Bill are you saying that had Mignini not given the interview that you would still believe she was guilty of calunnia? I'm pleased that you have come to the conclusion that she wasn't and isn't guilty of that crime but the tipping point remains interesting. Personally, as you know, the combination of the police chief's comments about buckling and telling them what they knew to be correct and the notes she left clearly saying the statements were not based on reliable facts convinced me, guilty or innocent, that the interrogation had caused her to tell them what they wanted to hear.
It is difficult to write about this, because it is "going back" to a position I now no longer hold. I'll give it a shot.
I would not call it a "tipping point", the decision to recant on calunnia. I'd call it a paradigm shift. Up until I heard Mignini's own words, I did not understand the big deal about "spontaneous statements," meaning that those who believe in Knox's guilt believe she made "spontaneous statements" to Mignini in the 1:45 to 5:45 am period, Nov 6.
Indeed, these "spontaneous statements" were also supposed to have been given in the period leading up to the 1:45 am "confession". First off, no one in their right mind can call ANYTHING Knox said, "spontaneous", except for maybe Hellmann. Please note, this is why I break with Hellmann's sustaining the conviction on calunnia. Hellmann, while acquiting on the murder related charges, basically says Knox made a "spontaneous statement" so as to end the stress of the interrogation. That's why Hellmann would say that the events leading up to 1:45 am lead to "spontaneity".
I had never, before reading Mignini's own words, fully appreciated what is meant by spontaneity. Basically it means that someone simply blurted out, outside of the context of questioning, "Ok, I'd like to tell you something..... you people are asking the wrong questions. You should be asking about Patrick. Patrick killed Meredith."
In this hypothetical recreation of what is meant by spontaneous, the police are supposed to have sat dumbfounded, and had to think for a second - wait a minute, "How would she know that?" It is on that basis that I'd be fair enough to police to ask a few more clarifying questions, before they had to shut this down. Why shut it down? Because to anyone but an idiot, she was now not a person, "informed of the facts," she was in fact incriminating herself, not just Patrick.
The very existence of Memorandum #1, the one in legalese Italian that Knox could not in a million years have managed after 6 weeks in Italy, its very existence is proof that the police did not "shut this down". They very much viewed her well before 1:45 am as a suspect, or else why write what they wrote, and force Knox to sign it?
Then on to Mignini. When Mignini arrived just after 1:45 am, he says three things.
1) This young woman looked like she'd had a giant release, a load of stress relieved.
2) She seemed afraid of Patrick
3) She wanted to talk, to clear her soul
There's a word to describe Mignini's take on these three observations, and that word has to do with the material produced by the north end of a southbound male-bovine. It's when Mignini said he volunteered to act, "as if a notary", to help Knox write down yet another version, a better version of the travesty she signed at 1:45 am, that the whole paradigm shifted for me.
It took him four hours to act as a notary? To record something "spontaneous"? Read below for why this is Mignini-the-liar at his best.
For one thing, I could no longer go with Hellmann, who you remember said Knox made what amounts to a spontaneous declaration about Lumumba simply to relieve the stress of the pre-1:45 am interrogation.
She had obviously been led to Lumumba. There was nothing spontaneous about his name entering the interrogation room. Why?
The first thing Mignini himself discovered, is that there's a text of the "person of interest interview", which is, in fact, something that implicates Knox as involved in the crime. It's why in the CNN interview, Mignini makes a big deal about lecturing the first set of interrogators about the relevant law! He magnanimously said about himself, "I ordered it stopped." "I reminded them she needed a lawyer as soon as the spontaneous confession came out! Stop!". The weasel that he is, he threw his own people under the bus.
Additionally Mignini wais horrified to find that the first set of interrogators had not themselves videotaped anything, nor had even a transcript of the whole of the 1st interrogation. So first thing Mignini set out to do after 1:45 am was to "repair" what was said in the 1:45 am confession.
What needed repairing? First and most obviously, Mignini could see the problem of the text she'd sent back to Patrick, with Knox saying at 1:45 am, "I replied to the message saying that we would meet immediately." In Italian, "Ho riposto al messaggio dicendogli che cisaremmo visti subito."
Even Mignini could see that it did not say that. It said, "'see you later", rendered in Italian, "ci vediamo". Sure, the "repair" omited full text including the other words she'd texted, "Certo ci vidiamo più tardi buona, serata," which ends with "Good evening". That text message in full actually saves the day for Knox, and for my consideration of calunnia, and what spontaneous means, and what it means in the context of Mignini claiming only to be, "acting as a notary would."
But it does more than destroy Knox's involvement in calunnia, it is the very place where Mignini begins to frame Knox.
So this is what I thought when reading the CNN piece - "sure Mignini, you were only taking Knox's spontaneous declaration." "You were only a notary." Bovine-waste. Not only was his intent to throw his own people under a bus, this was the very moment when he started to frame Knox.
Mignini spent the next four hours (4 hours!!) repairing the mistakes of the 1st interrogation. He probably thought of Rita Ficcara, Lorena Zugarini and Ivano Raffo (the 1:45 am interrogating officers) to have been complete idiots. "Watch me, I'll show you how to get a confession that will stand up in court." So much for anything spontaneous.
And instead of throwing out the 1:45 am confession, destroying it like the videotapes of the whole interrogative mess, they kept it. Sciocco, stupido, stolto, imbecille, ebete. And that's just Mignini. And then he had the gaul to tell CNN that he was only a notary recording a "spontaneous confession", one that took 7 hours to get, and two tries to engineer.
So I now have no quarrel with Arturo de Felice, Perugia police chief, who said, "Initially the American gave a version of events we knew was not correct. She buckled and made an admission of facts we knew were correct and from that we were able to bring them all in. They all participated but had different roles."
Of course she buckled - one more admission that there was nothing spontaneous about ANYTHING Knox said that night. When she finally got around to saying the right things about Lumumba, the fix was in.
Note, though, that this is also the answer to those who still claim Knox kept changing her story. She did no such thing. In four years. Well, except for when she buckled, as de Felcie observed, (change #1) and when she changed back to her original story (change #2). In four years, she's only ever told two stories, yet PGP still cling to her always changing stories.
Mignini lied, tryed to repair what the imbeciles (his thought) had done coming up to 1:45 am, and he did the repair by framing Knox. Lying about the text, even when he had the full text in front of him. Pure and simple.
As for the "Knox must have known Lumumba to be innocent" to be guilty of calunnia - I believe that if you scratch the surface of how a judge rules on things like that in an inquisatorial system, they are not as "letter of the law" as in the adversarial system. The inquisatorial system is after the truth, which is why I was stuck on the actual harm done to Lumumba by the events of the interrogation.
I think you need to interpret that law as an Inquisitor would who is after the truth. Even if it is a mistruth.
For me it was a paradigm shift with regard to seeing the interrogation through Mignini's eyes. And I have to thank Peggy Ganong profusely for translating the CNN interview.
