A
lawyer would have had to have been present for a confession, the police didn't want lawyers involved as they told both Raffaele and Amanda and their actions indicate. What they did was yell at Raffaele about what Amanda did that night until they convinced him that must have been the night Amanda went to
Le Chic. He didn't know for sure and they wouldn't let him check a calender, they wanted a statement to that effect and he signed it after being threatened if he tried to leave and not being able to call a lawyer or his father.
They then took Amanda into that room and went over her actions that night and again she fails to tell them about Patrick's text the night of the murder. As Arturo di Felice would say shortly after the arrest, quoted
here by Malcolm Moore et al of the Telegraph:
They had Raffaele and Amanda wiretapped, they (and the defense) would produce evidence of conversations between Amanda and Raffaele in court, they had access to her mobile phone records which recorded texts between Patrick and Amanda right before Meredith left for the cottage from her night with the English girls. Patrick had just met Amanda the day of the interrogations in a manner that might have looked suspicious, previously he'd called down to the
Questura (the night of the discovery IIRC) to check on Amanda, the police might have thought they were putting two and two together and they called Raffaele in and got a 'confirmation' that Amanda hadn't been with Raffaele and had gone to
Le Chic.
So with Amanda readily at hand being as she'd tagged along with Raffaele to the
Questura as she was afraid to be alone with a murderer on the loose, they took her into that room and after going through it again without her mentioning the text (as it really had nothing to do with the murder) they told her they had 'hard evidence' she was at the cottage, that Raffaele had 'dropped' her alibi and she had to stop protecting the murderer or she'd be going to jail for thirty years and would never see her mother again, amongst other pleasantries.
She'd told them
again and again what she knew, what they were asking her for was what she
didn't know but they claimed they had proof had happened. These weren't straighforward questions at all, they were about something the police said they had 'hard evidence' of that Amanda had no recollection of. So they told her that she might have 'repressed the memory due to trauma' as Anna Domino testified to, and they thrust the cellphone in front of her face and demanded she recall who it was, insistent it had something to do with the murder, and started hitting her upside the back of the head, 'to help her remember' and she recalled it was Patrick, and summoned metal images of Patrick, by the basketball courts, by the door of the cottage, just like she details in her note the day of the arrests, the best contemporaneous account of what Amanda was
actually thinking about the night of the interrogations, with no translator, no statement typed up by police in a language she could barely read,
her own words.
She probably 'leaps to the arrest of Patrick' because what happened in between those sentences was what would ruin her life and is probably very difficult to explain to someone who hasn't been surrounded by police yelling and threatening them about something that didn't happen in the middle of the night in a week of high stress and little sleep. They managed to convince her they must have been right and those mental images were related to the murder and she'd 'repressed' that. In simple terms they
gaslit her. As Arturo di Felice
also put it at that press conference:
They 'knew' that Amanda and Patrick had exchanged texts and thought it meant they met up the night of the murder, as the phrase Amanda used to say 'see you later' comes across in Italian more like 'see you soon' which implies a (definite) future meeting. They ignored the signing off of 'good night' which ought to have suggested that perhaps the foreign exchange student with only a semester of Italian and a couple months in Italy didn't mean it that way. Now
here are what they thought were the 'facts we knew to be correct' from the two statements Amanda signed in the middle of the night, exhausted, stressed and without a lawyer:
I've stripped all the official wording out of it and the description of Patrick and his bar and the cell phone numbers to pare it down to what the 'facts we knew to be correct' could have been. As you can see there's almost nothing there concrete outside the fact she received a text from Patrick and replied, everything else is qualified with how "confused" she was starting with when she (supposedly) left the cottage, then not being able to recall if Meredith was there, she struggles to remember the moment that Patrick had sex with Meredith, (because he didn't) can't remember if there were anything threats and then she "confusedly recalls that he killed her."
Now here's the 5:45 Statement, at this point Mignini is involved, the above happened (mainly) as the result of
Polizia di Stato officers from the
Questura, Raffo, Ficarra and Zugarini, listed in the officialese I snipped but can be found at the links above. The part following the statements and which ends the document is telling:
At this point she's supposedly a suspect, and as such subject to protections under Italian law, which would require a lawyer and taping, the latter something they had no problem doing other times she was in this room giving previous statements, or other rooms of the
Questura, or even talking to Raffaele on her cell phone as would be revealed in court. This part, and all of that night is
missing from their otherwise obsessive surveillance of Amanda. Here is the 5:45 AM statement, again stripped of the officialese and which came at the culmination of 53 of 89 hours she'd spent with police since the postal police arrived at the cottage at roughly 1 PM on the second:
Again, outside the text message exchange there's no
facts here that aren't qualified by "I do not recall exactly," "It seems to me" "I cannot recall," "I don't remember anything anymore, I am very confused in my head," "I do not recall," "I was imagining" and she's "not sure whether Raffaele was present." The only new 'fact' here is the scream which she testified in court as happening as a result of being led through the statement by Mignini (and others) and being asked why she didn't hear it, and she volunteered that maybe she'd covered her ears. "Fine, we'll write that down. Fine" is what they said. They fed it to her and recorded her speculation.
The other interesting addition is that now she's 'afraid' of Patrick when as revealed later in the statement she'd just met him that day (November 5th). Later during this day (Nov. 6) she'd write the note linked above telling them she didn't think she could be used as "testimone" and they needed to find the "Real murder(er)" and she didn't think any of this really happened, but for some reason between meeting Patrick at the University and her second statement she's become afraid of Patrick: because the police have convinced her he must have been the murderer.
The police had Amanda and Raffaele wiretapped and had their phone records, they were convinced that text message was related to the murder. They called Raffaele in and confused him to the point he signed a statement mushing up October 31st and November 1st as he wasn't sure what they did. They used that to go after an exhausted, stressed Amanda until the wee hours of the morning telling her they had 'hard evidence' she was at the scene and Raffaele had dropped her alibi, that she must have 'repressed' it and the poor girl
believed them. She summoned mental images when she remembered the text message and realized they were talking about Patrick and tried to
confabulate a statement around it, which she always qualified with how "confused" it was. Later that day (after she'd had a chance to sleep!) she'd write that note saying how she didn't think any of it happened, she couldn't be used as 'testimone' etc. The next day, the Seventh, she wrote them another note saying she was certain she'd never left and none of it happened, and the following said the same to her lawyers.
However the
police went out and arrested Patrick off this wholly confused gibberish elicited from an isolated foreign exchange student in the middle of the night, then rounded up a 'witness' to his bar being closed and took this before a judge, mainly on the strength of the text messages
and wouldn't let him go no matter what Amanda said, or they overheard Amanda saying to her mother, who as of the 10th has realized the cops didn't actually have any
evidence against Patrick, just the confused confabulation they coerced from her. Going from from what she's said, she feels badly about what happened to Patrick and blames herself for anything she might have had to do with it, but in the final analysis it was the
police who pushed her to the point where she "buckled and made an admission of facts we knew were correct," who accepted that confused gibberish as 'fact,' hauled him out of his home early in the morning and wouldn't listen to him or any of the ones who could alibi him--but instead rounded up a 'witness' to his bar being closed.
The police are the ones responsible for the arrest and detainment of Patrice Lumumba. That they have managed to scapegoat Amanda and she was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for their mistake is one of the true travesties of this case. She spent a total of four years in prison and they tried (and are still trying!) to use it take as much of her life as they can well as a result of that harrowing night in the
Questura, they all had medals pinned on their chests.
I wouldn't blame her if what she
really wants to say about it to anyone who asks is more along the lines of:
'Listen up, you bootlicking scumpuppy, the police are the ones who took me in the backroom and mind-raped me, they're the ones who arrested Patrick, and they were the ones who wouldn't let him go when I told them it never could have happened. My problem was believing those police, yours is you still do.'
She never wanted to harm Patrick, she wanted to help ILE find the killer of Meredith and in her condition that night not mentally and emotionally strong enough to disbelieve them as they went at her until she 'buckled and made an admission of facts we knew were correct.'
Amanda's note is the best contemporaneous account of what she was trying to convey after they did what they did to her in that overnight session. In it she explicitly says she cannot be used as 'testimone' and they need to find the 'REAL murder(er).' Her note on the seventh (for which I cannot recall a link--anyone else have one?) is definite, as is the one to her lawyers the following day. If they had ever let her see a lawyer when she asked then neither of those statements would have been signed, they knew that which is why they told her it would go worse for her if she had one. They were lying, they do that. They get away with it just by blaming her for 'accusing' Patrick when they're the ones who worked her over until she "buckled and made an admission of facts we knew were correct."
“Il caso è chiuso”
What is this duck rabbit visual illusion to which you refer?
