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

[anglolawyer]

I would guess that they ignore the recording requirement on a regular basis. I don't think they only should be criticized in this case. Frank wrote many posts about widespread behavior problems of the police in Italy. People that "fell down" and injured themselves so severely they died.

Do you think they hit her? What parts of her testimony about the interrogations don't you believe and why?

PS this is a set up.

 

[Grinder]

Do you think they hit her? What parts of her testimony about the interrogations don't you believe and why?

PS this is a set up.

I'm sure you have a list of my posts that you can use out-of-context to make me look like I erased the message myself.

Yes, I think they hit her, even if she says they hit her, which somehow probably means the opposite to you.

Of hand, I believe her testimony about the interrogations even if there is a passage you dug up that could be interpreted to mean they showed her Patrick's text.

 

[acbytesla]

I think Anglo's right about the text, but it is not enough come to " a finding that police deleted the text". It like all these arguments about whether Raffaele, was talking about Halloween or the night of the murder, or Amanda saying "she was there" to her mom.

Language is precise, but people's use of language is not and mis-communication happens all the time. People are using these statements which may be simple misunderstandings or they are using them out of context, either innocently or with malicious intent.

Give me something solid that is dependable. Eyewitness testimonies in the best of circumstances is notoriously bad and unreliable, but with homeless heroin addicts, or other witnesses that come forth after a year? If I was a judge, I wouldn't have let anyone of the three testify in my court.

The police had the opportunity to provide the court with reliable evidence by recording the interviews, by not doing so, they left a lot up to interpretation and open to suspicion of malfeasance.

 

[anglolawyer]

I'm sure you have a list of my posts that you can use out-of-context to make me look like I erased the message myself.

Hadn't thought of that. Good idea.

Yes, I think they hit her, even if she says they hit her, which somehow probably means the opposite to you.

No, I think they hit her too, even though she says they did. This is the set up part. If you believe they would hit her (illegal) threaten her (illegal) deprive her of representation to which they knew she was entitled (unlawful) deprive of sleep, comfort, refreshment, frighten her, make her scream for help, call her a whore, induce her to admit her presence at the scene (all bad) what's wrong with getting rid of an inconvenient SMS?

Of hand, I believe her testimony about the interrogations even if there is a passage you dug up that could be interpreted to mean they showed her Patrick's text.

Well I believe her account in a general way but it can't be expected she can give a verbatim account of what happened. No one could. She wasn't taking notes, there was a language barrier, people were coming in and out, shouting and gabbling all around her over a period of hours. I would expect her to recall fragments, like the ones I rely on.

Equally, I would disbelieve her if she said she deleted the text (she never did expressly say so however) unless she swore to a ruthlessly anal OCD. That was not her evidence either. As LJ has pointed out, the likelihood is she selected the 'reply' option and would not have been cycled back and prompted to delete. She turned the phone off. She was stoned. Just when do you think she deleted the message, having no subsequent recollection of receiving it let alone scrubbing it? The next morning? Later in the week? She dived into her phone and got all neat and tidy with her incoming texts.

I doubt it but if she did and if the cops were locked into their theory as you rightly say they were, why weren't they bothered at finding that message gone?

 

[Dan O.]

Equally, I would disbelieve her if she said she deleted the text (she never did expressly say so however) unless she swore to a ruthlessly anal OCD. That was not her evidence either. As LJ has pointed out, the likelihood is she selected the 'reply' option and would not have been cycled back and prompted to delete. She turned the phone off. She was stoned. Just when do you think she deleted the message, having no subsequent recollection of receiving it let alone scrubbing it? The next morning? Later in the week? She dived into her phone and got all neat and tidy with her incoming texts.

Why could she not have deleted the message right after sending the reply to Lumumba? You mention having to cycle around to get back to the original message. But isn't that what she would naturally do? She picks up her phone after watching Amalie and checks for received messages. She finds the message from Patrick and sends a reply. She continues checking new messages and there are no more so the phone starts listing the old messages. This is the message from Patrick which she just replied to so she deletes it to keep it from comming up again. This all happens withing 5 minutes after the movie ended.

I doubt it but if she did and if the cops were locked into their theory as you rightly say they were, why weren't they bothered at finding that message gone?

Who's to say they weren't. That seems to be the point where they stopped being nice to Amanda.

 

[anglolawyer]

Why could she not have deleted the message right after sending the reply to Lumumba? You mention having to cycle around to get back to the original message. But isn't that what she would naturally do? She picks up her phone after watching Amalie and checks for received messages. She finds the message from Patrick and sends a reply. She continues checking new messages and there are no more so the phone starts listing the old messages. This is the message from Patrick which she just replied to so she deletes it to keep it from comming up again. This all happens withing 5 minutes after the movie ended.




Who's to say they weren't. That seems to be the point where they stopped being nice to Amanda.

Just on your last point Dan - the correct tenor of Lumumba's message is in the 1.45 statement. Why? If the cops have turned her to putty, why is her account of what the text said in there? It sort of stands out like a beacon and it's against the narrative they are expecting from her.

Her 1.45 statement makes no sense at all. She says she got a message saying 'bar closed don't come' so she tells a lie to Raffaele and goes out immediately. There's nothing about a code (Grinder's theory) and nothing about deletion. Why don't they get her to say what they wanted and expected the message to say? They had no problems with the rest of the story.

 

[Grinder]

Just on your last point Dan - the correct tenor of Lumumba's message is in the 1.45 statement. Why? If the cops have turned her to putty, why is her account of what the text said in there? It sort of stands out like a beacon and it's against the narrative they are expecting from her.

Her 1.45 statement makes no sense at all. She says she got a message saying 'bar closed don't come' so she tells a lie to Raffaele and goes out immediately. There's nothing about a code (Grinder's theory) and nothing about deletion. Why don't they get her to say what they wanted and expected the message to say? They had no problems with the rest of the story.

Grinder didn't say it was code, just that they could have said it was code, if they were somehow bothered that his message didn't say " let's meet right now so I can be let into your house and screw Meredith". They never expressed an issue with his message except Matteini saying the disagreement between the two of them was evidence of someone lying or whatever her pea brain came up with.

They didn't make up a message because they didn't need to. The real contents of the message worked just fine, didn't it? They didn't have a problem with the message. You don't know if they had a problem with the rest of the story. They questioned her until she got it right which obviously means that she didn't right until the end.

At 5:45 they didn't know if the message was still on Patrick's phone, if Patrick's wife had seen the harmless text or I'll bet they didn't know if the carrier Amanda and/or Patrick were using might have the text on file.

 

[anglolawyer]

Grinder didn't say it was code, just that they could have said it was code

I know this

, if they were somehow bothered that his message didn't say " let's meet right now so I can be let into your house and screw Meredith". They never expressed an issue with his message except Matteini saying the disagreement between the two of them was evidence of someone lying or whatever her pea brain came up with.

That they may have been 'bothered' is evidenced by the figurative 'deletion' of the text from the 5.45 narrative. Tell us why it disappeared from there if they weren't bothered.

They didn't make up a message because they didn't need to. The real contents of the message worked just fine, didn't it

?
No!! The real contents were dismissed as a lie by Matteini because they were unacceptable!

They didn't have a problem with the message. You don't know if they had a problem with the rest of the story. They questioned her until she got it right which obviously means that she didn't right until the end.

The problems with the 1.45 version were fixed in the 5.45 document. IMO that's what it was for. What do you think it was for?

At 5:45 they didn't know if the message was still on Patrick's phone, if Patrick's wife had seen the harmless text or I'll bet they didn't know if the carrier Amanda and/or Patrick were using might have the text on file.

They arrested Patrick at 3.30 so they probably picked up his phone at the same time. Easy enough to check and delete (if necessary). It is clear that Italan carriers did not preserve text content in 2007. The cops would have known this and it doesn't freaking matter anyway! Oh, God - How many times must I explain .... ?

 

[LondonJohn]

Why could she not have deleted the message right after sending the reply to Lumumba? You mention having to cycle around to get back to the original message. But isn't that what she would naturally do? She picks up her phone after watching Amalie and checks for received messages. She finds the message from Patrick and sends a reply. She continues checking new messages and there are no more so the phone starts listing the old messages. This is the message from Patrick which she just replied to so she deletes it to keep it from comming up again. This all happens withing 5 minutes after the movie ended..

Well no, that's not how it works in practice. On (to my knowledge) every single GSM handset in 2007, if person A sent a text message to person B, then provided person B's handset was switched on at the time, the default "homescreen" of person B's handset (usually showing the network operator's name, and perhaps the time and date) would be augmented or replaced with a message along the lines of "New message, from person A, received at hh:mm". Person B would then have the option of using a designated menu button to retrieve the contents of this text message.

Having accessed the message's contents on screen, one of the menu buttons (probably the same one as was used to access the message contents previously) would be marked "options". Pressing this button would bring up a menu list of options for manipulating the message. One of them would be "delete", and another would be "reply". Selecting "reply" would auto-generate an outgoing text message addressed to person A, ready for person B to type in the message contents. Likewise, once person B had composed the reply message, pressing a menu button marked "send" would send the reply message to person A.

But what would happen next is the important thing. The screen on person B's handset would then return to the default "homescreen". This is exactly as person B would wish the screen to look, pending another incoming call or text message. There would be no need to "delete it (person A's original message) to keep it from coming up again" (as per your argument). The text message would not "keep coming up again" - it would just sit in the inbox. Perhaps you were thinking of voice mail messages?

Therefore, at this point it would be both time-consuming and somewhat superfluous for person B to go into the menu screens to find the text inbox, to select the message from person A, and to delete that message. The easy (default?) thing to do would be to do nothing once the reply had been sent - the phone would now be showing the normal "homescreen", and there would be no further annoying notifications of person A's incoming text message. The only possible downside is that person A's text would still be sitting quietly in person B's inbox, taking up a small portion of the phone's memory.

 

[Grinder]

They arrested Patrick at 3.30 so they probably picked up his phone at the same time. Easy enough to check and delete (if necessary). It is clear that Italan carriers did not preserve text content in 2007. The cops would have known this and it doesn't freaking matter anyway! Oh, God - How many times must I explain .... ?

At 6.30am on Tuesday, November 6, the bell to his fourth-floor flat in the town buzzed insistently and a woman's voice outside demanded he opened the door. He had barely had time to do so when the woman, assisted by, Patrick estimates, 15 to 20 others, barged their way in.
"They were wearing normal clothes and carrying guns," he says. "I thought it must be some sort of armed gang about to kill me. I was terrified.
"They hit me over the head and yelled 'dirty black'. Then they put handcuffs on me and shoved me out of the door, as Aleksandra pulled Davide away, screaming."
He was greeted outside by a convoy of seven police cars, sirens blazing, and driven to Perugia's police station, where he was subjected to a ten-hour interrogation.

 

[LondonJohn]

At 6.30am on Tuesday, November 6, the bell to his fourth-floor flat in the town buzzed insistently and a woman's voice outside demanded he opened the door. He had barely had time to do so when the woman, assisted by, Patrick estimates, 15 to 20 others, barged their way in.
"They were wearing normal clothes and carrying guns," he says. "I thought it must be some sort of armed gang about to kill me. I was terrified.
"They hit me over the head and yelled 'dirty black'. Then they put handcuffs on me and shoved me out of the door, as Aleksandra pulled Davide away, screaming."
He was greeted outside by a convoy of seven police cars, sirens blazing, and driven to Perugia's police station, where he was subjected to a ten-hour interrogation.

Yes, I think Anglo got mixed up over the time of Lumumba's arrest.

Gosh, reading those directly-quoted words of Lumumba again makes me wonder just why Mignini didn't perform his "mandatory" duty and file defamation charges against Lumumba? Surely Mignini, by his own admission, is FORCED to file charges? But yet neither Mignini nor the police filed any charges against Lumumba for these explicit and extremely serious accusations. I'm terribly confused.....

 

[Grinder]

A chilling text message predicting Meredith Kercher's death was revealed today.

The message saying "For me, tomorrow or tonight Meredith dies" was sent two days before the London exchange student was found dead in a pool of blood after her throat was cut.

Detectives are now using electronic records to find who sent it.

According to respected Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, a man received the message on his mobile phone from a number he did not recognise on 30 October.

Presuming the message was sent by mistake, the man deleted it but this week, after hearing reports of Meredith's murder, he contacted police in Rome where he lives.

Detectives are said to be trawling through records to retrieve the message and check if it was sent by one of the suspects - American student Amanda Knox, 20, her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, and Congolese bar owner Diya Lumumba, 38.

 

[Grinder]

IIRC my dear old Nokia 8103 would let me delete the incoming text and still allow a reply if I left just one text in the thread. In order to save storage space I would often delete messages that had no reason to be kept.

She said that it was her policy to delete incoming texts to save space and I see no reason to say she was lying about that.

People develop routines. Message comes in and one replies and goes back to incoming and delete, no big deal.

 

[Dan O.]

...
Therefore, at this point it would be both time-consuming and somewhat superfluous for person B to go into the menu screens to find the text inbox, to select the message from person A, and to delete that message. The easy (default?) thing to do would be to do nothing once the reply had been sent - the phone would now be showing the normal "homescreen", and there would be no further annoying notifications of person A's incoming text message. The only possible downside is that person A's text would still be sitting quietly in person B's inbox, taking up a small portion of the phone's memory.

And what about the case where the phone had been set aside for a couple of hours while watching a movie. Does the incomming text remain on the home screen indefinitely? And, in that situation, would Amanda know that if there were a second message received in the same time period that the other message would be presented on the home screen and she wouldn't need to go into the menus to retrieve it?

I'm just not buying the theory that Simone Tacconi hatched this plan to delete Patrick's message from Amanda's phone mere moments after acquiring access to that phone. Especially after showing that very message to Amanda. Not only are there othe repositories where that text might be found, the phone itself would retain the residual of the message and perhaps even an event log that would prove exactly who did the deed. I might find it plausible that he accidentally hit the delete button and deleted the text but doesn't the phone require confirmation for this?

 

[Grinder]

Yes, I think Anglo got mixed up over the time of Lumumba's arrest.

Gosh, reading those directly-quoted words of Lumumba again makes me wonder just why Mignini didn't perform his "mandatory" duty and file defamation charges against Lumumba? Surely Mignini, by his own admission, is FORCED to file charges? But yet neither Mignini nor the police filed any charges against Lumumba for these explicit and extremely serious accusations. I'm terribly confused.....

Yes it is a wonder that he and Hoyles weren't frog walked into prison and charged with criminal slander.

It is also noteworthy that his recordings haven't been seen. Why didn't his lawyer sue for the mistreatment not just the jail time?

I think it is normal for the police to ignore the recording requirement.

 

[Grinder]

I'm just not buying the theory that Simone Tacconi hatched this plan to delete Patrick's message from Amanda's phone mere moments after acquiring access to that phone. Especially after showing that very message to Amanda. Not only are there othe repositories where that text might be found, the phone itself would retain the residual of the message and perhaps even an event log that would prove exactly who did the deed. I might find it plausible that he accidentally hit the delete button and deleted the text but doesn't the phone require confirmation for this?

I agree that it is possible that he deleted it by accident. I don't remember needing to confirm a text deletion but phones vary. I think had he deleted by accident, they would have said so, in that the contents of the text as brought out were not of consequence.

 

[LondonJohn]

And what about the case where the phone had been set aside for a couple of hours while watching a movie. Does the incomming text remain on the home screen indefinitely? And, in that situation, would Amanda know that if there were a second message received in the same time period that the other message would be presented on the home screen and she wouldn't need to go into the menus to retrieve it?

I'm just not buying the theory that Simone Tacconi hatched this plan to delete Patrick's message from Amanda's phone mere moments after acquiring access to that phone. Especially after showing that very message to Amanda. Not only are there othe repositories where that text might be found, the phone itself would retain the residual of the message and perhaps even an event log that would prove exactly who did the deed. I might find it plausible that he accidentally hit the delete button and deleted the text but doesn't the phone require confirmation for this?

Yes, the notification of the incoming message (note: not the contents of the message, just the notification of its receipt) would remain indefinitely on the screen of the mobile. If a second message were then received, the screen would change to show notification of two received text messages. But in this instance, there's actually no suggestion that Knox received any other text messages during this particular time period.

Note also that I am not altogether convinced of the theory that the police deleted Lumuba's incoming text from Knox's phone. I am merely demonstrating that the vagaries of the menu systems meant that if one replied directly to a text on these sorts of handsets, it was far from unusual to leave the incoming text undeleted in the inbox - even if one's normal habit was to delete incoming messages once they had been read.

 

[tronic]

Tronic, you can clearly tell by this conversation that there was a mis-communication between Mansey and Sollecito. It is clear as day to me that Rafffaele was talking about Halloween night and not the night of the murder.

Completely False. I was aware of Sollecitos account of Halloween where he has his face painted, Knox also dressed up. I hadn't related that myself with the night in question, the night Kate Mansey (Daily Mirror) was questioning Sollecito about. Sollecito is adamant in that interview that he was talking to Mansey about the night of the murder. He was talking about it as he was ghoulishly accounting his involvement.

Louie on .net kindly pointed out that Sollecito re-counted this in his book. I have posted Sollecitos own account of Halloween here. He'd mentioned it before in his prison diary.

Also. Why did he say in the Kate Mansey interview that it was he and Knox who discovered the body of Meredith Kercher?

(in relation to this):
Sollecito claims that on the 31st he went to a graduation ceremony/celebration without Knox, and that he only saw her in the late afternoon when he painted her face like a cat for halloween, and she went out alone, while he stayed home and studied. Knox claims to have spent the day with Spiros, drinking coffee with him in the afternoon, and clubbing/drinking with him (Spiros) at night.

Do they really think the account Sollecito gave Mansey for November 1 sounds anything like their accounts for October 31? Throw in the fact that Sollecito (who describes himself as possessive of Knox) just found out that she had another boyfriend (DJ) and she was planning to meet him in China in December. I think from the POV of a jealous boyfriend, the accounts of the 31st and 1st are not even close.

SOLLECITO’S ACCOUNT OF OCTOBER 31, 2007
Quote:
October 31 was the first day since our meeting that Amanda and I spent almost completely apart. In the morning I was invited to a friend’s graduation ceremony, and I went to another friend’s house for much of the afternoon. Amanda had class, then focused on her plans for Halloween, a big deal for Perugia’s foreign students, though it meant nothing to us Italians. She and I did not meet up until late afternoon, at which point she drew cat whiskers on her face in makeup and, knowing my passion for Japanese comics, scrawled an abstract design on me. I didn’t feel like going out, so I worked on my thesis while Amanda walked over to Le Chic to meet up with some of her friends there.

Sollecito, Raffaele; Gumbel, Andrew (2012-09-18). Honor Bound (Kindle Locations 311-316). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

KNOX’S ACCOUNT OF OCTOBER 31, 2007

Quote:
MIGNINI: So it was just about a week before the facts, more or
less. Now, on the afternoon and evening of Oct 31, can you tell
us what you did?
AK: In the evening?
MIGNINI: Afternoon and evening.
AK: So, in the afternoon, I remember that I met a friend for
coffee, my friend Spiros. We had coffee in the center, and then
in the street when I was going back to meet Raffaele, I was still
with him and I met someone I had gotten to know at "Le Chic", who
said "We'll see each other later at Le Chic"...
MIGNINI: You said "We'll see each other later?"
AK: Yes, yes.
MIGNINI: To whom? To Raffaele's friend?
AK: No, no. It was my friend, that I had gotten to know in a bar,
a cafe that also had internet service, and then, okay. What
happened next? [Longpause with sound 'ummmmm', 'hmmm'.] Did I go
home? I can't remember.
MIGNINI: You can't remember.
AK: And then, for Halloween, I know I went to Le Chic first, and
then after I was there for a little while, I again met Spiros,
outside the Merlin, and we went to a place with a bunch of his
friends, I can't remember what place it was now, a kind of Irish
pub, and then he...I said I was tired and wanted to meet Raffaele
in the center, and so he accompanied me on foot to near the
church, where I met Raffaele, who took me to his apartment.

SOLLECITO'S ACCOUNT OF NOVEMBER 1 AS TOLD TO KATE MANSEY

Quote:
'Tell me about what happened that night,' Mansey said.
'Meredith has been out at the Halloween party", Raffaele said.
Mansey corrected him, saying this had been the night before the murder. 'So what was she doing that night?' she asked.
'I was out with Amanda at a party and Meredith was at a Halloween party with her friends', Raffaele said.
Mansey corrected him again. Raffaele looked irritated. 'Amanda and I had been out to a party and we went back to my place', he said.
'Who were you with?' Mansey asked.
'One of my friends', Raffaele replied.
'You are sure it wasn't Halloween night?'
'No, no, it was that Thursday night.' Raffaele insisted- the night of the murder.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Completely False. I was aware of Sollecitos account of Halloween where he has his face painted, Knox also dressed up. I hadn't related that myself with the night in question, the night Kate Mansey (Daily Mirror) was questioning Sollecito about. Sollecito is adamant in that interview that he was talking to Mansey about the night of the murder. He was talking about it as he was ghoulishly accounting his involvement.

Louie on .net kindly pointed out that Sollecito re-counted this in his book. I have posted Sollecitos own account of Halloween here. He'd mentioned it before in his prison diary.

What do you think this contradiction amounts to?

I'm assuming you aren't running the tired old game where a pro-guilt poster tries to establish that Knox or Sollecito got something wrong, and then acts as if it proves they are guilty if they did.

Given the extremely powerful evidence that those two weren't there at Meredith Kercher's time of death, no errors or even lies (assuming you can establish by some miraculous means that an error was deliberate) seem likely to lead a rational person to think they are guilty given that people make errors all the time.

Fixating on those two are this late stage just seems wilfully bizarre. Knox and Sollecito had no motive, cannot be linked to the scene of the crime and have a very solid alibi based on computer records preserved by the police themselves. There have to be literally hundreds of Perugians with no alibi who are better suspects than Knox and Sollecito, if for some bizarre reason you are convinced more than one person was involved in Meredith Kercher's murder.

Also. Why did he say in the Kate Mansey interview that it was he and Knox who discovered the body of Meredith Kercher?

I'm really not sure what point you are making here. That statement isn't wrong, just somewhat imprecise. They raised the alarm and were there when the body was discovered. People speak imprecisely all the time. But even if it were totally wrong, how could that have any implications for their guilt or innocence?

Life isn't an Agatha Christie novel, where if any character says anything which isn't precisely correct then it is a vital clue.

 

[anglolawyer]

At 6.30am on Tuesday, November 6, the bell to his fourth-floor flat in the town buzzed insistently and a woman's voice outside demanded he opened the door. He had barely had time to do so when the woman, assisted by, Patrick estimates, 15 to 20 others, barged their way in.
"They were wearing normal clothes and carrying guns," he says. "I thought it must be some sort of armed gang about to kill me. I was terrified.
"They hit me over the head and yelled 'dirty black'. Then they put handcuffs on me and shoved me out of the door, as Aleksandra pulled Davide away, screaming."
He was greeted outside by a convoy of seven police cars, sirens blazing, and driven to Perugia's police station, where he was subjected to a ten-hour interrogation.

Fat finger syndrome.

Whenever they arrested him, deleting the message would be on their list of Things To Do. No biggie. I like Dan O's idea that the phone knows who deletes the messages. Wot? Even if it did you can bet you can't think of a problem that a determined police force can't fix or hide away from all but the most insistent and resolute inspection and sometimes not even that would be enough.

The defence applies for an order releasing the phone for examination - application refused. Appeal. Appeal allowed. Phone casing released. WTF! Give us the rest of it. Application to the judge. Order made. Phone innards released. No surviving data due to being accidentally stored in Monica's bathtub. And by this time plenty of other evidence has been manufactured come to light anyway.

These are not serious objections.