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

[Mary_H]

He's very clear. Very direct: the US State Department closely monitored the case. They found no indications that Knox was treated unfairly.

Period.

Sorry.... but if I had to chose, I'll believe him.

It's really helpful to have the whole conversation and the date on which it took place. You've quoted from a press briefing on Dec 7, 2009. Interested parties can see the whole exchange here.

I'd think that given this briefing happened more than four years ago, you might at least have included just a bit more at the end of your quoted selection (bolding mine):

If you leave off at the place you did, it sounds like that nice Mr. Kelly has no doubt that our ally Italy has a fair, open, and transparent legal system and therefore that Amanda Knox got a fair, open, and transparent trial under that system. Actually what he said was that the thing was still ongoing, and that there would be an appeal, and that Senator Cantwell was asking for help from the Sec. of State, and that if it became appropriate, the US Gov't would further engage in the process.

Slightly different message, there. Especially from the vantage point of 2014.

I agree, kwill, as I pointed out when I posted the same link for Vibio four days ago.

The report refers only to the first trial (Vibio's first claim was that the State Dept. monitored the "trials"). Ian Kelly did say he had had no indication that Amanda was treated unfairly under local law. However, he equivocated quite a bit and emphasized that the State Department would continue to monitor the situation. No more word from them in five years.

 

[GWCarver]

I don't think I've ever seen the pillow discussed before in this manner. (That certainly doesn't mean it hasn't - I missed the first three years of this case and a lot in-between.)

In any case, is it known what was on the bottom of the pillow and the floor underneath the pillow? What I'm wondering would be if there is evidence the pillow was placed under Meredith rather than her being placed on the pillow.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

the new evidence versus the verdict

I am not sure if they are innocent or guilty. I change my mind every other day. It is that confusing to me. Some make the argument that since they were found guilty twice, that must mean they are beyond a reasonable doubt. It is a convincing argument. Now the U.S. State Department declares that there was no wrongdoing. However, a lot of it seems nearly impossible. No one has answered this question for me yet. How was it possible for them to wipe away their own DNA from the crime scene whilst leaving Guede's? I do not understand how this is possible.

kcoh,

It is literally impossible to clean up DNA selectively. The Court of Supreme Cassation made up unscientific principles about DNA contamination and DNA profiling, which I can only ascribe to a zeal to convict. There is a great deal that one could say about the passage that I highlighted, but I will content myself with one point. The Florence court heard by far the least evidence of the three courts, and all of it was unfavorable to the prosecution. Yet they convicted anyway, and that should raise some questions. Let us say that Nencini thought that the prosecution's case going in were strong. Then was he not morally obligated to grant the defense requests for more information in this trial? Yet he granted none AFAIK.

 

[LondonJohn]

What is all this bs about article 104? It's mendacious nonsense.

This is article 104, in English translation:

1. The accused, if in custody, has the right to meet with his/her lawyer from the start of the measure.

2. A person arrested in the act of committing an offence, or stopped in accordance with Article 384, has the right to meet with his/her lawyer immediately after his/her arrest or detention.

3. In the course of the preliminary investigation, when there are specific and exceptional reasons of caution, the court - upon a request from the public prosecutor - may, by reasoned decree, defer, for a period not exceeding five days, the exercising of the right (of the accused) to meet with his/her lawyer.

4. In the event of arrest or detention, the power provided for in paragraph 3 shall be exercised by the prosecutor up to the time when the arrested person is stopped or brought before a judge.

In other words, 104 states perfectly clearly that anyone arrested and detained has the right to immediate access to his/her lawyer, except if there are specific and exceptional reasons why this should not happen. In such specific and exceptional circumstances, the PM must present to a judge his reasons for denial of a lawyer.

It's abundantly clear that the "specific and exceptional" circumstances referred to in paragraph 3 are to do with the possibility of perversion of justice. In turn, they must therefore imply the risk of collusion and corruption between the accused person in custody and his/her lawyer. And in turn, this speaks clearly to organised crime.

In short, paragraph 3 should never have applied to Knox or Sollecito. There quite simply never were "specific and exceptional" reasons why they should have been denied access to their lawyers. Yes, the accusations they faced were very serious, but there was no shred of a possibility that Knox's/Sollecito's immediate access to their lawyers would or could have had any adverse impact upon the judicial process.

Knox and Sollecito should therefore not have been subject to the para 3 "opt out". They should have been granted immediate access to their lawyers, in accordance with 104 para 1. No question whatsoever.

As a postscript, didn't Mignini "lose" his formal written request for 104 para 3 measures, or did I dream that......?

 

[Mary_H]

Don't try to wriggle away. You perfectly understood it: if guede lifted a body and placed a pillow under it with his bloody hands, he should have left bloody smears or hand prints on the body.
Did you understand it?

Maybe he had only one bloody hand, having wiped the other one while tearing off Meredith's clothes.

Actually this is just a test. Have you finally put me on ignore, Mach? I notice you answering everybody else's questions about theft and staging and logic and believing Amanda, but not mine.

It's okay. To me, not answering questions says as much, if not more, than answering them.

 

[LondonJohn]

I agree, kwill, as I pointed out when I posted the same link for Vibio four days ago.

The report refers only to the first trial (Vibio's first claim was that the State Dept. monitored the "trials"). Ian Kelly did say he had had no indication that Amanda was treated unfairly under local law. However, he equivocated quite a bit and emphasized that the State Department would continue to monitor the situation. No more word from them in five years.

Ugghhh again, this is all nonsense and misdirection on behalf of certain pro-guilt commentators.

Essentially, the US State Department would only consider raising this sort of issue - far less actually initiate some sort of action concerning it - if one of their citizens was being treated so dreadfully by a foreign state that there was prima facie evidence of gross human rights abuses. I'm talking things like torture, kangaroo courts, extrajudicial punishments and so on. Really extreme.

Outside of that, the US recognises that for a whole host of diplomatic, political and judicial reasons, it has no place micromanaging another sovereign state's justice system - even where a US citizen is involved. That is why the State Dept blanked - and continues to blank - any questions about Knox's situation. But nobody should be in any doubt that this doesn't necessarily mean that State Dept observers monitoring this case might be of the opinion that Knox's convictions are unsafe. Instead, what it means is that the US respects Italy's justice system (and position as a US ally) sufficiently to allow Italy's justice process to take its course without any hint of US interference.

In addition, the US also knows that there's an additional safeguard for Knox's human rights in the form of the ECHR. However, I suspect that diplomacy and politics would mean that even if Knox is ultimately convicted and is unsuccessful in any application to the ECHR, the US will still refuse to intervene (or even comment) on the safety (or otherwise) of Knox's convictions - even if the internal State Dept view is that there was a miscarriage of justice. Their viewpoints might, however, have some bearing on any future extradition request.

 

[acbytesla]

Machiavelli's faith in Italy's justice system and Mignini et al is a joke. It is blind and it borders on it is ignorant. But this isn't the US vs Italy. He acts as of prosecutors and police are saints and coerced or even made up confessions by the police are mythological.

But the truth is the opposite. In the US alone the National Registry of Exonerations, estimates that 43 percent of wrongful convictions are the result of official misconduct.

Here are just a few that have resulted from coerced or totally fabricated confessions or statements.

From The National Registry of Exonerations
http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/featured.aspx
Deon Patrick
State: IL
Date of Exoneration: 1/10/2014
Deon Patrick was one of seven men charged with a 1992 double murder in Chicago. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was exonerated on January 10, 2014, after investigations by the Chicago Tribune, the Illinois Attorney General's Office and the Center on Wrongful Convictions revealed that police and prosecutors coerced confessions and concealed evidence.

Nicole Harris
State: IL
Date of Exoneration: 6/17/2013
Nicole Harris was convicted of murdering her four-year-old son in 2005 and sentenced to 30 years in prison based on a false confession coerced by police after 27 hours of interrogation. The conviction was reversed after the Center on Wrongful Convictions successfully argued that the boy's six-year-old brother, who said the death was accident, had been wrongly barred from testifying.

George Allen, Jr.
State: MO
Date of Exoneration: 1/18/2013
George Allen, Jr. was convicted of rape and murder in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1983, based on a coerced false confession and forensic fraud. He was freed in 2013 after DNA testing excluded Allen as the source of semen left at the scene, and it was discovered lab reports that had been altered to hide the fact that biological evidence recovered did not match Allen's blood type.

Damon Thibodeaux
State: LA
Date of Exoneration: 9/28/2012
Damon Thibodeaux was convicted and sentenced to death in 1997 for the rape and murder of his 14-year-old step-cousin. His conviction was based on a confession and two witnesses who said they saw him near where the body was found. Thibodeaux was exonerated by DNA tests as well as evidence that the confession was coerced, there was no rape, and the eyewitnesses were mistaken.

These are just a few examples of wrongful, bordering on criminal behavior by American prosecutors and police officers. And yet Machiavelli believes this kind of thing doesn't happen in Italy. Even though the evidence in this case proves pretty conclusively that there was significant proscecutoriial misconduct in this case.

 

[RoseMontague]

We are not talking about evidence or proof.

No. You are not. I am talking about proof beyond a reasonable doubt and this case doesn't rise above a minor suspicion. Your two bloody hands theory is more of the Let's Pretend stuff.

 

[kcoh]

Chris_Halkides,

I had a feeling that it was impossible to clean up DNA selectively. I have asked countless people who believe in their guilt to explain this to me and they have never responded. Given that it is impossible, I am confused why people are convinced that Knox and Sollecito had a hand in murdering Kercher. No one, at least who believes in their guilt, ever acknowledges the sheer fact that they could not have done that, which makes me skeptical.

I know people think they still may have cleaned up (bathroom, hallway). But that theory never made much sense, either. Why would they clean the hallway and bathroom but not the crime scene? And isn't the fact that there was blood, footprints, handprints, DNA, etc. evidence in and of itself that there was no clean up?

I guess the only way it would make sense is to apply impossible standards to Knox and Sollecito.

I guess why I lean toward innocence most of the time is because the prosecution's theory always defied, well, reality.

I wish someone else would get involved, review the evidence, and squash this once and for all.

 

[RoseMontague]

Not at all. She did not write that at all. She also did not say that: she was interrogated on Dec. 17. and never said anyone asked her to imagine things.
(moreover, it would make no sense for a detective to ask someone to imagine things).
Actually, she was asked nothing. She released a statement, without anyone asking questions. More than one statement. A series of writings and further statmenets.

So they stood around her staring at her did they? And she just decided to write something down that would land her in jail? You are wrong. Her version of the interrogation is the honest one.

 

[kwill]

I am not sure if they are innocent or guilty. I change my mind every other day. It is that confusing to me. Some make the argument that since they were found guilty twice, that must mean they are beyond a reasonable doubt. It is a convincing argument.

It would be a convincing argument if the convictions were based on forensically valid physical evidence combined with a convincing motive. As it happens, though, there's neither.

Now the U.S. State Department declares that there was no wrongdoing.

That's emphatically not the case. Vibio just posted selected clips from a press conference held four years ago. The US State Dept can't and won't say any such thing until the Italians have finished with the entire process.

However, a lot of it seems nearly impossible. No one has answered this question for me yet. How was it possible for them to wipe away their own DNA from the crime scene whilst leaving Guede's? I do not understand how this is possible.

That's because it isn't possible.

Another thing that's not possible is for Meredith to have still been alive after 9:30 pm. Her last meal was still sitting in her stomach when the autopsy was done. All of it. None of it had moved into her intestines, which means that the time between her last meal and the time of her death can be known with certainty. Her English friends all testified to when that last meal was. The coroner testified as to how far along the digestive process it was.

These two things -- the lack of physical evidence putting A & R at the murder scene together with their absolute alibi for the time of Meredith's death -- mean that they simply were not there. They had nothing to do with it, they know nothing about it, and they should never have been arrested in the first place.

 

[Mary_H]

Also, there is nothing "at odds" in her message. Her memoriale has all its lines entirely calculated and balanced, each statement has a function and they all depend on each other, the redaction is sophisticated and self-controlled. Every concept has a caveat, every assertion is balanced and framed by another, the writer searches to methodically construe ambiguity. Her intent is to offer a rationalizing justifying frame for ambiguity. The purpose of the note is build a logical construction to "protect" ambiguity.

You are not a speech analyst, Machiavelli, not by a long shot. You are particularly unqualified to analyze the speech of someone you think of as completely alien to you. You might as well be analyzing hieroglyphics with no background in Egyptian history.

<snip>She wrote false testimony, demonstrating her "remedy" to things consists in lying; she wrote false testimony containing false accusations against an innocent man, showing she intended to accuse an innocent. She stated she does not know what the truth is, and that she does not believe her own memory, so why should anyone else believe her? She added further unsolicited accusations and construed a justification for ambiguity. Her method is clear. This hand written note is evidence under all point of view, this evidence will remain, and the ECHR will do nothing about it.

You still have not explained why so many other people did believe her. Too bad you weren't there to witness the interrogation. You would have been able to spot the inconsistencies right off the bat.

 

[Grinder]

It is remarkable that the PGP don't believe that a US juror would abide by the judges order to avoid all information about the case outside the courtroom yet believe a heroin addict that saw nothing when asked the week after the murder but remembered with mathematical certainty suddenly 9 months later.

They don't believe in honor of a juror but believe a shopkeeper that also saw nothing and then had a remarkable memory recovery.

People that don't report the most horrifying scream of their life become key witnesses even though they get the day wrong and have no idea of the time.

They drop off crucial parts of quotes when they are losing their points. They alter information etc. No wonder they have no faith in the honor of someone else.

I think the term is lying liars.

 

[christianahannah]

Ugghhh again, this is all nonsense and misdirection on behalf of certain pro-guilt commentators.

Essentially, the US State Department would only consider raising this sort of issue - far less actually initiate some sort of action concerning it - if one of their citizens was being treated so dreadfully by a foreign state that there was prima facie evidence of gross human rights abuses. I'm talking things like torture, kangaroo courts, extrajudicial punishments and so on. Really extreme.

Outside of that, the US recognises that for a whole host of diplomatic, political and judicial reasons, it has no place micromanaging another sovereign state's justice system - even where a US citizen is involved. That is why the State Dept blanked - and continues to blank - any questions about Knox's situation. But nobody should be in any doubt that this doesn't necessarily mean that State Dept observers monitoring this case might be of the opinion that Knox's convictions are unsafe. Instead, what it means is that the US respects Italy's justice system (and position as a US ally) sufficiently to allow Italy's justice process to take its course without any hint of US interference.

In addition, the US also knows that there's an additional safeguard for Knox's human rights in the form of the ECHR. However, I suspect that diplomacy and politics would mean that even if Knox is ultimately convicted and is unsuccessful in any application to the ECHR, the US will still refuse to intervene (or even comment) on the safety (or otherwise) of Knox's convictions - even if the internal State Dept view is that there was a miscarriage of justice. Their viewpoints might, however, have some bearing on any future extradition request.

I haven't any idea what the State Department's opinion is on this particular case but thought their silence (or blanked questions concerning Amanda and her treatment) had to do with her not signing a Privacy Act Waiver. I am not sure this is the case from after her acquittal to the present date but that did apply from the beginning of her arrest to the acquittal (according to the Department).

 

[Diocletus]

Don't you think if there were specific instances of irregularities reported to the State Department they would investigate them, or at the very least, address them?

I agree they will not make a decision concerning extradition until asked to do so (if the case proceeds to that point) and then they will work together with the Justice Department.

Nope. Especially on this case because they know that Italians are like babies.

 

[Desert Fox]

Sollecito gave an interview to People magazine today. Many people were assuming that he would turn against Knox for a lighter sentence, but they have vowed to support each other. He says that he made the decision to return to Italy from the Dominican Republic despite his friends and family telling him not to. He says that he will continue to fight this injustice even though it is hard for him. He said he has nothing to hide.

Brave or foolhardy

 

[Dan O.]

Tell me, did the alleged perpetrator have clean hands or bloody hands, as he partly lifted the body (let's say her legs) and picked the pillow and placed it beneath the body?

This is a perfect example of how Machiavelli thinks like a two year old. He's smoshing everything together as if it all has to happen at once. Like the claim that the same person cannot leave both bloody shoe prints in the hall and a bloody foot print on the mat. That is simply stupidity beyond belief. But that was Mignini's argument. Mignini was aparently arguing in front of a bunch of two year olds that didn't know better and he got away with it. Making that argument here makes Machiavelly look like the two year old. It's time to grow up Mach.


We know that Rudy put a bloody hand on the pillow. This print is right on the edge of the pillow. A place one would grab to pull the pillow but not conducive to balancing. If you think the handprint was somewhere else, show us. I don't believe you were involved when we were discussing this piece of evidence.

Why does a once bloody hand have to remain bloody? There were water and towels available that can clean blood from hands. Rudy himself claims that he fetched towels from the bathroom. Rudy himself claims that his pants were wet when he left the cottage.

And, is there physical evidence of Rudy Guede in the small bathrhoom? It's remarkable that no DNA of him was found together with Kercher's blood, only mixed traces with Knox's DNA and Knox's blood.

What was tested and from those tests what was the expectation of finding DNA from the person that left the bloody footprint on the bathmat? What is the expectation of finding DNA of a person that used that bathroom for the last couple of months? What is the expectation that Machiavelli will claim there was mixed blood?

I can see that - besides the fact tha I may not be semen - this is not evidence of your scenario.

Yours is the argument of a 2yo.

But 1. the palm print is from balancing on the pillow, not grabbing it, it's an open palm; 2. in order to place the pillow under the body, grabbing the pillow would not be enough, he would need to also grab her legs and partly lift the body. Where are the other prints from this grabbing?

There is Rudy's DNA on the band of the bra. There are blood smears on Meredith's pants. There is a bruse on the inside of Meredith's leg. Unlike the bloody shoe prints, the hand print could be made after Meredith has been placed on the pillow.

Do you understand that this evidence is consistent with a 3 perpetrators scenario, or not?

Where is this evidence of 3 perpetrators? The only evidence linked to the murder is of Rudy Guede. the knife wounds are all consistent with a single small blade like that of the bloody imprint on the bed sheet. The blood on the inside door handle indicates that nobody inside had a clean hand to open the door. There are no footprints, handprints or DNA associating anyone else in Meredith's murder.

 

[christianahannah]

Nope. Especially on this case because they know that Italians are like babies.

Well, I didn't mean publicly. If someone important made a formal complaint or had information concerning irregularities, such as a senator, the Department would check into it wouldn't they even if the public wouldn't be privy to that information?

 

[Dan O.]

It takes more than one hand to lift a pillow?

It does for a two year old.

 

[Diocletus]

Well, I didn't mean publicly. If someone important made a formal complaint or had information concerning irregularities, such as a senator, the Department would check into it wouldn't they even if the public wouldn't be privy to that information?

Hmm. Yes. Or no. Only the shadow knows.

They're definitely not going to tell vibio, though.