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

[acbytesla]

I also have a question about the U.S. law. If a burglar murders someone during a burglary or breaking-and-entering into their home, isn't that considered felony murder?

That's exactly what that is considered.

felony murder doctrine
n. a rule of criminal statutes that any death which occurs during the commission of a felony is first degree murder, and all participants in that felony or attempted felony can be charged with and found guilty of murder. A typical example is a robbery involving more than one criminal, in which one of them shoots, beats to death or runs over a store clerk, killing the clerk. Even if the death were accidental, all of the participants can be found guilty of felony murder, including those who did no harm, had no gun, and/or did not intend to hurt anyone. In a bizarre situation, if one of the holdup men or women is killed, his/her fellow robbers can be charged with murder.

As of August 2008, 46 states in the United States have a felony murder rule,[11] under which felony murder is generally first-degree murder. In 24 of those states, it is a capital offense

 

[Diocletus]

It kind of disgusts me how Guede only got 16 years for sexual assault and murder and only has to serve, what, 6 or 7 of them before release? Meanwhile, people only care about "getting" Knox and Sollecito - people who obviously did not do it. So when it finally comes to light that they did not do it despite the media storm, will the Kercher family apologize? What about the Italian justice system? Will they be compensated for having to spend 4 years of their life in prison? Just curious.

You reap what you sew. In their single-minded pursuit of the people who didn't kill Meredith, the Kerchers ignored and even aided the person who did. Now he's out of jail having paid 6 years in exchange for Meredith's life. What did they expect.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Lukis Anderson DNA contamination case revisited

I wrote the author, a forensic scientist, of a short blog entry on the Lukis Anderson case, "One would ordinarily expect that the paramedics would change gloves from one case to the next. Assuming that this is true, one wonders how the DNA got transferred." He responded, "Thanks for your comment. This phenomenon goes to the separate ideas of ‘clean’ and ‘DNA clean’, and of course the incredible sensitivity of today’s forensic DNA testing methods. No doubt the paramedics aren’t going from call to call covered in blood from the previous patient. But, they are exposed to all sorts of body fluids in their work, some of which may be invisible. Also, cleaning up may remove the physical stain, but still leave some DNA behind.

It could be as simple as one patient coughing/drooling on an EMT’s shirt and then the EMT’s shirt comes into contact with the next patient’s fingernails.

I’m not terribly surprised that this happens. It just goes to how easily DNA can transfer and the difficulty of ‘tracking’ invisible DNA. If you look at the quality control records of most if not all DNA laboratories, you will most likely see instances where analysts have inadvertently transferred their DNA profile onto evidence. If it can happen in a controlled environment like an accredited crime lab, who knows what might be happening out in the field!" (highlighting mine)
EDT
The site administrator added, "I’ve also heard of the pulse oximeter as a suspected culprit."

 

[Kestrel]

You reap what you sew. In their single-minded pursuit of the people who didn't kill Meredith, the Kerchers ignored and even aided the person who did. Now he's out of jail having paid 6 years in exchange for Meredith's life. What did they expect.

In Italy, pandering to the egos of those who believe they can pick out guilty people by behavior alone trumps all other concerns.

 

[AmyStrange]

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I've tried to make this point before. Too many of the miscarriages of justice I know of have stemmed from the police investigating someone close to the victim for essentially arbitrary reasons. In the Madeleine McCann case, for example, not only were the family accused but there was also an English fellow who just happened to have a house nearby; of course this didn't lead to any arrests but it shows a typically wrong-headed focus.

Then if someone like this is wrongly convicted, it adds to the statistics - while a remote culprit is much more likely to escape altogether, so would be underrepresented in conviction figures.

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That's exactly the way I feel about it also. It would have happened in this case also if Rudy's DNA hadn't been on record. HELL, even with Rudy's DNA on file and on the scene, they still helped screw up the conviction numbers,

d

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[Desert Fox]

I love the case in Germany where they were looking for years for a female perp for a huge number of crime while in the end it was found out that she worked at the facility that made the cotton swabs. They were designed to be sterile but not free from DNA.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

die Frau ohne Gesicht

I love the case in Germany where they were looking for years for a female perp for a huge number of crime while in the end it was found out that she worked at the facility that made the cotton swabs. They were designed to be sterile but not free from DNA.

The case is sometimes called the Phantom of Heilbronn or the woman without a face.

 

[christianahannah]

A letter written by Rudy Guede on the FB page "Processo e dintorni. Storie di vite e storie di giustizia"

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Proc...di-vite-e-storie-di-giustizia/248562865304583

 

[anglolawyer]

A letter written by Rudy Guede on the FB page "Processo e dintorni. Storie di vite e storie di giustizia"

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Proc...di-vite-e-storie-di-giustizia/248562865304583

With what NancyS was saying about dissociation recently I wonder whether Guede might have persuaded himself that he didn't do anything.

 

[Desert Fox]

The case is sometimes called the Phantom of Heilbronn or the woman without a face.

I was arguing with a person in Germany about Raffaele's DNA on the clasp and Meredith's DNA on the knife and used this as evidence on just how easy it is for DNA contamination to occur.

Wasn't having any of it. Just told me to read the Italian Supreme Court document on the case. Now, he said "Especially these pages" and "Especially these pages." I did not read the whole thing but those he pointed to. Did not give me a good feeling of the Italian court. They he told me I had to read the whole thing. The thing is that it is written in legal language as is which makes it really had to make heads or tails out of it.

 

[christianahannah]

With what NancyS was saying about dissociation recently I wonder whether Guede might have persuaded himself that he didn't do anything.

I don't know. He addresses what he was not convicted of and what he is not (what others describe him as).

The whole page is interesting and has another post about Rudy further down. It appears to have been started late January 2014.

 

[Diocletus]

The thing is that it is written in legal language as is which makes it really had to make heads or tails out of it.

When you say "legal language," do you mean language that can lawfully be used in Italy? Or, do you mean language that a legally-trained person might use? If the latter, I defy you to find any English-language legal document that reads like that. I would like to see a decision the reverses on the basis of a failure to use osmosis.

 

[AmyStrange]

self-fulfilling prophecy (2010 FBI homicide/ relationship data)

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Another point that's worth mentioning, though it's a little tangential, is the tendency to go after a spouse or close relative - especially someone who has discovered the crime or reported the person missing. Joanna Yeates's bidie-in was extremely lucky. He was the one who discovered that she was missing and reported her disappearance to the police. They did home in on him at the beginning, but it seems that his mobile phone connection data and stuff like that proved he really had been away for the weekend and had been nowhere near the scene of the crime.

A young woman was murdered very near where I used to work, in the 1980s. Again her husband (of only a few weeks) reported her missing and they really did give him the third degree. It must have been terrible for him, lost his brand-new wife and the police are obviously suspecting him of murder. He was a butcher to trade, which probably didn't help. They only gave up on him when they found the body, and the circumstances of the murder tied it in to a serial killer they were already hunting.

Then again, there's Sion Jenkins. Discovered Billie-Jo as she was breathing her last, so they decided to pin it on him without any evidence or any motive.

The concentration on Amanda and Raffaele, with Amanda being the person close to Meredith who had reported her missing, could be seen as another one in this series.

"Jumping to conclusions" is probably the fundamental cause of most miscarriages of justice, if you really drill down to it.

Rolfe.

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This is why they do it (2010 FBI homicide/ relationships data):

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/uc.../crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl10.xls

According to this data, most homicides are committed by someone close to the victim. It only makes sense (to LE) to go after those close to the victim, especially with these numbers to back you up.

But personally, as I've said many times here, such numbers are really a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it's not really as difficult as you would think to find someone who is either a relative or a close friend who you can prove with probabilities (enough circumstantial evidence) that they were the ones.

And if you can somehow get a confession out of them, well, game over,

d

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[Diocletus]

I don't know. He addresses what he was not convicted of and what he is not (what others describe him as).

The whole page is interesting and has another post about Rudy further down. It appears to have been started late January 2014.

Yeah. All he was convicted of was being a co-conspirator with an indefinite roll in the whole thing. He can still stick to his story that he tried to help, and thereby pass himself off as an innocent bystander.

What a colossal screw-up.

 

[Desert Fox]

When you say "legal language," do you mean language that can lawfully be used in Italy? Or, do you mean language that a legally-trained person might use? If the latter, I defy you to find any English-language legal document that reads like that. I would like to see a decision the reverses on the basis of a failure to use osmosis.

I was reading an English translation.
Still, it did seem a harder slog to read than Kitzmiller vs Dover or Perry v. Brown.

 

[Kestrel]

I was arguing with a person in Germany about Raffaele's DNA on the clasp and Meredith's DNA on the knife and used this as evidence on just how easy it is for DNA contamination to occur.

Wasn't having any of it. Just told me to read the Italian Supreme Court document on the case. Now, he said "Especially these pages" and "Especially these pages." I did not read the whole thing but those he pointed to. Did not give me a good feeling of the Italian court. They he told me I had to read the whole thing. The thing is that it is written in legal language as is which makes it really had to make heads or tails out of it.

The legal jargon doesn't help, but what really makes the document hard to understand is the faulty logic.

 

[kwill]

LA Times this morning

Andrew Gumbel (ghost writer of Raffaele's book) has a long read in the LA Times Review of books this morning.

It's a good primer on the intersection of this case and the peculiarities of the Italian justice system.

Excerpt:

Mignini did not direct the court to look at the evidence per se, but to look at the logic of his reconstruction of the murder. And the high court endorsed his view when it sent the case back to trial last March. It was a mistake, the high court said, to focus on the shortcomings of the evidence piece by piece; the new trial judge needed to absorb the facts of the case “by osmosis” to appreciate the story in its totality.

The high court ruling was bizarre, even by Italian standards, because it all but directed the new appeals court to return a guilty verdict. (“This evaluation by osmosis will be decisive […] in demonstrating the presence of the two accused at the scene of the crime.”)

But its philosophy of what constitutes evidence — also bizarre to Anglo-Saxon ears — was consistent with the way many Italian prosecutors and judges think and act. What they are interested in are less the facts themselves than the narrative they can build from their interpretation of those facts.

They see themselves akin to poets, aspiring to a greater truth beyond the accumulation of evidence and dusty piles of official documentation. Their principal tools are rhetorical persuasion, instinct and artistic creativity. When they talk about logic, as Mignini and many of the other lawyers in the Kercher case have, they mean constructing a story that fits the predetermined view that the defendants are guilty.

source

Poets. Artistic creativity.
/facepalm

 

[Strozzi]

That's an interesting idea. As a practical matter, it might be hard to provide site-specific, language-specific cards, especially for someone who is traveling widely. But I could imagine a U.S.-based office that would maintain current lists of local lawyers and interpreters around the world (the ones compiled by embassies and consulates would be a good starting point), and would provide an international phone number. A subscriber in trouble would call the number for local referrals, just as every credit card and travel insurance company has one phone number that can be called from anywhere in the world. The service could even make the first call to a lawyer: "Your new client is Jane Smith. She's being held at precinct No. 14." Subscribers might get a card printed in half-a-dozen languages that would say something like "I am an American citizen. I assert all rights available to me under law. I decline to answer questions without counsel present. Please notify the U.S. embassy."

You could also include the emergency international contact number for the State Department. And of course, the lawyers and interpreters could be listed on a members-only website. It basically would work a lot like travel insurance that provides medical referrals in emergencies. Maybe the first consultation would be free, and for an extra fee, the service might even include a bail guarantee up to a certain amount, just as the AAA card can be used as a bond guarantee for some traffic offenses.

It sounds like there's a real opportunity here, especially for someone who is already in the travel business.

You have expanded on this more than I. The $10 per month fee, when aggregated with thousands of other students and travelers, should provide a steady retainer to one or several law firms in each country.

I travelled as a college kid to Europe in the "old days" (1970) before credit cards existed - at least they didn't exist for students at that time. I carried American Express travelers checks and went to the AmEx office in Paris to pick up mail from home. Now we have credit cards and email and cell phones.

Credit card companies are always looking for a new marketing benefit to offer to college students because landing a new college student customer has a high lifetime value, as people tend to stay with a credit card for years and years. A credit card company should roll this out and charge a modest monthly fee for the emergency legal coverage plan. Buy your international plane tickets with this card and your first month's fee of $10 is waived.

If a credit card company rolls out such an emergency legal plan and needs a product spokesman, I nominate Raffaele and Amanda.

 

[acbytesla]

I wrote the author, a forensic scientist, of a short blog entry on the Lukis Anderson case, "One would ordinarily expect that the paramedics would change gloves from one case to the next. Assuming that this is true, one wonders how the DNA got transferred." He responded, "Thanks for your comment. This phenomenon goes to the separate ideas of ‘clean’ and ‘DNA clean’, and of course the incredible sensitivity of today’s forensic DNA testing methods. No doubt the paramedics aren’t going from call to call covered in blood from the previous patient. But, they are exposed to all sorts of body fluids in their work, some of which may be invisible. Also, cleaning up may remove the physical stain, but still leave some DNA behind.

It could be as simple as one patient coughing/drooling on an EMT’s shirt and then the EMT’s shirt comes into contact with the next patient’s fingernails.

I’m not terribly surprised that this happens. It just goes to how easily DNA can transfer and the difficulty of ‘tracking’ invisible DNA. If you look at the quality control records of most if not all DNA laboratories, you will most likely see instances where analysts have inadvertently transferred their DNA profile onto evidence. If it can happen in a controlled environment like an accredited crime lab, who knows what might be happening out in the field!" (highlighting mine)
EDT
The site administrator added, "I’ve also heard of the pulse oximeter as a suspected culprit."

I always crack up. Actually I get a little angry about the comments that DNA doesn't just fly around. My thought is the hell it doesn't!!!

Every spring my cars gets covered with pollen dust. That is biological material people!! I'm not sure that pollen carries plant DNA, but I would imagine that it does. And this DNA that you can see!!!.

I think the amount of DNA that Stefanoni SAYS she found on the knife blade was around 50 Picograms. That is 50 Trillionths of a gram. You would need a Scanning Electron Microscope to see it!

The air carries condensed water molecules through the air and the wind carries sand and pollen. It is said, although I don't know if it is true that the majority of dust is actually exfoliated skin cells. Ever see what the inside of your ducts look like after a few years? Or the top of your refrigerator after a few months. Ever have to clean your Venetian blinds?

So in fact, anything that small, that light can easily travel through the air on a light breeze.

There is a huge difference between finding DNA under the fingernails or from a vaginal swab of a victim and finding it on a counter surface.

But even that isn't totally reliable if contamination occurs in the lab, and the smaller the quantity, the risk of contamination rises, probably exponentially.

 

[AmyStrange]

I see dead people's skin!!!

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I always crack up. Actually I get a little angry about the comments that DNA doesn't just fly around. My thought is the hell it doesn't!!!

Every spring my cars gets covered with pollen dust. That is biological material people!! I'm not sure that pollen carries plant DNA, but I would imagine that it does. And this DNA that you can see!!!.
I think the amount of DNA that Stefanoni SAYS she found on the knife blade was around 50 Picograms. That is 50 Trillionths of a gram. You would need a Scanning Electron Microscope to see it!

The air carries condensed water molecules through the air and the wind carries sand and pollen. It is said, although I don't know if it is true that the majority of dust is actually exfoliated skin cells. Ever see what the inside of your ducts look like after a few years? Or the top of your refrigerator after a few months. Ever have to clean your Venetian blinds?

So in fact, anything that small, that light can easily travel through the air on a light breeze.

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Not only that, but I read somewhere that more than half the dust you clean up in your house is dried, dead skin which I'm sure has some DNA in it,

d

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