Well said!
Meredith Kercher murdered-Amanda Knox Conviction Overturned #22
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gitana1
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Clear article on the case here:http://news.yahoo.com/italy-appeals-court-clears-knox-murder-195458468.html
From the article:
There were two options to acquit: that there wasn't enough evidence to uphold the conviction or that the pair simply didn't commit the crime. The eight-member jury determined the latter, clearing Knox and Sollecito completely...
The prosecution's case was set back during the appeal when two court-ordered independent experts reviewed the DNA evidence that had been used to link Knox and Sollecito to the crime during the first trial.
From the start, the weak point in the prosecution's case was the lack of motive along with unreliable and at times contradictory eyewitness testimony. Therefore, much depended on the scientific evidence gathered by investigators.
Prosecutors maintain that Knox's DNA was found on the handle of a kitchen knife believed to be the murder weapon, and that Kercher's DNA was found on the blade. They said Sollecito's DNA was on the clasp of Kercher's bra as part of a mix of evidence that also included the victim's genetic profile.
But the independent review ordered at the request of the defense, which had always disputed those findings reached a different conclusion.
The two experts found that police conducting the investigation had made glaring errors in evidence-collecting and that below-standard testing and possible contamination raised doubts over the attribution of DNA traces, both on the blade and on the bra clasp, which was collected from the crime scene 46 days after the murder.
From the article:
There were two options to acquit: that there wasn't enough evidence to uphold the conviction or that the pair simply didn't commit the crime. The eight-member jury determined the latter, clearing Knox and Sollecito completely...
The prosecution's case was set back during the appeal when two court-ordered independent experts reviewed the DNA evidence that had been used to link Knox and Sollecito to the crime during the first trial.
From the start, the weak point in the prosecution's case was the lack of motive along with unreliable and at times contradictory eyewitness testimony. Therefore, much depended on the scientific evidence gathered by investigators.
Prosecutors maintain that Knox's DNA was found on the handle of a kitchen knife believed to be the murder weapon, and that Kercher's DNA was found on the blade. They said Sollecito's DNA was on the clasp of Kercher's bra as part of a mix of evidence that also included the victim's genetic profile.
But the independent review ordered at the request of the defense, which had always disputed those findings reached a different conclusion.
The two experts found that police conducting the investigation had made glaring errors in evidence-collecting and that below-standard testing and possible contamination raised doubts over the attribution of DNA traces, both on the blade and on the bra clasp, which was collected from the crime scene 46 days after the murder.
Very well expressed. The Kerchers are a beautiful family, inside and out (as the picture below reveals), and the loss of the baby of their family was senseless and evil. In my opinion (and my opinion ONLY), they were exploited by Mignini and Maresca. I think their daughter died a needless death at the hands of a petty career criminal (Mr. Guede). May they find peace and solace in the days ahead.
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Turnadot
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Thing is though the alleged forensic evidence against Amanda and Raffaele is worthless due to contamination, IMO. Are they actually guilty? I don't know, and neither does the investigators, because they screwed up. Big time.
I mean, I can sit here and think Amanda acted wonky after Meredith's murder, but I can also put that down to shock, and being questioned by the police in Italy, who, by the way, don't play by the same rules as American cops. My husband is Italian, born and raised; his brother is a lawyer there, and he said flat out the corruption in the "justice" system is mind blowing. So I can well understand why Amanda might have lied, just to get it over with, after most likely being deprived of water and food for hours and hours on end.
Just my opinions...
gitana1
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Wow. This is an incredible op-ed piece on what a reporter uncovered about the case against Knox and why it happened the way it did:
When I went to Perugia in 2009, as Knox's testimony began, to research a book on the case, I didn't know whether she was guilty as charged, but I was certainly willing to believe it. Either way, it was a textbook example of our never-ending fascination with the supposed femme fatale...
After a few weeks in Perugia, I saw that there was something very wrong with the narrative of the murder that the authorities and the media were presenting. There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case. It became clear that it wasn't facts but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case...
In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior. A prison "doctor" (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox's blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she'd had sex with. Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it. Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was mistaken and she didn't have AIDS...
Finally, there were the prosecution's operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a "luciferina" — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity. She was "dirty on the inside." Always, even from the defense lawyers, the closing arguments ended with appeals to God, in a medieval courtroom with a peeling fresco of the Madonna on the wall and a crucifix hanging above the judge...
In her "prison diary," a document police handed to reporters after she'd scribbled in it for a month, Knox was often upbeat, blithe, clearly a devotee of positive thinking. The reporters who read the diary explained it as evidence of a psychopathic mind...
In Perugia, reporters found people to talk about how the young American had attracted sexual desire and attention from men — willfully and not. She may have been doing only what liberated, self-absorbed young American girls do — having fun. But that liberation and fun — breaking into solo singing in a restaurant, doing yoga stretches and cartwheels in a police station — were read differently by Perugia authorities and more reticent peers, like the victim's British girlfriends. To the Italian authorities, her careless seductiveness juxtaposed with the ghastly scene inside her house were clues to the witch, the deliberate player of men: Their theory was that she was not only a murderer but a murderous mastermind...
Knox was put through an extreme version of the test many young women face. She was endowed with compelling, mysterious powers. The focus on her sexuality suggests that civilization can easily tip backward to the primeval era when the feminine was classified, worshiped and feared in the form of powerful archetypes: Madonnas and Dianas, virgins and *advertiser censored*. Knox inadvertently fed these archetypes by the ways she behaved in public and advertised herself on the Web and, eventually, in her own compulsive writings.
In the end, however, it was precisely because she wasn't that monster, because she hadn't perfected that persona in the world, that she could do so little to defend herself. Knox had barely defined herself; she didn't possess the language or the maturity to match, let along overcome, the authority of other people's notions...
The young woman who first went to jail at age 20 was a cipher onto whose photogenic, smiling face some Italians could see the archetypal Madonna-*advertiser censored* and, in whose pale eyes, others saw a psychopath. She was arrested at a time and in a place where young sexually active women are endowed in the minds of grown men, and maybe women too, with propensities for fantastic adult kink that few possess. The gaunt, tense woman defending herself on appeal bore barely any resemblance to the fresh, pretty girl photographed kissing her boyfriend outside the murder scene. Only now, having lost the power to bewitch and beguile, has she been revealed as human — and also, apparently, not guilty of murder.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-burleigh-knox-20111004,0,2921659.story
Much more at link.
When I went to Perugia in 2009, as Knox's testimony began, to research a book on the case, I didn't know whether she was guilty as charged, but I was certainly willing to believe it. Either way, it was a textbook example of our never-ending fascination with the supposed femme fatale...
After a few weeks in Perugia, I saw that there was something very wrong with the narrative of the murder that the authorities and the media were presenting. There was almost no material evidence linking Knox or her boyfriend to the murder, and no motive, while there was voluminous evidence — material and circumstantial — implicating a third person, a man, whose name one almost never read in accounts of the case. It became clear that it wasn't facts but Knox — her femaleness, her Americaness, her beauty — that was driving the case...
In person, in prison and in the media, Knox was subjected to all manner of outlandish, misogynistic behavior. A prison "doctor" (he has never stepped forward publicly) tested a sample of Knox's blood and then informed her she was HIV-positive, prompting Knox to list every man she'd had sex with. Authorities passed the names of seven men to reporters from the British tabloid pack, who printed it. Soon thereafter, Knox was told the doctor was mistaken and she didn't have AIDS...
Finally, there were the prosecution's operatic closing arguments, repeated almost verbatim in the appeal that ended last week. Knox was a "luciferina" — a she-devil — capable of a special, female duplicity. She was "dirty on the inside." Always, even from the defense lawyers, the closing arguments ended with appeals to God, in a medieval courtroom with a peeling fresco of the Madonna on the wall and a crucifix hanging above the judge...
In her "prison diary," a document police handed to reporters after she'd scribbled in it for a month, Knox was often upbeat, blithe, clearly a devotee of positive thinking. The reporters who read the diary explained it as evidence of a psychopathic mind...
In Perugia, reporters found people to talk about how the young American had attracted sexual desire and attention from men — willfully and not. She may have been doing only what liberated, self-absorbed young American girls do — having fun. But that liberation and fun — breaking into solo singing in a restaurant, doing yoga stretches and cartwheels in a police station — were read differently by Perugia authorities and more reticent peers, like the victim's British girlfriends. To the Italian authorities, her careless seductiveness juxtaposed with the ghastly scene inside her house were clues to the witch, the deliberate player of men: Their theory was that she was not only a murderer but a murderous mastermind...
Knox was put through an extreme version of the test many young women face. She was endowed with compelling, mysterious powers. The focus on her sexuality suggests that civilization can easily tip backward to the primeval era when the feminine was classified, worshiped and feared in the form of powerful archetypes: Madonnas and Dianas, virgins and *advertiser censored*. Knox inadvertently fed these archetypes by the ways she behaved in public and advertised herself on the Web and, eventually, in her own compulsive writings.
In the end, however, it was precisely because she wasn't that monster, because she hadn't perfected that persona in the world, that she could do so little to defend herself. Knox had barely defined herself; she didn't possess the language or the maturity to match, let along overcome, the authority of other people's notions...
The young woman who first went to jail at age 20 was a cipher onto whose photogenic, smiling face some Italians could see the archetypal Madonna-*advertiser censored* and, in whose pale eyes, others saw a psychopath. She was arrested at a time and in a place where young sexually active women are endowed in the minds of grown men, and maybe women too, with propensities for fantastic adult kink that few possess. The gaunt, tense woman defending herself on appeal bore barely any resemblance to the fresh, pretty girl photographed kissing her boyfriend outside the murder scene. Only now, having lost the power to bewitch and beguile, has she been revealed as human — and also, apparently, not guilty of murder.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-burleigh-knox-20111004,0,2921659.story
Much more at link.
Turnadot
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There was one in Italy where the man got off for raping a woman because the judge said the guy couldn't have got the lady's jeans off himself. <modsnip> judge.
gitana1
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And what's sad is, based on his "cooperation" with the police and the prosecution, IIRC, his 30 year sentence was reduced to 16, as he aided the authorities in convicting Knox and Sollecito.
That sucks because I don't believe Knox and Sollecito had one thing to do with this crime. I think Guede, a career criminal, acted alone.
So in the end, the manipulation of evidence, of two young people's minds, of the media and public sentiment, by a corrupt and many think insane prosecutor and his henchmen, has led to a reduced sentence for the real culprit. (IMO).
The Kerchers seem somewhat willing to accept that a mistake is made, based on their comments after the appeals verdict. After they read the report as to why the pair were 100% exonerated of the crime of murder, I am afraid they will see that justice for their daughter and sister was perverted and sacrificed merely to satisfy the insanely passionate whims of a deranged and criminal man - Mignini. That is horrible.
Can any one clarify these points for me please?
1. Did Amanda and Raffeale say why their phones were off for a period of time that spanned the murder time?
2. Did Raff ever explain why there was no activity on his computer throughout the time of the murder?
3 why did both of them change their stories?
the above questions bother me , looking at the forensics alone then imo the evidence points to Rudy as being the lone killer, imo he attended the property because he fancied Merridith , he tried it on with her but she refused and it turned ugly from there on,
Listening to Amanda's pleas to the appeal court I believed what she said.
1. Did Amanda and Raffeale say why their phones were off for a period of time that spanned the murder time?
2. Did Raff ever explain why there was no activity on his computer throughout the time of the murder?
3 why did both of them change their stories?
the above questions bother me , looking at the forensics alone then imo the evidence points to Rudy as being the lone killer, imo he attended the property because he fancied Merridith , he tried it on with her but she refused and it turned ugly from there on,
Listening to Amanda's pleas to the appeal court I believed what she said.
gitana1
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Wow. Another incredible article, this one posted in the Guardian UK:
The overturning of the murder convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, came as no surprise. The appeals trial showed that virtually all the crucial evidence used in the original trial to convict Knox and Sollecito was faulty, erroneous, worthless, or manipulated...
But big questions remain. How could two innocent people be convicted of such a heinous crime, backed up by a 400-page opinion, spend four years in prison, and then have their convictions so resoundingly overturned?
The answer lies in the Italian concept of face, la faccia, whose deep and pervasive power most Anglo-Saxons who have not lived in a Mediterranean country have a hard time appreciating.
The story begins almost a decade ago, long before Meredith Kercher's murder, when the pubblico ministero (public prosecutor) of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, opened an investigation into the mysterious death of a doctor whose body was found floating in Lake Trasimeno in 1985.
<modsnip>
Furthermore, Guede had been involved in a string of crimes, for which he had never been prosecuted by the Perugian police. An enduring mystery is why Guede was repeatedly released after committing serious crimes, such as breaking and entering while in possession of a knife. If it turned out Guede had murdered Kercher alone, hard questions would be asked of the Perugian police and prosecutors about why they had repeatedly released him...
Crucial evidence that could have exonerated them was lost or mishandled. For example, the hard drive on Sollecito's computer, which could have shown he was on his computer during the time of the murder, was "fried'' by investigators as they supposedly tried to copy it.
<modsnip>
Much more at link. It explains a lot about the system over there: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/04/knox-acquittal-only-possible-verdict
The overturning of the murder convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of British exchange student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, came as no surprise. The appeals trial showed that virtually all the crucial evidence used in the original trial to convict Knox and Sollecito was faulty, erroneous, worthless, or manipulated...
But big questions remain. How could two innocent people be convicted of such a heinous crime, backed up by a 400-page opinion, spend four years in prison, and then have their convictions so resoundingly overturned?
The answer lies in the Italian concept of face, la faccia, whose deep and pervasive power most Anglo-Saxons who have not lived in a Mediterranean country have a hard time appreciating.
The story begins almost a decade ago, long before Meredith Kercher's murder, when the pubblico ministero (public prosecutor) of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, opened an investigation into the mysterious death of a doctor whose body was found floating in Lake Trasimeno in 1985.
<modsnip>
Furthermore, Guede had been involved in a string of crimes, for which he had never been prosecuted by the Perugian police. An enduring mystery is why Guede was repeatedly released after committing serious crimes, such as breaking and entering while in possession of a knife. If it turned out Guede had murdered Kercher alone, hard questions would be asked of the Perugian police and prosecutors about why they had repeatedly released him...
Crucial evidence that could have exonerated them was lost or mishandled. For example, the hard drive on Sollecito's computer, which could have shown he was on his computer during the time of the murder, was "fried'' by investigators as they supposedly tried to copy it.
<modsnip>
Much more at link. It explains a lot about the system over there: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/04/knox-acquittal-only-possible-verdict
gitana1
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Yes. They both had other plans that night but the plans fell through so they had an unexpected first night alone together. They did not want to be disturbed as they had fun in Sollecito's apartment by anyone who might call or had a change of heart about the earlier changed plans. So, they turned off their phones. *
As to the computer, as you can read in the link I just posted, the authorities "accidentally" fried Sollecito's computer when copying it. They subsequently claimed there was no activity. In reality, it was destroyed and there was no way to determine if there had been computer activity as the pair claimed.
* Remember, this so-called murderous pair met on October 25 at a concert. Meredith was murdered on November 1st, a mere eight days later. This was their first night to be really alone together.
ANOTHER GREAT FIND!!:great:
I am posting these up on the JREF forums!
Footwarrior
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Amanda testified in court that she turned off her phone to save the battery and so she could not be called back to work. Raffaele never testified on this subject, but may have turned off his phone to avoid getting another call from his father.
The prosecution claimed that the last activity on Raff's computer was at 9:10 pm. A more complete analysis showed the video file Narato being started at 9:26 pm and the screensaver log indicated only short periods of inactivity until 6:22 am.
Amanda only changed her story during the interrogation on that night of Nov. 5 and 6. Before and after that date, she has consistently said she spent the night at Raff's place. Raff never really changed his story. He did say that he couldn't vouch for where Amanda was while he slept, but that is simply common sense.
Posted on JREF: One of the jurors speaks to press:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/04/amanda-knox-juror-speaks-ou
alwayslooking
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They get a free night alone, their phone's are turned off, no computer activity.....wow, and Amanda roommate just happened to be murdered that night!
AnaTeresa
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The thing is, correlation isn't causation. There's got to be more than that.
Nova
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<modsnip> except we don't know whether there was computer activity. (In fact, we know there was computer activity until nearly 10 pm, by which time MK was most likely dead.) PLE destroyed three computers, so we don't know for sure what happened after 10.
Lots of people turn off and/or recharge their phones at night. That the murder took place at night greatly increases the odds that many phones were turned off in Perugia.
AK spending the night with RS left MK alone, thus increasing MK's vulnerability to an attacker. I'm not blaming AK for this; she had a right to spend the night with her boyfriend.
But all these factors make the "amazing coincidence" you imply not so amazing.
Cappuccino
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All of the above, plus - if coincidences never happened, there wouldn't be a word for them, would there?
Not least of which being the revelation that the only reason LE knew their phones were off was because Amanda and Raf told them they turned tem off. No attempt to hide that...
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