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

[CoulsdonUK]

CoulsdonUK,

You raise some interesting questions. Police often latch onto people close by prematurely, and then can't seem to backtrack (Norfolk Four). They had arrested the pair prior to the emergence of definitive evidence against Rudy (notwithstanding Diocletus's point with respect to the early DNA results). If the police had done as you suggest, they would have had to admit that their initial theory of the case was completely wrong. Swapping Guede for Lumumba allowed them to claim that they were mostly right (and only the wily Amanda threw them off at first).

Did racism did play a large role in the investigation or the case as a whole? Everyone's mileage may vary. Other than the "dirty black" verbiage, I don't see evidence of racism in ILE's actions, and I don't see it in the pair or in the pair's supporters. Rudy tried to play the race card, but he is clearly saying whatever it take to minimize the consequences for himself. MOO.

Halides1

Well my questions relate in part to collective racial bias against in this case people of African origin and it being unusual that two middle class white students would be targeted in a way that has been discussed here especially if one looks into the collective behaviour of Italian law enforcement towards African immigrants. I am aware of the Norfolk Four and your interest in the Duke Lacrosse team case. However, I think you’ll agree these cases are exceptions rather than the rule.

If the Norfolk four and Duke Lacrosse team case involved economically deprived African Americans defendants would anyone have been surprised, would the media even of picked up the cases?

It still doesn’t make sense to me that within a month of Meredith’s murder they had two white middle case defendants who were attending universities in Perugia verses an African immigrant drifter\drug dealer\burglar who according to some was known to Perugian law enforcement.

It would appear in this case the racial bias within Italian law enforcement was turned completely on its head.

 

[moodstream]

Anyone ordering a pizza in Perugia needs to check their receipt to be sure they were not served bleach. Apparently it is a common mix-up in Perugian restaurants.

funny

 

[acbytesla]

Halides1

Well my questions relate in part to collective racial bias against in this case people of African origin and it being unusual that two middle class white students would be targeted in a way that has been discussed here especially if one looks into the collective behaviour of Italian law enforcement towards African immigrants. I am aware of the Norfolk Four and your interest in the Duke Lacrosse team case. However, I think you’ll agree these cases are exceptions rather than the rule.

If the Norfolk four and Duke Lacrosse team case involved economically deprived African Americans defendants would anyone have been surprised, would the media even of picked up the cases?

It still doesn’t make sense to me that within a month of Meredith’s murder they had two white middle case defendants who were attending universities in Perugia verses an African immigrant drifter\drug dealer\burglar who according to some was known to Perugian law enforcement.

It would appear in this case the racial bias within Italian law enforcement was turned completely on its head.

I have no doubt that the media is more interested in the injustices that happen to white people more than they do with minorities. Just look at the attention given to the Jon Benet Ramsey case.

This is a strange case as to who the defendants are. I'm always a little amused at how some people complain about all the attention given to Amanda and Raffaele and how Meredith has been forgotten. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Amanda and Raffaele had not been arrested and put through this ordeal it is unlikely that this case make page one in any of the London newspapers beyond maybe a day or two.

I have no doubt that the police "honestly" form their perspective zeroed in on Amanda and Raffaele as suspects. Amanda probably was different from the "Italian" girls they were used to and this was something that made them look at her differently.

If any kind of prejudice was at play in this case, it was more the jealous kind. Perugia is a university town where a lot of fairly wealthy foreign students come and spend their money to study and party. I bet like most University towns, there is a certain love hate relationship with the kids that come and stay for a few years.On the one hand, the locals need the money from the students to keep their town vibrant, and on the other, their has to be a certain resentment because let's face it, most of these students are spending their parents money and many of them don't respect the work that goes into it. They party, they get in fights, they are often arrogant and self absorbed.
Not that I think Amanda and Raffaele are these things, but I bet to the cops and the prosecution, they became poster children for their prejudice.

Just look at Machiavelli's posts about Amanda being a rich white girl and how Knox supporters are mostly racists. It's really a sort of a blue collar prejudice against those that have a little money.

 

[Strozzi]

Yes. Why not say she woke up early and wanted to get some disinfectant for the kitchen spill or something else and say she didn't see Lysol so just returned to Raf's and made some coffee and watched him sleep.

The same thing with the plaza. If they actually spent 2 1/2 hours there why not mention it because they could miss Curatolo 30 meters away.

We have people saying that they were clever enough to fake a knife outline (and in that case they were able to get all the blood AND DNA off of it), stage a break-in, dispose of all their bloody clothes, shoes and cleaning equipment, but forgot to coordinate an alibi and incorporate their public appearances into it. We have them saving Rudy's evidence yet not using the knowledge of that evidence to throw suspicion on him.

Kate Mansey's FB friend Antonio Fois was the cub reporter that found all the witnesses except Nara and Formica IIRC. I would like much more information about this guy and how many witnesses he has found since this case. Did he have access to resources to help people remember?

Meredith hung out with her white british friends and the boy downstairs.

Amanda seemed to have a diverse group of people in Perugia she socialized with that didn't include many Americans. She even talked with a black man at a cafe that shockingly she found attractive. Of Mach is sure it was Rudy because of the lack of diversity in Perugia.

Although only there 6 weeks at the time she was locked up, Amanda's diverse acquaintances and friends in Perugia included Italians and North Africans. She also happily accepted employment working for an African, Lumumba, who is Congolese (formerly Zaire).

Mach may claim again that Amanda had the phone number of a drug dealer in her phone. Please note that Mach never said it is the phone number of a known drug dealer. I must ask if it is true that the individual was in the fall of 2007 a drug dealer and , if so, did Amanda know of this?

I also want to then ask why did the Perugian police and prosecutors allow drug dealers such free run of their university town where they could come into social contact with visiting British, American, and other foreign students? If the PLE had done their job, drug dealers like Curatalo, Laura, Meredith's downstairs boyfriend, and others, and burglars like Guede would not have been free to be in contact with visiting foreign students.

 

[Grinder]

I have always found this curious. Raffaele and Amanda white middle class students, Guede always described in the media as an immigrant from Cote d’Ivoire, a drifter\drug dealer\burglar living in a country that doesn’t exactly embrace Africans (deliberate understatement) and yet Perugian law enforcement according to some folk here targeted Raffaele and Amanda almost as soon as Meredith was discovered, it has never made sense to me given racial bias within Italian law enforcement I have never understood why the police as some say here would target two middle class white students.

Perugian authorities could have easily and very quickly thrown the book at Guede, released Raffaele and Amanda and had a quick closure to a murder case, instead and for little or no reason according to some they targeted Raffaele and Amanda.

As for Racial bias, how many of us would have even noticed a news story of an Ivorian drifter\drug dealer had murdered a British student in Italy?

As you know I think that there was reason behind the PLE suspecting A & R. At first, before Amanda was broken down by the PLE and told them about Patrick, which they knew to be the truth, they didn't have a black man to blame. It is noteworthy that Amanda, the racist, had no problem frequenting and then working in a bar owned by a black man.

It follows your characterization of Italy that they did go after a black man and made sure to arrest him and close his bar etc. They had the connection with PL and 'knew' he had done it.

I think that the PLE were convinced A & R were involved. Their accounts of that evening remain sketchy to this day. Then they had the knife DNA which came before arresting Rudy. I'm sure that Steffy didn't make it well known to anyone that her techniques weren't to the book. I doubt anyone on the prosecution side questioned her work, certainly not within days or weeks.

The staged break-in fit and no one was there to doubt it.

Then there was the FB page of RAf. The Manga comics with violent rape murders.

I noticed the story immediately because AK was from here so I was following well before she was arrested.

 

[Bill Williams]

It still doesn’t make sense to me that within a month of Meredith’s murder they had two white middle case defendants who were attending universities in Perugia verses an African immigrant drifter\drug dealer\burglar who according to some was known to Perugian law enforcement.

It would appear in this case the racial bias within Italian law enforcement was turned completely on its head.

When the race card was first played, way back when, I had the same questions as you. Why not just throw the whole shooting match at a black guy, if Italians were so biased against Africans?

There are three things I have learned since. Your mileage will obviously vary.

1. I now sincerely believe that the PLE initially targeted Raffaele, so as to get something which would allow them to break Amanda, but the purpose of breaking Amanda was to (at the time) get at Lumumba, a black guy.

The trouble was, the case against the "dirty black" as Lumumba himself said he was called at his own interrogation fell apart.

2. THEN the forensics came back and all of it pointed to Rudy Guede. It's only a coincidence that Rudy and Patrick share what can only be regarded as a diverse "black" background... because the word "black" really does not describe well the varied ethnicities in Africa. There is reason to believe that the PLE is not telling us everything, much the same claim as guilters throw around in saying that Amanda is not telling us everything. But with Rudy's known criminalized background, and the PLE not saving Meredith from him, the PLE has avoided the explaining as to why Rudy's past went unchecked when he showed up.

3. The overt sexism of Italy in general, and Perugia in particular, the slut/saint caricatures of women. One need only review the words used against Knox as trial, while Raffaele sat there wondering if they were ever to to get around to him!, to see the overt sexism that substituted itself for actual evidence against Knox.​

That's me. It's one of the advantages of spreading the events over a timeline. I still could be completely wrong, but that's how I've though about it, because I started at that very same place - the overt racism in Italy towards blacks should have and very well could have resulted in Patrick Lumumba still being in jail, with no evidence pointing to him either.

Add to this that I have talked with women cops in my own community, who talk about how they have to outdo the boys in being "macho" because otherwise women (in the RCMP!) are systemically discriminated against within the force. Google "sexism" and "RCMP" and you see such things as that the last time a Commissioner of the RCMP was appointed, he was appointed specifically to deal with sexism in the force.

And this is "liberal" Canada! Sexism in Italy is alive and well too...

 

[Bill Williams]

Oh yes, and to arrest Amanda, they had to arrest her alibi, too. They've been searching for a way to shooe-horn Raffaele into this crime ever since. At first it was that he, himself, carried a knife. But his knives did not match anything to do with the crime. Then it was his sneakers - and it took the Sollecitos themselves to count the rings on the soles to remove those sneakers as evidence, too.

Right now the sole thing even remotely pointing to Raffaele is a lone Y-Haplotype DNA-thingy.... on a clasp where there are at least four other, unidentified male-DNA traces. And the one pointing to Raffaele could also point to a major portion of Itasly's male population. And this is before:

1) Patricia Stefanoni's own admission that she could not rule out that she, herself, had contaminated the clasp with an obviously dirty glove, caught in the Scientific Police's own video!

2) it fails to explain why the Y-Haplotype would be on the clasp, if a bra had been forcibly removed!​

CoulsdonUK, when you say it is strange that the PLE would target two white, middle class kids, the only reason TO target Raffaele is that he's Amanda's alibi. You can't very well let him go and have him testify as a free-witness that she'd been with him all night.

They've been trying to shoe-horn Raffaele into this ever since.

Otherwise, can anyone explain why, at the risk of 25 years in jail, Raffaele would maintain the alibi? The thing that guilters never explain is what advantage a guilty-Raffaele could have to do that.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

random thoughts on race and wrongful accusations

CoulsdonUK and Acbytesla,

With respect to the Jon Benet Ramsey case, there was an episode of CSI Miami that referenced her murder. My very rough paraphrase follows: A hispanic parent who has lost a child says to Caine. "When a pretty blonde girl goes missing, the whole world cares. When a dark skinned girl goes missing, no one cares." Horatio Caine (David Caruso's character) corrected her, saying, "You're wrong. Almost no one." IMO the attention on this case worked to the disadvantage of the white, upper-middle class parents. They were suspected and to some degree vilified despite the lack of anything beyond being close by, if John Douglas and Mark Olshaker gave an accurate summary of the case in their book Law and Disorder.

With respect to Duke lacrosse, the race and economic class of the defendants worked to their disadvantage in the sense that the early commentary tried to bend over backward to be fair the false accuser, based on these two factors and her gender. Their wealth bought them a highly competent defense team, which earned their sizeable paychecks. But it was the blogosphere (which out-hustled and out-thought the MSM) that partially salvaged their reputations. There are some in the media and at Duke who have never apologized for the things that they said and did, which is remarkable in one sense but is unsurprising in another: people hate to admit that they are wrong. If the defendants had been poor and black, they might not have ever been charged; however, if they had been poor and black, they might well have been convicted. BTW the police misconduct in the DL case is at least the equal of the misconduct in the Perugia case, perhaps more serious. Rose Montague is a good person to ask for another perspective on the case.

There is no doubt that some poor, black defendants in the U.S. get a bad deal. IIRC most of the defendants in the Tulia, Texas case were both poor and black. It has been some time since I read up on this case, so my recollections are not likely to be perfect. However, it is interesting that the there was eventually an investigation into this travesty. Eric Frimpong was convicted on the basis of iffy DNA evidence. I don't know the exact racial make-up of his defenders, but I am 100% confident that at least one person who has tried to help is white.

The Norfolk Four can be compared to the Duke lacrosse case in one respect: the cases might not have played out the same way in other cities. Durham, NC is not Hanover, NH, home of Dartmouth (as one person close to the case observed to me). Some black people who work there refer to Duke University as "the plantation," although how much of that is meant as a joke is not easy to say from afar. On the other hand, the DL team was known for being especially polite to the staff people with whom they interacted. I don't recall any evidence that emerged to suggest that the players were racially insensitive, but some evidence came to light that suggested otherwise. Norfolk, VA has some tensions between the police and the Navy. Maybe this is true in any town in which there is a large military presence (Jacksonville, NC would be a possible city with which to compare it).

The Norfolk Four were certainly not upper middle class, and they were not particularly well served by their attorneys IMO. Why did this case catch the attention of journalists and experts in false confessions? I don't know, but at least one other case of false confession is also known to a significant fraction of the public, the Central Park Five, which involved black defendants. If there is a take-home message here (and I am not sure that there is), it would be that chance plays a big role in these cases.

 

[Bill Williams]

CoulsdonUK.... here's a piece from The Guardian, which you may or may not agree with.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/26/amanda-knox-retrial-italian-justice

It's from March 2013.

The sexual assault and murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007 was a dreadful crime. The perpetrator, Rudy Guede, left copious amounts of forensic evidence at the scene and is currently serving a prison sentence. In normal circumstances, Guede's conviction would have been the end of the matter, but these are not normal circumstances. The announcement that Amanda Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, are to face a retrial means a fourth set of proceedings, no doubt with worldwide publicity. It also confirms the reluctance of the Italian authorities to let go of a misogynist fantasy which has turned the case into a prolonged media circus.

The central mystery of this case is not the identity of the murderer but the steely determination of the Italian authorities to drag in two other suspects, Knox and Sollecito......

There's no doubt that their release infuriated prosecutors in Perugia, who had convinced themselves that Knox was a villainous character who could easily have walked out of a medieval witch trial. It's impossible to overstate the influence on Knox's trials of Perugia's dark history, which has earned it a reputation as an "epicentre" of medieval witch burnings. It's left a residue of superstition and fear of female sexuality which emerged time after time in court, with one lawyer actually accusing Knox of being "diabolic".

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I have always found this curious. Raffaele and Amanda white middle class students, Guede always described in the media as an immigrant from Cote d’Ivoire, a drifter\drug dealer\burglar living in a country that doesn’t exactly embrace Africans (deliberate understatement) and yet Perugian law enforcement according to some folk here targeted Raffaele and Amanda almost as soon as Meredith was discovered, it has never made sense to me given racial bias within Italian law enforcement I have never understood why the police as some say here would target two middle class white students.

Perugian authorities could have easily and very quickly thrown the book at Guede, released Raffaele and Amanda and had a quick closure to a murder case, instead and for little or no reason according to some they targeted Raffaele and Amanda.

By the time they knew about Guede, they had made a public accusation and the media was having a field day. That was what they cared about, not race.

Sure, they could have released Amanda and Raffaele along with Lumumba and admitted they were completely wrong when they held their triumphant news conference on Nov. 6. That is what they should have done. But, as we all know, it's not what they did.

 

[Grinder]

Right now the sole thing even remotely pointing to Raffaele is a lone Y-Haplotype DNA-thingy.... on a clasp where there are at least four other, unidentified male-DNA traces. And the one pointing to Raffaele could also point to a major portion of Itasly's male population. And this is before:

Any chance you have a credible source for this?

1) Patricia Stefanoni's own admission that she could not rule out that she, herself, had contaminated the clasp with an obviously dirty glove, caught in the Scientific Police's own video![/quote]

Here's what to wrote a couple months ago:

Bill Williams wrote:
Re: contamination of the bra-clasp. And taking this from a source which is friendly to the prosecution - John Follain - and from the 1st instance trial; the Massei trial. Stefanoni all but admits, on the stand and under oath ("A Death in Italy," p. 306-307) that she contaminated the bra-clasp at collection. (Highlighting is my own addition, not in the original text.)​

So your source is a true crime novelist? Do you have anything else.

But even he reports:

"Can you confirm to me the answer you have me in pre-trial hearings that you didn't touch the hooks with your gloves?"

Stefanoni, herself pointing at the screen: "Excuse me but you can't see that I ... you can't see on these images [whether I did or not]..."

Bongiorno: "All right, everyone will make up their own minds."

So even Bongiorno doesn't claim she admitted anything - she says people will judge it themselves

2) it fails to explain why the Y-Haplotype would be on the clasp, if a bra had been forcibly removed!

???​

 

[LondonJohn]

I have always found this curious. Raffaele and Amanda white middle class students, Guede always described in the media as an immigrant from Cote d’Ivoire, a drifter\drug dealer\burglar living in a country that doesn’t exactly embrace Africans (deliberate understatement) and yet Perugian law enforcement according to some folk here targeted Raffaele and Amanda almost as soon as Meredith was discovered, it has never made sense to me given racial bias within Italian law enforcement I have never understood why the police as some say here would target two middle class white students.

Perugian authorities could have easily and very quickly thrown the book at Guede, released Raffaele and Amanda and had a quick closure to a murder case, instead and for little or no reason according to some they targeted Raffaele and Amanda.

As for Racial bias, how many of us would have even noticed a news story of an Ivorian drifter\drug dealer had murdered a British student in Italy?

Others have already responded to this post in a similar vein to what I'm about to write..... but:

It's ALL about the fact that the Perugia authorities thought they'd "solved the case" by the morning of November 6th 2007. They triumphantly and self-importantly announced this to the world's media (as well as the good burghers of Perugia).

What's more, in the authorities' flawed "theory" of the crime, the so-called "dirty black" (Lumumba) WAS the main protagonist: Knox had merely let him in, cowered in horror as Lumumba viciously assaulted and stabbed Meredith, and had then become an accomplice and accessory after the fact. And Sollecito (per this "theory") hadn't even been there at all! He'd lied on Knox's behalf after the fact, but he'd not been at the cottage at the time of the murder.

So, in fact, the Perugia authorities arguably were demonstrating overt racism from almost the very beginning of the investigation. They certainly are open to accusations of racism in their theorising (utterly erroneously and without a shred of decent evidence save for the confused and coerced utterances of Knox) that Lumumba was the "savage" or "animal" who violated and dispatched Meredith Kercher.

And of course once it was clear that a) Lumumba had nothing to do with it, and b) Guede was proved by the forensics to have been a participant, the authorities felt (in my view) a far stronger reluctance to admit their grotesque error of judgement - their utterly flawed and moribund Knox-Sollecito-Lumumba theory - than they felt any urge to allow possible racist undertones to lead them to pin the whole thing on Guede.

Simply put: to think that the Perugia authorities were not institutionally racist, purely on the basis that they continued with their flawed prosecution of Knox and Sollecito (and "refused" to see Guede as the sole assailant), is to deeply misunderstand the basic human psychology that was probably at play here. In fact, I think there are several other clear pointers, both related to the case (the "dirty black" accusations of racial abuse from Lumumba, the ludicrous forced closure of Lumumba's bar) and unrelated to this particular case, which tend to suggest that racism against the immigrant black African population actually does have a significant hold withing the Perugia law enforcement community.

 

[LondonJohn]

Hi Machiavelli,
I too seem to recall a picture,
this 1 being a photograph of some police officers receiving awards for a job well done in the Amanda Knox case we discuss.

But for some reason,
I do not recall seeing any Blacks, Asian's nor Hispanic looking people in the photo. Just White police officers.
Do you have a copy of that photograph handy?

I wonder,
are there any racists on The Flying Squad?

Weird how when he was paid $70,000. Euro for an interview with The Daily Mail, Patrick Lumumba stated this:
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.

"I was questioned by five men and women, some of whom punched and kicked me," he claims. "They forced me on my knees against the wall and said I should be in America where I would be given the electric chair for my crime. All they kept saying was, 'You did it, you did it.'

"I didn't know what I'd 'done'. I was scared and humiliated.
Then, after a couple of hours one of them suggested they show me a picture of 'the dead girl' to get me to confess. "It might sound naive, but it was only then that I made the connection between Meredith's death and my arrest. Stunned, I said, 'You think I killed Meredith?'

"They said, 'Oh, so now you've remembered' and told me that if I confessed I'd only get half the 30-year sentence."*


Callin' a suspect a "Dirty Black"?
Hmmmm...

Why, for some reason, does this seem to convey to me that it was racist white cops who arrested and beat Lumumba?




(*) -Link:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-Lumumba-reveals-framed-Merediths-murder.html

A very good point indeed, very well made.

Over to Machiavelli..........

 

[Bill Williams]

Any chance you have a credible source for this?

1) Patricia Stefanoni's own admission that she could not rule out that she, herself, had contaminated the clasp with an obviously dirty glove, caught in the Scientific Police's own video!​

Here's what to wrote a couple months ago:

Bill Williams wrote:
Re: contamination of the bra-clasp. And taking this from a source which is friendly to the prosecution - John Follain - and from the 1st instance trial; the Massei trial. Stefanoni all but admits, on the stand and under oath ("A Death in Italy," p. 306-307) that she contaminated the bra-clasp at collection. (Highlighting is my own addition, not in the original text.)​

So your source is a true crime novelist? Do you have anything else.

But even he reports:

"Can you confirm to me the answer you have me in pre-trial hearings that you didn't touch the hooks with your gloves?"

Stefanoni, herself pointing at the screen: "Excuse me but you can't see that I ... you can't see on these images [whether I did or not]..."

Bongiorno: "All right, everyone will make up their own minds."

So even Bongiorno doesn't claim she admitted anything - she says people will judge it themselves



???[/QUOTE]

Whatever.​

 

[LondonJohn]

By the time they knew about Guede, they had made a public accusation and the media was having a field day. That was what they cared about, not race.

Sure, they could have released Amanda and Raffaele along with Lumumba and admitted they were completely wrong when they held their triumphant news conference on Nov. 6. That is what they should have done. But, as we all know, it's not what they did.

Exactly. And you can add to this the fact (as I mentioned above) that the authorities were arguably exhibiting potential racism in their triumphalist "theory" they were all crowing about on the 6th November: in this "theory" Lumumba was the savage who had lusted after Meredith and who had violated and killed her - Knox had done nothing more than facilitated Lumumba's base animalistic desires and subsequently cover up for him, and Sollecito had done nothing more than lie on Knox's behalf.

 

[LondonJohn]

As a slight side point, I think Guede knew exactly what he was doing when he invented the "black man found, black man guilty!" dialogue shouted at him by the fictional "other man" in the cottage. I think he was overtly bringing up a racist angle, in an attempt to force the authorities to bend over backwards to exclude racist thinking from their investigation - and possibly to even go out of their way to give him (Guede) additional benefit of the doubt in a "we're not racist! look!" reaction.

I think Guede knew full well how ethnic minorities were viewed and treated by the authorities in Perugia. I think he invented this phoney dialogue as a pre-emptive strike against these prevailing attitudes.

 

[Mary_H]

I have always found this curious. Raffaele and Amanda white middle class students, Guede always described in the media as an immigrant from Cote d’Ivoire, a drifter\drug dealer\burglar living in a country that doesn’t exactly embrace Africans (deliberate understatement) and yet Perugian law enforcement according to some folk here targeted Raffaele and Amanda almost as soon as Meredith was discovered, it has never made sense to me given racial bias within Italian law enforcement I have never understood why the police as some say here would target two middle class white students.

Perugian authorities could have easily and very quickly thrown the book at Guede, released Raffaele and Amanda and had a quick closure to a murder case, instead and for little or no reason according to some they targeted Raffaele and Amanda.

I go along with those who have pointed out that Patrick was the first police target, and Amanda was brought in to support a case against him; Raffaele to support a case against Amanda.

As for Racial bias, how many of us would have even noticed a news story of an Ivorian drifter\drug dealer had murdered a British student in Italy?

This is a good point, but the fault lies with the press, not with its readers. We can't read what is not written about.

 

[Mary_H]

CoulsdonUK and Acbytesla,

With respect to the Jon Benet Ramsey case, there was an episode of CSI Miami that referenced her murder. My very rough paraphrase follows: A hispanic parent who has lost a child says to Caine. "When a pretty blonde girl goes missing, the whole world cares. When a dark skinned girl goes missing, no one cares." Horatio Caine (David Caruso's character) corrected her, saying, "You're wrong. Almost no one."

"YAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!!!"

 

[LondonJohn]

As another side issue, I observe a curious angle to the wish - the need - of various pro-guilt commentators to see Knox and Sollecito convicted and imprisoned for the Kercher murder.

In some high-profile criminal cases, the prior notoriety of the suspect(s) can prejudice people. For example, one might successfully argue that Saddam Hussein was given a flawed trial and was executed with indecent haste - but that might be offset by a prejudice against his previous behaviour when in office. Likewise, one might be inclined to pursue Al Megrahi for guilt over the Pan Am bombing even if one had doubts over the evidence presented at his trial, since he was an agent of a Libyan state that had undoubtedl done some deeply nasty and immoral things before the bombing.

But in the case of Knox and Sollecito, the Kercher case is all there is. None of the pro-guilt commentators can be basing their pursuit of Knox/Sollecito on anything other than the evidence (or lack of evidence) in this specific case, combined with what they think they know about the characters of the two suspects. In my view, many of them have decided to reinforce their positions by deciding that what they are fighting for is "justice for Meredith", and, behind this overarching truism, constructing the false equivalence that "justice for Meredith" is synonymous with "convictions for Knox and Sollecito".

Such a falsely-constructed psychological "comfort blanket" is fascinating to observe, especially when it's nurtured and reinforced in a blinkered, self-referencing environment. But furthermore - and much more insultingly - a significant subset of such "thinkers" (maybe even all of them) believe that pro-acquittal/pro-innocence commentators are actively anti "justice for Meredith". This false belief seems to mainly be founded on a bogus assumption that many (most?) pro-acquittal/pro-innocence commentators actually know or suspect Knox and Sollecito to have committed the murder, but choose (for some bizarre and unspecified reason) to commentate in favour of their acquittals/innocence nonetheless.

I tells ya, when this whole sorry charade is finally played out, there will be a fascinating - and educational - dissertation/research paper to be written on the online commentary on this case, with specific focus on the nature, structure and strategies of the pro-guilt community.

PS: I note with interest that one of the pro-guilt commentators recently pronounced herself to be "heartened" by the number of anti-Knox comments (many of them fairly vitriolic) under an online newspaper report. Truly a fascinating - and disturbed - group of individuals, gripped by groupthink, faulty reasoning, and a weird desire for badly-aimed retribution.....

 

[Grinder]

As another side issue, I observe a curious angle to the wish - the need - of various pro-guilt commentators to see Knox and Sollecito convicted and imprisoned for the Kercher murder.

In some high-profile criminal cases, the prior notoriety of the suspect(s) can prejudice people. For example, one might successfully argue that Saddam Hussein was given a flawed trial and was executed with indecent haste - but that might be offset by a prejudice against his previous behaviour when in office. Likewise, one might be inclined to pursue Al Megrahi for guilt over the Pan Am bombing even if one had doubts over the evidence presented at his trial, since he was an agent of a Libyan state that had undoubtedl done some deeply nasty and immoral things before the bombing.

But in the case of Knox and Sollecito, the Kercher case is all there is. None of the pro-guilt commentators can be basing their pursuit of Knox/Sollecito on anything other than the evidence (or lack of evidence) in this specific case, combined with what they think they know about the characters of the two suspects. In my view, many of them have decided to reinforce their positions by deciding that what they are fighting for is "justice for Meredith", and, behind this overarching truism, constructing the false equivalence that "justice for Meredith" is synonymous with "convictions for Knox and Sollecito".

Such a falsely-constructed psychological "comfort blanket" is fascinating to observe, especially when it's nurtured and reinforced in a blinkered, self-referencing environment. But furthermore - and much more insultingly - a significant subset of such "thinkers" (maybe even all of them) believe that pro-acquittal/pro-innocence commentators are actively anti "justice for Meredith". This false belief seems to mainly be founded on a bogus assumption that many (most?) pro-acquittal/pro-innocence commentators actually know or suspect Knox and Sollecito to have committed the murder, but choose (for some bizarre and unspecified reason) to commentate in favour of their acquittals/innocence nonetheless.

I tells ya, when this whole sorry charade is finally played out, there will be a fascinating - and educational - dissertation/research paper to be written on the online commentary on this case, with specific focus on the nature, structure and strategies of the pro-guilt community.

PS: I note with interest that one of the pro-guilt commentators recently pronounced herself to be "heartened" by the number of anti-Knox comments (many of them fairly vitriolic) under an online newspaper report. Truly a fascinating - and disturbed - group of individuals, gripped by groupthink, faulty reasoning, and a weird desire for badly-aimed retribution.....

I think they mostly believe that the insiders, in particular the family, know she did it. They believe other supporters such as those at the Vashon party are just stupid dupes of Melloxes and Marriott.

They also believe commenters must be paid by Marriott.

Peggy, Pete and the few others that have gone public with real names seem to be interested in some sort of strange claim to fame. PQ seems obsessed with Meredith.

Their going after people they thought had supported any aspect of Amanda's or Raf's case is bizarre and creepy.

They seem so happy to see others' pain. Schadenfreude.com or net.

Peggy and other people from Seattle seem to think that their early public opposition to innocence somehow showed that Seattle could be run by these influential families. I also believe that some of these hateful women were and are jealous of the youth of Amanda and her potential to marry and have a family.