Didn’t she also claim she was beaten at the same time? Was there even a shred of evidence to substantiate this?
Can’t find anything about receipts being presented as evidence. Nearest I can find after a skim is the testimony of the supermarket owner in court, stating Amanda Knox was waiting outside the store at 7.45am and went to the cleaning section, despite claiming she was asleep until 10am with Sollecito.
what I read is that her father said that she told him she was slapped.
So the police announced shortly after the murder that they had evidence that never appeared at the trial. Instead of receipts they come up with an eyewitness, who remembers her enough to do an ID from a photo days later but not well enough to remember if she actually bought anything. Seems to me this could just as well support the defense’s ‘victim of a witchhunt’ claim.
It doesn’t exonerate Knox but that was not the point. It simply casts doubt on how balanced the site is in their presentation of the case and how well they have weeded out facts from media speculation. As an additional example, the sources cited are not related to the statements or testimony of the Postal Police, but the website kind of makes it look that way doesn’t it? And this is my biggest beef with the case – the intermingling of fact and fiction, especially since the jurors have access to it.
I got my information from the Friends of Amanda website, which, while obviously created for her defense, does a better job IMO of presenting the facts and rebuttals of both sides. With regards to the Postal Police it states:
"The verbal testimony of the Postal Police, that they know they arrived at 12:35 because one of them checked his watch, contradicts a log entry made by the department supervisor at the time of the incident, which says the car was not sent out until 12:46 pm. Raffaele called the emergency number at 12:51 pm.
The Postal Police also produced a time-stamped black-and-white photo taken by a surveillance camera in a parking garage across the street from the cottage. It shows an unmarked sedan, which they claim was the one they drove that day. Given the location of the camera, however, the car in the picture would have just passed the driveway leading to the cottage and would have had to follow a circuitous route to get back to that driveway."
The most obvious thing about this murder trial of an american girls, and it’s also quit funny, is to see the level of mistrust american people have toward other countries judicial system and to see the level of indignation at the idea of a do-goody american student could have commited murder and that one foreign country dare to actually challenge that view.
Look people, you invade countries illegally o pretex taht ones carries out aluminium tubes that could be sued to make WMD (and in taht case, let’s then arrest 95% of the world), you detain taxi driver who’s sole crime has to be at the wrong place at teh wrong time during the Afganistan invasion, you detain people without trial, send them to other countries to torture them or isolate them on Gitmo, you make it legal to actually spy on your citizen and you are actually dumb and arrogant enough to critisize Italia Justice system without stopping for a second about the way your justice treat foreigners?
One by just reading this forum actually understand why half of the world would happily blow up the moral midget your country had become.
BUt I suggest teh follwoign to you who after all still hold your justice system in high standard. Let’s inspire the Italian Justice with the way you treat potential murder, yet maybe innocent exept for the fact of being black.
In most USA here’s how this girl would be judged by your system:
Murder=death penalty.
Let comdemed her to death penalty, send her to some remote shithole for some old fashion water boarding and the like, and put a rope around her neck.
That’s the American system, should we apply it to the case??should we??
The italian system is far fearer because in a case like this, she can appeal as many time as she wants, adn she probably will, and at least unlike in your dumb country she won’t have to wait on death row with no further appeal, hoping that a sadistic governor or president give her grace at the last minute.
I think you need to look up what “over and over again” means. Hint: it doesn’t mean twice.
But I’m going to leave that one.
One appeals to the court of appeal. They decide whether there shall be a retrial based on a certain things. One of those is how the trial was conducted. In England and Wales (I grew up in England) it is based around the idea of an “unsafe” conviction which apparently means “when someone has been found guilty because the evidence was wrong or the witnesses didn’t tell the truth”. As an example, convictions have been quashed of IRA members due to the nature of the evidence and/or confessions (see: Birmingham Six, Guildford Four). Fabricated evidence and edited confessions aren’t exactly the conduct of the trial- For a start the fabrication and editing would have taken place before there even was a trial …
It has gone the other way these days. Now DNA evidence is seen as infallible by most, much like fingerprints. The truth of the matter is that both can and indeed have pointed to entirely the wrong people in legal proceedings in the past, which is why, for example, in the UK DNA evidence must be accompanied by other evidence in order to secure a conviction. DNA alone isn’t enough.
But anyway, I only brought up OJ as it was a neat example of exactly the sort of trial I was talking about when offering a converse to your example. Just to show that such a trial can and has happened.
I find this thread very interesting. This is the only place I’ve read anybody thinking that Knox is innocent. In saying that it’s really the only US forum I visit so that might have something to do with it.
From everything I’ve read I’ve always believed Knox to be guilty. Changing her story, changing her alibi, accusing an innocent man, her bizarre behaviour. I just think its interesting that so many Americans have jumped on the “she is innocent and was railroaded” argument. If everything about the case remained the same but if it took place in the US would it really have garnered as much attention and outrage?
I feel for Meredith Kercher’s family. That girl has been lost in all of this.
As I understand it, the changing story/alibi and accusation all occurred in the same interrogation. From The Innocence Project:
"In about 25% of DNA exoneration cases, innocent defendants made incriminating statements, delivered outright confessions or pled guilty.
These cases show that confessions are not always prompted by internal knowledge or actual guilt, but are sometimes motivated by external influences."
I find it interesting that you place so much emphasis on the circumstantial evidence. I think people here are reacting far more strongly to the forensic evidence. It may well be a cultural difference. What do you make of the fact that 1 of the now 3 convicted murderers left copious amounts of forensic evidence as a result of the speculated 15 minute struggle, but the only evidence that Knox or Sollecito left was a small amount of DNA on a highly contested piece of evidence that wasn’t collected until 6 weeks after the murder.?
I’m not American, and like many on this thread I haven’t said she’s innocent; just that there’s nowhere near enough evidence to convict.
Hmm. Maybe not as much attention but I’m sure that there would be some outrage about the verdict.
But do you doubt that the situation would be much the same with the nationalities reversed: an italian girl convicted in america?
This is not a good way of leaving something. 
What would “infinite appeals,” which I never suggested, look like in the first place? A country only has so many courts and types of motions.
That was too vague on my part, yes.
I know those kinds of trials have happened and I would not have denied it. And it’s a problem. But it doesn’t show why a prosecutor should be able to appeal a not guilty verdict.
I’d be tempted to comment on the US media coverage, if we hadn’t had some very similar press reaction here in 1997, when two nurses called Parry and McLauchlan were found guilty in Saudi of murdering a colleague called Gilford.
48 Hours did a piece on this case (I only saw some bits on the regular news):
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/48hours/main4005725.shtml
They have their investigator go through a lot of the evidence.
Frankly, the U.S. press did a hell of a lot better job of covering it than the UK or Italian press… but even there a lot of the stuff they reported was just only what the prosecution said and only started giving the defense’s side in the last few months. When semi-balanced coverage only happens in the last few months of a multi-year story in one country of three involved, it’s way too late.
It means nothing because IT’S NOT TRUE. None of it. Stop reading tabloid reports and taking them as gospel truth.
The “true justice” site is the most misinformed site I’ve seen write about the case. And the people in charge of it are heavy into spamming and harassing anyone who disagrees with them.
Which is nothing compared to the anti-Knox supporters. Hell, I started out thinking that there must be something to the claims made against her based upon the reports I read, but after looking into it and seeing just how incredibly slanted that coverage was against Knox and checking the actual facts it became clear that there are a lot of people whose desire for “justice” means they are on a witch hunt. That’s certainly true with the Italian police, and with some of the claims floated around it’s almost literally a witch hunt with the claims about some ancient anti-Catholic group making human sacrifices, etc.
Half of that has already been explained multiple times and half of it is just outright nonsense with no basis in reality whatsoever. But then if you’re using the ?“true justice” site for your information it’s no wonder, because they just use whatever nonsense they invent up or take from tabloid papers and try to present it as fact without using one ounce of common sense.
You are not really convincing me with blanket statements like this. They had a lot more information and a lot less hysteria then many sites I saw on this subject. So far the only complaint I’ve seen leveled is about the time of the police’s arrival that is in question and that hardly counts and misrepresenting evidence.
Your claims are falling flat.
Found this in the news today.
This is an interesting addition to this case. The judge somehow was able to glean a completely different set of circumstances and motive from the testimony given than that which the prosecution spent 15 months trying to prove, but in the end, in his opinion, she still did it.
She was also given an extra year on her sentence because she “slandered Patrick Lumumba” (the bar owner).
It seems that even after the train has pulled into the station, the railroading continues.
Mods: Not trying to resurrect a zombie here. If this deserves it’s own thread, please lock this one and let me know and I’ll start a new one. It seems to be a valid continuation of this discussion, tho, so I posted here first. Thanks.
It’s been less than three months since the last post to this thread, which is safely under the zombie threshold in my opinion. So don’t worry about that.
All I can say about the judge’s ruling is that it’s typical of everything else that has happened in this case.
The only way Knox would get infinite appeals would be if she were sentenced to death in the United States.