Meredith Kercher murdered-Amanda Knox appeals conviction #17

[Nova]

I don't agree with Hendry's analysis at all, but that is known already. Blood soaked raises too many questions for us to figure out what it means exactly IMO.

I'm not contradicting you, fred, but how do you make a decision that blood patterns can't tell us anything? I would never assume I have the knowledge to make that decision.

 

[dgfred]

I believe the bank call was around ten, but the phones were discarded much later.

 

[Nova]

I was only teasing, Nova..:innocent::seeya:..guess I remain the sole person who thinks razzing is funny....:waitasec:I understand how much the concept of reasonable doubt lacks an exact or fixed definition. It is a shame, because it is relatively easy to understand: reasonable doubt does not mean all doubt, it means doubt which any reasonable person would hold. It should be a universal standard, but I am agreeing with you, it is muddled and murky....thanks for your always excellent input....

No harm done, my friend. I misunderstood and thought you wanted to quarrel about this. I didn't understand why.

I think it's easy to define reasonable doubt in the abstract, but it gets much harder when one starts evaluating evidence.

Case in point: surely nobody would accuse fred or sherlockh of being anything but intelligent, rational adults. Yet obviously they find the prosecutor's proof meets the burden of reasonable doubt where you and I do not.

Are they just giving different weight to the existing evidence or is their understanding of reasonable doubt different from ours? I don't believe there's an easy answer to that question, but I am convinced we are all essentially "reasonable" people here.

 

[dgfred]

I'm not contradicting you, fred, but how do you make a decision that blood patterns can't tell us anything? I would never assume I have the knowledge to make that decision.

Well so far we don't know if she was wearing it or not, whether she took it off or not, whether someone took it off of her or not, whether it fell into the blood or not, etc...

So I am inclined to think that I (we) can't figure out anything for sure regarding the jacket.

If it had alot of another's dna on it, or a knife cut in it, or something of that nature then we might could make some assumptions IMO.

 

[Nova]

@Nova,
Do you think posting that he had a criminal record is misleading?

In a technical, legal sense, probably so. I don't mind you correcting me.

But in a casual discussion such as this one, I think we can assume RG was a petty burglar and thief.

 

[Nova]

Well so far we don't know if she was wearing it or not, whether she took it off or not, whether someone took it off of her or not, whether it fell into the blood or not, etc...

So I am inclined to think that I (we) can't figure out anything for sure regarding the jacket.

If it had alot of another's dna on it, or a knife cut in it, or something of that nature then we might could make some assumptions IMO.

I don't know exactly what the blood soaking pattern might reveal to an expert. Frankly, I would be surprised if experts couldn't tell at least whether the jacket (sweatshirt, hoody, whatever) was on or off when MK was first stabbed. They should be able to tell by the relationship of the blood stains to MK's known wounds.

I'll certainly grant your point that some people remove jackets in a way that leaves the sleeves reversed. I don't, but I believe that others, including your daughter, do.

 

[SMK]

No harm done, my friend. I misunderstood and thought you wanted to quarrel about this. I didn't understand why.

I think it's easy to define reasonable doubt in the abstract, but it gets much harder when one starts evaluating evidence.

Case in point: surely nobody would accuse fred or sherlockh of being anything but intelligent, rational adults. Yet obviously they find the prosecutor's proof meets the burden of reasonable doubt where you and I do not.

Are they just giving different weight to the existing evidence or is their understanding of reasonable doubt different from ours? I don't believe there's an easy answer to that question, but I am convinced we are all essentially "reasonable" people here.

Quarrel with you, never.

But yes, I would agree, fred, otto, sherlock, are every bit as reasonable as the rest of us. And the PMF and TJMK posters are highly intelligent, educated, and articulate, for sure.

For some reason, the theory of AK and RS "sits right" with them, and not with us. So perhaps we are all thinking intuitively....:waitasec:

and yet the evidence would seem to leave a large margin for doubt and error.....I do not think it is impossible that AK and RS may have been involved, but highly unlikely, and to me, the prosecution does not meet the burden of proof by U.S. standards....

To me, Guede is suspect due to his prior behavior. I do not like his entering and cooking at the nursery, despite the fact that he may simply have been needy. Call a friend, but do not just break in somewhere where you do not belong. He has a problem with boundaries...and he admitted to lurking about , waiting for MK. It does not "sit right"....

 

[SMK]

@Nova,
Do you think posting that he had a criminal record is misleading?

Ideally, Guede's prior petty crimes should have nothing to do with the murder. But realistically, they are a huge red flag, especially as we know he was there, and was sexual with MK. (When in our 20s, my sister and I had this silly notion that we could be honors students, the daughters of professionals, but still befriend all kinds of petty rough types, because it was the "right thing to do", and we had some Tennessee Williams romantic notion of the dark side. In the end, as I have mentioned before, our widowed mother was robbed and raped at knife point by one of these "romantic creatures". I think she would have been murdered if my sister and her boyfriend had not arrived home and made the culprit flee. He was later caught and sent to prison. It was a sobering lesson to our Romanticism. So I do see a connection, and a strong one, between Guede's past and the MK murder.)

 

[Nova]

Quarrel with you, never.

But yes, I would agree, fred, otto, sherlock, are every bit as reasonable as the rest of us. And the PMF and TJMK posters are highly intelligent, educated, and articulate, for sure.

For some reason, the theory of AK and RS "sits right" with them, and not with us. So perhaps we are all thinking intuitively....:waitasec:

and yet the evidence would seem to leave a large margin for doubt and error.....I do not think it is impossible that AK and RS may have been involved, but highly unlikely, and to me, the prosecution does not meet the burden of proof by U.S. standards....

To me, Guede is suspect due to his prior behavior. I do not like his entering and cooking at the nursery, despite the fact that he may simply have been needy. Call a friend, but do not just break in somewhere where you do not belong. He has a problem with boundaries...and he admitted to lurking about , waiting for MK. It does not "sit right"....

I hope "quarrel" wasn't too strong a word. I used it instead of "fight" because I think of a quarrel between adults as a short and unimportant event. I certainly wasn't offended.

I completely agree with your post above. I don't know why the opinions of reasonable people vary so widely on this case. I know I'm not anti-LE or anti-Italian (just critical of a particular group of Italian officials who botched this investigation); I don't assume those who find AK and RS guilty are anti-American or hate attractive females.

 

[SMK]

I hope "quarrel" wasn't too strong a word. I used it instead of "fight" because I think of a quarrel between adults as a short and unimportant event. I certainly wasn't offended.

I completely agree with your post above. I don't know why the opinions of reasonable people vary so widely on this case. I know I'm not anti-LE or anti-Italian (just critical of a particular group of Italian officials who botched this investigation); I don't assume those who find AK and RS guilty are anti-American or hate attractive females.

No, I was just being silly, my bad :crazy:
And I agree, I do not think any of those who believe the convictions are just are driven by irrational hatred or prejudice....Just somehow able to envision as probable a scenario which seems absurd to us. :waitasec:

 

[Nova]

Ideally, Guede's prior petty crimes should have nothing to do with the murder....

I would agree with that statement if MK had been murdered in a different place and if RG's DNA, prints in blood, etc., hadn't been found all around and even inside her.

Since a break-in that may or may not be real is at issue here, I think RG's past is very relevant. Yes, of course, we should keep in mind that he was never convicted.

But what are the odds that there is a broken window at a crime scene where an accused burglar admits to being present?

 

[SMK]

I would agree with that statement if MK had been murdered in a different place and if RG's DNA, prints in blood, etc., hadn't been found all around and even inside her.

Since a break-in that may or may not be real is at issue here, I think RG's past is very relevant. Yes, of course, we should keep in mind that he was never convicted.

But what are the odds that there is a broken window at a crime scene where an accused burglar admits to being present?

I agree. It just is too coincidental. And his admitting to not only being there, but being sexual with MK, really raises red flags in a rape/murder scenario.....ETA: He was not convicted, but he was apprehended, twice in Perugia, once in Milan....

 

[Nova]

No, I was just being silly, my bad :crazy:
And I agree, I do not think any of those who believe the convictions are just are driven by irrational hatred or prejudice....Just somehow able to envision as probable a scenario which seems absurd to us. :waitasec:

No bad, no harm done, no need to apologize.

In my own case alone, I think it may be easier for me to view LE's claims critically because I wasn't following the case in 2007, when so many leaks to tabloids were still being taken seriously.

But I don't think opinions here line up neatly based on length of time following the case, so that's just me. ("That's just I", actually, but the correct grammar sounds funny. LOL.)

 

[Nova]

I agree. It just is too coincidental. And his admitting to not only being there, but being sexual with MK, really raises red flags in a rape/murder scenario.....

Do I remember correctly that he admitted to sexual activity with MK on the Skype call, even before his DNA was found inside her?

If so, I don't know how anyone gets around that.

 

[Malkmus]

I would agree with that statement if MK had been murdered in a different place and if RG's DNA, prints in blood, etc., hadn't been found all around and even inside her.

Since a break-in that may or may not be real is at issue here, I think RG's past is very relevant. Yes, of course, we should keep in mind that he was never convicted.

But what are the odds that there is a broken window at a crime scene where an accused burglar admits to being present?

Those odds narrow him down even more when you take in account that this accused burglar was caught two weeks prior with goods stolen from a place where a rock was also thrown through the second floor window.

 

[SMK]

Do I remember correctly that he admitted to sexual activity with MK on the Skype call, even before his DNA was found inside her?

If so, I don't know how anyone gets around that.

Yes. IIRC, he did....i agree

 

[Sonata]

She'd basically just arrived in Italy, fred. I'm aware she took Italian classes in school before she left, but there's a big leap from taking classes to fluency. A murder conspiracy is a specialized agreement, the vocabulary for which is unlikely to be covered in class.

I have had to demonstrate "proficiency" in two languages (Spanish as an undergrad, French as a grad student); neither effort would have enabled me to agree to criminal activity with people I hardly knew.

AK only knew RS for a little over a week. They could not possibly have talked "a lot." We also don't know how much she understood of what he said. There are reports that she and MK tended to hang out together because neither was entirely comfortable speaking Italian.

As for your other question, we've discussed the evidence that the anime didn't stop running until 9:48 that night. Yes, it's possible they didn't watch to the end, that mid-cartoon they suddenly got up and ran out to commit murder, but I don't believe they did. And I don't believe they ran out the very second the cartoon ended.

So I put them at RS' place until 10 pm. By 10:12 or 15, MK's cell phones are pinging where they were discarded.

There simply wasn't enough time for AK and RS to decide to commit murder (or even play a prank), collect their accomplice (RG), go to the cottage, interrupt MK and kill her.

Agreed on the language aspect. In my final year I had to give a business presentation in Russian. Took me WEEKS of vocab cramming and was a nightmare. I also had to give a 20 min presentation about my year abroad (I chose the topic of the modern Russian musical compared to western musicals) followed by 10 mins of questions, Again - nightmare and took ages of cramming. Neither of these things are of AKs level from what I can tell and yet I still to this day would be unable to negotiate an attack and/or cover up with Russians.

 

[Sonata]

Well so far we don't know if she was wearing it or not, whether she took it off or not, whether someone took it off of her or not, whether it fell into the blood or not, etc...

So I am inclined to think that I (we) can't figure out anything for sure regarding the jacket.

If it had alot of another's dna on it, or a knife cut in it, or something of that nature then we might could make some assumptions IMO.

I agree about the jacket and on your previous comment about it being inside out. I am in my twenties and still treat my clothes with minimal care. I would easily chuck a jacket on my bed or whatever with sleeves inside out. It doesn't mean anything unless we know whether MK was neat enough not to make a habit of that.

 

[sherlockh]

I thought she was wearing a jacket. And this was the first time I'd seen this evidence list posted this way. I thought her jacket was sitting on the back of her chair, which indicates she came home, took off her jacket, and threw it on her chair.

If her jacket was still on, then I think she wasn't home long. On a personal level, it speaks to me the strongest. I find that strange, because it is the least scientific piece of evidence. Just a personal thing.

Nowhere in the judges report it says 'jacket'. She was wearing a sweatshirt. Why in the world must she have taken that off when she got home? Could have but why must? What if she was wearing a t-shirt? Doesn't make any sense. Well, it does actually since this is how things must be turned around to believe AK is innocent. Meredith would have taken her sweatshirt off, Amanda would have put her sweatshirt on....lol...

And at around 9 pm Meredith and Sophie Purton had left.
She remembered that Meredith, that afternoon, was wearing a pair of rather loose blue jeans, fabric gym shoes, and a light blue sweatshirt with a zip fastener. Underneath she had a long-sleeved T-shirt and over this a top. She carried a cream-coloured bag with a long shoulder strap.

 

[SMK]

Nowhere in the judges report it says 'jacket'. She was wearing a sweatshirt. Why in the world must she have taken that off when she got home? What if she was wearing a t-shirt? Doesn't make any sense. Well, it does actually since this is how things must be turned around to believe AK is innocent. Meredith would have taken her sweatshirt off, Amanda would have put her sweatshirt on....lol...

Well, it may be referred to as a 'jacket' since it zippered and was over her shirt. And it was soaked in blood, so she likely had not removed it. All of these things are grist for the mill to sleuthers, of course.