Continuation Part 14: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Antony]

Sometimes the task in front of a jury is incredibly simple: do they believe the defendant? They are entitled not to and not to have reasons that would not satisfy a Bayesian - 'I just didn't believe him', 'he came across as lying'.

(Fixed it to what I think you meant.)

That sounds to me like abandoning the presumption of innocence and reversing the burden of proof. Fine - if the defendant's story is implausible then yes, the jury shouldn't have to accept it; but "he came across as lying" strikes me as unacceptably subjective.

 

[RoseMontague]

Just out of curiosity, how many people in this thread who said they trusted the court's initial guilty verdict because the court heard all the evidence and we lowly web surfers couldn't make a sound judgement now admit the woman is not guilty given a higher court has ruled in Knox's favor?

I have not seen any. Some have gone quiet.

 

[Antony]

You'd have to. You'd have no choice. You cannot question that someone believes someone else. You can question their judgement in doing so, but that's all.

No, I don't think that's true. The burden of proof is not symmetrical. Testimony taken to support the prosecution has to be BARD. Testimony supporting the defence merely has to be plausible and consistent.

Remember Massei's stunning "reasoning" on Nara Capezzali, regarding the veracity of her claims of hearing the "scream of death"? Here it is, in its glory:

If there had not been such a scream, and if Mrs. Capezzali had not actually heard it, then the Court can see no reason why she would have spoken about it.

Try modelling that piece of human reasoning in mathematical terms..................

Which is the sort of thing that makes Massei's verdict subject to legal challenge on grounds of being arbitrary.

 

[Sergei Walankov]

Just out of curiosity, how many people in this thread who said they trusted the court's initial guilty verdict because the court heard all the evidence and we lowly web surfers couldn't make a sound judgement now admit the woman is not guilty given a higher court has ruled in Knox's favor?

Lionking did drop by, but this was to announce that the subject was irrelevant now and we weren't to discuss it anymore.

 

[Kaosium]

Hi Dave.

The whole thing has been ridiculous from the start. What's sad is that a bizarro prosecutor can ruin so many lives, Knox's and Sollecito's, but also Kercher's significant others who believe justice wasn't served. I agree, the Italian Supreme Court may have simply been rational human beings looking at a lack of convincing evidence.

I was replying to the post that said the decision could have been tainted with politics. Yes, politics of not wanting to be embarrassed by the lunacy of this case.

Take a bow, SG!

Great to see you posting in the thread again. I suspect the politics of the Italian judiciary had something to do with the ISC quashing. Have you read the Hellmann Report and ISC sections on Quintavalle and Curatolo? It's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.

 

[Kaosium]

I have not seen any. Some have gone quiet.

Do you know who is still active outside this thread? I've actively avoided them as best I could, did I read correctly that PMF is closed? What did that mean?

Did I forget to welcome you back? I meant to but I can't recall if I posted it now! I know I have more books to buy, don't I?

 

[Kauffer]

I am sure that made sense when you typed it and I have no reason to doubt you but that is really laughable if true. I cannot imagine in our jurisdiction a 7 year process which results in a verdict of 'guess what? nothing happened in the first place'. Those careless cops! Gumming up the works with non-existent crimes. Somebody better have a word with them.

This was Charge E under Hellmann - simulating a burglary - the crime did not take place. So no actus reus.

 

[anglolawyer]

(Fixed it to what I think you meant.)

That sounds to me like abandoning the presumption of innocence and reversing the burden of proof. Fine - if the defendant's story is implausible then yes, the jury shouldn't have to accept it; but "he came across as lying" strikes me as unacceptably subjective.

Thanks for the fix. Nonetheless, that is the system.

 

[Antony]

Sollecito could hate the police, prosecution, and fraudulent judges, but I can't see any justification for him to hate Knox. Hate her for being a vulnerable victim to tough, deceitful cops in the midnight interrogation to obtain something condemnatory to arrest her? The police did essentially the same thing to Raffaele that night, only they began it with him a half-hour before they started in on Knox. Sollecito allowed himself to speak while confused. He signed a statement that they wrote which he said was a mash-up. The police played him too and used some of his confused statements on Knox to claim she went out the evening of the murder, when the fact is they both were together in his flat the entire evening and night.

I hope they remain friends. They have been through a terrible ordeal - one that was man-made by corrupt police, prosecutors, and judges who don't know the meaning of personal integrity.

Tell me one police player, prosecutor, or judge other than those on Hellman's court who themselves wouldn't have turned and lied to save their own skin for a foreign girl they knew only a week before this monstrosity engulfed them. You think Mignini or Stefanoni or Napoleoni or Giobi or Batistelli would have stood firm with the truth and suffered the unjust consequences? They would have lied to save their own skins to separate themselves from the co-victim, abandoning her to the Perugia wolves.

In later years, I hope Sollecito and Knox can look back at what happened to them in their twenties and realize that it was an evil that they survived. Much like others who in their 20's survive a terrible accident or near-fatal illness or war, to live on.

And of course, guilty people who get found out always blame each other. They are a mutual liability. That's what the guilt-crowd never seem to understand. Innocent people who are jointly accused stick together.

If Amanda and Raff meet up soon (maybe even at each other's weddings) and are photographed together, then no doubt the hate mob will denounce them for their supposed "brazenness", missing the point that no guilty pair, having pulled the wool over the world's eyes, would have the confidence to ever be seen together again.

 

[RoseMontague]

Do you know who is still active outside this thread? I've actively avoided them as best I could, did I read correctly that PMF is closed? What did that mean?

Did I forget to welcome you back? I meant to but I can't recall if I posted it now! I know I have more books to buy, don't I?

It's good to see you as well. dotorg is closing at the end of April, some have already migrated to dotnet. There were a few here that seemed to rely on the Italian system for the basis of their opinion. Now that the final conclusion has been reached they have not said much of anything.

 

[Strozzi]

Shortly after the acquittal someone fired a shot over my house. Probably a coincidence, but it's kinda creepy being as I know that some of those involved in this cause like The Machine (who's involved in other guilt projects as well) know where I live. Sometimes people get all worked up when on the internet these days and it bubbles over and they do something that they regret.

No real harm done and since the MPD is on it I don't need to think about it anymore. I do miss the days when it wasn't so easy to track people down online because sometimes people do and write things that aren't necessarily indicative of their character when they get too worked up or perhaps are drunk.

Kaosium, regarding the shot fired over your house, let me advise you to turn down the music and pay the noise ticket.

My sister lives very near you. She has been interested in this case through me. She has argued innocence with a co-worker who could not understand how the pair could be innocent when two lower courts found them guilty.

My sister can help the person who fired the shot. My sister is a psychiatric nurse. She would be glad to administer medications to The Machine, too.

 

[Kaosium]

I do not believe that the video I saw was malicious. It might have been a demonstration to show the cartwheel story did not make sense, for example.

it was quite a while ago when I would have seen the program.

You thinking you saw a video of Amanda doing a cartwheel is not unique, Randy N thought he saw one as well years before he started posting on the case.

There can't be one, otherwise the Polizia di Stato would have to admit to having tapes of that night in the Questura. Boy would I like to see those!

 

[Kaosium]

It's good to see you as well. dotorg is closing at the end of April, some have already migrated to dotnet. There were a few here that seemed to rely on the Italian system for the basis of their opinion. Now that the final conclusion has been reached they have not said much of anything.

Thank you.

Kaosium, regarding the shot fired over your house, let me advise you to turn down the music and pay the noise ticket.

LOL! I prefer headphones these days.

My sister lives very near you. She has been interested in this case through me. She has argued innocence with a co-worker who could not understand how the pair could be innocent when two lower courts found them guilty.

I sure hope they move on, it seems for some of these there's an aftermath where some try to keep convincing people the person they condemned must have been guilty.

My sister can help the person who fired the shot. My sister is a psychiatric nurse. She would be glad to administer medications to The Machine, too.

I've often wondered if that person ever posted here. Not to my knowledge. We took apart a few of his lists though...over and over again. I remember discovering that he was right about the prosecution claiming mixed blood which was a real puzzle as Massei actually disproves it in his Motivations, quoting Stefanoni who also had to testify that there was no way to tell. They just 'hypothesized' the mixed blood.

 

[LondonJohn]

No, I don't think that's true. The burden of proof is not symmetrical. Testimony taken to support the prosecution has to be BARD. Testimony supporting the defence merely has to be plausible and consistent.


Which is the sort of thing that makes Massei's verdict subject to legal challenge on grounds of being arbitrary.

No, that was not one of the potentially challengable things at all.

A court heard testimony from Capezzali. She said that she heard a loud, blood-curdling scream that night, followed by the sound of multiple people running away. It was entirely up to the court to decide whether it thinks that a) Capezzali heard a scream and fleeing, because the scream she describes actually did take place, or b) Capezzali honestly thought she heard that scream and the fleeing, but in fact it was probably her mind playing tricks on her and this is therefore not evidence that the scream in fact happened, or c) Capezzali is - for whatever reason - making up the story about hearing a scream and the sound of people fleeing.

Note that I'm concentrating here on just whether or not Capezzali's testimony proves that such a scream and fleeing took place at around the time she says it took place - and not the wider issue of whether that scream and fleeing (if they existed) could be linked to the murder.

The court would be wholly entitled to say that it believed Capezzali was telling the truth and that she was not mistaken. The court wouldn't have to say exactly why it came to that conclusion. It might point out that in the court's opinion Capezzali appeared of sound mind and not prone to fantasy or hyperbole, and it might point out that it could have been physically possible for someone in her location to have heard such a set of noises if they had in fact occurred. But ultimately it's a pure judgement call on whether Capezzali's testimony is to be taken as evidence that there really was a scream and the sound of people fleeing at the time she said there was.

If there had been a strong factual piece of evidence that suggested that Capezzali simply couldn't have heard such a scream from the cottage (to take that point to extremes, imagine if Capezzali lived four miles away from the cottage and had claimed to have heard a scream from the cottage), then Massei's court's decision on Capezzali could have been challenged on the basis that its judgement was squarely at odds with facts in evidence. But otherwise, it's impossible to challenge a straight judgement call.

 

[Antony]

Yes, I have a very dim memory of having seen that on video. Hell for all I know it was a fictionalized movie on the tv, or the like., or a dramatization on the news*I do recall that it seemed to have taken a prominent role in the proceedings, I have and had no idea that there was a dispute that it had or had not taken place.

I have no idea at all who mignini is. *like a 20/20 type show?

 

[LondonJohn]

With all due respect LJ, I see this argument similar to "the anything is possible" argument. Both may be theoretically possible but don't represent an actual intellectual concept.

I don't understand your argument here at all.

I am saying that while I think it's possible to construct a mathematical model that could output a "correct" verdict in a criminal trial, it would require an astonishingly complex set of inputs in order to replicate human reasoning. Therefore, for practical purposes as of 2015, I believe it's impossible to construct a sufficiently robust mathematical model to do this job (and I suggest that the modelling may have to be so complex as to require the use of things such as AI, fuzzy logic and quantum computing.

Look: you can build a mathematical model that will accurately tell you the real-world probability (and standard deviations etc) of pulling three blue balls in a row out of a sack that originally contained 20 blue balls and 20 red balls. And if you actually conduct that experiment in the real world a whole bunch of times, the real-world results you get will converge towards the results predicted by the model.

But imagine another scenario. If you're a heterosexual male, you probably glance at women sometimes in the street or in a store or on public transport, and you make a pretty instant assessment of whether you find that woman physically attractive. Your input into that process is usually no more than your vision. For the sake of this argument, imagine that in your head you might be grading any particular woman on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being not at all attractive to you, and 5 being wow, super attractive to you.

So imagine now that you are trying to build a computer model that could take the same input - a still or moving image of a woman - and accurately model whether or not you would find that woman physically attractive and where on the 1-5 scale you would place her. Stop and think about that. This is something that you can do in your head pretty instantly. But even though you don't realise it, there are a truly astonishing number of highly nuanced (and often abstract) thought processes going on in that split second before you reach your decision. The precise (and minutely differing) position and size of the woman's eyes, nose, mouth etc. The way she wears her hair. What you can discern of her physical body type (which would include complex understanding of how clothes hang on a body, how they reflect the underlying body type, how they can disguise body type). More abstract things still, such as the way the woman "carries herself". A comparison between the woman and other women whom you find attractive (or not). Society's definitions of what constitutes "physical attractiveness" in a woman*

This is an incredibly complex set of operations being carried out inside your mind in a split second. Most of these operations are extremely difficult to translate into a mathematical form, and some of them are mind-blowing difficult to translate into a mathematical form. I therefore propose that it would be nigh-on impossible for anyone today to build a mathematical model that came anywhere even close to accuracy in mirroring/predicting how you would rate the physical attractiveness of any given woman, based on the single input of a still or moving image of that woman.

That's what I'm trying to say here.



* For example, in Europe during the Renaissance, the prevailing cultural norm among the higher social classes was that the most beautiful women had a body type that we would now classify as very overweight or obese (i.e. "Rubenesque"). And that would have obviously impacted heavily on how a given person at that point in history would have rated the physical attractiveness of a given woman that he saw.....

 

[Antony]

As to your post, I think you might be right, but they may also have also done it because they thought AK/RS were innocent and the time had come to stop the various little corrupt legal fiefdoms in Italy from continuing on with their sad nonsense.

Frank Sfarzo's account (which I read second-hand here) of the judges' body language as they listened to the prosecution submissions seems to support this view.

 

[LondonJohn]

Peggy Ganong has announced that PMF.ORG is closing.

For my money, she consulted a lawyer.

Gosh. I might even resort to the internet cliche of "Wow. Just wow".

I suspect that one of four things might be driving this volte face (and I'm still amused at how Ganong even managed to slip an arbitrary French phrase into her announcement - it's not perhaps that she needs people to be impressed by her command of French, is it.....? ):

1) She became quickly disillusioned by the opinions of many of the posters on her forum in the wake of the SC decision, and began to see those people for what they really are;

2) She stood back and decided that in fact she didn't want to devote any more time and energy to this forum - perhaps because she's become so disillusioned herself;

3) She decided (maybe in discussions with others) that there was now the very real possibility of her getting caught up in legal action, since she has legal responsibilities as the nominal owner of the forum;

4) She responded to some sort of formal legal communication giving her fair warning of legal repercussions to the content on her forum.


For myself, I'm glad that .org is closing. I had always hoped that this verdict would cause the majority of pro-guilt commentators to pack up their tents quietly and go away. I think that this would be in the best interest of everyone - including themselves. I'm very interested to see reactions to this announcement - many pro-guilt posters do seem to be conceding that their obsession with the pro-guilt campaign was taking over their whole life, and that the enforced closure of their "battleground" might indeed be a blessing in disguise.

It will be somewhat interesting to see what happens with .net and TJMK now. And/or whether any pro-guilt posters come over to ISF to air their arguments here. I doubt it somehow, but we live in hope.

 

[Samson]

Do you know who is still active outside this thread? I've actively avoided them as best I could, did I read correctly that PMF is closed? What did that mean?

Did I forget to welcome you back? I meant to but I can't recall if I posted it now! I know I have more books to buy, don't I?

PMF ORG is closing down over a month or so. Peggy is allowing the opportunity for some one to buy it however.
It contains excellent material for researchers into cognitive dissonance, which has ramifications for all areas of collective human wellbeing.
The content should be permanently available, and archived in the same way the Nazis catalogued and filmed their behaviour.
Cliche alert,
If we don't learn from history it will be repeated.

ETA I posted before reading down to LondonJohn. Is there a Bayesian calculation for the word cliche independently occurring in consecutive posts?
Also, I am not suggesting PMFers should be equated to Nazis, but I stand by the allusion for formal logical reasons.

 

[anglolawyer]

PMF ORG is closing down over a month or so. Peggy is allowing the opportunity for some one to buy it however.
It contains excellent material for researchers into cognitive dissonance, which has ramifications for all areas of collective human wellbeing.
The content should be permanently available, and archived in the same way the Nazis catalogued and filmed their behaviour.
Cliche alert,
If we don't learn from history it will be repeated.

I'll buy it. I bid a dollar.