But would anyone have tuned in if it weren’t for her name?
I lost a lot of sympathy for her after she tried crowdsourcing funding to pay for her dream wedding shortly after buying a $718,000 house. I do not believe she was guilty, based on the many pieces I read, btw.
Did you read her essay? Her request isn’t to stop talking about her. Her goal is to gain a little of the agency that she has been denied throughout the process, and ask that people consider this in a different light.
And that is what is being discussed here. As I said in my first post on the topic, her essay made me consider the impact on her and Meredith Kercher’s family in way I otherwise wouldn’t have.
Had she just ignored the film, would there be less attention on her?
I’m not sure how to say it any clearer than my post directly above.
@Just_Asking_Questions seemed to think that she was asking to be left alone.
Why did you ignore the qualifier that you quoted?
By speaking up, she’s strengthening the connection between the fictional movie and the real-life case that inspired it.
I’m sure she would have preferred that, but as she has said, that ship sailed long ago. Her options are to sit idly by, or attempt to have some voice in her own story.
Did you read any reviews of the movie before her essay came out? Every review mentioned her. This was not some secret connection that no one noticed before she brought it up.
Nope. Haven’t read any reviews. Haven’t read her essay. Have no plans to see the movie.
And no one has more interest and time to discuss JFK than a conspiracy theorist, just like no one is more eager to discuss 9/11 or the shape of the Earth than the crackpots. The absolute last person I want to listen to on any of these topics is someone who spends a lot of time on a forum for them.
So sure - she committed a brutal murder for absolutely no reason, as the first-ever antisocial act in her life, that someone else she met once was convicted of after leaving his DNA all over the crime scene, and despite the prosecution’s case against her amounting to “she’s an American slut who has sex and probably a Satan-worshipping witch.” OK, maybe she’s the one person in the history of the world who did that. Even if you think this is metaphysically possible the idea that it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt and she deserves to be in prison is triply ludicrous.
There’s a reason Italians think she’s guilty and it says a lot more about Italian politics and culture than it does about Amanda Knox. It’s not surprising that the same reflexively anti-American impulses manifest in some people from other countries, including the U.S.
I don’t know that we want a big Amanda Knox case discussion, I’m someone who has participated in a lot of True Crime forums and other things over the years (I was very active in the EARONS/Golden State Killer community years before he was caught etc), I know that a lot of people in these communities are very passionate and often are very informed. That being said judges and legal professionals who have full unfettered access to every aspect of a case file, and who have formal legal training, deserve quite a bit of deference in such cases. It would take very, very powerful evidence for me to second guess the final ruling of Italy’s Court of Cassation. There’s a few particular reasons for this:
-It is typically the case in the Italian criminal justice system when an appellate court overturns a trial court, it remands the case back for a re-trial. The Court of Cassation specifically said it was not doing that in its final 2015 ruling because the investigative work, evidence collection, interrogations etc were so manifestly flawed from day one, that it was not possible for a fair trial to be conducted. This is important for the True Crime crowd because it means a lot of information they rely on was produced by an investigation that the professional courts have basically said is invalid. When the investigation itself is fundamentally unsound, you have to put a serious veneer of doubt on anything that investigation produced.
-The court specifically cited “an absolute lack of evidence” putting Knox and her boyfriend in the murder room or on the body of the victim–which given the police narrative as to how this murder was committed, it is all but impossible that you wouldn’t have significant forensic evidence on the scene.
@ZosterSandstorm says quite a bit that is entirely accurate–there was significant media attention on this case from day one, and a significant desire by the Italian press and public to blame a “wicked American.” This colored how the investigation was conducted and how the prosecutors behaved.
Italy has one of the worst criminal justice systems in Europe, reforms attempted in the late 1980s were left half-finished and leave Italy with serious defects in basic operations of its justice system. If such a deficient investigation had occurred in most other Western countries, with such serious violations of procedural norms and chain of custody, it is unlikely charges would have been brought against Knox and Sollecito.
Meanwhile there is fairly compelling physical evidence linking Guede to the crime.
All that being said am I sure she didn’t do it? I can’t say that. I’m just saying that it’s easy when people get really close to a case to assume they know everything about it, but Italy’s Court of Cassation is actually made up of people who didn’t have to grasp together knowledge from the internet, but who had full unabated access to every official case file and all the evidence. They also are experts in Italian law and criminal procedure, and found the evidence uncompelling and the procedure manifestly defective. Where criminal procedure is defective, discovering the truth becomes hard to impossible.
I have a feeling my comments on the Knox case may elicit further comment (or maybe not), but some salient details that I think should raise serious questions about the validity of various armchair investigations:
Two signed statements by Knox have no validity under Italian law - A lot of the belief, at least as I’ve seen, that Knox is guilty is based on her collected statements to Italian police during the investigation, including two signed statements. It should be noted that these were acquired without access to counsel, and the Italian courts have ruled as far back as in 2008 that those statements, in a legal sense, do not exist. It is absolutely true she told lies to the police, as no configuration of reality could comport with what she said. But lying to police is not itself evidence of a crime. It is also difficult to rely on signed statements that are improperly obtained. Without assistance of counsel it is impossible to know for sure everything involved in how these statements were agreed to and procured.
We do not definitively have a murder weapon - We have a knife that belonged to Sollecito that was alleged to be the murder weapon. This knife was alleged to have Knox’s DNA on the handle (as well as Sollecito’s) and Kercher’s DNA on the blade. It never had visible blood on it. There is an actual mountain of DNA analysis that has been done on this knife by a large number of people. What was definitive for the Italian Court of Cassation was the fact that the original handling of the knife was so sloppy it is very hard to trust anything about it. The knife sat in a cardboard box, it was not in sealed evidence. The court actually asserts that the lower court interpreted the expert evidence incorrectly, and that the expert evidence finds there is not likely to be Kercher’s DNA on the knife. Some of the earliest testing done which did find Kercher’s DNA on the blade has been rebutted in any number of ways, specifically in how it was tested and the very low amount of DNA on the blade frequently being seen in cases of cross contamination, as a weapon actually used to kill someone would have far more DNA of the victim on it. You can go out there and pull the literal dozen plus expert opinions on it, I tend to agree with the Italian court’s assessment that the lower court for reasons unknown chose to take the view that the evidence proved it was the murder weapon with Kercher’s blood on it, but the actual expert write ups do not seem to support that.
Kercher’s Bra Clasp - which was found in the murder room, was purported to have Sollecito’s DNA on it. This was the physical evidence linking Sollecito to the murder room, and by implication his purported accomplice Knox. This bra clasp was found after sitting on the floor of the murder room for forty-six days and was handled by multiple people wearing dirty gloves who passed it back and forth with other physical evidence multiple times before it ever reached a crime lab.
Does that sound like CSI? No, and there’s a reason it doesn’t, because that isn’t how you handle forensic fucking evidence. The amount of Sollecito’s DNA on the clasp was low enough that, again, it is consistent with cross contamination. Given it was handled sloppily by multiple people with dirty gloves, who had been handling items that did have Kercher’s blood on it, we can basically conclude nothing about this bra clasp. The chain of custody is so poor that we cannot reliably believe anything about it.
Knox’s statements not being allowed in court remove a lot of evidence for motive and remove any evidence clearly putting Knox at the scene of the crime. The weak physical evidence of the knife and bra clasp further remove Sollecito and Knox from being easily linked to the crime.
It is very easy to simply say that Knox and Sollecito’s frequent lies told to police, and the fact they made varying levels of incriminating statements to police (which were mostly not admissible at trial) could be held up as evidence this was an OJ situation. “They did it, but the investigation was fucked so you couldn’t properly convict them.” But it must be understood that statements made to police without attorneys present are not allowed in the United States for a reason, under the terms of treaties with Italy an attorney is supposed to be present when an American is being interrogated. It is very difficult to trust what comes out of those custodial conversations lacking proper protections, especially when young and scared people are involved, people who maybe have bad inclinations to lie to try to protect themselves.
Now I am not a forensic expert, but going back to my own forays into the True Crime world, I will say that a typical intimate murder scene is a smorgasbord of physical evidence linking the murderer to the murder. By intimate murder I mean things like bludgeoning, stabbings, beatings etc. A rifle shot through the window, yeah you won’t really leave DNA evidence there. A murder alleged to occur during a torture and rape session, involving a stabbing? There is no way with 21st century investigatory science it would not leave significant DNA evidence. Trace DNA wasn’t quite at current levels 10 years ago, but it was far enough along that it would be very, very difficult to rape and stab someone to death, in a prolonged torture session, and not leave skin DNA, hair DNA, various fluids etc all over the crime scene.
There are also innumerable procedural issues with the Italian police investigation, that would take actual hours and hours of time to compile here. For example the police officer who picked out Sollecito’s knife from his kitchen drawer, said he determined it was the murder weapon based on “intuition”, because he said it looked like it could have caused the wounds he had seen on Kercher. He had, in fact, not seen Kercher’s body yet so had no idea what the wounds looked like. Another bit of ineptitude is the police burned the computers of both Kercher and Knox, which could have contained salient information. Meanwhile they were quick to note vague and non-definitive evidence of activity on Sollecito’s computer that they alleged undermined part of his alibi.
@Martin_Hyde I’m sure you’re writing in good faith, but you are only repeating myths and serious factual errors propagated by the Knox camp, without checking their accuracy. They are simply false.
It reminds me of the way that Trump supporters keep repeating talking points about how the election was stolen, the post-in votes were changed, about death panels, anti-vax, etc, etc. You can debunk these obvious myths and talking points as much as you like, but they will keep on repeating them relentlessly
In this case, many Americans have simply never been exposed to the other side of the story. They’ve heard only one side - the Knox talking points.
There is another side. It is not a conspiracy theory, or anything remotely like one. It is a sober look at the factual evidence.
The conspiracy is the Knox version, repeated again and again ad nauseam in a similar way to Trump talking points – with as little truth, but more successfully (for an American audience anyway).
Complete myth - there is actually a large mass of forensic evidence and sworn testimony from multiple witnesses that contradicts the Knox story.
I suggest you read this summary of evidence.
I suggest you read about the knife here.
That the profile found on the knife recovered from Sollecito’s apartment is a match to Meredith was never in question. The experts for both sides stipulated to the fact that those two profiles match. Conti and Vecchiotti, although they reveal their bias in attempting to avoid directly answering the question, eventually admit that the DNA profile recovered from the knife is a match to Meredith Kercher. Their criticism with respect to the knife DNA is that they feel Stefanoni ought not to have tested it at all, but since it was tested and a profile obtained this result should nevertheless be excluded because the small size of the sample precluded dividing it first for two separate amplifications.
I suggest you also read about Sollecito’s bullshit story explaining how Meredith’s blood got on the knife while they were cooking together.
I suggest you read the detailed analysis of the bra clasp evidence here.
I also suggest you read about
Their page on the bloody footprint looks like a joke to me. They have somehow derived immense confidence from a smeary, incomplete footprint on a carpeted mat.
I don’t see how anyone can have a shred of confidence in matching a footprint when it’s unknown how much blood was on the foot to start with, or how much weight was put on the foot, or if the foot’s owner had scrunched their foot up at all, or moved it while walking, or how the carpet itself distorted the print, or how the blood soaked in, or a million other things. Putting the information in a spreadsheet does not increase confidence if the data itself is junk.
Somehow their spreadsheet also has “100%” matches on seven different millimeter-level measurements on the foot. It’s impossible to measure something squishy like a foot on seven different dimensions and come up with the same number each time to the millimeter, let alone do the same with a footprint under unknown conditions. Wherever most of those numbers came from, they’re bogus. Was that even court data or just something that internet sleuths cooked up from photos?
You’re right, that page is very incomplete.
For a more detailed analysis see the Massei Report, pages 338-342.
Due to the lack of minutiae found on the friction ridges [“epidermal ridges”], these latter being highly differentiating elements, the technicians decided that the print on the mat was useful for negative comparisons but not for positive ones; in this case, in the same manner as for print 5/A and for numerous others, Dr Rinaldi and Chief Inspector Boemia arrived at an opinion of probable identity, as will be explained.
The whole section is worth reading for the full analysis.
The claims made in that section are weaker than those made on the wiki page. Nevertheless, the PDF does imply that several of the measurements were identical between the ink print and blood print. This makes me intensely skeptical that any debiasing measures were taken (i.e., the measurements of the images were made by separate parties with no contact). If the same person or same group performed the measurements, they should be thrown out.
I do not see anything in the footprint that would exclude more than about half the population, given the expected variation on a soft surface like that.
Half the population are not in question. We have to look at the footprints of the possible suspects. (See also the numerous bloody footprints elsewhere in the house.)
The bathmat print is in Meredith’s blood.
The conclusion was probable identity.
Click on the image for a larger version:
Bear in mind that enhanced imaging was also used, but I don’t have the photos of those.
NB: This was only one item among many, many items of evidence. The whole of the evidence has to be considered together.
I’m aware that there’s more evidence than that, and really I don’t have any real personal opinion on the case. I just browsed the wiki site a bit and came across that page and found it to be decidedly uncompelling. While the page makes it sound at a superficial level that it was a near-exact match, it obviously is not and could not be. And there is decided reason for skepticism about some of the measurements due to their too-exact nature.
But even if you allow a millimetre or two, you still come to the same conclusion. The bathmat is fuzzy, but with an artificial fabric, the blood doesn’t get absorbed and spread.
A better use of your time would be to watch the BBC documentary for an overview of the case first. It’s worth watching to get the big picture.
Let’s just address the knife since re-examining the entire case is beyond reasonable scope, to serve as a basis for whether I am just repeating “myths.” Here is an actual, incontrovertible fact about the knife:
In the final Italian Court of Cassation ruling on the matter, which is summarized by the New York Times ( Italy’s Highest Court Explains Decision to Clear Amanda Knox - The New York Times (nytimes.com) the court actually says that there was never proven blood on the knife. Why would the court say something like that if, as you suggest, it is so obvious that Kercher’s DNA was on the knife?
The reality is the DNA evidence purporting to link the knife to Kercher was heavily disputed for many years. It would be possible to post about this for hours, but I go back to–I give a lot of deference on such matters to Italy’s Court of Cassation. They are the experts in the Italian legal process, they also are working from the best source of information possible on the investigation–they had all of the original investigative work available to them and they also had of course all the work that was done in the years after the initial conviction. They also, unlike the True Crime community, are working from documents in their native tongue. A major issue with a lot of the True Crime community in this case, both the pro and anti Amanda side, is that the more detailed documents available are often only available in Italian, with only selected translations available. This means people who do not read Italian are left running translations through translation engines, which is fine for many uses but not great for analyzing complicated legal and technical literature.
There are a lot of twists and turns that occurred with the knife. For example Sollecito offered a weak explanation as to why it might have had Kercher’s DNA on it, most likely this was a lie, but it has never been denied that Sollecito and Knox have told numerous lies during the course of the investigations and trials. That’s unfortunate, but isn’t in and of itself enough to overcome problems with physical evidence.
The prosecution has always vigorously maintained the integrity of the knife’s DNA evidence, primarily because without it they have virtually no case at all in terms of physical evidence. But it is not accurate really to say the knife evidence was ever unambiguous. During the original trial for example the prosecution refused to disclose portions of the DNA testing, including the negative controls used. The DNA identification technique they used to detect Kercher’s DNA is not the most reliable, and is particularly prone to detect contaminations. Like I said, the arguments over the DNA evidence on the knife is complicated and could be argued about for days–but it should be made very clear, this wasn’t a bloody knife that had a smorgasbord of Kercher’s DNA on it. If it was the murder weapon, it was heavily cleaned. Even given that, the amount of DNA supposedly found on it was so small that it is actually possible it was the result of contamination–this is a point that has been argued vigorously by both sides, but again, I go back to the Italian Court of Cassation’s comments on it.
The knife simply was not stored or handled professionally, which if the knife was soaked in Kercher’s blood it would be one thing, but improperly handled evidence in which we don’t know if technicians had been freely handling other evidence and then possibly contaminating the knife is worrisome when the actual evidence is such a small amount of potential DNA. The Italian Court of Cassation obviously are not DNA experts, but they are experts in evidentiary law in Italy, and their ultimate opinion was that there was no clear evidence that Kercher’s blood was ever on the knife.
Is it possible the Court got it wrong? Of course, but as I said back in my original post on it–unlike the internet sleuths (and I don’t use that term in a derogatory fashion, I am no better informed), the Court of Cassation are experts in Italian law, Italian criminal investigations etc. It isn’t enough just to find disputed evidence arguing against their conclusion, for me to weigh more heavily than the ruling of this court would require significant and convincing evidence of error on their part, which I simply do not believe has ever been demonstrated by anyone.