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

[Briars]

Briars,

Several of us have rebutted your claims to the effect that the luminol footprints were either made in blood or in turnip juice. How do you respond?

Did you must have been busy watching the great hockey. What other substance did you come up with? The prints were made by two people comparable with the defendants. I did see Grinder had posted something on false negatives with TMB but I didn't read it.

 

[Bill Williams]

Do you have a link to any of these reports? It does sound pretty scary, with the way "evidence on demand" appears to work in Perugia.

I don't so everyone should take it for what it's worth.

Still, this is a guy who remembered nothing within days of Knox's arrest, but suddenly remembered month's later, even though other store employees would only corroborate his first story.

Why do guilters accuse Knox of changing her story when even Massei said she didn't, but Quintavalle changes his and he's to be believed?

 

[Grinder]

Did you must have been busy watching the great hockey. What other substance did you come up with? The prints were made by two people comparable with the defendants. I did see Grinder had posted something on false negatives with TMB but I didn't read it.

I'm hurt. You also haven't been able to comprehend the oft posted list of substances that can make luminol glow. The prints didn't match either of the defendants and the pattern of the steps doesn't fit with any explanation of crime, but what the hay?

It would seem that whenever someone responds to your ignorant claims you put your head in the sand or somewhere dark.

 

[anglolawyer]

But I have already. You have the time so look for posts answering Grinder about Nara and whether she should have checked her clock.The time she used the loo may have been sooner not the usual 2 hour wait. Look for posts about Curatolo and how he assumed they never left because he was reading In fact they simply left and returned .Pretty sure it's all been discussed , more then once in fact.

Briars

You aren't addressing the full difficulty posed by your rather arbitrary rearrangement of the evidence. Take these quotes:

Capezzali heard scream around 11.30

This is a judicial finding at first instance.

Not being able to demonstrate that the exact time of the murder could be established based on Guede’s intercept, there instead remain, ‚credible‛ (according to the same CAA) depositions from two witnesses: Capezzali and Monacchia. The time of the ‚harrowing scream‛ and the sound of steps of several people running is indicated as between 23:00 and 23:30

The witness Nara CAPEZZALI said that she heard a scream at about 11.00 or 11.30 PM that was so heart rending that, afterwards, she had difficulty going back [6] to sleep; an event that was further substantiated by Antonella MONACCHIA,

ISC p.85 But the most obvious strain in the interpretation is certainly recognisable in the undervaluing of the declarations of no less than three witnesses, in harmony with one another and absolutely independent.
Ms Dramis, in turn, provided a significant fact regarding the time, since she said that she had arrived home after 10.30 PM, having been to a film screening from 8.00 until 10.00 PM, [and that] she had fallen asleep until, shortly afterwards, she heard running steps below the window, such as she had never heard before.

You are arguing against Massei, Galati and the ISC. Moreover, as the ISC records, three witnesses independently put the scream well after 10.30. IIRC the two truck was there from 10.30 until 11.15. How do you address this mass of evidence?

Just to be clear, I think it's all crap. I don't believe any of them heard Meredith Kercher scream, but that's not my problem. It's yours. Please reconcile your theory with the evidence you accept as being given by Capezzali and corroborated by two others. We can discuss Toto another time.

 

[Briars]

Grinder you have a woman who gets up an hour earlier to pee,maybe she had extra water at dinner, She always got up at the same time assumed it was 11:15 . It was a scream not screaming then there was silence so she eventually went back to bed You cannot believe she didn't note the time compare that to Sollecito who wanted a calendar to remember what was going on 3 nights earlier. The scream was mentioned by 4 people if you include Guede and Amanda. Then you have the other witness who thinks possibly Guede ran into her around 10:30

Nader

 

[Bill Williams]

Briars

You aren't addressing the full difficulty posed by your rather arbitrary rearrangement of the evidence.

<.... sinister deletia ....>​

Just to be clear, I think it's all crap. I don't believe any of them heard Meredith Kercher scream, but that's not my problem. It's yours. Please reconcile your theory with the evidence you accept as being given by Capezzali and corroborated by two others. We can discuss Toto another time.

No, let's discuss Toto now. Toto testified that AK and RS were in the square the whole length of time. Briars response is to say, "Well, he saw them there except when he was reading," which is the same thing as saying that Toto saw them there except when he didn't.

I beg you, Briars. Please read the bit upthread on Denialism. On of the elements of it is that a denier just makes things up to explain gaps in their theory.

 

[Bill Williams]

Grinder you have a woman who gets up an hour earlier to pee,maybe she had extra water at dinner, She always got up at the same time assumed it was 11:15 . It was a scream not screaming then there was silence so she eventually went back to bed You cannot believe she didn't note the time compare that to Sollecito who wanted a calendar to remember what was going on 3 nights earlier. The scream was mentioned by 4 people if you include Guede and Amanda. Then you have the other witness who thinks possibly Guede ran into her around 10:30

Nader

Aren't you at least going to enter evidence that she actually did have extra water at dinner? I thought not.

Also, Knox never said she heard a scream. She was asked specifically if she'd been in the cottage why she DIDN'T hear a scream. She replied that she must have had her ears covered with her hands.

Knox at interrogation describes nothing to do with the crime.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Sure. There's probably nothing wrong with his arguments as far as the narrow statistical side of things goes. As I said, I doubt he'd take on Gill on the broader topic of contamination and transfer.

I thought the Radio 4 interviewer made a fair point when she said that Raffaele's argument that his DNA isn't on the clasp might be the wrong approach to take, and that the contamination argument was far more convincing. There again, I doubt Raffaele knows very much about DNA either.

I have always thought that disputing the presence of Raffaele's DNA on the bra fastener is the least tenable of the defense arguments and one they should have avoided. Why hand the opposition a narrow argument they can focus on and win?

Vogt and her ilk completely ignore the broader issues at stake. To accept the DNA evidence in this case, one must take a certain view:

Lab procedures don't matter, chain of custody doesn't matter, and police procedures at the crime scene don't matter. As long as the authorities can come up with a DNA test result that seems to prop up an accusation they have already made, it must be accepted as valid.

That, apparently, is the official stance of the Italian court system at this point. It's not what anyone was saying at the forensics conference in Seattle this past week. This is exactly what responsible people are trying to prevent, and they are looking hard at the case and the findings of the courts.

 

[Grinder]

Grinder you have a woman who gets up an hour earlier to pee,maybe she had extra water at dinner, She always got up at the same time assumed it was 11:15 . It was a scream not screaming then there was silence so she eventually went back to bed You cannot believe she didn't note the time compare that to Sollecito who wanted a calendar to remember what was going on 3 nights earlier. The scream was mentioned by 4 people if you include Guede and Amanda. Then you have the other witness who thinks possibly Guede ran into her around 10:30

Briars people taking heart medicine pay attention to how long it takes for the drug to work. Although I don't have any study I can refer to I think that the vast majority of people of Nara's age note the time when they wake in the middle of the night.

She heard not a normal scream, whatever that is, but the most horrible scream of her life. Then shortly thereafter she contends she heard footsteps on the stairs (NOT SILENCE) and on the gravel which she was able to hear and distinguish through double pane windows. The only tests run on this indicate it is highly unlikely she could have heard these things. She didn't just eventually go to bed she made tea and drank it to calm herself down, an activity that would take a half hour.

The other witness actually doesn't think it was Rudy, but what the hay?

It is interesting that you bring up Raf's confusion about the day. On one hand you say he withdrew Amanda's alibi and on the other you admit he was a space case. What is more comparable is that without anything remarkable happening on the night of the 1st you expect the kids to remember times to the minute.

Since you claim looking at a clock wouldn't be expected or normal as I claim, how in the world would she know that she usually awoke at 11:15 or was that supposed to be funny.

 

[Briars]

Aren't you at least going to enter evidence that she actually did have extra water at dinner? I thought not.

Also, Knox never said she heard a scream. She was asked specifically if she'd been in the cottage why she DIDN'T hear a scream. She replied that she must have had her ears covered with her hands.

Knox at interrogation describes nothing to do with the crime.

I guess she has a habit of covering her ears as Mignini noted . Your other comments are reminders that I chose to waste time here and hold no one else responsible.

 

[Bill Williams]

I guess she has a habit of covering her ears as Mignini noted . Your other comments are reminders that I chose to waste time here and hold no one else responsible.

Please do not misunderstand. She did not, in fact, cover her ears at the cottage, because she was not at the cottage.

She was asked at interrogation why she did not hear screams. The Reid Technique does not allow for someone to make statements which point to innocence. Police actively discourage this and force the person being interrogated to "answer the question as asked".

So she, confused and exhausted, or as she said, "stressed out", said: "I don't know, maybe I covered my ears.

This is what happened, unless you want to say that you agree with Nina Burleigh, who developed the thesis in "Fatal Gift of Beauty", that Mignini went into the interrogation room ready to use his knowledge of Masonic ritual to break this case.

Don't beat yourself up, though. We all choose to waste our time here.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Gregory Taylor and the lack of DNA

Did you must have been busy watching the great hockey. What other substance did you come up with? The prints were made by two people comparable with the defendants. I did see Grinder had posted something on false negatives with TMB but I didn't read it.

Briars,

Dan O. and I have both indicated that rust is one such substance, and Dan has made an argument that the luminol-positive substance is something that is bound in some way to the floor material (I hope I am paraphrasing correctly--Dan O., please correct me if I am wrong). In addition I sought out the knowledge of two people (Virkler and Lednev) who coauthored a review article in Forensic Science International, and they indicated plant matter. I would add soil to that list. A couple of years ago Professor Lednev served on a White House subcommittee or task force that was looking at the future of forensics.

The hypothesis that the luminol-positive substance from the footprints is blood predicts that Meredith's DNA should be present, yet none of Meredith's DNA was found. In the Gregory Taylor case, the lack of DNA was taken as a strike against the same hypothesis, as I have discussed previously. In addition, your way of framing the issue (in effect that the defense must prove that it is some substance other than blood) is exactly backwards: Forensic chemists have made it clear that a positive presumptive test doesn't magically make it a conclusive that blood is present. That is why there is such a thing as confirmatory testing. These days confirmatory tests have very low limits of detection. Yet apparently a confirmatory test was not run in this instance.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

DNA contamination at a crime scene

"It emerged in March that two areas of investigation were red herrings. Forensic examiners mistakenly flagged up a spot of DNA on Williams's hand in 2010, before realising six weeks ago that it matched a scientist on the crime scene." link to the Gareth Williams case. So contamination at the crime scene is possible, even when the deceased is an agent of MI6.

 

[LondonJohn]

More incomprehension I see ......

It had nothing to do with parole - the issue was

Oh dear. More incomprehension I see......

I hadn't realised that you wouldn't be able to understand my post. I was addressing the following issue: you were suggesting that a desire to see a bad outcome for a person who was black (while at the same time desiring a good outcome for people who were white) was somehow inherently indicative of a racist mindset.

So I gave another example, using the hypothetical of someone desiring a bad outcome for a white person, to show just how logically flawed your "argument" was. In other words, someone desiring a bad outcome for Charles Manson - a white man - cannot by any logical reasoning be considered an anti-white racist based on that datum point alone.

Does it make a little more sense to you now (possibly not, but I gave it a shot at making it simpler, so that's perhaps the best I can do)?

 

[Grinder]

Briars,

Dan O. and I have both indicated that rust is one such substance, and Dan has made an argument that the luminol-positive substance is something that is bound in some way to the floor material (I hope I am paraphrasing correctly--Dan O., please correct me if I am wrong). In addition I sought out the knowledge of two people (Virkler and Lednev) who coauthored a review article in Forensic Science International, and they indicated plant matter. I would add soil to that list. A couple of years ago Professor Lednev served on a White House subcommittee or task force that was looking at the future of forensics.

This is publicly available and give a better account of the wide range of substances that will light up luminol. While rust is possible a diluted blood from another time may be more likely in that it is very difficult to clean without strong cleaning agents.

ABSTRACT: A wide range of domestic and industrial substances that might be mistaken for haemoglobin in the forensic luminol test
for blood were examined. The substances studied were in the categories of vegetable or fruit pulps and juices; domestic and
commercial oils; cleaning agents; an insecticide; and various glues, paints and varnishes. A significant number of substances in each
category gave luminescence intensities that were comparable with the intensities of undiluted haemoglobin, when sprayed with the
standard forensic solution containing aqueous alkaline luminol and sodium perborate. In these cases the substance could be easily
mistaken for blood when the luminol test is used, but in the remaining cases the luminescence intensity was so weak that it is unlikely
that a false-positive test would be obtained. In a few cases the brightly emitting substance could be distinguished from blood by a
small but detectable shift of the peak emission wavelength. The results indicated that particular care should be taken to avoid
interferences when a crime scene is contaminated with parsnip, turnip or horseradish, and when surfaces coated with enamel paint are
involved. To a lesser extent, some care should be taken when surfaces covered with terracotta or ceramic tiles, polyurethane varnishes
or jute and sisal matting are involved. Copyright
2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.​

Given that the booties of the ICSI had light blobs on them it has been widely assumed that they over-sprayed the luminol.

 

[CoulsdonUK]

A kind of left field question about the DNA experts that appeared in the BBC 3 TV programme (Balding) and BBC radio 4 programme (Gill); did either of them actually examine anything from the crime scene, it wasn’t clear from either programme?

It’s just that I think it has been mentioned once or twice about the lack of EDF’s being released.

 

[LondonJohn]

anglolawyer,

One possible problem with his approach is that it might be suspect-centered, perhaps depending on how it is applied. I think a great deal turns on the question of how the hypotheses he uses are generated. It would be helpful to know more about how the forensic science community views his work in this regard. Ultimately, we will have to wait and see how generally his method of mixture analysis is adopted.

As I understand it, a simplified explanation of mixed-DNA analysis and the problems related to suspect-centric evaluation might be the following:

Suppose a sample is analysed, and it shows peaks at the following numbers:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Suppose, just for the sake of this example, that every human being had peaks at four (and only four) numbers. So (for example) I might be 2, 4, 7, 8. You might be 1, 3, 4, 9. And so on.....

Now, if the person conducting the test is asked to make a tentative evaluation of whose DNA is on the sample - but without being given any reference DNA profiles to work with - it's very possible (probable even) that they would say something along the lines of: "It's difficult to make any positive singular matches, since there's clearly such an admixture of profiles that singling out any one contributor would be next to impossible.

But suppose now that the person conducting the test was given the reference sample of a particular individual, together (perhaps) with the information that this individual was a suspect. Suppose that this reference sample was 3, 5, 6, 9.

There is now a very real possibility that the person doing the test might look again at the tested sample, and - consciously or unconsciously - find ways to "match" the suspect to the sample. In this example, the tester might find ways to rationalise that the peaks at 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8 were stutters or other forms of artifact, and that therefore the only genuine contributory peaks were at 3, 5, 6 and 9. And hey presto! Suddenly the tester is able to conclude that the tested sample "matches" the profile of the suspect.

I think I have the driving principles of this issue correct - but anyone should feel free to correct me if I've got any aspect fundamentally wrong. Again, my example is meant to greatly simplify the real-world genetics, in order to highlight the underlying principles.

 

[Briars]

I'm hurt. You also haven't been able to comprehend the oft posted list of substances that can make luminol glow. The prints didn't match either of the defendants and the pattern of the steps doesn't fit with any explanation of crime, but what the hay?

It would seem that whenever someone responds to your ignorant claims you put your head in the sand or somewhere dark.

One last post I was pleased to see that TMB gave false negatives because like you I had been searching. Of course the prints were blood and a belated thank you for the false neg info.

 

[LondonJohn]

A kind of left field question about the DNA experts that appeared in the BBC 3 TV programme (Balding) and BBC radio 4 programme (Gill); did either of them actually examine anything from the crime scene, it wasn’t clear from either programme?

It’s just that I think it has been mentioned once or twice about the lack of EDF’s being released.

They haven't been able to examine the EDFs or any of the testing machine's primary source data. Nobody outside of Stefanoni has ever been able to do so.

But they have both examined the electropherograms - that's the most they can possibly have to work with, unless and until Stefanoni provides proper full disclosure. Most informed people realise this will almost certainly never happen. It's likely that Stefanoni has thrown away the vital source data, with a second (but less likely) possibility that she still has the data but is deliberately hiding it from the defence and every other interested party.

 

[anglolawyer]

One last post I was pleased to see that TMB gave false negatives because like you I had been searching. Of course the prints were blood and a belated thank you for the false neg info.

You are out on a limb, disagreeing with Massei, Galati and the ISC on the scream evidence and Stefanoni herself on the significance of negative TMB. What do you think? Might a confirmatory test have been useful? Not a rhetorical question.