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

[Mary_H]

The evidence is supposed to be visible "outside" independently from the judge; evidence is a logical elaboration, explicitly expressed, based on factual elements which exist outside the judge's mind.
It's verified, explicit, objective, consistent.
Prejudice, instead, is a judgement. It's an evaluation. So it's entirely inside the judge's or the people's mind.
Prejudice is also usually implicit. So it's unexpressed, subjective, unverifiable. You can't "weigh" or "scale" prejudice, a subjective condition.

But you can admit the tendency toward prejudice is inherent, you can weigh which types of presentation tend to create the most prejudice through the power of suggestion, and then you can regulate against them.

Judge Massei described a possible scenario of Meredith lying on her bed, tinkering with her phone. He didn't think of her sitting in a chair, or wearing her head phones, or reading a book. He described what he had seen in a picture.

The same goes for the witnesses who came forward months later to say they knew who Amanda was because they had seen her picture in the paper. Their impressions were completely the result of the power of suggestion and, therefore, are not credible.

 

[Machiavelli]

Yes, I know. You also think that they hit her, but you don't think that that has any impact on the reliability of the resulting statements or the legitimacy of the conviction.

I have to admit, that I have a lot of difficulty getting my head around why anyone would think that way. This position implies a blind deference to authority, submission, a disregard for human rights and I suspect a bit of jingoism and racism against gringos.

So, let me understand, you catch a murderer, or let's say a terrorist, a rapist, a mobster, a tax evader. The perp is hit at the back of the head. Then, the prosecution and conviction becomes illegitimate and the perp becomes... innocent.

It's not me the one with a blind deference or racism: you attribute a real super-power to the Italian police: they hit a guy at the back of the head, and the guy - whatever terrorist or perp he is - becomes innocent!
They have a kind of power of 'revirgination', they donate a palingenesis of innocence.

 

[Machiavelli]

One more thing: I think you have hit on something here. You state that evidence is "verified, explicit, objective, consistent." I think you, and maybe Italians in general, believe the presented evidence as fact -- even if it is an interpretation of evidence. In most trials of which I am familiar, the merit of all evidence is weighed by the judge/jury and its value is debatable.

In Italian (in the Italian law) the word for "evidence" is "prova". As for the law, it is provided that the "prova" (evidence) is "formata" (created, put together) in the "dibattimento" (the trial or evidentiary phase of the proceedings).

An exact equivalent of the word "evidence" does not exist. The word "evidenza" exists in Italian language but it is not used in this context, it only idicates things that are already manifest and which look obvious.
"Prova" is a term simlar to "proof" and suggest a logical process; so it is something that is "done" (by the judges) rather than "presented".

 

[acbytesla]

So, let me understand, you catch a murderer, or let's say a terrorist, a rapist, a mobster, a tax evader. The perp is hit at the back of the head. Then, the prosecution and conviction becomes illegitimate and the perp becomes... innocent.

It's not me the one with a blind deference or racism: you attribute a real super-power to the Italian police: they hit a guy at the back of the head, and the guy - whatever terrorist or perp he is - becomes innocent!
They have a kind of power of 'revirgination', they donate a palingenesis of innocence.

Oh, puhhhhleeeease Machiavelli, you would spin anything. The hit on the back of the head is just another sign of coercion during the interrogation. It has little to do with Amanda's guilt or innocence, Let's face it, there isn't any physical evidence of their guilt. (Not that you would admit that.) The only thing the prosecution has really, is the statements Amanda made during the interrogation. What is sad, is that the prosecution didn't video record the interrogation...or they did but won't produce them.

What you guys fail to see is that "real confessions" that are recorded really are extremely persuasive. But of course that wasn't a real confession...now was it?

You don't have to answer...we know what you will say.

 

[Mary_H]

So, let me understand, you catch a murderer, or let's say a terrorist, a rapist, a mobster, a tax evader. The perp is hit at the back of the head. Then, the prosecution and conviction becomes illegitimate and the perp becomes... innocent.

It's not me the one with a blind deference or racism: you attribute a real super-power to the Italian police: they hit a guy at the back of the head, and the guy - whatever terrorist or perp he is - becomes innocent!
They have a kind of power of 'revirgination', they donate a palingenesis of innocence.

The police are the ones who blew it out of proportion by denying they hit her and going so far as to sue her for saying it. Apparently to them it is a huge deal to be accused of giving someone a couple of smacks to the back of the head. I would not think much of it if it happened to me. Amanda did not make a big deal out of, she just mentioned it.

Amanda looks innocent not because she got hit, but because the cops lied.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

So, let me understand, you catch a murderer, or let's say a terrorist, a rapist, a mobster, a tax evader. The perp is hit at the back of the head. Then, the prosecution and conviction becomes illegitimate and the perp becomes... innocent.

It's not me the one with a blind deference or racism: you attribute a real super-power to the Italian police: they hit a guy at the back of the head, and the guy - whatever terrorist or perp he is - becomes innocent!
They have a kind of power of 'revirgination', they donate a palingenesis of innocence.

If the conviction hinges on a confession, then yes, the conviction becomes illegitimate because the confession becomes illegitimate. The perp may be guilty as hell, but that piece of evidence is no good because it was obtained without adherence to the rules.

 

[Strozzi]

You're kidding, right?

Machiavelli, if the prosecution needs to demonstrate the position of several people in a room so as to show that A stood in a specific position to B and C twisted and turned in a specific manner, they can demonstrate these spatial relations and movement using animation. The figures can be generic figures. That conveys to the jurors that Persons A, B, and C were positioned and moved in just such a way. But to paint specific faces on the figures, or in this case to draw the animated figures to very closely resemble specific individuals including the accused and victim goes far beyond the need to specify spatial positioning and movement. Drawing and coloring one of the characters as Amanda with her hair color, hair length, and hair style in a distinctive sweater with horizontal white and brown stripes to identically match the distinctive horizontal-stripped sweater she wore to court is not really for spatial clarity. It is to convince (trick) the viewers mind into believing that these are one and the same and hope that the viewers merge the two together in their minds. It is done to try to overcome the viewers' rational thinking.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

If the conviction hinges on a confession, then yes, the conviction becomes illegitimate because the confession becomes illegitimate. The perp may be guilty as hell, but that piece of evidence is no good because it was obtained without adherence to the rules.

I would resist framing the issue here as one of "adherence to the rules." The most important question is whether the police obtained accurate information. In the case of Amanda's statements, they clearly did not.

 

[Bill Williams]

Machiavelli, if the prosecution needs to demonstrate the position of several people in a room so as to show that A stood in a specific position to B and C twisted and turned in a specific manner, they can demonstrate these spatial relations and movement using animation. The figures can be generic figures. That conveys to the jurors that Persons A, B, and C were positioned and moved in just such a way. But to paint specific faces on the figures, or in this case to draw the animated figures to very closely resemble specific individuals including the accused and victim goes far beyond the need to specify spatial positioning and movement. Drawing and coloring one of the characters as Amanda with her hair color, hair length, and hair style in a distinctive sweater with horizontal white and brown stripes to identically match the distinctive horizontal-stripped sweater she wore to court is not really for spatial clarity. It is to convince (trick) the viewers mind into believing that these are one and the same and hope that the viewers merge the two together in their minds. It is done to try to overcome the viewers' rational thinking.

Thank you.

Every once in a while I get the feeling that it is me who is crazy... Machiavelli just continues to spin this, spin this, spin this, seemingly unfazed by embarrassment.

He spins that Amanda and her mom were capable of talking in Mafia code, that Amanda is capable of "choosing not to sleep", that "riti" really means "game", and all the other stuff repeated ad naseum up thread......

How much longer can he keep going with all this? Apparently a long, long time.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

I would resist framing the issue here as one of "adherence to the rules." The most important question is whether the police obtained accurate information. In the case of Amanda's statements, they clearly did not.

Machiavelli's post described a hypothetical situation whereby a rapist, terrorist, etc. could be considered innocent because of physical abuse during the questioning.

In the U.S., it is true that if a case hinged on only a confession and that confession was discovered to have been the result of an illegal interrogation (e.g. abuse, lack of Miranda, etc.) the perp may very well be declared 'not guilty' because the confession would not be admissible. Those are the rules; I really don't know how else to phrase it. Again, it was a hypothetical situation and not specifically in reference to this case.

 

[Bill Williams]

If the conviction hinges on a confession, then yes, the conviction becomes illegitimate because the confession becomes illegitimate. The perp may be guilty as hell, but that piece of evidence is no good because it was obtained without adherence to the rules.

I would resist framing the issue here as one of "adherence to the rules." The most important question is whether the police obtained accurate information. In the case of Amanda's statements, they clearly did not.

Charlie I completely disagree.... an interrogation is fundamentally NOT about getting accurate information from the suspect. It's just not about that task.

Cops go into an interrogation with a fairly decent theory and the sole purpose is to get their suspect to confess. Their purpose is NOT to get the suspect to add or subtract to the theory, it is solely to have them confess to the theory the cops have.

It is the basis of the PLE's/Rome police's remarks. "She buckled and told us what we knew already," as well as, "we solved this through behavioural observation, even before the forensics came in."

I agree with you that one of the hallmarks of false confessions is that the interrogatee either assents to or dreams up false information.... but Ampulla of Vater is right... the issue really is about the legitimacy of the process of interrogation - not the veracity of the information itself.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrogation

I apologize for going on and on about this, but this is a key issue in understanding how things went off the rails so badly.

Two quotes of note from the Wiki piece (and, no, I did not place them there!)

The Reid technique is a trademarked interrogation technique widely used by law enforcement agencies in North America. The technique (which requires interrogators to watch the body language of suspects to detect deceit) has been criticized for being difficult to apply across cultures and eliciting false confessions from innocent people.

Interrogation (also called questioning or interpellation) is interviewing as commonly employed by officers of the police, military, and Intelligence agencies with the goal of extracting a confession or incriminating statements.

Incriminating statements can be new information, don't get me wrong. And there have been instances when, at interrogation, the cops have stumbled across a new scenario for the crime....

But confession is always the goal, and the remedy in the courts is that proper process be followed, or even the worst of the worst walks.... because the consequences are so devestating to both innocents and the long-term legitimacy of police work..... if they get it wrong.

It's precisely why the safeguards are in place.

 

[moije2]

By the way, nobody should lose sight of the fact that no matter whose DNA was identified on 36I (it appears to have been solely Knox's), the actual amounts of DNA involved were extraordinarily small.

Given that there had already been irreversible mistakes made in the way the knife was collected, stored and handled prior to it coming into Vecchiotti's possession, it was in many senses immaterial for evidential purposes whose DNA might have been at 36I in such minute quantities. Frankly, even if Meredith's DNA had been identified at 36I, the prior incompetence and malpractice surrounding the knife would have rendered any such result highly questionable anyhow.

So, even though it appears that Knox is the only DNA contributor to 36I, I think it's still highly arguable that this result is inherently unreliable anyhow, owing to the prior possibility of contamination - even if the Carabinieri employed only best practice in their analysis of 36I.

And when you add not-a-real-doctor Stefanoni's gross abandonment of practically every single piece of mandatory low-template protocol in her initial analysis of 36B (and her supposed discovery of Meredith's DNA), it can only serve to render Stefanoni's results utterly unreliable and incredible.

I would have to say that you are optimistic. Given that the SC handed down a scathing rejection of the annulment with instructions to do a better job and convict. I wouldn't want to be in a position of arguing that (if it occurred) the finding of Meredith's DNA this time around was "inherently unreliable" anyway. That is of course true, as it always has been, but don't ask me to argue that in front of the Supreme Court!

 

[Bill Williams]

I would have to say that you are optimistic. Given that the SC handed down a scathing rejection of the annulment with instructions to do a better job and convict. I wouldn't want to be in a position of arguing that (if it occurred) the finding of Meredith's DNA this time around was "inherently unreliable" anyway. That is of course true, as it always has been, but don't ask me to argue that in front of the Supreme Court!

Since the trier of fact in Italy is the lower court, it would continue to be a black mark on Italian justice to have the ISC rule, in effect, that regardless of what the science says, it is now a matter of law (not fact) that Meredith's DNA be found on the knife.

 

[moodstream]

I am afraid I can see where this is all headed:

According to Gazzetta del Sud english , the methodology used by the experts nominated by the Florence judge as those applied to a "low copy number" and are the same as the ones used by the Perugia experts which led to criticism of the initial findings of the forensic police.

Hence, since the defense does not object to the finding of Knox's DNA, how can they call foul when it comes to Ms Kercher's?

 

[Mary_H]

The knowledge that about what information is false as opposed to what is true is quite essential in a psychological perspective about manipulation. If a person persuades someone about something he belives by conveying information he belives true, I do not call that manipulation.
On non-psychological level, a pure communication level, you may address the power of the media employed - the "unbalance of medium" - and one may call that a media influence. Which is something different. But that - as for psychology, communication and moral - would be persuasion techniques, not manipulation.
If the reporter has access to all information and bears a specific responsability of telling the truth, and understands the message is partial, slanted or false (such as the US networks did when talking about the Meredith case) this would be manipulation. But the prosecution is a party, they have a task of illustrating ther accusation.

However when you say "they want to believe it's true and they want the court to believe it's true, too, so they illustrate it", this - which regards presentation can't be acceptable as a criticism of the video animation, because just the same could be said about everything a prosecution, does, any prosecution, in any trial. The prosecution attempts to convince the court, wanting the court to believe their accusation is true. They deploy an array of means to that purpose. Several of those are communication techniques. Why specifically a video should be wrong or not acceptable rather than something else?

I am sure the lawyers and instructional technicians here have more basis for explaining why the video should not have been allowed than you and I have, so I won't continue to argue that, except to say that Italian taxpayers have better things to do with their money.

Regardless of whether the process is one of communication techniques, persuasion, manipulation or attempting to prejudice, the key question in this case is why the prosecution wanted to convince the judges of a specific scenario when the prosecutors themselves were not sure of the scenario. A subset of that question is why that specific scenario is the one that occurred to the prosecutors without evidence for it, which we have discussed many times.

 

[Samson]

Believe me or not, it's like that. It is inconcievable that evidence is prevented from entering the court because deemed "prejudicial".
Such a decision by the judge would be regarded as "prejudicial"!
In a system with inquisitory features, evidence cannot be subject to filters. The Court is regarded as a panel of investigators, not as a jury.
There is only a Code that determines what kind of evidence can and cannot be entered/used.

"The Court is regarded as a panel of investigators, not as a jury."

If this is the case they would have investigated the vandalism with a view to finding what happened.

1. They would have found someone of Rudy's build to do the climb then, not wait 6 years for an amateur rock climber to demonstrate it was easy.
2. They would have noted the fresh scuff mark in the police photo on the lower window frame was exactly where the climber would place his foot, as was shown 6 years later.
3. They would have studied the photograph of the deeply impaled glass shard in the scuri, below and left of the fresh damage caused by rock, and questioned whether this velocity required was plausible from inside, late at night with the dead body present, and the resultant noise.
4. They would have noted that the glass distribution was exactly where it would occur with the rock hurled from the car park.
5. They would have questioned whether it was likely two people would figure to relocate the glass inside the room to the exact locations consistent with an exterior throw, and remove all fragments from where it would land from a staging.
6. They would not have introduced the notion of illogicality of doing it on the street front, because Machiavelli clarified in this recent post

"Originally Posted by Grinder View Post
Would there normally be traffic at 8 to 10 on that type of evening?
Mach's answer,
"I don't live in Perugia, so I can't tell exactly, but my guess is no. There would be very little traffic. Moreover that road is an area with limitation on traffic permissions (this is why there are video cameras); I don't know what the rules were in 2007; but not many people, basically only the residents would enter that road with a car. They won't do that at dinner time, on a holiday.
I think there would be nobody, no vehicle passing."

7. They would have recalled the staging became an unnecessary feature when the correct perpetrator was arrested, and the portly Lumumba was released.

Massei entered a conviction for this staging, as in logical terms it was a necessary condition for supposing AK and RS were involved in any crime.

This staging is the foundation stone for the prosecution case, yet it is now clear it was not only unlikely, but impossible.

Edward McCall states it as a fact in his wiki.
" After the murder was discovered and the burglary investigated the police were able to determine that the burglary was staged. "

Inspector Clouseau would have run rings around these investigators.

 

[LondonJohn]

I am afraid I can see where this is all headed:

According to Gazzetta del Sud english , the methodology used by the experts nominated by the Florence judge as those applied to a "low copy number" and are the same as the ones used by the Perugia experts which led to criticism of the initial findings of the forensic police.

Hence, since the defense does not object to the finding of Knox's DNA, how can they call foul when it comes to Ms Kercher's?

Ah no: The "Perugia experts" referred to here most categorically are NOT not-a-real-doctor Stefanoni and her band of incompetents. Rather, the term "Perugia experts" refers to the experts retained by the appeal court in Perugia - in other words Conti & Vecchiotti.

And C&V most assuredly found that the attribution of Meredith's DNA to the knife was unreliable and of zero evidential value.

 

[moodstream]

Ah no: The "Perugia experts" referred to here most categorically are NOT not-a-real-doctor Stefanoni and her band of incompetents. Rather, the term "Perugia experts" refers to the experts retained by the appeal court in Perugia - in other words Conti & Vecchiotti.

And C&V most assuredly found that the attribution of Meredith's DNA to the knife was unreliable and of zero evidential value.

I see now that you are correct. Great!

 

[LondonJohn]

I would have to say that you are optimistic. Given that the SC handed down a scathing rejection of the annulment with instructions to do a better job and convict. I wouldn't want to be in a position of arguing that (if it occurred) the finding of Meredith's DNA this time around was "inherently unreliable" anyway. That is of course true, as it always has been, but don't ask me to argue that in front of the Supreme Court!

I don't think I'm optimistic. Remember that a key plank of C/V's argument for not DNA-testing 36I was that any results would be essentially meaningless. That's because they already knew there were only super-low-template quantities of DNA on that sample, and the knife had already been mishandled enough for any super-low-template DNA testing to be rendered worthless on account of potential contamination.

The SC argument was: if it can be tested, let's have it tested. But even though it's shown Knox's DNA in minute quantities on the very edge of detection limits - and is thus of no value to the prosecution in any case - it's still intellectually correct to argue that the result is unreliable and of no evidential worth. Which is what C&V thought in the first place. And, for the same reason, the alleged extra-low-template quantity of Meredith's DNA on 36B should also be excluded - as indeed C/V concluded.

 

[Bill Williams]

I don't think I'm optimistic. Remember that a key plank of C/V's argument for not DNA-testing 36I was that any results would be essentially meaningless. That's because they already knew there were only super-low-template quantities of DNA on that sample, and the knife had already been mishandled enough for any super-low-template DNA testing to be rendered worthless on account of potential contamination.

The SC argument was: if it can be tested, let's have it tested. But even though it's shown Knox's DNA in minute quantities on the very edge of detection limits - and is thus of no value to the prosecution in any case - it's still intellectually correct to argue that the result is unreliable and of no evidential worth. Which is what C&V thought in the first place. And, for the same reason, the alleged extra-low-template quantity of Meredith's DNA on 36B should also be excluded - as indeed C/V concluded.

So why is this knife still relevant at trial? It seems they really DID randomly pick a knife for no other reason than.....

..... what? Most certainly not to solve a horrible murder, six years less a day ago.