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

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Strozzi said:
Charlie, I agree. There are countries that lack basic forensic capabilities. Italy is not one of them.

Stefanoni's lab has the necessary equipment to do work to a certain level. Her foresic organization lacks the processes and staff to use it reliably and to protect and document their results. In other words, Stefanoni keeps a dirty lab.

If you want evidence that Italy tries to save face, you simply have to look at the Calunia law and how it is used. A defendant states in court that she was struck by police in an interrogation, and she is charged with a crime for stating that that is what the state authorities did to her. That is one way a society tries to save face.
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My point to Vibio, however, is that Italian authorities are not in any way unique in their obsession with "saving face." It is a syndrome I have seen in many cases, throughout the world.

A certain lawyer, Alfred Denning, addressed the matter explicitly in arguing against a new trial for the Birmingham Six, in the UK:

Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial ... If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. ... That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, "It cannot be right that these actions should go any further."

He argued, in effect, not that the men were guilty, but that the justice system should protect itself from an inquiry that shows them to be innocent.

That kind of candor is rare. Denning laid bare the obsessive concern that keeps many innocent people locked up long after the case against them has been discredited.

I am somewhat in the loop on the Angie Dodge case in Idaho. It was a sexual homicide where an intruder killed a girl in her apartment and then stood over her body and masturbated. The DNA in the semen has never been matched to anyone.

Chris Tapp is locked up for this crime. Tapp was a local kid who knew the victim, and he was kind of a dope. A cop worked him over, day after day, for weeks, and finally got him to admit being at the crime scene and to accuse his friend, Ben Hobbs, who was the person the cops really suspected of the murder.

But Hobbs was smarter than Tapp. He didn't incriminate himself, even when the cops told him Tapp had accused him. When the cops finally got a DNA sample from Hobbs, it didn't match the crime scene DNA.

At that point, it should have been obvious that the entire premise of the investigation was just plain wrong. This was a crime committed by one pervert, not a group of guys who were friends of the victim. Good grief. But the cops and the prosecutor could not admit they had wasted months on a wild goose chase, because it would make them look bad.

So, they offered Tapp a deal: tell us the name of the guy who ejaculated, and you can go free. Otherwise, we will use your confession in court and you will go down.

Tapp of course could not take this deal, because he was not involved and had no clue who really did it. So he was tried and convicted on the strength of his "confession," and now he is in prison.

The police detective responsible for this travesty is now the mayor of Idaho Falls.

Carol Dodge, the victim's mother, realizes Tapp is innocent and her daughter's killer has never been brought to justice. She is waging a battle to free Tapp and re-open the investigation. She is a thorn in the side of the local authorities. Last year, someone from the Idaho Falls prosecutor's office stood up in a court hearing and suggested that Carol Dodge, who has been seeking justice for all these many years, might be an accessory to the murder of her daughter in some unspecified way.

Yea, verily, that is what he said.

There we have "saving face" in America. It's no different than what is going on with Amanda and Raffaele.

This one of the endless long stories I could write up and post on JREF... all completely true and relentlessly similar.
 
Desert Fox said:
I translated as something like a sentence to "Time served" like the US will sometimes do instead of a retrial when they want to make a case go away.
A bit iof face saving as well.

I notice that Amanda's case against Calunnia was only filed after the retrial.
Wonder if the supreme court had just accepted his verdict if she would not have simply accepted it.
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The date governing the filing of her appeal to the ECHR is whatever date in which the ISC rejected her appeal against the Hellman conviction. She had 6 months from then. I thought she filed late which probably means I don't have it exactly right. If she really filed late then someone should be shot.
 
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anglolawyer said:
The date governing the filing of her appeal to the ECHR is whatever date in which the ISC rejected her appeal against the Hellman conviction. She had 6 months from then. I thought she filed late which probably means I don't have it exactly right. If she really filed late then someone should be shot.
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6 Mos. after the ISC Fabrication Motivation.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
I am somewhat in the loop on the Angie Dodge case in Idaho. It was a sexual homicide where an intruder killed a girl in her apartment and then stood over her body and masturbated. The DNA in the semen has never been matched to anyone.
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Are you suggesting that they ran a DNA test on the semen? Absurd.
 
anglolawyer said:
Yes, he could have overturned it. But he didn't.
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I think he was trying to keep feathers from getting ruffled, and give the kids a chance to be done with everything (i.e., finality). Would have been a small price to pay.

I also think that he purposefully wrapped the calunnia conviction in some language/findings that he might have thought rendered it suspect in a way that made it right for reversal.

Big miscalculations if I'm correct. He should have driven the stake home.
 
Diocletus said:
I think he was trying to keep feathers from getting ruffled, and give the kids a chance to be done with everything (i.e., finality). Would have been a small price to pay.

I also think that he purposefully wrapped the calunnia conviction in some language/findings that he might have thought rendered it suspect in a way that made it right for reversal.

Big miscalculations if I'm correct. He should have driven the stake home.
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The whole section of the judgment on calumny is worth reading but I just pick this bit out, in reference to the question I asked myself earlier about the court's findings:

But why Patrick Lumumba, exactly? Because the police had found, on Amanda Knox’s phone, the message “see you later”, sent by her to Lumumba on the evening of November 1; which could also mean she actually intended to see him later to go somewhere, maybe to the house on Via Della Pergola — whence the insistent questioning about that message, its meaning, and its intended recipient.

By “giving up” [Dando "in pasto"] that name to those who were interrogating her so harshly, Amanda Knox probably hoped to put an end to that pressure, now a true torment after long hours, while adding details and constructing a brief story around that name would certainly not have been particularly difficult, if for no other reason than that many details and inferences [illazioni] had already appeared in many newspapers the next day, and were circulating all throughout the city, considering the modest dimensions of Perugia.
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The highlighted part shows that H-Z found as a fact something I do not accept and which Amanda herself disputes in some passages of her evidence. I really do wonder about the degree of communication between her and her lawyers on this key part of her experience. Who mentioned Patrick first? If the cops already knew who he was and already suspected him that would blow apart their claim that it was her. It would mean either that they named him or that they pushed her towards doing so.
 
anglolawyer said:
To the constitootionalists: what happens if someone is convicted in Texas but escapes their guards and crosses over the state line into neighbouring Hawaii (or Alaska, it don't matter) and then they are captured? Does Texas have to show probable cause to get them back? If not, why not? Why don't all the various amendments kick in to oblige Texas to have to show a case? And if Texas does not have to show a case, what became of those constitootional guarantees?

By the way, that was one lousy piece of drafting. All the important stuff has to be introduced by amendment.
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I am far, far, far from a constitutional lawyer, or a lawyer at all... but the US Constitution says that States will recognize as valid all the laws of the other States, unless there is a federal exemption. Same-Sex marriage was some such exemption, it was Bill Clinton who signed into law the exemption not requiring one State to recognize the marriages performed in another State.

AFAIK there is no other such piece of legalese requiring any jurisdiction to recognize a foreign law and/or decision of a foreign court other than through treaty... and all the treaty does, I believe, is give that foreign power reach and standing in a US court.

And at the end of the day, the action required by the domestic US court to extradite, is "veto-able" by the State Department for any grounds whatsoever, really. It is in the final analysis a political decision.
 
Desert Fox said:
Is Canada also nuts for being resistant to extraditing Ms Benbenek to the US?
Just seems to be part of how all countries do this sort of thing.
There is always some interpretation involved
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This is how Wikipedia interprets Canada's actions, and their stipulations BEFORE agreeing to extradition. My guess is that those stipulations are not in the US/Canada treaty. But Canada had Bembenek. If the US wanted her back they could agree or go hang.

Wikipedia said:
Bembenek, however, sought refugee status in Canada, claiming that she was being persecuted by a conspiracy between the police department and the judicial system in Wisconsin. The Canadian government showed some sympathy for her case, and before returning her to Wisconsin, obtained a commitment that Milwaukee officials would conduct a judicial review of her case. The review did not find evidence of crimes by police or prosecutors, but detailed seven major police blunders which had occurred during the Christine Schultz murder investigation, and she won the right to a new trial. Rather than risk a second conviction, however, Bembenek pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and received a reduced sentence which was commuted to time served. She was released from prison in November 1992, having served a little over ten years.
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It's in Wikipedia so it must be correct.
 
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anglolawyer said:
The whole section of the judgment on calumny is worth reading but I just pick this bit out, in reference to the question I asked myself earlier about the court's findings:


The highlighted part shows that H-Z found as a fact something I do not accept and which Amanda herself disputes in some passages of her evidence. I really do wonder about the degree of communication between her and her lawyers on this key part of her experience. Who mentioned Patrick first? If the cops already knew who he was and already suspected him that would blow apart their claim that it was her. It would mean either that they named him or that they pushed her towards doing so.
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Maybe. But maybe what it means is that they had Patrick's name (after all, they had the text message) but went on to question her about him after finding the message to him.
 
Strawberry said:
In an interview on Italian television, Raffaele apparently seems to distance himself from Amanda Knox...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ehavior-murder-denies-hes-distancing-her.html
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This looks far more to me like the mainstream media looking to work up a story where none really exists.

What Sollecito is saying is that the prosecution should NEVER have considered him and Knox as a "package deal" - in other words it was never the case that they either both did it or they both did not. And he's absolutely correct.

What he's not (apparently) saying in any way is that he thinks Knox might have had something to do with the murder. However, I do think he's doing himself few favours opening himself (and Knox) up to misinterpretation. Seriously, someone needs to grab both him and Knox, and give them an hour's instruction as to how the media can (and routinely do) distort and "sex up" things to generate a "readable" piece of copy.

I would say that it's extremely instructive to read even the headline of that Mail piece. Witness how they refer to Knox: "Foxy". There's an angle here: an angle that Mail journos and sub-editors know full well (from being seasoned operators in their field) prurient, sexually-repressed, true-crime-obsessed readers want to see in their newspaper of choice.

Oh and by the way, if any proof were needed that Sollecito (at least) was not being controlled by some sort of carefully-choreographed PR stranglehold, this is it. Likewise Knox. They both appear to be saying and writing what they like at the moment. Neither of them seems to realise the potential damage they could do to themselves through willful or innocent misrepresentation of what they say/write. If I were in their shoes, I would make damn sure that the message I wanted to get out was carefully constructed and presented - not in any attempt to deceive, but out of a strong desire to have my communication properly understood and interpreted.
 
Strawberry said:
In an interview on Italian television, Raffaele apparently seems to distance himself from Amanda Knox...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ehavior-murder-denies-hes-distancing-her.html
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Read Raffaele's book, and you'll get more than this. Raffaele sensed that Amanda's behaviour in the Questura, while nowhere near an indication of guilt, was going to make her stick out to the cops. He is Italian, she is not. He "gets" the cultural confusions, she did not.

He's never been one to march to anyone's drummer, not Knox's not the PLE's not Mignini's, not even his own family - who at one time begged him to say that at the crucial time, he could not vouch for Amanda.

He simply could not lie about that. Their stories about the murder night, Nov 1, have always been consistent, as even Judge Massei wrote in his motivations report. At the time of the murder, they both were together at Raffaele's place.

The Daily Mail is just being the Daily Mail. They will print that blue is red if it would sell a paper.
 
The Sollecito interview is very grave. How anyone can still think these two are innocent is beyond me. Now we learn she returned hours later???
 
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We should look at the timeline for the morning of 2nd November. PIPs should expect to find nothing amiss. Briars should be interested since she has claimed Amanda spent two hours just taking a shower. I just looked again at Honor Bound and WTBH. Straight off there is a conflict: Amanda says Raf was sleeping when she left while he says he took a call around 9.30 from Pop and she left right after.

Her account does not have her doing anything except taking the shower, getting dressed, finding the poop and leaving. Then she makes some calls, apparently while walking home. She says she called her mother - while walking back to Raf's. Then she called Filomena. Her text suggests she had not got there yet. She seems to gave arrived somewhere in the midst of calling Metedith's two phones.

Am I right in thinking the call to Mum was at 12.47 local time? If so, that's well over three hours after she set out. That seems a long time. Has anyone any thoughts, or corrections, to this timeline?
 
If I were him I would be pretty pissed at Knox as well..... I don't think if that would be right... but I would.
 
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