" (no matter how they behaved), and the Kerchers' peculiar physical appearance would be mocked and lampooned.

I can clearly picture them going on about the vampire costume and the pot plants of her boyfriend. :duck:

On the other had, she probably would've booked it together with her friends long before any "fatal interrogations", leaving the police with Guede in the end. I suppose nobody but a few people would ever have heard about the "poor American girl" that was murdered in Perugia because such a story is to trivial to remain in the papers for too long.

-
Osterwelle
 
This is the main reason I consider "victim-centred justice" to be very dubious, ethically speaking. The fact is that relatives of murder victims rarely behave very admirably when the person convicted of the killing successfully challenges that conviction. People like Cheryl Tooze are very rare.


Oh, tell me about it!

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=7711526

I've heard people who were there describe the US Lockerbie relatives as being "groomed" to believe the prosecution case - which frankly makes the case against Knox and Sollecito look credible! One observer even used the word "brainwashed".

I think the bereaved have a strong desire to know who is to blame for their loss, and a tendency to cling to a suspect presented to them as plausible. Giving up that comforting illusion seems to be more than many of them can manage.

It's also likely with the Kerchers that close examination of the evidence is too painful for them, dealing as it does with the bloody death of their daughter and sister. So they take what Maresca and Mignini tell them at face value. It's just a pity that John Kercher in particular has chosen to use his tabloid newspaper contacts to attack Knox and even pursue her across the Atlantic in an attempt to make her liberty as confined and miserable as her captivity.

Rolfe.
 
It's not just the canonisation of Meredith, who seems to have been an ordinary girl who drank and smoked pot and slept with her Italian boyfriend just like Amanda was doing. And have you seen the baby pics they posted of her, and the near-worship extended to that icon? It's the hagiography of the Kercher family.

The Kerchers have suffered an appalling loss, but that doesn't make them saints. On the contrary, the way they are behaving at the moment is quite reprehensible in my view. But according to the PMF crowd, they are the most "gentle", "dignified" and so on people on the face of the earth. I'm afraid, having watched that live press conference from Perugia they gave on the day of the verdict, I didn't come away with a high opinion of them at all.

I suppose if it had been Amanda who had come home early and surprised Rudy and been murdered, and Meredith who raised the alarm and was falsely accused, we'd be seeing the exact mirror image. Amanda would be the saint, and Meredith the sex, drugs and alcohol obsessed "witch". And the Knox and Mellas families would be "gentle and dignified" (no matter how they behaved), and the Kerchers' peculiar physical appearance would be mocked and lampooned.
All the protagonists in this are ordinary people with ordinary faults and virtues. All of them have suffered to a greater or lesser extent. The roles could be shuffled as required. There's no great virtue or vice on any side.

Reading PMF is a bit of an education, in the anthropology field.

Rolfe.
Yes, it is an anthropological study, isn't it. One thing, though: I believe if Meredith had come in the next morning, and found Amanda dead, that somehow, she would NOT have been viewed as a drug/sex obsessed witch, and Amanda a saint. I feel this very strongly. I am not sure why, but I cannot picture it. I think Meredith would have been believed, and not suspected, and Guede would have been caught, and it would never have been a huge, global story. There would be no PMF to deify the Knox/Mellas family, nor to call them "genteel" and "refined". Amanda carries an aura, a gestalt, as it were, which MADE this case what it was.
 
It's also likely with the Kerchers that close examination of the evidence is too painful for them, dealing as it does with the bloody death of their daughter and sister. So they take what Maresca and Mignini tell them at face value. It's just a pity that John Kercher in particular has chosen to use his tabloid newspaper contacts to attack Knox and even pursue her across the Atlantic in an attempt to make her liberty as confined and miserable as her captivity.


If I remember correctly, John Kercher wrote in an article that he has read the massai-report about ten times, he knows all the evidence …
 
Yes, it is an anthropological study, isn't it. One thing, though: I believe if Meredith had come in the next morning, and found Amanda dead, that somehow, she would NOT have been viewed as a drug/sex obsessed witch, and Amanda a saint. I feel this very strongly. I am not sure why, but I cannot picture it. I think Meredith would have been believed, and not suspected, and Guede would have been caught, and it would never have been a huge, global story. There would be no PMF to deify the Knox/Mellas family, nor to call them "genteel" and "refined". Amanda carries an aura, a gestalt, as it were, which MADE this case what it was.


I'm inclined to believe you. Knox was gauche, and not worldly-wise. I suspect Meredith might have handled it better.

On the other had, she probably would've booked it together with her friends long before any "fatal interrogations", leaving the police with Guede in the end. I suppose nobody but a few people would ever have heard about the "poor American girl" that was murdered in Perugia because such a story is to trivial to remain in the papers for too long.


That covers two interesting points. Meredith would probably have taken her mother's advice and got the hell out, especially as her English friends were doing that. In which case they would have got Guede in due course, and done a decent job of convicting him.

And nobody would remember the victim. It's precisely because this case has become a cause celebre on account of being a notorious miscarriage of justice that anybody at all knows who Meredith Kercher is.

I can clearly picture them going on about the vampire costume and the pot plants of her boyfriend. :duck:


Oh yes, that too! We'd be inundated with undoctored pictures of Meredith with blood running down her chin, especially the one with the smug, knowing leer, and her relationship with "a drug dealer" would be big news. I read somewhere that she had a caution for drunk and disorderly in England, too. The stories that she was exasperated with Amanda would be trotted out as evidence that she had a motive to kill her housemate.

Poor girl. She didn't deserve what happened to her, nobody deserves that. But she was just another student, just like Amanda. And just as easy to demonise if that's the narrative du jour.

Rolfe.
 
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On the DOT.net we are told Amanda can't sell her story because of Son of Sam laws.

Seriously, who ever took these people seriously? It's like they are self parodying at this point. I actually enjoy reading PMF on occasion now because they are so freaking funny.
Don't those dolts know it is convicted criminals who fall under this law, and writing about their crime, and profiting from it? Amanda was acquitted, and would be writing not about the crime, but about her wrongful imprisonment, which she has every right to do. I wish I could find this funny, but when intelligent people say two and two is five, it is worrisome. :jaw-dropp
 
Wow, such tortured logic. So is it your belief that if there is evidence that makes it impossible for someone to have been at a murder scene, but this evidence contradicts their alibi, then you assume they can be guilty of the murder because they lied, even though the evidence proves they couldn't have committed the murder. Do I have this correct?

I may suggest to refrain from the practice of attampting to re-construct a reasoning in the shape of a generalizing rule, using universal concepts and categories.
The reasoning here is on Curatolo. About his specific testimony and its timing uncertainities, about the lack of alibies of the defendants after 8:40, about the lack of certainity in the so called (by you) medical conclusions about ToD, and about the verious possibility of how Sollecito and Amanda could be involved in this specific crime.

Stomach content analysis puts ToD between 9pm and 10pm.

Your opinion puts the ToD between 9pm and 10pm.
There is no scientific certainity, despite I know that posters on this board are used to claim there is such certainity. There isn't. Variants do not allow to formulate a response in the terms that you claim.
But on the other hand, there are witnesses (two) who place a very disturbing woman's scream, obviously to be related to the murder and nothing else (corroborated by the testimonies of two suspects), at a time that is not between 9 and 10 pm. And this is also something called evidence.


Curatolo's testimony, if you believe it, puts Amanda and Raffaele not at the cottage until "right up to midnight".

False. Curatolo's testimony does not consist in a continous observation, and if read literaly, based on the calculation on buses leaving, the last time he spots the defendants may well be at 22:30.
But the overall combination of the uncertainities allows a bigger game between the elements. Even a ToD at 9.00 does not really imply anything about defendants' innocence. They both don't have an alibi after 8:40. They could well have met again at 9:30 after Meredith had been killed, and one of them was present as she was killed while the other was not.


This creates quite the conundrum for you; either you don't believe this witness and therefore their alibi is not being contradicted and they weren't at the murder scene when Meredith died, or you do believe this witness and therefore they weren't at the murder scene when Meredith died.

Absolutely not. I can also believe parts and discredit other parts of a testimony, if I deem there are founded reasons to do so.

Not surprisingly, you seem to want to accept Curatolo's testimony, but in order to make things work, you wish to disbelieve stomach content analysis (i.e., adjust the ToD to your liking) and suggest Curatolo has the right people and the right day, but he's got the wrong time.

No. I never made such statement. I always repeated I have no definitive position about Curatolo's testimony. But there is something which I do reject, and this is the reasons put forward by posters on this board in order to discredit Curatolo. It is possible - but bear in mind this is not a judgement, merely a teorethical scenario based on the fact I did not listen to the whole CUratolo's testimony - that Curatolo is wrong in identifying the two suspects and gets the wrong people. This is an intrinsic danger. However, I do not accept the theory that he is unreliable because a drug user or possessor, nor that he is lying.
I also reject the reasoning that Curatolo might exonerate Raffaele and Amanda in some cases: it cannot, in principle, because a false alibi constitutes itself always evidence of guilt. And guilt is a wider concept depending on the concept of responsability, not directly depending from a scenario. A false alibi is the covering of a crime.
In this case, also the several different ways for how the two suspect can have participated to the crime, allow us to consider various scenarios, among them also a (teorethically possible) one where Curatolo sees the two after the crime is committed instead of before; and we may also consider that only one of them may have been present in the house as Meredith was killed. This shall not change the verdict by the law, in my opinion.
The verdict of guilt comes from the demonstration that both took part to the cleanup and alteration of the scene, both cover the event by tampering with evidence and lie about their knowledge of facts. And also, both physically touched things and the victim's body and committed crimes in the context of the murder, and there is evidence at least one second person took part to the aggression. There is also obvious physical and logical evidence that the third suspect (who had a link to Knox) did not leave all the physical evidence on the crime scene.
 
However, I do not accept the theory that he is unreliable because a drug user or possessor, nor that he is lying.

Let me help you understand something. It doesn't matter whether Curatalo is lying, mistaken or right. He was on drugs, and so no judge is going to use his testimony to convict two people of murder. Cannot and will not happen. Mignini of all people should have and certainly did know this, and committed a fraud on the courts by using Curatalo's testimony. Mignini is no better than a common liar.
 
Of course Pilot did not take kindly to the advice given to try and defuse his anger. Instead he ran over to PMF and spit out more anger. It is kind of sad to see people self destruct.

I don't know about our poster, Pilot, but that stint7 guy who posted about you on the hate site sounds like a total nutcase.
 
If I remember correctly, John Kercher wrote in an article that he has read the massai-report about ten times, he knows all the evidence …

So he's been reading Massei over and over and over again ever since PMF translated that monstrosity of illogic and deceit. Those PMFers really hosed the Kerchers, didn't they? Oh well, all in the name of Meredith . . .
 
I was talking about leaving the police station on Nov. 5. Knox was not free to do so, and therefore was detained. The treaty section in question does not depend on any formal status of the person detained. This is obvious from reading it. The reason for this is precisely so that the police cannot play the semantic games you are playing.

Note that I am not saying the police cannot detain people for questioning. But if they do and the person is a foreign national, the police have a clear obligation under the treaty to inform the person of their rights under the treaty. The treaty trumps Italian criminal procedural rules, so to the extent they conflict, the treaty controls.

But Amanda's interrogation as a witness started at 22:40 and by 01:45 was over.
You are talking about this period of time. This is the time during which it occurred that, from a certain moment on, Amanda was probably not able to leave. You cannot seriously be argueing that the magistrate should have taken contact with the consulate around midnight, after 22:40 but before 01:45, even before having seen the police minutes of interrogation and even before their redaction. This is delusional. The police don't have any such "clear duty" (by the way, the police are also not allowed to contact foreign offices nor anyone releasing investigation and not allowed to release information about a questioning, they don't have a mandate do do so) only the magistrate is competent for taking contact with the consulate, if the suspect cannot do it himself. This has to be done "with no delay", but no delay in fact does not mean in real time, not exactly in that moment as an event occurs. It does not mean that if you are detained in any informal manner, the consulate must be informed it within fifteen minutes otherwise the treaty is violated. This is a delusional twisting of rules. Not even God would be entitled this service. The consulate is informed with no delay as soon as an authority releases a decree of arrest, or as a state of detention is anyway acknowledged. Which has to occur with no delay to be constitutional, always sooner than within 48 hous, but does not need to be literally in real time.
 
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But Amanda's interrogation as a witness started at 22:40 and by 01:45 was over.
You are talking about this period of time. This is the time during which it occurred that, from a certain moment on, Amanda was probably not able to leave. You cannot seriously be argueing that the magistrate should have taken contact with the consulate around midnight, after 22:40 but before 01:45, even before having seen the police minutes of interrogation and even before their redaction. This is delusional. The police don't have any such "clear duty" (by the way, the police are also not allowed to contact foreign offices nor anyone releasing investigation and not allowed to release information about a questioning, they don't have a mandate do do so) only the magistrate is competent for taking contact with the consulate, if the suspect cannot do it himself. This has to be done "with no delay", but no delay in fact does not mean in real time, not exactly in that moment as an event occurs. It does not mean that if you are detained in any informal manner, the consulate must be informed it within fifteen minutes otherwise the treaty is violated. This is a delusional twisting of rules. Not even God would be entitled this service. The consulate is informed with no delay as soon as an authority releases a decree of arrest, or as a state of detention is anyway acknowledged. Which has to occur with no delay to be constitutional, always sooner than within 48 hous, but does not need to be literally in real time.

Actually, upon reflection I don't completely disagree. Generally the police don't have to inform suspects of their rights until there is enough evidence to make an arrest. But once there is, they absolutely do have to inform the suspect of her rights. But then again, most countries that use such procedural rules make a bright line at arrest: you're either under arrest, or you're free to leave. If there is a twilight zone in Italian law where she is neither free to leave nor under arrest (meaning that the police can physically restrain her from leaving), then it seems to me the treaty's provision is triggered. I don't know enough about Italian law to say whether that is the case. But if you are being questioned at the police station, and you are not free to leave, then you are detained. The treaty says "or detained in any other manner." Presumably that doesn't apply to an officer stopping someone on the street to ask a couple questions, but when 12 detectives are interrogating you at the station, that's another matter. The treaty is not subordinate to Italian law. If Italy wants their law to be otherwise, they should not have ratified the treaty.

Either it was highly improper for the police to have assigned someone to prevent her from leaving, or the treaty required that she be informed of her rights. That is what the treaty says. If she was free to leave but never asked to leave, that is not the fault of the police. But if the police are relying on the twilight zone of being neither a suspect in custody nor free to leave, then the fact that Italy classifies some people as "witnesses" rather than suspects does not circumvent the treaty. If she was not detained within the meaning of the treaty, then the police had no right to prevent her from leaving. Any Italian law to the contrary is a violation of the treaty. If the police had the right to prevent her from leaving and did in fact prevent her from leaving, then she was detained and should have been informed of her rights. The police don't get to have it both ways.

At any rate, Amanda should have refused to talk once it became clear the police thought she was involved in the murder. She should have refused to answer any more questions as soon as the questioning became hostile. Unfortunately, innocent people with no criminal history are not very savvy when dealing with the police.

But the Vienna Treaty is the least of the problems I have with the interrogation. More alarming are the failure to record, the hitting, the denial of food and water, and the denial of use of the restroom. And scheduling the interrogation overnight so as to exhaust, confuse, and disorient her. And the actions of the translator in trying to convince her she was repressing memories (this one is undisputed). None of those things were necessary, and none of them are conducive to eliciting the truth from a suspect. I believe her testimony about these things because the explanations for the failure to record the interrogation are utterly implausible and far too convenient for the police. And it would be consistent with the shoddy way the police handled every other aspect of the case. They should have outsourced the investigation to the Marx brothers.

One thing, though: if the interrogation only lasted until 1:45, why is there a 5:45 statement?
 
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Do people agree that AK was in custodial interrogation?

Is there a requirement that when an individual is placed in custodial interrogation that:
1. The individual be informed of their right to request that their consul be informed of it?
2. That their consul be informed that one of its citizens is in custodial interrogation whether the individual requests it or not?
3. That custodial interrogation not be commenced until formal notification is transferred to the person's consul?

I agree on possible positive answers on points 1 and 2. About point 3, I can see this would be not compatible with the laws that regulate investigation in most countries.
However, there must be some adjustment of concepts. In fact in Italy there is no “custodial interrogation”. Such condition, legally, simply doesn’t exist.
A police interrogation is, by definition, never a custodial situation, unless it leads to the redaction of incriminating minutes. Only from that moment you may talk about state of custody.

But also, an important point about the international treaty, is that it relates only to state of detention, does not depend on interrogation. In other words, the sense of informing the consul is to exercise a right of the suspect to do what he/she would be allowed to do himself/herself if he/she was free, but not more than this: it is a right of a person in case of detention, not a tool or anything aimed to provide an option or a right to interfere with or prevent specific investigation/judicial events such as interrogation.

Finally, there is a general concept about the Italian system, that the possible procedure issues cannot be used with the same argumentations and effects as may happen common law systems. The procedure issues involving police investigation normally do not have invalidating effects on the judicial process. There can’t be really a basis to overturn convictions on grounds of legitimacy for police misconducts or police procedure errors.

The US State department has a policy that when its agents meet foreign police resistance to informing arrested US citizens of their right to consular visitation because they US doesn't always provide it, that the foreign police department should be told to do it because "two wrongs don't make a right".

By the way I absolutely agree that two wrongs don’t make a right. But this applies to a defendant’s claims in the first place.

This is complicated by the issue of when an individual needs to be informed of their right to an attorney. On this, the US and Italy seem similar but in the US the requirement that an individual be informed of the right to an attorney and the right to remain silent is almost absolute and no information obtained during a custodial interrogation can be used against an individual until he has been informed of his rights, period. In Italy there seems to be some wiggle room on this as evidenced by this case.

Now, there seems to be possible not full understanding of the systems of the kind of the Italian system. The “absolute” right to remain silent in fact does not exist at all for normal citizens in Italy, there is not even the slightest right to remain silent, unless one decides to accept the status of formal suspect. So its’ not really a small wiggle room: you cannot refuse to provide information unless there are legal grounds that change your status. But on the other hand there is a different system of protections, which consists, for formal suspects, in the right to lie or to make spontaneous statements without a questioning or to refuse to answer to any question at you like, and the right for a formal suspect to speak to a judge before speaking to anyone else. For police witnesses, the protection consists in a prohibition on the use of to use any declaration by a witness against himself for the crime for which the witness releases declarations.
 
The procedure issues involving police investigation normally do not have invalidating effects on the judicial process. There can’t be really a basis to overturn convictions on grounds of legitimacy for police misconducts or police procedure errors.

You mean, like, the police can knock the tar out of the "witness" and nothing happens? This is already quite clear.
 
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