Let me help you a bit here Bill. I thought the point you were making was that evidence about the motive is so thin and ambiguous that even people that believe that RS/AK are guilty can't reliably or consistently determine what the motive might have been from the available evidence. And I thought that was a pretty good point.
I'm not sure that I have made that point, at least as the point of contention. It's not so much that guilters, "can't reliably or consistently determine what the motive might have been", which is in fact true... but that guilters erect a strawman when it comes to innocenters criticising them.
They always seem to go off on how unimportant, really, a motive is. I agree with that to the degree that a conviction for a crime is very, very possible without the prosecution demonstrating motive.
But this is not a situation where the two prosecution teams (Mignini's and Crini's) have simply made passing reference to motive - as if to say that, "Well, we really cannot be sure, but it looks to me like it was the pooh in the toilet, but at the end of the day we really don't know. We believe that the other evidence still holds together, even if motive cannot be known."
This is one of those cases where there simply is no "all the other evidence", as guilters like to fall back on when one item of that "all the other evidence" hits the dustbin; in succession until there are no items left.
The fact of this case is, aside from "all the other evidence", there actually IS no motive for AK and RS to have been involved in this murder. Incredibly, this is what even Judge Massei says - Judge Massei says that the motive IS KNOWN - not that the motive is thin and ambiguous - but that the motive is Rudy's.
Aside from all the rather bizarre determinations Judge Massei made in his motivaqtions, on motive he is clear. The question for him is not that there is no known motive, it's that the motive is Rudy's... it's his lust. Massei says that the options are that AK and RS goaded him into going into Meredith's room, or that it is his lust, and Massei says, in black and white, "this court believes it is Rudy's lust.
It's partly because AK and/or RS have no motive at all to goad Rudy to go in, and Rudy himself needed no urging from others anyway.
What is startling to me is that guilters consistently have to argue against Massei to maintain their guilt position. When it comes to motive, it's not that it is ambiguous - in Knox and Sollecito, for even the convicting judge, motive for them is non-existent, which is why he invents this, "choice for evil".
The devil made them do it, is Massei's theory.
It is always possible that we have missed something when we are trying to make an assessment of something that people disagree about. Maybe our biases have clouded our view. Maybe we aren't as smart as we think we are. But if the people that disagree with us can't derive a consistent narrative out of the evidence they are relying on to support their view then this is an indication that there is something wrong with their analysis and we might be right.
A complete lack of motive has always been a major stumbling block for the prosecution in this case. But most of the judges and prosecutors seems to think there is a motive, but they don't seem to agree on what that motive might be. One obvious explanation as to why the different judges and prosecutors don't agree on a motive is because there is in fact no significant evidence of a motive and they each just make up a motive unconstrained by the need to find evidence to support it.
This is where guilters, themselves, get tripped up. Yes, a complete lack of motive for RS and AK is a stumbling block for the prosecution. Yet guilters, rightly, say they don't really need one, esp. if the other evidence is solid.
Yet why is it that between Crini and Mignini and the ISC they go through motives by the sack-full? Indeed, motive is important enough for the ISC to include that as a reason to reverse Hellmann's acquits!
And not only is motive important enough to have the acquittals reversed, the ISC names THE motive it wants more fully explored - the sex-game gone wrong.
(Notice it is the ISC which is trampling all over the Kerchers on this one - John Snr. has consistently been abhoured by the thought that people think this about his daughter! And yet this is one thing the ISC uses to send the case back to trial!!)
And this is so important to the Crini case in Florence, that after the Aveillo evidence for the prosecution collapses, when the RIS Carabinieri evidence collapses another element of the prosecution case - Crini in his summation goes off on another motive-tangent. Rudy's pooh in Filomena's toilet, causes Knox to kill Meredith; sex-game gone wrong disappears and we're back to household tensions.....
.... when the Massei motivations explicitly says that relations between Knox and Kercher were normal and friendly. Heck, at trial, even Meredith's boyfriend testifies to that!
It's not that evidence of motive is ambiguous and thin - for Rudy the motive is clear: lust. For AK and RS the motive is missing completely. It's why the sole convicting judge had to get all theological on us...
... the devil made them do it, otherwise there is no explanation.
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