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

[Mary_H]

<snip>We don't know which of 12 of more appendages Rudy used to violate Meredith. We only know that the forensics say he did and Rudy admits it in his oral sex story. The presence of semen was tested and found to be negative. This says that one appendage in particular is unlikely. Rudy's statements in the Skype call also confirm this. If there was only digital penetration, there doesn't have to be arousal. But then there is the possible semen stain that was never tested...

By his "calling card," I meant his semen (that's what my dad used to call animal excrement he came across). I think the evidence points to the dried stain being Rudy's semen, in which case, he was aroused during, or during and before, the attack.

If Rudy performed oral sex, the lab should have been able to identify saliva on Meredith's genitalia.

 

[moodstream]

This is what Massei has to say about the arrival of the postal police:

the Postal Police (who it can be held that, according [81] to what is maintained by the defendants’ defence, arrived after Raffaele Sollecito’s telephone call to 112, and this by nothing other than the fact that regarding these calls to 112, the Postal Police say nothing; in the same way that they said nothing about those that preceded them, at 12:40 pm and at 12:50 pm; each of these phone calls being of a not brief duration that, therefore, would not have escaped the attention of the two police officers)

Crini is betting that no one has a real mastery of the details of the case, and no one is going to bother to find out. The SC surely won't care.

 

[Mary_H]

I see from Barbie's tweets that Knox's defense gets one more rebuttal.

I know what I want is irrelevant. I'll say it anyway. I want the defense to present a powerpoint presentation: one page for every accusation with clear, simple bullet points that refute the accusation. Very clear, very simple.

Have they ever presented something like that?

I'm with you there W. If memory serves, I don't think they ever have.

If they did that, I would then guarantee a not guilty verdict. That would be hard to explain away in a motivation's report. I would start with the duodenum and end with it, no pun intended.

And as always, that's just my opinion,

d

ETA I'd like for Raffaele's lawyer to do it. She got the jurors laughing the last time, even after Maresca's disgusting display. That's how I was able to guarantee the not guilty verdict last time. Just sayin...
-

I'm with you, too, Wildhorses. I would ask that the prosecution also be required to offer a simple, clear presentation of each specific accusation, including when it happened, who did it and how it is known, instead of this:

Prosecutor: "Your honor, we believe the three defendants worked together. We believe Knox Amanda and Kercher Meredith fought. We believe Kercher was restrained and taunted by the three defendants. We believe a kitchen knife from Sollecito's apartment was the murder weapon. We believe the defendants staged a break-in to divert attention from the crime."
Judge: "I see. And what evidence leads you to make these claims?"
Prosecutor: "I didn't say we had evidence. I said we believe."
Judge: "Molta buona. Proceed."

With the nebula of charges that include judges saying things like, "Meredith may already have been there or she may have arrived later, we don't know," it's hard for the defense attorneys to get a handle on what they're fighting against. I think they have had to infer a lot.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I don't have time to figure this out now. It was all very clear to me five years ago, but right now I'm still missing something.

I have convinced myself that the PP were just rolling by at the 12:36 timestamp. I was mistaken to think they parked at that time.

And I found CCTV clips of people crossing the street at the 12:48 timestamp. But I need to be reminded: how do we know those people are the postal police?

We can't tell from the photo. But the timing lines up exactly with what Raffaele has always said.

It' helps to revisit the official story. The Postal Police made the claim that the car shown at 12:36 is theirs.

But, they also claimed the clock was 10 minutes fast, so the time was actually 12:26.

That is their "proof" as to when they arrived. They say they parked the car and showed up just after 12:30. That would mean they were there for about half an hour before Filomena and her friends started to arrive, shortly before the door was broken down, which everyone agrees was about 1:15.

During that time, Raffaele received a phone call from his father, he made a phone call to his sister, and he made two calls to the emergency number. Amanda made a call to her mother. The police didn't mention any of this in their testimony or explain how they occupied that entire time frame.

After the Postal Police testified, Bongiorno gave her presentation in which she established that the clock had to have been at least 10 minutes slow. Therefore, if the car shown in the video is that of the Postal Police, it was 12:46 or later.

So now I guess the new story, introduced five years after the original testimony, in a closing argument without any supporting evidence, is that the Postal Police showed up at different times.

 

[Kaosium]

This is what Massei has to say about the arrival of the postal police:

the Postal Police (who it can be held that, according [81] to what is maintained by the defendants’ defence, arrived after Raffaele Sollecito’s telephone call to 112, and this by nothing other than the fact that regarding these calls to 112, the Postal Police say nothing; in the same way that they said nothing about those that preceded them, at 12:40 pm and at 12:50 pm; each of these phone calls being of a not brief duration that, therefore, would not have escaped the attention of the two police officers)

Crini is betting that no one has a real mastery of the details of the case, and no one is going to bother to find out. The SC surely won't care.

Yeah, while Raffaele and Amanda are inviting them in, telling them what they found and taking them to Meredith's door and the bathroom the postals are supposed to miss them making all those calls.

Raffaele's phone has calls at 12:35, 12:38, 12:40, 12:50, 12:51 and 12:54. Amanda's at 12:07, 12:08, 12:11, 12:11, 12:12 12:20, 12:34 and 12:47, all about the murder as they discovered it, tried to call Meredith and then started calling around telling people and asking what they should do, culminating with the calls to the Carabinieri. When the Postals show up five minutes after the last call they invite them in.

To what end would Raffaele deny calling the Carabinieri afterward if that's what he really did? How could summoning more police to the scene be in any way incriminating after they asked the Postals to come in, filled them in and the Postals didn't want to break down the door? It didn't happen that way so Raffaele tells what actually did happen, but if he hadn't already called the Carabinieri he'd have had a perfectly valid reason to have made that call because until Filomena and her boys arrived, summoned by Amanda's calls, the Postal police weren't going to do anything, they were just there to return phones.

 

[Wildhorses]

We can't tell from the photo. But the timing lines up exactly with what Raffaele has always said.

It' helps to revisit the official story. The Postal Police made the claim that the car shown at 12:36 is theirs.

But, they also claimed the clock was 10 minutes fast, so the time was actually 12:26.
That is their "proof" as to when they arrived. They say they parked the car and showed up just after 12:30. That would mean they were there for about half an hour before Filomena and her friends started to arrive, shortly before the door was broken down, which everyone agrees was about 1:15.

During that time, Raffaele received a phone call from his father, he made a phone call to his sister, and he made two calls to the emergency number. Amanda made a call to her mother. The police didn't mention any of this in their testimony or explain how they occupied that entire time frame.

After the Postal Police testified, Bongiorno gave her presentation in which she established that the clock had to have been at least 10 minutes slow. Therefore, if the car shown in the video is that of the Postal Police, it was 12:46 or later.

So now I guess the new story, introduced five years after the original testimony, in a closing argument without any supporting evidence, is that the Postal Police showed up at different times.

Thanks Charlie.

The highlighted sentence is for Grinder. It's WHY Massei didn't "debunk" the postal police's claim or explain in detail his reason for accepting Bonjiorno's timing correction. It would have been too embarrassing to the postal police to state in plain Italian that Perugia's finest confused a fast clock with a slow one.

 

[RoseMontague]

The question I have is that even if you assume the whole called the cops after police arrive is true then why did Amanda alert Filomena that something was wrong at least 30-40 minutes earlier? Filomena could have called the cops herself. Why did she make that call if she was not ready for the cops to show up?

 

[katy_did]

We are definitely on the same wavelength. What is amazing about the case right now is that the most reliable reports have been coming from the pro guilt camp and that too may be feeding our worries.
I'm trying to take a deep breath. Either way this has been a joke of a trial.

Other than Raffaele's spontaneous statement, the RIS report on Sample 36I and the testimony from Aviello, this has been a worthless trial. Really a joke.

Totally agree with the highlighted part. Just look at the way Barbie Nadeau manages to tell us that Raffaele's lawyer pronounced Amanda's name as K-nox and notes one of the judges's objections, but says barely a word about the actual content of her (very good) rebuttal. I'm only surprised she didn't tweet the lawyer's hair colour, that must have taken an enormous amount of self-restraint.

Perhaps that's a little unfair since Barbie's tweets aren't exactly packed full of content anyway, but yes, in general I think we're inevitably getting a slightly skewed view of how the case is going.

 

[Wildhorses]

I'm with you, too, Wildhorses. I would ask that the prosecution also be required to offer a simple, clear presentation of each specific accusation, including when it happened, who did it and how it is known, instead of this:

Prosecutor: "Your honor, we believe the three defendants worked together. We believe Knox Amanda and Kercher Meredith fought. We believe Kercher was restrained and taunted by the three defendants. We believe a kitchen knife from Sollecito's apartment was the murder weapon. We believe the defendants staged a break-in to divert attention from the crime."
Judge: "I see. And what evidence leads you to make these claims?"
Prosecutor: "I didn't say we had evidence. I said we believe."
Judge: "Molta buona. Proceed."

With the nebula of charges that include judges saying things like, "Meredith may already have been there or she may have arrived later, we don't know," it's hard for the defense attorneys to get a handle on what they're fighting against. I think they have had to infer a lot.

Here's where we differ. I shudder at the thought of a prosecution presentation. The background would be a photo of Knox with horns, a pitchfork, and a dildo. If they wanted to keep it clear, simple, and indicative of their reasoning, it'd be page after page of two words: She BAD. She very, very BAD.

(I never said they could count.)

I don't entirely agree that the defense didn't know what it was fighting. That was true for the first trial. The first trial was chaos. Third time around... if they didn't know what to expect, they're in the wrong biz.

 

[Wildhorses]

The question I have is that even if you assume the whole called the cops after police arrive is true then why did Amanda alert Filomena that something was wrong at least 30-40 minutes earlier? Filomena could have called the cops herself. Why did she make that call if she was not ready for the cops to show up?

Hellman makes that point.

"There has been much discussion on whether the call to 112 happened before or after the arrival of the Police, with it having been hypothesized by the Public Minister that the call to the Carabinieri at 112 had been made on seeing the arrival of the Police, just to validate the notion [tesi] of their innocence. Except that even the Corte di Assise of first level, on the basis of the testimony given by the on-duty Police personnel and of the times reproduced from the logs, arrived at the conclusion that these calls had been made before the arrival of the Police and unaware of their imminent arrival. And, for that matter, what makes irrelevant the problem of whether the call to the Carabinieri was before or after the arrival of the Police is the fact that Amanda Knox had already called Filomena Romanelli at 12:08 pm, certainly before the arrival of the Police, such that at that point, she had already informed [partecipato] another person [soggetto estraneo] (whether it was the Carabinieri or Filomena Romanelli in this context does not matter) that they (Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito) had entered into the house on Via Della Pergola, finding a situation that caused alarm."

 

[katy_did]

My main fear is that Nencini is a pliant functionary who was tagged to deliver a conviction, everything said in court is meant solely to whip up the mob, and it will work only too well.

I'm not quite that cynical. I think that if Nencini believes them to be innocent, then he'll find a way to acquit, even if it means saying the case falls just on the doubt side of reasonable doubt. Ignorance worries me more than the idea that Nencini was preselected to deliver a guilty verdict: the possibility that he won't delve deeply enough into the case, but will rule only on a superficial understanding of it. But that's down to him and the way he carries out his role as a judge, not so much about whether the whole thing is basically a show trial.

What gets me about Maresca's comments yesterday on Hellmann's verdict being 'signposted' is he doesn't consider the possibility that just maybe, Hellmann and Zanetti read the documents from the case prior to the trial starting, and had therefore reached some conclusions already as to how they would approach the trial. In other words, they did their research! Given the comments which followed from the prosecution, Nencini was always going to have to appear ruthlessly even-handed, regardless of his views.

 

[RoseMontague]

We are definitely on the same wavelength. What is amazing about the case right now is that the most reliable reports have been coming from the pro guilt camp and that too may be feeding our worries.

I'm trying to take a deep breath. Either way this has been a joke of a trial.

Other than Raffaele's spontaneous statement, the RIS report on Sample 36I and the testimony from Aviello, this has been a worthless trial. Really a joke.

I think the prosecution allowing for an earlier TOD is important and might be a point of contention to the ISC depending on how the judges write the motivation. I think that allowing an earlier TOD while at the same time allowing the reliability of Nara and Curatolo is a logic fail.

The poop theory may also have some appeal success, and it will certainly play well in the press, depending on if the judges accept this theory.

Mareca's charge that the Hellmann court had decided on innocence in advance. Remember the ISC wanted to make sure that a possible bribery charge by Aviello was explored and ruled that Hellmann failed to do that. I also have a feeling that this was a mistake on the part of Maresca, making this accusation in court and I don't think this is the last we have heard on this matter.

I also feel allowing Patrick's lawyer a place in court is a questionable decision and may come up in a defense appeal to the ISC.

 

[RoseMontague]

Hellman makes that point.

"There has been much discussion on whether the call to 112 happened before or after the arrival of the Police, with it having been hypothesized by the Public Minister that the call to the Carabinieri at 112 had been made on seeing the arrival of the Police, just to validate the notion [tesi] of their innocence. Except that even the Corte di Assise of first level, on the basis of the testimony given by the on-duty Police personnel and of the times reproduced from the logs, arrived at the conclusion that these calls had been made before the arrival of the Police and unaware of their imminent arrival. And, for that matter, what makes irrelevant the problem of whether the call to the Carabinieri was before or after the arrival of the Police is the fact that Amanda Knox had already called Filomena Romanelli at 12:08 pm, certainly before the arrival of the Police, such that at that point, she had already informed [partecipato] another person [soggetto estraneo] (whether it was the Carabinieri or Filomena Romanelli in this context does not matter) that they (Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito) had entered into the house on Via Della Pergola, finding a situation that caused alarm."

Wow, thank you. The whole point of the before or after is rather moot when you consider this. Much like all the various so-called "evidence" in this case, it makes little sense from a logic standpoint.

 

[RoseMontague]

Just thought it rather ironic considering the source of this opinion piece.

http://www.giornaledellumbria.it/blog/giustizia-riforma-non-più-rinviabile

 

[JREF2010]

Crini is betting that no one has a real mastery of the details of the case, and no one is going to bother to find out. The SC surely won't care.

Its a sure bet Crini is making too, or so it seems.

 

[JREF2010]

I'm not quite that cynical. I think that if Nencini believes them to be innocent, then he'll find a way to acquit, even if it means saying the case falls just on the doubt side of reasonable doubt. Ignorance worries me more than the idea that Nencini was preselected to deliver a guilty verdict: the possibility that he won't delve deeply enough into the case, but will rule only on a superficial understanding of it. But that's down to him and the way he carries out his role as a judge, not so much about whether the whole thing is basically a show trial.

What gets me about Maresca's comments yesterday on Hellmann's verdict being 'signposted' is he doesn't consider the possibility that just maybe, Hellmann and Zanetti read the documents from the case prior to the trial starting, and had therefore reached some conclusions already as to how they would approach the trial. In other words, they did their research! Given the comments which followed from the prosecution, Nencini was always going to have to appear ruthlessly even-handed, regardless of his views.

Yes, does Maresca comments come from desperation or over-confidence?

 

[acbytesla]

I actually have rose colored glasses and they work, even on a golf course.

What? You use them to ignore the water hazards and sand traps your ball usually finds its way?

Or do you say? "That wasn't a triple bogey, it was a snowman!!!"

 

[acbytesla]

I think paranoia and pessimism allows people to deal with disappointment easier. I get that way when I'm watching a sporting event. Like this last Sunday when the Seahawks fell behind 10 to 0. I was already preparing myself for the disappointment that I've known watching sports in Seattle over the last 30 years.

Charlie for example got a little freaked out over Crini's new addition to the Emergency call. Frankly, my bet is the judges aren't even listening to any of the lawyers at this point, particularly when they add something new at this point. They know that there really aren't new facts at this late date.

I'm taking a deep breath and keeping my fingers crossed. I'd pray but since I don't believe in God, I'm not sure any God would take it seriously .

 

[katy_did]

I think paranoia and pessimism allows people to deal with disappointment easier. I get that way when I'm watching a sporting event. Like this last Sunday when the Seahawks fell behind 10 to 0. I was already preparing myself for the disappointment that I've known watching sports in Seattle over the last 30 years.

I agree - it would be more comfortable in a sense to expect a conviction. If you expect the court to convict you have little to lose; if you have faith in human nature and people's ability to do the right thing, on the other hand...

Now, I wonder what the motivation is behind the blind insistence from the PGP that there's going to be a conviction? When I went on PMF and suggested one possible outcome could be a sort of compromise decision, they accused me of "wishful thinking" amongst other less palatable things, as if this were an outcome I somehow wanted! It can't be self-protection in their case, since believing there's going to be a conviction isn't going to help at all if there isn't one. Some of the statements they're making now will look a bit silly in hindsight if they're wrong, which they must realize. Maybe unity/group solidarity?

 

[acbytesla]

I agree - it would be more comfortable in a sense to expect a conviction. If you expect the court to convict you have little to lose; if you have faith in human nature and people's ability to do the right thing, on the other hand...

Now, I wonder what the motivation is behind the blind insistence from the PGP that there's going to be a conviction? When I went on PMF and suggested one possible outcome could be a sort of compromise decision, they accused me of "wishful thinking" amongst other less palatable things, as if this were an outcome I somehow wanted! It can't be self-protection in their case, since believing there's going to be a conviction isn't going to help at all if there isn't one. Some of the statements they're making now will look a bit silly in hindsight if they're wrong, which they must realize. Maybe unity/group solidarity?

I don't buy the idea of a compromise decision either but not because of wishful thinking. Just that in my opinion it is pretty close to impossible..no impossible to have a compromise. Either they are guilty of conspiracy to commit murder or they aren't.

I am flabbergasted that this even went to trial. The evidence is beyond pathetic. But I've seen people in the US convicted on pathetic evidence too. Not that two wrongs make a right, just that wrongful convictions happen in a lot of places.

I can't say that I'm optimistic that Amanda and Raffaele will be acquitted, but I don't see a guilty from the clues that we have seen in this trial either. Mignini and Maresca were just as absurd and over the top in their description of Amanda and Raffaele during the second trial as Crini and Maresca are in this trial.

As for the PGP being so convinced, so what? They see this all through their glasses of guilt. The fact that there has been a 3rd trial is enough to puff them up and it depresses me. But that doesn't mean they actually know anything.