Continuation Part 4: Discussion of the Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito case

[freeski]

What's coming is like the scene between Cruise and Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," all Cruise has to do is get Nicholson to say, "I ordered a code red." And no one is more surprised than Cruise that Nicholson actually says it. Even though, Knox is only parroting the police-imaginings... I believe the cops are equally surprised, "Tun-der-en, Jay-zuz, me boy, we wuz right!"

But Cruise's character KNEW he had ordered the code red. The previous night he said to Demi Moore something like, "he wants to say it. I just have to get him to say it". He wasn't surprised that he had given the code red; he was concerned about whether he could actually get him to say it. Big difference.

So either it's a bad example, or you're actually confirming the Wolf's opinion. They weren't surprised that Lumumba and Knox "were the ones". But they were concerned as to whether they could get her to admit it. Hence the joy when she did.

They had decided who was guilty and they just had to break her. They may have been surprised that it only took a couple of hours (she's not mafia after all), but the high fives show they got the result they were looking for. That's the reaction of people who've got a plan, and the plan succeeds just as they wanted, not people who are suddenly surprised by what they've been told. They KNEW before they brought her in. Giobbi admits as such and I don't think it's an idle boast. There's no way Knox spontaneously said she was at the cottage, or that Lumumba was involved. They hammered her till she admitted what they fed her, and told them what they knew to be true. It also ties in with Matteini's comment that they had to get to her before her mother turned up. I also think the speedy and ruthless way they arrested and beat Lumumba shows that it wasn't a surprise to them that he was the one. They were itching to get him, and Amanda gave them the reason they were looking for.

Regardless, I'm not quite sure why this is such a hot and contentious topic. Perhaps the grey area is really white after all.

 

[Grinder]

deleted

 

[Grinder]

Regardless, I'm not quite sure why this is such a hot and contentious topic. Perhaps the grey area is really white after all.

Agree and even if it were gray it isn't that hot a topic. Everything reported over the years and the court documents I've seen translated all substantiate that the ILE was focused on Amanda and that they fed her the Patrick scenario. There is no other way the "until she told us what we knew was correct" quote makes sense.

The calunnia is "hot" because it is the lynch-pin for almost every argument for guilt. Without that night there is no changing stories. There is no accusing a black man. There is no lack of an alibi.

 

[codyjuneau]

I am weighing in on Bill's side of this one. I think the police were truly cretinous and that you never go far wrong by underestimating their intelligence whether in Italy or here (England) or, probably anywhere. Most of the time, criminals fall into their laps because they are even more stupid.

And Rudy did fall into their laps. Had the police been patient they could have worn their self awarded medals proudly. If they had aborted their initial theory when the evidence implicating Rudy surfaced they could have at least worn them with honor. But they chose to obstinately turn the medals into badges of shame. What a shame ... but it was their choice.

 

[Bill Williams]

But Cruise's character KNEW he had ordered the code red. The previous night he said to Demi Moore something like, "he wants to say it. I just have to get him to say it". He wasn't surprised that he had given the code red; he was concerned about whether he could actually get him to say it. Big difference.

Cruise's character "knew" nothing. Lt. Col. Markinson, who had reason to lie if he wanted to, was the one who told Kaffee. The Corporal and Private confirmed it.... but Kaffee did not "know" it, any more than the Perugian police "knew" that Knox and Lumumba had been involved.

They suspected that a key holder had been involved. They also suspected that at the Hallowe'en party, Kercher could have made a date and not told anyone else.

The only time Kaffee "knew" that Jessup had ordered a code red was when Jessup blurted it out on the stand. The only time the cops "knew" that Lumumba had been involved was when they hassled her about the "See you later" message, and coerced her into inagining meeting Lumumba.

At that point it was equally likely that she'd also either imagined loaning him the key, or actually accompanying him to the flat. To get her to imagine how she'd possibly "know" that Lumumba had done it, they further pressured her to admit to being there.

Up until then the list of suspects was small, and it is 20-20 hindsight to suggest that the only suspect in the pre-Nov 5/6 period was Knox. They followed her because of the key, and focused their efforts on her, simply because she was the last one, other than Raf, to be available to drag into an interrogation room. Romanelli was a lawyered-up investigative dead-end by that time.

It was Amanda or nothing. And they made sure they got something, and it is my view that the cops actually talked themselves into saying after, "we knew it all along".

It is actually a fairly moot point, though, so this'll be the last kick at the cat for me on this. Whether they'd zero'd in on Knox and her alone vs. keeping investigative options open until Nov 5/6, is actually moot.

The real tragedy belongs to their arrogance once Guede is known, and he, and he alone, matches the forensics. That Mignini had to send the Scientific Police back 46 days' later to, "find something, find anything," is far more germane to this.

So that's my last kick. I'll have to live with my inability to be convincing.

They had decided who was guilty and they just had to break her. They may have been surprised that it only took a couple of hours (she's not mafia after all), but the high fives show they got the result they were looking for. That's the reaction of people who've got a plan, and the plan succeeds just as they wanted, not people who are suddenly surprised by what they've been told.

All that also fits hitting it out of the park with their last at-bat, knowing that if they didn't do it with Knox, then all leads were dry - until Guede enters the scene, that is.

 

[PhantomWolf]

Not meant that way, but apologies if it sounded that way.

Accepted, it just came across as a little terse.

We're arguing a shade of grey here, and I am am having problems disputing anything you say, really. The shade of grey really is, just how surprised WERE police prior to the 1:45 confession memorandum?

I don't think that we're that far apart, we're just not agreeing on some of the finer details, though those details have a bearing on the position we take.

I'm pushing for that they thought the evidence that they had, as you outline very well, was a bit of a long shot. The shade of grey is that you bump it up to being theory numero uno. Is this not a fair description of the "grey" that separates us?

This seems pretty correct. From everything I have seen the ILE focused on Amanda pretty quickly and followed that line almost exclusively. They did look at a few others in the first couple of days, but by the 3-4th, they'd targeted in on Amanda as being part of it and figured out a way to go after her. I don't think it was just because she hadn't lawyered up and others had.

The shade of grey, then, is that if Amanda had a black boss, and if the police had mistaken the timing of the CCTV camera to make it look like Amanda and Lumumba going to the cottage, rather than Meredith and Rudy, I think the police were very aware that they could not be sure about the Amanda/Lumumba pairing. So here we are, two innocenters, trying to make the police seem smart!

Unlike Anglolawyer I don't believe that the police are stupid. I wouldn't put them in the Einstein end of the intellect pool either, but I think they can tie their shoelaces most of the time. Once you have excluded the break-in as being real, the early evidence really does point at Amanda. She was there when the police arrived, there was the believed calls to the Carabinieri after the Polizia had arrived, the whole showering in the bathroom without noticing the blood, the unusual behaviour (which even those that believe in her innocent have to admit was a bit quirky.) Filomena just didn't have any of that pointing at her.

I think that in those early days they had quickly accepted that the break-in was staged and figured it was a housemate. Of the housemates, all the evidence screamed Amanda. We know they believed that the woman on the tape was Amanda, they simply didn't have anywhere near the level of evidence against anyone else. If all the evidence says (A) and very little says (B), why rate (A) as a long shot because of (B)'s existence, or have (A) and (B) at equal possibilities?

This is the problem I am having in arguing this - I just repeat, that the police were more than likely as vigourously investigating the other possibilities; Amanda's black boss vs. Romanelli scoffing her laptop from a crime scene both could (and should) fuel police suspicions in those early, fog-of-war days. It's just that Romanelli had lawyered up.... and the police needed to solve this faster than the regular processes seemed to allow.

I haven't seen a lot of evidence that by the 3-4th they were still "vigorously investigating the other possibilities." I also don't think that Filomena taking her laptop was all the suspect. At the time she took it, they were looking at a burglary attempt, not a murder. It's not like she broke in after the cottage was closed up to take it, rather she took it from a room where the window was broken and she wasn't planning to return to for several days. She also did it right in front of the police. I don't think anyone would want to leave their laptop there under those conditions, so I don't see her actions are all that unusual or suspicious.

Amanda too had multiple witnesses early on - visitors to Raf's place who saw her. So I think it is a saw-off, and on the late evening of Nov 5, they just took full advantage of having Knox in the building to put the boots to Raf, as you say.

Not for the time of the murder, which the police knew was after 9pm, and it was only one witness, whom I'm not sure the police had spoken to prior to the 5th. Someone might know that.

As to the putting the boots to Raffaele because Knox was there, they deliberately called him in to break his alibi for her so it would not have mattered had she been there or not. If she wasn't a suspect at that time, why would they have called him in at night to break the alibi? Why did they have a dozen or more of the top mafia interrogators sitting in the station waiting to be put on Knox as soon as they got the break through with Raffaele? Why was the PM there watching? (Why did he subsequently lie and claim he wasn't there?) This isn't the sort of setup up one does on the chance of a long shot. This is the sort of setup one does when they know they have one last shot to break a suspect and they'd better get it or they lose them for good.

What's coming is like the scene between Cruise and Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," all Cruise has to do is get Nicholson to say, "I ordered a code red." And no one is more surprised than Cruise that Nicholson actually says it. Even though, Knox is only parroting the police-imaginings... I believe the cops are equally surprised, "Tun-der-en, Jay-zuz, me boy, we wuz right!"

As Freeski pointed out, Cruise's character knew what he wanted Nicholson's to say, he just didn't know how he was going to get him to say it. The whole scene was based about that, and I believe that you're unintentionally right in that something similar happened. The cops knew what they wanted Knox to say, and they believed they had the evidence to get her to confess. They may have been surprised by the speed it happened, but I don't think they were surprised by the name given, or that it came, they had spent over three hours beating her with the evidence and directing her to the point they wanted her. I don't believe it was "omg, we were right?" it was more, "Yes, we were right!"

Even with Raf's alibi-destroying forced imaginings of his own, if Knox had not played along, if she'd clammed up, or fainted and needed hospitalization, I don't think the cops would have had anything to upgrade her to "suspect".

It would be just like it is with PGP people today (four years later) - "she knows something she isn't telling."

I think the police actions of that night show that she was a suspect. The whole "she was a witness" claim is nothing more than an attempted legal smokescreen to claim she didn't need a lawyer with her when they grilled her. The Supreme Court saw right through that one.

Remember, Knox's mistake was that she thought she was being helpful, and was genuinely mystified that the police thought she had ANY information that might solve this. She lives that betrayal to this day.

I agree, and being helpful and believing what the police tell you are the major things lead to false memories and a false confession. The entire interrogation was a perfect storm for exactly that, and it got exactly that.

I'm not sure what else to argue, given that I'm not dismissing at all what you claim the cops think they had. But they also had other investigative routes - frustratingly, they simply couldn't pull Romanelli into an interview room like they'd done to Knox. They took advantage of her helpfulness, lied to her basically.

Again I don't think they actually lied, they told her the truth as they knew it at the time. They were wrong about what they knew, but they weren't deliberately misleading her. I also think you are trying to give too much weight to other possible scenarios; to me there was just never the evidence for them in the police's hands at the time. Filomena getting her laptop from her room and lawyering up is nothing like the evidence they believed that they had on Knox.

And if they'd showed a little patience - maybe that's what we're arguing about - by that time Guede might have been in the picture, and Commissioner Marco Chiacchiera could have said, "I told you so!"

Quite true, but they knew they Knox's mother was arriving the next day to take her back to the States. She was their prime suspect so they needed to hit her with the biggest guns they had and get a confession from her before that could happen.

This fits both our scenarios, as they are reflected in the memorandums. We are arguing about the beginning of the process which led to the memorandums. I think the police were genuinely surprised to find that this one struck oil. To the police it must have seemed like hitting a home run on their last at-bat.

I disagree slightly. I don't think they were surprised that they "struck oil", they "knew" the oil was there, they just didn't know how easy it would be to get it.

Similarly they wouldn't have been lying to Romanelli as such - if they'd put the screws to her, thinking that stealing her laptop suggested "Romanelli knows something that's going to break this wide open. All we have to do is to get Romanelli's boyfriend to admit that he couldn't verify her whereabouts while he's asleep, and take that to Romanelli and see if she starts to sweat."

Except that at the time they were still thinking an early ToD, shortly after 9pm, they got Raffaele to admit that Knox had left early, after the text message, not just that she could have left when he was asleep. They couldn't have done the same on Filomena. They believed that the woman they had on the tape was Knox, and she was walking, Filomena would have had to drive there. And so on, they simply didn't have anywhere near the pile of evidence again Filomena that they believed they did against Knox. As such to claim that these would be equally viable possibilities, or that the Knox/Lumumba theory for which they had ample evidence was a long shot because of other possible theories for which only a little evidence existed, is quite illogical to me.

If Romanelli started to imagine how Meredith could have died, there could have been a similiar, "You must then have been there, Filomena, or else how do you know? After all, you've got a front door key, and we have evidence the break-in in YOUR room was staged." They could have even accused her of a nice bit of misdirection by agreeing with postal police on Nov 2 that it looked staged - arguing that point would draw attention to her.

And yet even with these imagining, the pool of evidence against her would have been a fraction of what they already had against Knox. This is the thing. Even though the majority of what they believed on the 5th was incorrect, it was all pointing squarely at Amanda, not Filomena. If anything, it would have been stupid to have ignored that pile of evidence and been focusing attention elsewhere.

My point is that it could have easily been Filomena subsituted for Knox, or even four perps instead of three - that would have been even more lurid for the tabloid press.

So what is it that we're aruging other than a shade of grey - one that (and I'm not being rude here) there's no evidence to suggest that other possibilities could have been just as pressing.

The problem is that quite simply, I don't see any evidence that the police did consider any other possibilities as pressing. Given what we now know they knew back then, the evidence pointed at one specific person as being involved. I don't accept that they were swinging in the dark, because I don't believe they were that stupid. They had very good reasons for focusing on Knox, reasons that didn't apply to any one else, and despite your attempt to inflate the evidence against Filomena, it just doesn't stack up to anything close to what they had against Knox before she went into the police station that night. To me it would be absolutely astounding if Amanda was not a suspect, if not their prime suspect, before Raffaele's alibi being broken, and given that and the other evidence they almost certainly must have had (knowledge of the text messages, the location of Patrick's phone, the car garage camera tape), the police would have had to have been complete imbeciles to not have been considering Patrick as a suspect as well.

Please, I'm not being rude - your position is based on 20-20 hindsight. I believe that a fair description, and not an insult or anything.

I don't think it is, I'm basing my position on what we now know the police knew (or should have known if not completely incompetent) on the 5th, and what my beliefs would have been given that knowledge (assuming that the police were intelligent enough to see the same things.) With that knowledge in hand, that pile of evidence, I just can't see how the idea it was Knox and Lumumba who were involved could possibly be considered a long shot, while the lack of evidence pointing at Filomena or anyone else could possibly be equated to it. To me that just doesn't make sense.

Here's an experiment for you. Make two columns. Write down all the evidence the police had against Knox and Lumumbra at 6pm on the 5th on one side, and all the evidence that they had against Filomena on the other. Now figure out who you think would have been their prime suspect(s).

 

[PhantomWolf]

I am weighing in on Bill's side of this one. I think the police were truly cretinous and that you never go far wrong by underestimating their intelligence whether in Italy or here (England) or, probably anywhere. Most of the time, criminals fall into their laps because they are even more stupid.

This we'll have to disagree on, I don't agree that they were stupid. Stuck in their beliefs, yes, but not stupid.

So, you think attaching significance to the hip swivel and pizza eating are not evidence of stupidity? I demur.

No, I do see it as evidence of other things, such as misogyny, but not stupidity.

How long would it have taken the police to pop round to Le Chic anytime between 02-11-07 and 05-11-07 and interview Patrick, check his till receipts and ask him a question or two about where he was on the NIQ? They needn't have tipped their hand, they could just say they were verifying accounts given by all occupants and those associated with him (as they were probably doing anyway). Had they done some basic police work like this they would not have ruined Patrick's life nor made themselves look foolish.

Had they not jumped the gun on anything they did they wouldn't have ruined lives. If they waited on the forensics, they'd have not ruined Amanda and Raffaele's either. That they didn't do their jobs right from almost the start speaks volumes about what they believed. They thought they had it right, so they cut corners, and screwed it up.

They had a perfectly harmless and easily explained exchange of texts between employer and employee which, because they were stupid, they turned into evidence of guilt. It is not hindsight which warrants the characterisation of stupidity but elementary common sense.

Unfortunately Amanda's poor Italian turned her text into one that indicated a meeting sooner rather then later. They also had what they believed were both of them on tape going to the cottage, Patrick's phone near the cottage, and more. Under that pile of evidence, the misunderstood text message must have looked like the nail in the coffin of a pair of killers regardless of how innocent it could have been. This is the thing, they didn't base their belief in Amanda and Patrick's guilt just on that text, but on the entire foundation of evidence they were building. It was a foundation of incorrect assumptions and mistakes, but it was still there.

You are simply describing their stupidity in technicolor. Watch Colombo if you want to see a real policeman at work. Doing things the Perugia way you get what turns out to be an obviously dodgy document which has more of the cops' own idiotic surmise in it than actual information from the suspect. 53 hours at the questura and the crack team of interrogators come up with 'I confusedly remember Patrick did it.' Brilliant!

Actually if I want to know how cops work, I'll just talk to the ones I know pretty well rather than take Hollywood's idea of it.

I agree that they pretty much screwed the pooch in this case, but I don't believe it was from stupidity, I think it was because they thought it was going to be an open and shut case. They found a lot of evidence pointing at a suspect extremely quickly, and jumped to a conclusion, then as soon as they got something that confirmed it, they were off and running with "she told us what we already knew."

Agreed. And why did they believe this? Because they were ...

No, it certainly wasn't stupid to accept the evidence, in fact quite the opposite. They would have been stupid to have ignored it. Just because it was evidence mostly created by mistakes and misunderstands, does mean it was stupid to accept it before those mistakes and misunderstandings were realised, and after that they just weren't willing to admit that they had gotten it so wrong (an issue I see with a lot of people, even the most brilliant ones. Admitting you were wrong can be extraordinarily hard).

Words fail me.

I don't think they should fail you really. While false memories and false confession are now a well known phenomena and is pretty well understood by scientists, even people on this board have trouble accepting and understanding it when presented papers on the subject, so for a bunch of cops in Italy to not understand that they were walking Amanda right down the path into a perfect storm for a false confession is not actually that surprising. They used techniques that police have used for decades, even in the States, and only recently has there been enough study on it to understand exactly how dangerous it is and how easy it is to create false confessions doing it that way.

Ever heard of confirmation bias? They were not going to let her out of there until she had confirmed their bias? That is stupid because it is unproductive of useful new information. Four years later, we are still discussing the consequences.

I find this a really strange question, especially since my entire posting on this described exactly that, no, I didn't name it, but that is exactly what I have been describing. I have always believed that the Cops fell for a confirmation bias, that they had the pile of evidence that showed that she and Lumumba were involved and as soon as she said enough to confirm it they jumped straight to "we got them." This is why the "confessions" were so vague. If there wasn't a confirmation bias, the confession would have been far more detailed, so it vagueness shows that they already had a scenario in mind and Amanda's false confession confirmed it for them. At that point they didn't feel they needed anything more substantial, they knew Amanda and Patrick did it, and so by grabbing and interrogating Patrick like they did Amanda they'd get a confession from him too, and tie up the case in a nice bright ribbon. Case Closed. A shame for them that their confession was just Amanda parroting back what they told her in the form of false memory and confession.

 

[Bill Williams]

I haven't seen a lot of evidence that by the 3-4th they were still "vigorously investigating the other possibilities." I also don't think that Filomena taking her laptop was all the suspect. At the time she took it, they were looking at a burglary attempt, not a murder. It's not like she broke in after the cottage was closed up to take it, rather she took it from a room where the window was broken and she wasn't planning to return to for several days. She also did it right in front of the police. I don't think anyone would want to leave their laptop there under those conditions, so I don't see her actions are all that unusual or suspicious.

I'm cherry picking this one bit from your post..... to make the point that all evidence we 4 years later sift through, is through the lens of Amanda's disasterous Nov 5/6 interrogation.

I will have to check, but I believe Romanelli scoffed her own laptop after it had been secured as a crime scene, which is after the body was found and everyone had been ushered out. Acc. to Dempsey, Filomena goes into her room and "tromps around" on two occasions on the 2nd of Nov, after the police had declared the place a crime scene - as had Knox each into their own rooms.

For Filomena to declare that the broken glass was located only on top of her strewn clothes, assumes she was in the room actually lifting the clothes to look(!). Talk about disturbing a crime scene. Would THAT have escaped police's notce, as smart as you believe they are? (I do not intend "snarkiness" in saying this..... it's just that Romanelli does some very strange things, not quirky like Knox, but strange in a more-related-to-direct-evidence sort of way.)

Incredibly, she manages to slip in AGAIN past police to get her laptop from her room(!!!!!!!). When she brings it to her questioning that night down at headquarters, the investigators almost have apoplexy. They chide her for interfering with a crime scene, but leave it at that. No one is fired for missing that a suspect was allowed to tamper with evidence - a laptop for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph's sake!

As one of the two key holders, I believe that Filomena herself was in investigative peril at that time, and very well it could have been her at the infamous Nov 5-6 interrogation fingering some random name in the list of her text messages. I'm not kidding about that.

When her laptop was eventually returned, acc. to Dempsey, the harddrive had been messed with, but I am unclear how badly. Enough, though, for Filomena to notice and complain.

But the reason all this is now unavailable to amateur investigators like you and me, is that we are looking at all this through pre Nov 5/6 lens. The mountain of investigation has focussed on Knox, like a magnifying glass focussing the sun on a bug. All else has fallen by the wayside.

If they could have gotten Filomena in an interview room after midnight and had slapped her on the head a few times, it would have been an even more lurid Foxy Knoxy and Romantic Romanelli sex-crazed lesbians attacking a helpless victim assisted by two mezmerized boys....

It's just that the significance ofhow Filomena could have been pulled into this is lost in the tabloid tsunami to come aimed straight at Knox.

 

[Bill Williams]

Here's an experiment for you. Make two columns. Write down all the evidence the police had against Knox and Lumumbra at 6pm on the 5th on one side, and all the evidence that they had against Filomena on the other. Now figure out who you think would have been their prime suspect(s).

I think I explained it in my note above. Filomena scoffing a laptop, such laptop, as are they all, is returned damaged. Filomena is one leading the investigators far more than Amanda COULD, given that the latter could not speak adequate Italian. All Knox had were cartwheels and quirky, unrelated-to-the-crime behaviour.

Lumumba even less. He sent one lousy text message to an employee, gets on in return. Next thing he knos the police are busting down his door.

I think Filomena tops the list. And if the Nov 5/6 interrogation had turned up nothing against Knox, they'd have been calling in Filomena WITH her lawyer. "Tell me, Filomena, what files did you destroy on your laptop? Liar! You know something." Slap. Lawyer: "You can't do that!" Police: "Look, she's a budding lawyer herself, and if she wants to be one one day, she'll take a few more slaps until she tells us what she knows. We know she knows!"

 

[PhantomWolf]

Cruise's character "knew" nothing. Lt. Col. Markinson, who had reason to lie if he wanted to, was the one who told Kaffee. The Corporal and Private confirmed it.... but Kaffee did not "know" it, any more than the Perugian police "knew" that Knox and Lumumba had been involved.

They suspected that a key holder had been involved. They also suspected that at the Hallowe'en party, Kercher could have made a date and not told anyone else.

The only time Kaffee "knew" that Jessup had ordered a code red was when Jessup blurted it out on the stand. The only time the cops "knew" that Lumumba had been involved was when they hassled her about the "See you later" message, and coerced her into inagining meeting Lumumba.

I think you are splitting hairs between "knew" and "believe to the point of almost certainty by can't prove."

At that point it was equally likely that she'd also either imagined loaning him the key, or actually accompanying him to the flat. To get her to imagine how she'd possibly "know" that Lumumba had done it, they further pressured her to admit to being there.

I disagree, they believed they had her on tape going to the cottage so in their minds they "knew" she was there.

Up until then the list of suspects was small, and it is 20-20 hindsight to suggest that the only suspect in the pre-Nov 5/6 period was Knox. They followed her because of the key, and focused their efforts on her, simply because she was the last one, other than Raf, to be available to drag into an interrogation room. Romanelli was a lawyered-up investigative dead-end by that time.

I think that you are ignoring all the other evidence they had gathered in those 5 days. On the 5th they had more evidence against Knox than just her having a key. It was all the other evidence they had on her that make her stand out as the prime suspect, not her just having a key.

It was Amanda or nothing. And they made sure they got something, and it is my view that the cops actually talked themselves into saying after, "we knew it all along".

I disagree, the only time constrait they were under was the belief that Amanda was about to leave for the US. If she wasn't their number one suspect, or very high on their list, or they had a lot of other theories, they could have waited on the forensics and made a play then.

It is actually a fairly moot point, though, so this'll be the last kick at the cat for me on this. Whether they'd zero'd in on Knox and her alone vs. keeping investigative options open until Nov 5/6, is actually moot.

In the larger picture yes, but in relation to the charge of callunnia it does. Funnily enough, to me, your position that Amanda surprised the police with the "Patrick did it" and your claim now that she is innocent of callunnia, don't actually mesh. If it was Amanda that brought up Patrick as the killer, regardless of what Mignini or the police did, then under Italian Law she is guilty.

However, if it was the police that brought up Patrick and convinced Amanda that he was guilty and she just wasn't remembering because it was so trumatic for her, then even under Italian law I suspect she's got a good case for aquitial if there is a retrial on that one charge.

The real tragedy belongs to their arrogance once Guede is known, and he, and he alone, matches the forensics. That Mignini had to send the Scientific Police back 46 days' later to, "find something, find anything," is far more germane to this.

agreed

So that's my last kick. I'll have to live with my inability to be convincing.

Don't be too hard on yourself, the issue is you're lacking the evidence for your case, and missing the evidence that appears to contradict your claim. It's always hard to be convincing when you take a position under those circumstances.

All that also fits hitting it out of the park with their last at-bat, knowing that if they didn't do it with Knox, then all leads were dry - until Guede enters the scene, that is.

Except that all leads weren't dry, they still had a boat load of forensics coming in, and there wasn't anything saying they had to get the case solved in 5 days, so there is really no reason for their rushing it, other than they believed that it was Amanda that did it and were worried she'd flee the country if they didn't act then and there.

 

[anglolawyer]

@phantom wolf
I suggest a third column in which we write down all the 'evidence' against Patrick (it won't have much in it) and a fourth for the very simple checks which could have been made to establish his whereabouts on the night of 01/11/2007. I suppose it's against me that they probably couldn't fully exclude him because they will have had a very large TOD window to exclude him from but then it's for me that that was their fault too.

 

[freeski]

The only time the cops "knew" that Lumumba had been involved was when they hassled her about the "See you later" message, and coerced her into inagining meeting Lumumba.

Ah, I see the confusion. We're actually in agreement. You're using "knew" in the sense of proved. I'm using it in the sense of "I'm pretty damned sure, I just have to find a way to show it". That's why I capitalised KNEW. Probably I needed to put it in quotes.

At the point in the proceedings of, say, 1am Nov 6th, I am not applying legal proof semantics to what the police "know". i.e. what they "knew" before Knox's statement would never hold up in court. After her statement, then yes it would. Or rather, before her statement they couldn't touch Lumumba, whereas after it they could go and get him.

 

[Antony]

And Rudy did fall into their laps. Had the police been patient they could have worn their self awarded medals proudly. If they had aborted their initial theory when the evidence implicating Rudy surfaced they could have at least worn them with honor. But they chose to obstinately turn the medals into badges of shame. What a shame ... but it was their choice.

The episode of the medals is a curious one, and you have to wonder what the purpose of it was from the police POV. My take on it is that the police union announce the award specifically as a response to the criticism they were receiving from the Knox/Sollecito supporters.

The irony is that had they done their job properly - i.e., waited for the forensic results instead of arresting 3 innocents in haste - then Guede would have been properly convicted and sentence, the Meredith Kercher memorials would have run their course, and the case would have been consigned to being a tragedy affecting a handful of people. Few people (in world terms) would remember it 4 years on, and I doubt that medals would have been issued at all (do they routinely award medals in these kind of cases?)

Even more so, had the police and prosecution admitted to an honest mistake and released the 3 promptly (instead of frenziedly fabricating a case against Knox and Sollecito as Guede's accomplices), then I'm sure nobody would have suggested medals for the red faces involved.

 

[Antony]

...

Unlike Anglolawyer I don't believe that the police are stupid. I wouldn't put them in the Einstein end of the intellect pool either, but I think they can tie their shoelaces most of the time. Once you have excluded the break-in as being real, the early evidence really does point at Amanda. She was there when the police arrived, there was the believed calls to the Carabinieri after the Polizia had arrived, the whole showering in the bathroom without noticing the blood, the unusual behaviour (which even those that believe in her innocent have to admit was a bit quirky.) Filomena just didn't have any of that pointing at her.

...

I agree with the rest of your post, but I think they concluded the break-in was "staged" because they thought Amanda was involved, not the other way around. If there really had been reason to think that the break-in wasn't genuine, then Filomena might have been in trouble, given that it was in her room.

 

[anglolawyer]

@phantom wolf

I think we may be using different definitions of 'stupid'. Mine involves not applying intelligence and reasoning to the facts and, anterior to that, not getting the facts straight when it would have been easy to have done so (e.g. How about checking Patrick's phone? Maybe he didn't delete his side of the text message and it would have turned out not to say, 'let's meet up and confusedly kill Meredith'?). And I really do think you would be better off watching Columbo.

 

[Grinder]

Bill,

Please provide a non-Dempsey proof of Filomena sneaking into her room the next day and taking her laptop. My memory of this event is that she went into her room at the request of the PP and at that time or just after that retrieved the laptop.

Of course, the interrogation changed the entire investigation and the perception of Amanda.

You came to this forum proclaiming that you were a guilter because you thought she should have been convicted of calunnia but that she should receive no sentence. It's good you have come around. It seems that now you need to make more out of this conversion.

I'm with the comment that you're splitting hairs. The police "knew" that Amanda and Patrick were involved and the chief's comments the next day made it clear. It was also made clear by Amanda's notes, in that they stated that the police questioned her until they heard what they wanted.

Filomena had an alibi that included more than just her boyfriend. Now I've had fun with PGP saying it could be Filomena if the TOD is a vague as they claim. I believe that the TOD was too early to include Filomena and early reports were that Patrick had no witness or proof that he was in the bar before 10:30. Pretty clear that the ILE had the correct earlier TOD at the beginning and only moved it later to accommodate Curatolo and Nara.

 

[Grinder]

To any PGP,

Why didn't Amanda give the police hints that it was Rudy? Why would she have left the evidence of Rudy if she didn't want him caught?

I see that now in an expanding round of racist charges against Amanda it is speculated that she knew she was being recorded and therefore named Shaky in a conversation in order to have the police suspect him. Why would she mention him and not Rudy?

In terms of the overall theory of the PGP this is the greatest single weakness. Why set him up and then finger others?

Of course, the idea they cleaned and were able to only leave Rudy's DNA etc. is ridiculous.

 

[Bill Williams]

Ah, I see the confusion. We're actually in agreement. You're using "knew" in the sense of proved. I'm using it in the sense of "I'm pretty damned sure, I just have to find a way to show it". That's why I capitalised KNEW. Probably I needed to put it in quotes.

At the point in the proceedings of, say, 1am Nov 6th, I am not applying legal proof semantics to what the police "know". i.e. what they "knew" before Knox's statement would never hold up in court. After her statement, then yes it would. Or rather, before her statement they couldn't touch Lumumba, whereas after it they could go and get him.

I don't think we're in agreement here. They may have suspected Lumumbam but they also questioned Knox heavily earlier about Shaky. Remember, my thing here is that even until 10 pm Nov 5, they only reason they thought Knox interesting was because she had a key. And in the "follow the key" meme, she was one of two equally suspicious people, the other being Romanelli, who had the added suspicion attached to her of scoffing her own laptop from behind crimescene tape!

And there were other memes, one of which was, "Who did Meredith meet at the Halloe'en party who she might have invited over, or attracted enough attention to want to break in the next night?"

So, then, the "knew" of Lumumba is only as a possibility among many. With the "See you later", they thought they'd found the mother lode at El Dorado!

Because if they hadn't had this "wild stroke of luck", by the time Knox and Sollecito were hypothetically let go at 6 am, the police would officially be out of easily followed leads.

They'd have been scratching their heads until Guede came on the radar.

I also think that the reason Giobbi after-the-fact made such a big deal about hip swivels, cartwheels and pizza eating (when she should have been home crying) is to suggest that he had "proof" apart from Mignini's imposed "spontaneity" upon Knox.

That's right, I think Giobbi risked being thought a fool because he knew darned well that Mignini's tactics at interrogation were eventually going to backfire.

Either that, or it was a good old fashioned ego war between Giobbi and Mignini, "I solved it, he only confirmed it," was something both could say.

But if it is true that Giobbi was a witness to Knox's 10 pm - 1:45 am interrogation, he would have known there was nothing "spontaneous" about what Knox had claimed.

So I now believe he's minimizing the significance of Mignini's interrogaiton mess, he now has to justify why he (Giobbi) thought Knox was suspicious. And he said what he said about hips and pizzas, risking sounding stupid, as a way of distancing himself from Mignini who he knew had done something illegal (as the Italian Supreme Court bore out!).

To us lay-prognosticators, all this gets post-hoc harmonized into someone called the generic "The Police". As in "The Police" suspected Knox all along.

No they didn't. People like Giobbi, after the fact, had to invent these back-stories which only became interesting once:

1) the quirky Knox and unspontaneous was a suspect, and
2) many of them knew Mignini had bullied a gormless foreigner into a false confession.

They needed to cover their own asses.

It's us who have harmonized these stories into a not-so-coherent whole.

So, no, I do not think we're in agreement.

 

[Bill Williams]

I agree with the rest of your post, but I think they concluded the break-in was "staged" because they thought Amanda was involved, not the other way around. If there really had been reason to think that the break-in wasn't genuine, then Filomena might have been in trouble, given that it was in her room.

Sorry Anthony, I don't buy this at all.

The "staged" nature of the break-in was one of the very first things claimed, by Postal Police, then by Romanelli, then by Profazio. All this before 1:45 pm on Nov 2. The record shows, including Knox's 2009 court testimony, that they quizzed her repeated on the key.

It was only after her imaginings about Lumumba on Nov 5/6 that the police put Knox in the cottage at the time of the murder. Up until then she had had all her other imaginings proved wrong about the crime. No, it was not a foot sticking out of the closet.

 

[Bill Williams]

I think that you are ignoring all the other evidence they had gathered in those 5 days. On the 5th they had more evidence against Knox than just her having a key. It was all the other evidence they had on her that make her stand out as the prime suspect, not her just having a key.

Ok, now you've got me. I said I was going to let this lie.... here I am posting....

What "other evidence"? Please read what I wrote to Anthony about the way we harmonize the various individual law-enforcement people as "The Police", as if they are a single entity. What "other evidence"?

If you're going to bring up Giobbi's "evidence" as "other evidence", I think that has more to do with Giobbi's post-hoc claims about why he was "so sure" about Knox in the Nov 2-5 period. He's actually trying to distance himself from Mignini - either for his own ego reasons ("I solved it, he only confirmed it") or because he knew what Mignini did at interrogation was:

1) illegal
2) non-spontaneous and actually planted evidence into Knox's imaginings

and Giobbi knew he was going to need a back-door.

This use of the term "all the other evidence" is a perfect example of the way we harmonize "The Police" as a single entity. They are not. They are egos in their own right.

I disagree, the only time constrait they were under was the belief that Amanda was about to leave for the US. If she wasn't their number one suspect, or very high on their list, or they had a lot of other theories, they could have waited on the forensics and made a play then.

Pul-eeeeeze! Sorry for the snarkiness, but "the only time constraint"? Whereas people think that it is suspicious that the whole investigative anti-Mafia team were there on the night of Nov 5/6, I don't. It's because all those people had been told to cancel all holidays, say goodbye to their spouses, girlfriends and boyfriends for the next month - and don't bother sleeping. Eat when you can, because when Mignini wants you somewhere 24/7, you'd better be there.

The import of the murder of a foreign co-ed in a university town WAS the pressure to get this cased closed ASAP. "The only time constraint" was Amanda? Pull-ease. "They could have waited on the forensics"? o they couldn't. They were in a pressure cooker, and no one had slept for 5 days. The international media had descended on little ol' Perugia like locusts.... clerks at the Questura were being offered bucks for interviews..... the smallest rumour showed up in a British tabloid headline.

I apologize for the snarkiness but I can't believe someone is claiming that the police were willing to be patient. This one really has got my dander up!

In the larger picture yes, but in relation to the charge of callunnia it does. Funnily enough, to me, your position that Amanda surprised the police with the "Patrick did it" and your claim now that she is innocent of callunnia, don't actually mesh. If it was Amanda that brought up Patrick as the killer, regardless of what Mignini or the police did, then under Italian Law she is guilty.

However, if it was the police that brought up Patrick and convinced Amanda that he was guilty and she just wasn't remembering because it was so trumatic for her, then even under Italian law I suspect she's got a good case for aquitial if there is a retrial on that one charge.

Sorry. As a recent recanter, and as someone still a little sheepish about the whole thing, permit me some defensive comments.

Your second sentence in the box above is a tiny misrepresentation of what I'm claiming. Just a tiny one, but one that makes all the difference.

Amanda did, in fact, surprise the police with the "Patrick did it", but they were the ones who brought Patrick into the room. They were the ones saying they "already had proof" and that "all you'd be doing would be confirming what we already know."

And they were not doing this (is this not the very point we're fighting about?) because they "knew" anything about Patrick, but they were simply going to push this meme until it either wrecked on the rocks, or until that 1 in a million things happened...... Knox eventually (not spontaneously, but eventually) inagines what could have happened if the police are demanding that they have evidence against Lumumba, which of course they did not. They were on a fishing trip.

Add to this, that once they'd finished with their high fives that they'd caught a BIG fish.... one of the cops gets the bright idea to ask Konx, "Wait a minute, how then would you know Lumumba did it," similar to the question they'd trapped Sollecito with - "If you were asleep, how'd you know she DIDN'T go out?"

So Knox, definitely not spontaneously, but under leading by the inquisators, then imagined herself there....

Rather than supporting calunnia, this destroys calunnia.

Is this a defensive enough post?

Don't be too hard on yourself, the issue is you're lacking the evidence for your case, and missing the evidence that appears to contradict your claim. It's always hard to be convincing when you take a position under those circumstances.

But I am also saying that the evidence you claim is all post-hoc reasoning. It's equally jard..... ok, I'll avoid the snark on this one, lest the moderators intervene.