Meredith Kercher murdered in Perugia, Amanda Knox convicted #3

[flourish]

You're entitled to your opinion, of course. I have trouble believing anyone can read the Nov. 6 statement (see otto's link above) and say they would imprison a man for two weeks based on those statements. AK does not claim to have seen PL kill MK. She merely says she has a vague memory of seeing him at the basketball courts and in front of her house the night before. And then she says she's not sure those memories are real.

I'm not excusing AK for bringing up PL's name in the first place. But if you believe testimony from a witness who questions her own recollection and merely places a person in the general vicinity of crime are enough to put a man in jail, then I hope you never have the power to do so.

***

I don't know how much they had to drink that night and I never claimed to believe AK "blacked out". I was merely reporting that I have had the sort of fleeting image memory she reports after consumption of pot and alcohol. FWIW, I wouldn't have wanted anyone locked up on the basis of such memories.

Uh, geez, :croc:

PL would not be even in the equation if AK hadn't have mentioned him. Here's a quote from said link:

In my mind I saw Patrik in flashes of blurred images. I saw him near the basketball court. I saw him at my front door. I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming.

Hmm...I saw Patrick coming closer then I cowered in the kitchen while Meredith was screaming.

Sorry, still not convinced there was any LE over-reacting here.

 

[dgfred]

Are you saying she didn't make those claims in the infamous email?

Because she does claim to have been hit and exhausted in her Nov. 6 written statement.

Your previous question: The knife was found in his kitchen drawer.

No, she doesn't claim to have been hit or coerced in her emails.

 

[dgfred]

Uh, geez, :croc:

PL would not be even in the equation if AK hadn't have mentioned him. Here's a quote from said link:



Hmm...I saw Patrick coming closer then I cowered in the kitchen while Meredith was screaming.

Sorry, still not convinced there was any LE over-reacting here.

Plus she said he scared her and was a 'bad' man. She STILL never said that he was NOT involved, except to her mother in a way... not to law inforcement.

 

[Steely Dan]

It's true that the younger the suspect or the lower the i.q., the more apt a statement produced under pressure is false. But the phenomenon is by no means restricted to those groups. Obviously, MK isn't stupid, but she was alone in a foreign country functioning often in a second language.



It's usually called "felony murder" in the U.S., meaning someone was killed while you were in the process of committing a felony. At the beginning of the court's report (linked by otto above) there is a discussion of Italian concepts in which one becomes an "accomplice" (not the word in Italian) because an act is considered to be ongoing even after one has left the vicinity and ceased the activity.

Not exactly our notion of "felony murder", but it shares some characteristics.

To me, "violent sex play" or whatever the prosecutor calls his theory sounds a lot like "satanic panic" and "child molestation ring" and other such wild claims that eventually turned out to be mere fictions created to make sense of difficult-to-explain forensics in order to fit a foregone conclusion of guilt.

Okay, RS had a knife collection. I never shared the fascination, but a lot of teenaged and young men have them without slaughtering co-eds. And despite the fancy collection, we're supposed to believe he or AK brought along a kitchen knife with which they or RG stabbed MK.

I don't know the motive and the some things are questionable but there is, IMO, more against her than for her. I think she let herself get into a situation that got way out of hand. Unfortunately, that's tough doo-doo for her.

She sees it as an accident that she didn't intend to happen and therefore doesn't feel real bad about it and thinks she'd never do it again so why admit to doing it at all.

If this crime had happened in America under the same circumstances with the exact same evidence I believe she would have been convicted. Unfortunately, she wouldn't have the whole "I was railroaded by the Italian PD" defense to use.

The pro Amanda side has distorted the truth in the few things I've read from them claiming to prove her innocence. IMO, she's lucky she did this in Italy. In America her punishment may have been more severe. JMO

 

[Allusonz]

No, I want people or organizations to cite their references! Like, "according to a study conducted at _____ by _____, 25% of ___________, etc."

Statistics can be misrepresented. It is important to see the source.

If the stats came from studies done by the innocence project, that means something different to me than an independent study that the innocence project is referring to.

I am certain again that if you contact them you can determine whether their studies meet the criteria of which you seek as I can only guage my criteria

 

[Allusonz]

So the defense, parents, or ANYONE can not contact him or look themselves??? :snooty: So far the court has refused to believe him in any way.

There is NO WAY to read AK's email, her 'statements' about Patrick and look at her behavior after he was arrested without seeing she was trying to deflect the investigation with lies and misinformation IMO. She did not claim she was hit, she did not claim to be exausted/tricked/hungry... she just lied.

Of course there is no way to read them since the prosecution computer expert did not destroy one, not two, but three hard drives that he was examining. The odds of that occurring i would not even want to hazard a guess but again very covenient. The defense was not able to examine them either

 

[Allusonz]

Your previous question: The knife was found in his kitchen drawer.

No, she doesn't claim to have been hit or coerced in her emails.

Actually the kitchen knife was not "found"

Armando Finzi, an assistant in the Perugia police department's organized crimes unit, first discovered the knife in Sollecito's kitchen drawer

"It was the first knife I saw," he said. When pressed on cross-examination, said his "investigative intuition" led him to believe it was the murder weapon because it was compatible with the wound as it had been described to him. With gloved hands, he placed the knife in a new police envelope, taped it shut with Scotch tape, then placed it inside a folder, he said. There were smaller and bigger knives in the drawer, but no others were taken into evidence from the kitchen, he said

It was "Investigative Intuition" that made him take one knife out of a drawer full of knives and amazingly it had gasp DNA that matched not only AK but MK how convenient

rofl rofl rofl

 

[Allusonz]

knife

this occurred on November 16th as per the date on the photograph taken by police

 

[dizzychick]

So the cops destroy her puter while in the process of searching it for evidence of a crime. I notice there is no puter evidence offered by the DA to prove a crime occurred. So, assuming she is innocent and her puter use would prove such, the cops removed that ability from her thus making their case stronger. I would be very concerned about this event and strongly suspect an attempt was made to cloud the real facts of the defendant's whereabouts the night of the crime. If this was US court I would move for an immediate dismissal based on this alone.

I have not seen a shred of evidence she did anything other than act like a silly girl during in a very serious matter.

 

[Nova]

Uh, geez, :croc:

PL would not be even in the equation if AK hadn't have mentioned him. Here's a quote from said link:



Hmm...I saw Patrick coming closer then I cowered in the kitchen while Meredith was screaming.

Sorry, still not convinced there was any LE over-reacting here.

Fair enough. In my opinion, you hold LE to very lax standards. Even in the quote you find so damning, AK doesn't claim to have actually witnessed a rape or murder.

I grant you AK is trying to muddy the waters by mentioning PL. And that was wrong of her.

But anyone who can set aside the "Amanda Knox is the embodiment of all that is evil" mindset should also be able to see that muddying the water is ALL she is trying to do. She repeatedly stops short of actually accusing PL of the crime. Still wrong of her, we'll agree, but with a fair reading it's obvious she's just trying to escape the pressure of official suspicion by diverting their attention, not actually trying to get PL arrested and convicted.

She could have said she saw PL stab MK. She did not.

 

[Nova]

Your previous question: The knife was found in his kitchen drawer.

No, she doesn't claim to have been hit or coerced in her emails.

Well, she does mention being hit and confused in the Nov. 6 statement she wrote in the police station while RS was being questioned. otto linked to it above. IIRC, that was the morning after the interrogation in question. The hitting wasn't something she made up months after the fact.

As for knife, thanks for giving me the location. I'm sorry, but in any other case, we'd all be laughing at LE claiming the murder weapon was a kitchen knife and they magically found it in RS' drawer.

If we are to believe the court report, RS and/or AK took an 8" non-retractable kitchen knife with them to the basketball courts, hung out for awhile, took it to AK's house and stabbed her roommate (suddenly, interrupting their lovemaking), and then carried it back to RS's house and washed it carelessly before replacing it in the drawer.

Meanwhile RS had at least one switchblade if he wanted something easy to carry and much more exotic knives if he wanted something to show off. Instead, he brought an oversized steak or butcher knife?

Yeah, right. If we're going to believe all that, we might as well believe MK had dinner at RS' house and never mentioned it to anyone. That's hardly more incredible.

 

[Nova]

Plus she said he scared her and was a 'bad' man. She STILL never said that he was NOT involved, except to her mother in a way... not to law inforcement.

I have said over and over again that both AK and her mother behaved badly with respect to PL.

Nonetheless, no decent judge in this country would find those vague statements "probable cause" to lock up somebody for two weeks. (At least not the written statements; I don't have a transcript of everything she said during interrogation. But whatever she said that night; she wrote a fresh account the following morning.)

Whether the Italian system, the infamous prosecutor or the Perugia police were to blame, they, too, contributed to the injustice.

AK may have been the initial cause--and she will always carry that responsibility--but she stopped short of actually accusing PL of the crime, she repeatedly cast doubts on her own recollections of him, and SHE didn't have the power to incarcerate him.

I don't think it helps make the verdicts seem more convincing to portray Amanda Knox as the "puppet master" who engineered everything that took place after the murder.

 

[Nova]

I don't know the motive and the some things are questionable but there is, IMO, more against her than for her. I think she let herself get into a situation that got way out of hand. Unfortunately, that's tough doo-doo for her.

She sees it as an accident that she didn't intend to happen and therefore doesn't feel real bad about it and thinks she'd never do it again so why admit to doing it at all.

If this crime had happened in America under the same circumstances with the exact same evidence I believe she would have been convicted. Unfortunately, she wouldn't have the whole "I was railroaded by the Italian PD" defense to use.

The pro Amanda side has distorted the truth in the few things I've read from them claiming to prove her innocence. IMO, she's lucky she did this in Italy. In America her punishment may have been more severe. JMO

Perhaps. But all I see proven--on the basis of the final court report--is what we would call "obstruction of justice." Because even if you accept all the claims against AK, there's still no specific evidence that she acted in the rape and/or murder themselves.

You might get an aggressive prosecutor to go for a "felony murder" conviction here (which can carry the death penalty), but then you'd have to prove that AK, RS and RG were all engaged in a joint criminal enterprise. Perhaps the theft of MK's cell phones and credit cards would suffice for that purpose, but you'd have problems with the fact that none of those were used by AK (IIRC). A steep hill to climb, given that AK had plenty of money in her bank account.

(Slightly OT, but it was often discussed with regard to the Ramsey case that even if you could prove there was no intruder, it wasn't enough to prove that ONE of the Ramseys killed Jon-Benet, you'd have to be able to prove which one. I see a similar problem here, in terms of American law. Italian law doesn't seem to have the same problem; the judge is content to assert that AK and RS "chose extreme evil," whatever that means, and without specifying who did what exactly.)

 

[Nova]

Actually the kitchen knife was not "found"

Armando Finzi, an assistant in the Perugia police department's organized crimes unit, first discovered the knife in Sollecito's kitchen drawer

"It was the first knife I saw," he said. When pressed on cross-examination, said his "investigative intuition" led him to believe it was the murder weapon because it was compatible with the wound as it had been described to him. With gloved hands, he placed the knife in a new police envelope, taped it shut with Scotch tape, then placed it inside a folder, he said. There were smaller and bigger knives in the drawer, but no others were taken into evidence from the kitchen, he said

It was "Investigative Intuition" that made him take one knife out of a drawer full of knives and amazingly it had gasp DNA that matched not only AK but MK how convenient

rofl rofl rofl

Just when I thought the knife business couldn't get more unbelievable...

 

[Nova]

Here's a link to the infamous AK email, for those like me who need our memories refreshed:

http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2009/02/from-amanda-knox.html


dgfred is correct that AK doesn't mention being hit here, though she does talk about the strain of being held at the police station. One of the posters at the site claims the aggressive interrogation took place the date AFTER the email, but I don't pretend to know the chronology. Perhaps dgfred or otto does...

 

[Nova]

No, I want people or organizations to cite their references! Like, "according to a study conducted at _____ by _____, 25% of ___________, etc."

Statistics can be misrepresented. It is important to see the source.

If the stats came from studies done by the innocence project, that means something different to me than an independent study that the innocence project is referring to.

http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions.php



As near as I can tell, flourish, the 25% figure refers to cases where the IP has achieved eventual exoneration, mostly through DNA testing, and where records indicate the innocent defendant either confessed or made false statements under the pressure of interrogation. It is IP's figure and does not seem to have been challenged, though it would be easy to do so since their cases are public record. (At the same site, you can find a discussion of the many states that are moving to require taping of all interrogations, precisely because of this problem.)

So the 25% figure does NOT include guilty persons who were coerced into making inadvisable statements. More importantly, it does NOT include innocent persons whose cases were never referred to IP or weren't accepted by IP because there was no DNA or the equivalent to prove their innocence.

If anything, the 25% number is low.

 

[otto]

You're entitled to your opinion, of course. I have trouble believing anyone can read the Nov. 6 statement (see otto's link above) and say they would imprison a man for two weeks based on those statements. AK does not claim to have seen PL kill MK. She merely says she has a vague memory of seeing him at the basketball courts and in front of her house the night before. And then she says she's not sure those memories are real.

I'm not excusing AK for bringing up PL's name in the first place. But if you believe testimony from a witness who questions her own recollection and merely places a person in the general vicinity of crime are enough to put a man in jail, then I hope you never have the power to do so.

***

I don't know how much they had to drink that night and I never claimed to believe AK "blacked out". I was merely reporting that I have had the sort of fleeting image memory she reports after consumption of pot and alcohol. FWIW, I wouldn't have wanted anyone locked up on the basis of such memories.

Patrick was arrested based on testimony Amanda gave as a witness, not the voluntary statement she wrote the next day. Amanda claimed that Patrick was in the cottage, she was in the kitchen and that she heard a terrible scream.

The part of voluntary statement that is problematic is the following:

"I stand by my statements that I made last night about events that could have taken place in my home with Patrik, but I want to make very clear that these events seem more unreal to me that what I said before, that I stayed at Raffaele's house."

Much of Amanda's testimony involves references to "flashback", vague memory, or no memory. Flashback is a term that is commonly associated with drug abuse, and is considered to be a memory that is incomplete or vague. Her flashbacks are perceived to be glimpses of what happened the night Meredith was murdered.

Amanda claims that they had dinner around 11 PM, but two witnesses place the dinner at about 8:30 (Raffaele's father, the friend that dropped by to talk to Raffaele). The cell phones were turned off some time around 9, and the rest of the evening seems to be a complete blur for both Amanda and Raffaele. It is known that Amanda left Raffaele's house to go to work (cell phone tracking), but on the way to work, Patrick called and said that she didn't have to work. They claim that they slept until 10 the next morning, but cell phone and computer activity make that more like 6 AM.

The time between about 9 or 10 in the evening, and 6 the following morning is the time in question. Neither Amanda nor Raffaele have alibis for that time, as their stories about what happened are not the same. The only fact that they both report is that they were too drugged to remember what they did.

 

[otto]

Fair enough. In my opinion, you hold LE to very lax standards. Even in the quote you find so damning, AK doesn't claim to have actually witnessed a rape or murder.

I grant you AK is trying to muddy the waters by mentioning PL. And that was wrong of her.

But anyone who can set aside the "Amanda Knox is the embodiment of all that is evil" mindset should also be able to see that muddying the water is ALL she is trying to do. She repeatedly stops short of actually accusing PL of the crime. Still wrong of her, we'll agree, but with a fair reading it's obvious she's just trying to escape the pressure of official suspicion by diverting their attention, not actually trying to get PL arrested and convicted.

She could have said she saw PL stab MK. She did not.

Another problem for Amanda is that she knew that Meredith bled to death even though she was in the kitchen when Meredith's door was broken in. Immediately after the murder was discovered, everyone was asked to go to the police station, including Meredith's friends. Descriptions of Amanda at the police station are odd.

"Their behaviour at the police station seemed to me really inappropriate," she said. "They sat opposite each other, Amanda put her feet up on Raffaele's legs and made faces at him. Everyone cried except Amanda and Raffaele. I never saw them crying. They were kissing each other."

Robyn Butterworth, another close friend of Ms Kercher, said: "Amanda's behaviour was very strange. She didn't seem to show any emotion about what had happened."

They also testified to hearing Ms Knox say that she had seen Ms Kercher's body in the closet of her room with a blanket over it.

Ms Butterworth said: "I don't know who she was talking to. She was talking to the room. I didn't want to talk to her because I found it quite upsetting ... I was really upset that she was even mentioning these things. I removed myself, I didn't want to know. I also remember her talking on the phone, saying, 'It could have been me, how do you think I feel – I found her.' ... She kept talking about how she had found Meredith. She sounded proud that she had been the first to find her."

While in the waiting room at the police station, another of the friends, Natalie Hayward, remarked: "I hope Meredith wasn't in too much pain." Ms Frost remembered Ms Knox replying: "What do you fcking think? She fcking bled to death."

Meredith was on the floor covered with a bed cover or duvet, yet Amanda knew how she died. How could she have known that?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1569353/Merediths-flatmate-proud-to-find-body.html

 

[otto]

I have said over and over again that both AK and her mother behaved badly with respect to PL.

Nonetheless, no decent judge in this country would find those vague statements "probable cause" to lock up somebody for two weeks. (At least not the written statements; I don't have a transcript of everything she said during interrogation. But whatever she said that night; she wrote a fresh account the following morning.)

Whether the Italian system, the infamous prosecutor or the Perugia police were to blame, they, too, contributed to the injustice.

AK may have been the initial cause--and she will always carry that responsibility--but she stopped short of actually accusing PL of the crime, she repeatedly cast doubts on her own recollections of him, and SHE didn't have the power to incarcerate him.

I don't think it helps make the verdicts seem more convincing to portray Amanda Knox as the "puppet master" who engineered everything that took place after the murder.

This is from Amanda's witness statement to police. It is more than enough to arrest someone and detain them for two weeks, especially when Amanda's voluntary statement says that she stands by her statements about Patrick:

"She reportedly told them during interviews on Tuesday: "I want to talk about what happened because the incident has left me really upset and I am really scared of Patrick (Lumumba), the African man who owns the pub Le Chic where I work sometimes.

"I met him on the evening of November 1 after having replied to a message he sent me, with the words 'Let's meet up'.

"We met at around 9.00pm at a basketball court in Piazza Grimana and we went to my house. I don't remember if my friend Meredith was already at home or if she came in later. All I can say is that they went off together.

"Patrick and Meredith went off into Meredith's room while I stayed in the kitchen. I can't remember how long they were in there together - I can only say that at one point I heard Meredith screaming and I was so frightened I blocked my ears.

"I don't remember anything after that - my head's all confused. I don't remember if Meredith screamed and I heard thuds too because I was upset, but I guessed what might have happened.

"I found Patrick this morning (Nov 5) in front of the language school and he asked me some questions. He wanted to know what the police had been asking me. I think he also asked me if I wanted to meet some journalists, maybe to find out if I know anything about Meredith's death.”

Of Sollecito, she said: "I don’t know for sure if Raffaele was there that night, but I do remember very well waking up at my boyfriend's house, in his bed, and I went back to my house in the morning where I found the door open."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1568640/Suspect-statements-in-Kercher-murder-case.html

 

[otto]

What is interesting about the information provided by Amanda is that there were most likely "thuds", as there is evidence that Meredith's head hit the wall. There was also most likely a scream, as the neighbor also reported a scream. Amanda knew that Meredith bled to death immediately after the murder and well before the body had been examined. Meredith was not strangled, shot, suffocated, or anything else, she did in fact slowly bleed to death.

Amanda's vague memory fits the facts very well.