In the Bible Belt, more like hey’decades’
I’m sorry @GreenWyvern, but as a 3rd party with only minimal knowledge of the Knox case, your side in this argument is not convincing at all.
ETA: And Amanda Knox has no leg to stand on. You own your image, you own your name (in some respects), you don’t own in any way events that have happened to you.
Like I mentioned I’m not 100% sure I want to rehash every piece of evidence in this case. I’m also not saying Knox is 100% innocent. What I am saying is I give great deference to the Italian Court of Cassation, and the fact that they remanded the case for a retrial in 2013 is not unusual–in the Italian system that is actually typical anytime the original trial result has had to be thrown out. The decision it made in 2015 to actually declare that reasonable doubt exists, and no further trial would be allowed, is relatively uncommon, the norm is they would continue to have trial court level trials until a result at that level met the appellate review standards of the higher courts. It’s a different system than in the United States, the appeals process isn’t viewed as sort of an after-trial like it is here, but part of the original determination in a sense.
The Court of Cassation said that it found no compelling evidence that there was blood on the knife, that means the prosecutor has no unambiguous murder weapon even. Some experts even testified the knife in question doesn’t produce wounds consistent with those found on Kercher’s body. My single biggest take away is the Court of Cassation said they felt the original investigation was rushed and sloppy due to public pressure.
Was lying or deliberate framing afoot? I don’t know that that is the case, were the police and prosecutors putting their thumbs on the scales of some aspects of the evidence instead of following where the evidence took them? I think that did happen. And that’s a serious problem. The police have physical control of the evidence. When the physical control of the evidence is sloppy, and the evidence paints an unclear picture even if you believe a lot of what the prosecution says, in my mind that’s very problematic to say someone is guilty. There’s actually a whole list of crazy things about this case by the way:
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Two of the investigators on the scene of the crime were dismissed from their jobs in the years that followed for incompetence and misconduct (not relating to the Knox case, but other cases they were involved in)
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There was an injured cat that was allowed to walk through the crime scene for hours and maybe over a day after the crime scene was first being processed. Some of the blood evidence analyzed by the police, they later found out was feline blood. Again, this was like real Barnie Fife shit. Imagine an American forensics team letting a stray fucking cat walk through blood and other evidence in a fucking murder scene.
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The luminol tests which the prosecution claim revealed bloody footprints, were done something like a month after the murder, after the crime scene had been ransacked by police multiple times. Note that some of the police visits to the scene were not even formally documented, meaning investigators were showing up and doing “god knows what” and then leaving. Maybe nothing nefarious, but just builds up more evidence about the troubling chain of custody issues. The purported footprints in blood, tested negative for blood using a number of test mechanisms, and I believe only in like one mechanism did it test positive and those were disputed. There were also defects in how the investigators compared the footprints to the actual feet of the people involved, that at least according to defense experts made it unreliable to even assert whose feet the prints were from. (And the prints may not have even been in blood, meaning they may have not been evidence of anything.)
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The knife is the only clear evidence linking the murder to Sollecito and by extension Knox, without the knife, the only physical evidence linking Sollecito to Kercher is her bra clasp that had Sollecito’s DNA on it. Again, this clasp sat on the floor of the murder scene for 46 days, and when it was finally processed it was handled by numerous technicians who were wearing dirty gloves. It was later processed by people who had been handling other pieces of evidence and hadn’t cleaned their gloves in between. Given the extremely small amount of Sollecito DNA on the bra clasp, this evidence would be seriously problematic for use in any American court. By the way the bra clasp had 3 other unknown males’ DNA on it, which would be consistent with “sloppy handling in evidence by sloppy technicians.”
This is one of my favorite pop cultural scenes about a criminal trial, and is worth watching:
Vinny is actually hitting on a core truth about criminal trials in the United States–the prosecution is going to build what appears to be a very, very strong case. This will happen in virtually every trial, whether the person is guilty or innocent. Why is that? Because for one, prosecutors in America do not even bring charges at all if they do not believe they can obtain a conviction. For two, no prosecutor is going to pick only the strongest piece of evidence and use that as his whole case, he’s going to pull together whatever strands of evidence he possibly can, and spin it in the most detrimental way possible to the defendant. But if all that strung together evidence can, as Vinny says, be called into question, be shown to be thin or lacking legitimacy, then 100%, you acquit. You do not say “well each piece of evidence is 50% likely, and since there’s so much of it, we will just convict.” Instead, the fact that all your evidence is 50/50, means your whole case is 50/50. People aren’t supposed to be convicted on 50/50.
All the inconclusive evidence in the world isn’t worth even as much as one piece of conclusive evidence. I mentioned before that I followed the EARONS/GSK case for years and years before he was caught. The thing is, take the DNA he left from raping his murder victims out of those cases. If a time traveler gave an investigator a tip “hey, GSK was Joseph DeAngelo”, without that DNA evidence, not a single one of those crime scenes had enough evidence to unambiguously convict him. You would just have a lot of circumstantial shit. DeAngelo was a cop, and he knew not to leave the evidence that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, could link you to a crime scene. What he didn’t know is that about 2 years after his final rape homicide some forensic experts in the UK would obtain the world’s first conviction based on sequencing the DNA of a bodily fluid and linking it to a perpetrator. Over the next 22 years though, he was still safe. While he could not have easily predicted DNA testing would become a norm, he still did not have his DNA in the CODIS system because he had never been convicted of anything more serious than shoplifting (which ended his police career) and a DUI. The final nail in his coffin was another development that he never could have anticipated–that eventually we would have genealogical DNA databases, that you can upload a profile to and find near relatives. When they uploaded his profile in 2018 they found 6 matches for people who would be his great-great grandparents. And by following down all those people’s descendants, one by one they marked off all the people who were the wrong age, all the people who never lived in California etc, and they got to two people. One of those people they tested his DNA and it wasn’t him, so they now knew it was Joe DeAngelo. So they follow him around, collect a discarded tissue he throws out, and link his DNA definitively to something like 12 murders.
There was basically a warehouse full of East Area Rapist evidence up in Sacramento from his initial crime spree. All of that evidence combined, if you had it to use against DeAngelo but you DID NOT have the DNA evidence–you would never obtain a conviction. Because all of that evidence would just have been circumstantial. The incontrovertible DNA evidence was worth more than all the other evidence combined, because it establishes almost undeniable guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
In this case we don’t have DNA evidence akin to that (DeAngelo left behind large amounts of semen that provided unambiguous samples to test for in amounts that could never be simple contamination), the amount of evidence involved with Sollecito is among the thinnest of thin types of DNA evidence you have.
Then on top of that, all the normal controls that are used in forensics for the collection and processing of biological evidence, were not followed. The prosecution experts frequently used testing methods that were not considered the most appropriate for getting a good result, they frequently violated norms of handling forensic evidence–norms in Italy by the way, I’m not talking American norms. When the evidence is so trace, and the evidentiary standards are not followed, you do not have particularly reliable evidence.
Right - but the Knox trial happened in 2009, not 1993, in the very context of a country looking down at the U.S. The entire reason Italy wanted to get Knox was because they were upset about U.S. policy in Iraq and so forth. You would think that if you are going to take down the arrogant, backwards Americans you would not do so by emulating one of the worst things the U.S. justice system ever did, and at that, doing so in the highest-profile criminal trial your country has had since the turn of the century rather than in some backwater relying on god knows who to prosecute.
I’m skeptical of anyone who gets persuaded into their position from watching a documentary.
To be fair, I don’t think My Cousin Vinny was actually a documentary. 
Lol!!
This has already been answered but maybe it deserves more response.
There are literally infinite possible reasons why a person might lie.
Out of that literally infinite list, you are somehow failing to find even a single one by yourself.
This includes “no reason”. It also includes being badgered by hostile questioners until you reach for an answer, just to try to satisfy them. Sometimes people just say things. It happens. It takes extremely little experience with human beings to realize that sometimes people just do random shit for no purpose.
But the problem goes even beyond that.
No one here owes you an explanation to make the world make sense to you. Your question is asking for a competing narrative to replace your current narrative. Right now you have a story in your head that makes sense to you: They lied because they were guilty. And yes, that does make sense. It might very well be true. But it is not the only possibility. If that story isn’t actually true – and I don’t know one way or the other – then that doesn’t mean anyone can give you a pretty replacement narrative that fits all the little details in your head that you so desire to fit. Sometimes shit just doesn’t make sense. Real life isn’t a TV show where everything is tidily wrapped up in the last five minutes. Sometimes reality doesn’t make sense, does not result in a tidy story. You are asking for a competing narrative to replace your existing narrative – which literally no-one here owes you – but sometimes there is no narrative. There is no story that will make things fit, because of a random and crazy world. They might have lied for obscure reasons that we will never understand, or for no reason at all. No analysis is serious if it does not have a place for “This makes sense but it might be wrong for reasons that I do not understand, and will never understand.” You absolutely cannot rely on someone else telling you a different competing story, because often that does not exist.
On the related subject of how people could possibly confess to murders they didn’t commit,consider the four hapless suspects in Arizona’s Buddhist temple mass murder case.
"Eventually, it was discovered that the men were coerced into confessing, (Waddell Buddhist temple shooting - Wikipedia) with investigators extracting false confessions by exaggerating evidence, badgering them with leading questions, and threatening the death penalty. A homicide chief for Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office at the time said the interrogators hammered on the suspects until their will was broken, and that “after a while, they were willing to say anything.”
It is noteworthy that the scandal following revelation of botched investigation and false confessions led to Joe Arpaio being elected Maricopa County sheriff on a promise of restoring credibility to the office.
Part of my reason for not ascribing particular weight to a defendant lying and saying bad things goes back to my hobbyist interest in True Crime novels and participation in various forums. There have been so many Innocence Project cases where they’ve proven someone didn’t commit a crime (often with DNA evidence showing someone else did it), where the person confessed. There’s a huge mental hang up a lot of people have around confessions. This is actually often baked into the legal system, where police / prosecutors / judges put a lot of weight on confessions. And most of the time confessions are actual admissions of guilt. But it’s common enough a phenomenon and proven so many times now, that we know under the pressure of police interrogation (which is often basically bullying in nature), a lot of people crack and lie and confess to things they have not done.
That’s not that big of a surprise, is it? We already know not to accept confessions received under torture; now we’re in the process of accepting that not all torture is physical.
I don’t have a position on Amanda Knox’s guilt or innocence, and I’m not any kind of lawyer, never mind a criminal lawyer, and I know even less about Italian law than I do about American law.
But really, you must know that the authorities (police, prosecutors, whoever) deceive, manipulate, bully and sometimes even torture people into false confessions all the time.
And sometimes that coercion takes the form of manipulating the accused into inventing explanations for evidence (real or fabricated).
So, yes, it wouldn’t surprise me if some dude got tricked into saying he just went into the brothel for change.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the case of the Central Park Five, way back in 1989 (is that right?). How the police obtained “confessions” from those innocent suspects might be instructive.
I’ve never been one who covets power and wants the thrill of exercising it at will but, as the president of Italy, I would take advantage of the following presidential power, which states: “Article 72 says that the president shall have the power to grant pardons, reprieves, respites or remissions of punishment or to suspend, remit or commute sentences.”
In other words, I’d end this nonsense, PRONTO!
For an interesting look at the psychology surrounding the case, as well as the many faults, here is Dr. Grande’s analysis. He does psychology studies of famous people or criminals. The focus here is not on Amanda herself, but how mis-aimed focus made here the center of events to which she had almost no involvement. What’s interesting is that we can see the same forces at work in this very thread: the insistence that Knox was somehow. in some unclear way, “involved,”
and no matter what the evidence actually indicates the involvement simply changes instead of being analyzed and judged rationally.
I’ve thought of another way to explain this, which might be helpful.
Take a paper of paper.
Draw a normal distribution – a bell-shaped curve – and then fill in a relatively narrow interval that centers on the peak of the curve.
That particular interval will be include more area, which is to say it will be more likely, than any other interval of the same width but centered somewhere else. So if we’re telling a story, trying to explain to ourselves what seems plausible, the interval that covers the center is the single most plausible single story that we could possibly tell.
HOWEVER.
If we then add up all of the other intervals, they will sum to an area greater than the narrow interval focused on the center of the curve. Each and every one of these other intervals – each and every one of these other stories we could tell about what happened – is individually less likely to have happened than the interval in the middle. But combined, the sum of all the implausible stories adds up to a greater probability than the story in the center.
Now let’s imagine that conversation.
“I lean toward the explanation in the middle. I think that’s the single most plausible theory.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Well then, please explain why we have the results that we have, if the answer isn’t in the center.”
That last question is hugely problematic. And it’s problematic precisely because it wants a concrete story as an alternative to the single most plausible story. But every single other possibility is, individually, less plausible than the center story. And so if we compare that center story with each other story, one by one, that plausible center story is going to win. It’s going to sound more convincing every single time, against every other possible alternative that could ever be offered. Nevertheless, in this particular made-up example, the sum of all the less plausible stories adds up to a much more likely outcome than the single most plausible story by itself. This is what I mean by “random shit”.
I want to state, again, that I don’t know this case. I don’t have any strong opinions. But it is, quite inherently, not fair to compare the single most plausible hypothesis, with the plurality of probability behind it, in one-on-one match ups with the other possibilities. The bell curve literally goes off forever in both directions. Reality can shoot off toward infinity in even higher dimensions.
It’s not always the case that the sum of the random shit outweighs the single most plausible hypothesis. But it is sometimes the case. And that means that asking for a “plausible story” to replace the story that is already inside our heads can be a major mistake. Sometimes reality is messed up. Sometimes the most plausible story is wrong. Sometimes the sum of random shit adds up to a situation much more plausible than the single most plausible story.
The problem I have with any theory of Knox’s guilt is that she had absolutely no motive whatsoever to kill her roommate, never had a history of mental instability, but we are to believe that she and her new boyfriend acted in concert with a drifter, who had a history of violence, to kill her roommate just because?
What caused her to be accused in the first place was her odd behavior and the primacy bias. The police find a murder that seems absolutely random and unsolvable. They look at the roommate first, and there she is acting completely weird, kissing her boyfriend continuously outside the apartment in what almost everyone viewed as a strange thing. So they focus on her. And even when it is discovered that a violent, random drifter did it, it is difficult to put aside that first notion that maybe she had something to do with it too.
In almost every case where someone is exonerated, we can look back to the initial investigation and see that they did something that society considers odd or goofy, something that doesn’t make sense to us, or something that we personally would not do. But, not everyone is like us. And just because people are odd doesn’t make them criminals.
That’s the attitude Robert Durst’s attorneys looked for in potential jurors. 