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

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This speculation was interesting to me. There is a lot here that would be judged as misconduct for a prosecutor in most western non-Italian countries I suspect. I'm not sure about Italy though, but misconduct seems to be the only reason for the mistreatment of Lumumba even in Italy. One straightforward explanation is that a lawyer was hand picked for Lumumba that Mignini planned to use as part of a tag team effort to go after Knox and Sollecito to get inadmissible evidence before the court and Lumumba was pressured to go along with the scam with the "stick" of shutting him down if he didn't go along and the "carrot" of financial gain if he did go along with the scam. Mignini is probably the principal player responsible for damaging Lumumba and in the US and I assume most other western countries Lumumba would have sued the jurisdiction of Mignini and possibly Mignini himself. Prosecutors in the US have fairly broad protection from this kind of suit but the apparent malfeasance involved here might have made Mignini personally liable. A prosecutor in the US might have also found himself open to criminal charges for abuse of office over an incident like this.

Not likely. Here's a good article about how the US system works, both in theory and in practice:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/...sconduct-new-orleans-louisiana_n_3529891.html

Amanda linked this on her blog, BTW.
 
And as for confused communication, there is no credible language problem, not on a sentence like "brake down the door" or "get in", and even if you don't know the language at all: even a dog would have effectively expressed the necessitiy to break down the door if that was what he intended to communicate.
I can't believe no one else caught the irony here. If this is some sort of Kaufmanesque performance art, bravo.
 
So without horizontal velocity how did the glass shard attain velocity, which must be exactly the same as the rock, to impale like a bullet? This is a critical piece of evidence for the defence IMO.


I don't presume that Rudy could toss a 4 kg rock as fast as a bullet. The glass was pressed between the rock and the inner shutter forcing the glass into the wood.

Generally, when a rock is thrown through a window, the glass will enter the room about as far as the rock. We can see this in the defense demo video. However, in this case the rock transfers most of it's forward momentum to the inner shutter. The shutter being lighter than the rock and the impact point being near the hinge results in a reverse leverage that causes the shutter to open much faster and the resulting suction behind it is what propels the glass fragments further into the room. The rock after having given up most of it's momentum falls close to the wall where it lands in the bag with just enough forward momentum to topple the bag.
 
Not likely. Here's a good article about how the US system works, both in theory and in practice:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/...sconduct-new-orleans-louisiana_n_3529891.html

Amanda linked this on her blog, BTW.

A reasonable response and even if I wasn't aware of this article I have been one that has argued that similar kinds of false convictions that depended on a misbehaving prosecutor, problematic police actions and lying forensic scientists have happened in the US quite often so that some of the claims in this thread of unique problems in the Italian justice system are not accurate. *

However, I did say, "Prosecutors in the US have fairly broad protection from this kind of suit but the apparent malfeasance involved here might have made Mignini personally liable. A prosecutor in the US might have also found himself open to criminal charges for abuse of office over an incident like this. "

And what I was talking about in particular was the treatment of Lumumba. Here there was a third party that apparently was completely innocent that continued to suffer damages even after what I understand information that completely exonerated him became available. But I will concede that I am not well informed in this area and perhaps your suggestion that a US prosecutor might not have been punished for doing something like this is correct. What would certainly have happened for somebody with the resources ato hire a lawyer is that a court order would have been sought and probably secured allowing Lumumba to reopen his business.

* I don't mean this comment to be a springboard for a discussion of unique problems in the Italian legal system. I completely concede that there are Italian legal procedures that are just wrong IMHO.
 
No, she just said sometimes Meredith locked her door.

But you, you admit yourself that she was trivializing and downplaying the locked door, and that she was not expressing any urgency, insofar as you concede that "she may well have intended to be reassuring".

If she was reassuring, she was downplaying the locked door, and she was expressing that breaking down the door was not that urgent.

If she was reassuring, if she actually thought it was true that Meredith would lock her door (nobody corroborated this anyway) so maybe they should not be concerned, that would make her become inconsistent, because later she offered a narrative in which her own feeling of urgency and need to enter the room was a focal point, and she would be inconsistent because she attempted to break down the door herself and build a narrative about this.

So she is lying in her e-mail and in her story explaining her attampt to break down the door, there is no way. If she had no feeling of urgency, she is lying.

Morover, also the fact that she did not feel urgency itself is rather suspicious - this lack of concern, conflicting with her e-mail story, would be out of place even without the conflicting e-mail narrative.

What Knox does not say, what she does not communicate, her lack of urgency, may be even more important than the phrases she says.

And, the lost-in-translation theory is simply utterly non-credible. It is not credible that Sollecito got wrong a simple statement wording it like a rather peculiar "Meredith locks her door even when she takes a shower". And it is even less credible that he makes such gross translation mistake of delivering a wrong reassuring message, after he just attempted to break down the door himself (!) out of alleged Knox's anxiety (Knox allegedly even tried to enter from the window). And that this mistake was repeated twice.
And also, it is not credible that Sollecito failed to break down the door (a 60+ kg adult man, a kickboxer).

I meant that Amanda and Raffaele had already tried to break down that door,

But we don't know why. Whe know that it was not because of Amanda Knox's alleged feeling of urgency, because such attitude is something she was not having.

they called the caribinieri (and numerous others)

The fact that they called the carabinieri so late, and that they called numerous others, is an interesting detail to the prosecution too.

with their concerns which included the locked door, and they invited the postals in and showed them the other things that worried them. That is the context I was referring to.

Yes but also her e-mail narrative, it is another context; and the previous attempt to break down of the door requires a context too, which she offers in her narration.
And the context she offers is conflicting with her lack of urgency (in addition with conveying reassuring information), something which was observed by many witnesses.

Because she simply offered the probably true information that Meredith did sometimes lock her door (...)

By the way, I wonder how you jump to the conclusion that the information was "probably" true, given that information we have is she locked her door only once when she left for a week.

Other possibilities: she heard Filomena say something she knew was wrong and wanted the police to have the best possible information. Or, she was trying to keep hope alive that perhaps the door being locked didn't mean what she feared.

But where is the anxiety, the urgency, the need and the intent of entering Meredith's room, as she expressed in her narrative, that she reports have lead her to attempt to break down the door some time prior to that moment?

(...) Then maybe she said it more than once because it happened to be true? She may well have been trying to reassure them as well as herself that the worst was not the only possibility.

Don't you think it's curious that she omits talking about the first time, and describes the event as if it just happened later, when Filomena was already there?

However she and Raffaele were the ones that reported it and summoned everyone else.

You keep repeating it as if this "summoning" was an exculpatory element, while in fact it is not. Moreover, a textbook would tell you that staging of a crime is very common in domestic murders and this summoning and calling of police, leading to the discovery of the body, is exactly what most stagers do.

Not wanting to break someone else's property on merely a suspicion without knowing for sure there was a body behind the door and it was possible the locked door meant nothing is a poor reason to suspect them when they were the ones who reported it all!

But they DID brake someone else's property! They had already broken the door. They only did not break it down completely (not as far as we know at least).

They are the ones who created any urgency or reason to break it down at all.

It's correct. And, it's the point. The point is that they themswelves were not consistent with the urgency they created, as for what comes out from the description of such urgency theu offer in their own account.
 
You give me too much credit. I am not well informed enough about this case to create an original theory. I was just parroting somebody else's theory in this thread. But regardless, it seems that you don't think much of the theory. So who was responsible for keeping his establishment shut down while he was no longer a suspect and why did they do it?

He remained a formal suspect for over 4 months, maybe even 6 months, as far as I remember.

Only a preliminary judge can decide to withdraw the status of formal suspect, and to withdraw the seizure of something on a murder case.
But judges' timings follow beaurocracy cautionary rules that don't take in account live interests of people, in perticular on what concerns the time to wait. Did you ever consider that the cottage in via della Pergola was seized for somthing like 18 months? Do you know how much this delay damaged the owners in monetary terms?
Lumumba suffered no unfavourable treatment.

What possible liability should Knox have for this situation?

She is supposed to pay all damaged that she caused.
If found guilty of murder, she also has to pay the whole monetary damage to the house owner, Mrs. Tattanelli.
She also has to pay for the video animation.

Even if you accept the notion that her mention of Lumumba in her sleep deprived state while she was being grilled by the Perugia police to tell them "what they know" then presumably you also accept her recanting of anything she said against Lumumba the next day.

Actually she repeated further accusations. She placed firther false evidence. She wrote two 'memoriali', in the first she says "I stand by what I said" and in the second she says "I didn't lie". So she repeats accusations.
 
A reasonable response and even if I wasn't aware of this article I have been one that has argued that similar kinds of false convictions that depended on a misbehaving prosecutor, problematic police actions and lying forensic scientists have happened in the US quite often so that some of the claims in this thread of unique problems in the Italian justice system are not accurate. *

However, I did say, "Prosecutors in the US have fairly broad protection from this kind of suit but the apparent malfeasance involved here might have made Mignini personally liable. A prosecutor in the US might have also found himself open to criminal charges for abuse of office over an incident like this. "

And what I was talking about in particular was the treatment of Lumumba. Here there was a third party that apparently was completely innocent that continued to suffer damages even after what I understand information that completely exonerated him became available. But I will concede that I am not well informed in this area and perhaps your suggestion that a US prosecutor might not have been punished for doing something like this is correct. What would certainly have happened for somebody with the resources ato hire a lawyer is that a court order would have been sought and probably secured allowing Lumumba to reopen his business.

Maybe. But look at the civil forfeitures in this country. There was a discussion about this here, springing from this article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman

Most of those people weren't even charged with a crime. The cops just took their money and valuables and sent them on their way.

Bottom line, if the cops decide to **** with you, you're **********, especially if you're poor and dumb. But you don't even have to be poor and dumb. Look at Claus von Bulow.
 
He remained a formal suspect for over 4 months, maybe even 6 months, as far as I remember.

Only a preliminary judge can decide to withdraw the status of formal suspect, and to withdraw the seizure of something on a murder case.
But judges' timings follow beaurocracy cautionary rules that don't take in account live interests of people, in perticular on what concerns the time to wait. Did you ever consider that the cottage in via della Pergola was seized for somthing like 18 months? Do you know how much this delay damaged the owners in monetary terms?
Lumumba suffered no unfavourable treatment.



She is supposed to pay all damaged that she caused.
If found guilty of murder, she also has to pay the whole monetary damage to the house owner, Mrs. Tattanelli.
She also has to pay for the video animation.



Actually she repeated further accusations. She placed firther false evidence. She wrote two 'memoriali', in the first she says "I stand by what I said" and in the second she says "I didn't lie". So she repeats accusations.

The complete sentence:

And I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrik, but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me that what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele's house.

Emphasis is mine.

Above that, she wrote:

In regards to this "confession" that I made last night, I want to make clear that I'm very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn't remember a fact correctly. I understand that the police are under a lot of stress, so I understand the treatment I received.

However, it was under this pressure and after many hours of confusion that my mind came up with these answers. In my mind I saw Patrik in flashes of blurred images. I saw him near the basketball court. I saw him at my front door. I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming. But I've said this many times so as to make myself clear: these things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened or are just dreams my head has made to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions I am being asked.


You really have to put on the blinders and shut down your brain not to see what was going on here.
 
She is supposed to pay all damaged that she caused.
If found guilty of murder, she also has to pay the whole monetary damage to the house owner, Mrs. Tattanelli.
She also has to pay for the video animation

LOL. I think she should also pay for the Parmalot fraud with Monopoly money.
 
Maybe. But look at the civil forfeitures in this country. There was a discussion about this here, springing from this article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman

Most of those people weren't even charged with a crime. The cops just took their money and valuables and sent them on their way.

Bottom line, if the cops decide to **** with you, you're **********, especially if you're poor and dumb. But you don't even have to be poor and dumb. Look at Claus von Bulow.

On the other hand, Nifong and Anderson went to jail. For that matter, Mignini has been convicted in court.
 
You keep repeating it as if this "summoning" was an exculpatory element, while in fact it is not. Moreover, a textbook would tell you that staging of a crime is very common in domestic murders and this summoning and calling of police, leading to the discovery of the body, is exactly what most stagers do.

Precisely. Thus Sollecitos and Knox's alledged lack of urgency and downplaying of the locked door is throughly incompatible with the idea that they are conducting a staged crime with a staged discovery.

Stagers often give themselves away by being abnormally urgent, or overplaying details.
 
Why is Machiavelli going on about Knox not showing "urgency" when if it hadn't have been for her, poor Meredith wouldn't have been found, perhaps for days? The reason Filomena was called and the reason the PP were invited in were because of Knox.

Sheesh.
 
Machiavelli - you seemed to have missed that Oggi is reporting that Mr. Mignini is going to trial on Jan 15.

Is Oggi a band of criminals as a result?
 
But it is not easilly seen at all! You seem to have no clue what you are talking about. You are maybe relying on photos taken from 80 meters or more from a building, maybe with 200mm photo lenses.
Nobody could notice a person on the balcony at night, and even if anyone saw it, that wouldn't be suspicious.
A person climbing thought a window is suspicious! And that window is something like 10 meters from the road, it's in front of the cars passing by, in front of any passer by walking out from the parking lot. And close to the street lamps.


Mach,
I used to run a well known surfshop in Santa Monica,
from which "DogTown" is famous from, for many years.

I had bars on all the store front windows and doors.

Another surfshop down the road on Main Street had its store front window,
facing well lighted Main Street, broken into before. It has no security bars. (*)
And even with the alarm sounding, thieves ripped off the place.

Thieves are BOLD!
So are rapists and murderers!
To think otherwise is simply stuuuu-pid, IMHO!
:rolleyes:
RW


* - Mach, haven't you ever heard of house burglarers gettin' stuck in a chimney?
Surely you realize that not every thief enters in the most logical place, right?

Don't you know that the home owner who owns the flat where Meredith Kercher was murdered and raped installed security bars on the 2nd story window of what was once Filomena's bedroom?

Now why would they do that if there was no chance in ^^^^
of a thief or murdering rapist ever entering thru that window,
as illogical as it may sound to you?
Hmmmm...
 
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Precisely. Thus Sollecitos and Knox's alledged lack of urgency and downplaying of the locked door is throughly incompatible with the idea that they are conducting a staged crime with a staged discovery.

Stagers often give themselves away by being abnormally urgent, or overplaying details.

The classical clues, as I know them, are: overly cooperative, or overly distressed. (over a more general period of time around discovery, not specifically before the finding of the body).

Overplaying of details may be present of this case. However, the suspicious behaviour of both Knox and Sollecito was perceived immediately, even by people who were not investigators (Luca, Filomena (I think it was them but might be Marco) for example, became so suspicious that they checked their car after they carried Knox and Sollecito on the back seat, thinking that they might have dumped some evidence item).
 
This speculation was interesting to me. There is a lot here that would be judged as misconduct for a prosecutor in most western non-Italian countries I suspect. I'm not sure about Italy though, but misconduct seems to be the only reason for the mistreatment of Lumumba even in Italy. One straightforward explanation is that a lawyer was hand picked for Lumumba that Mignini planned to use as part of a tag team effort to go after Knox and Sollecito to get inadmissible evidence before the court and Lumumba was pressured to go along with the scam with the "stick" of shutting him down if he didn't go along and the "carrot" of financial gain if he did go along with the scam. Mignini is probably the principal player responsible for damaging Lumumba and in the US and I assume most other western countries Lumumba would have sued the jurisdiction of Mignini and possibly Mignini himself. Prosecutors in the US have fairly broad protection from this kind of suit but the apparent malfeasance involved here might have made Mignini personally liable. A prosecutor in the US might have also found himself open to criminal charges for abuse of office over an incident like this.

I agree, but if I recall correctly one of the proposed reforms by the last Italian government was to make the judiciary liable for wrongful prosecutions. As the government fell soon afterward I doubt it was implemented and for other reasons am unsure if it would be an effective reform. I do think something needs to be done to reform that byzantine leviathan, but I wonder if there might be unintended consequences to such a reform?

I suspect the ease in which wiretapping is allowed in Italy combined with the custom of juicy tidbits being leaked and prosecutors being able to just file charges willy-nilly with little oversight is extremely corruption prone. That doesn't mean I know what the solution is, though it would give me a joyful thrill to see the current system 'razed to the ground' as Crini is fond of saying of the Hellmann court. :p
 
Machiavelli - you seemed to have missed that Oggi is reporting that Mr. Mignini is going to trial on Jan 15.

Is Oggi a band of criminals as a result?

I didn't miss it. I think it's the second time they write this. It's incorrect.
Personally, I answered by saying they are the Spezi friends group, this should say it all.
I don't know if the label of "criminals" would make sense (albeit Giangavino Sulas has a collection of pending charges for defamation) but they are certainly liars. They are spinners.

I told you what the Jan 15. hearing is. The problem is if you had a bit of knowledge of law procedure you would just not repeat questions about it.
It is just obvious that the Jan 15. hearing can't be a trial. To have a trial, you would need an indictment. Whoever knows a bit of law would take it as self evident.
 
The classical clues, as I know them, are: overly cooperative, or overly distressed. (over a more general period of time around discovery, not specifically before the finding of the body).

So, niether classical rule applies to Knox and Sollecito then, who were deemed to be suspiciously under co-operative and absent of distress.

Overplaying of details may be present of this case.

On the contrary - Knox and Sollecito are being held to standard of underplaying details - the open front door, the blood in the bathroom, Meredith missing.

Pointing out poo in a toilet is not overplaying. It turns out the poo actually was from an intruder.

However, the suspicious behaviour of both Knox and Sollecito was perceived immediately, even by people who were not investigators (Luca, Filomena (I think it was them but might be Marco) for example, became so suspicious that they checked their car after they carried Knox and Sollecito on the back seat, thinking that they might have dumped some evidence item).

Source? Note that the 'suspicious' behaviour reported were that K+S were under distressed.

It's funny that you're actually making a better arguement for why their behaviour is exculpatory than I could, and you're using the very best evidence contrary to your contention that could have been chosen.

Keep it up.
 
The complete sentence:

And I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrik, but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me that what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele's house.

Emphasis is mine.

Above that, she wrote:

In regards to this "confession" that I made last night, I want to make clear that I'm very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn't remember a fact correctly. I understand that the police are under a lot of stress, so I understand the treatment I received.

However, it was under this pressure and after many hours of confusion that my mind came up with these answers. In my mind I saw Patrik in flashes of blurred images. I saw him near the basketball court. I saw him at my front door. I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming. But I've said this many times so as to make myself clear: these things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened or are just dreams my head has made to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions I am being asked.


You really have to put on the blinders and shut down your brain not to see what was going on here.

You already know that I cosider this writing a further placing of false evidence.

There is no doubt this is a piece of evidence against Patrick Lumumba.
 
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