Even assuming that’s true, it doesn’t mean that it’s not evidence. But can you give me a cite to this evisceration by court-appointed experts?
Assuming that’s true, so what?
Sure, and you started the game by (apparently) pretending for rhetorical purposes that you did not know what I was talking about.
That was what you were doing, right?
I mean when you asked “Do you mean the knife that was found at Sollecito’s house that was found to not be compatible with Kercher’s wounds,” you knew perfectly well what knife I was talking about, right? You just wanted to make your assertions in a cutesy way, right?
By the way, I appreciate your use of the passive voice. Who exactly found the knife “to not be compatible with Kercher’s wounds”?
It’s based on my general knowledge and common sense. Do you seriously dispute my claim?
What are you trying to say? Discredited evidence is as good as no evidence. You can’t pile up 100 pieces of evidence with 1 percent credibility/reliability and say that this is good as one piece of evidence with 100 percent credibility/reliability.
But is it really 1%?
If you pile up 100 pieces of evidence with 50% credibility/reliability, it’s still not 100% but it’s pretty good.
ISTM that a lot of Knox supporters are ignoring that (in addition to treating defense team claims as gospel truth). They are looking at each piece of evidence completely in isolation, and having dealt with that one piece on its own, they move on to the next one, and so on. That’s not valid, logically.
It depends on the nature of the discrediting. If the defense attorney hires an expert to testify that a particular piece of evidence does not inculpate his client, it might discredit the evidence somewhat but the evidence might still have probative value.
Anyway, the claim on the table seems to be that there is NO affirmative evidence against Amanda Knox. That doesn’t seem to be true.
I think this is probably true. For example, the observation that one of the rooms was ransacked but nothing of value was taken and the night-table drawer was not opened. Standing alone, this is weak evidence but it still has some value.
Frankly, without some coherent explanation or suggestion of how Knox and Sollecito were in any way connected with the convicted murderer Guede, any consideration of the so called “evidence” is merely Anomaly Hunting. Motive is no small thing in proper criminal law.
It’s not nothing, but it’s overrated.
The prosecution (& anyone else) FTM, doesn’t know these people. They can deal with actual evidence in from of them. But the fact that they can’t figure out something that they have no connection to is not that big of a deal.
The logic, as above, is if A follow from B etc. If we could expect that the prosecution should be able to figure out the connection between the various characters, then the fact that they can’t do this suggests that there is no connection (and that they couldn’t have committed the crime in concert). But to the extent that the prosecution is unlikely to be able to figure out the connection even if there was one diminishes the importance of them having failed to do so.
Again, it’s not nothing if the prosecution has no connection/motive (or a weak one). But it’s not a dealbreaker either.
[ETA: your putting emphasis on “convicted murderer” is ironic, since Knox herself was in that category a few days ago.]
I don’t see how. Given that Amanda Knox was actually convicted, it’s reasonable for outsiders to look at the evidence to see if it supports a conclusion that she was guilty, or at least involved in the murder. And from the point of view of Italian law enforcement, Amanda Knox was a suspect almost from the very beginning.
But it’s not everything. Besides, the thread is not about whether Amanda Knox was properly convicted (or acquitted). The thread is about whether she was involved in her roommate’s murder.
One last thing: If anyone here is engaged in results-oriented reasoning, it’s Knox’s defenders who insist that there was NO evidence against her.
Yes.
Back it up, please, with a cite.
I don’t know how many times protocol for GD allows me to repeat a question, but I really would like you to comment further on the inhumanity of Meredith Kercher’s family.
That’s great. Glad to know what you would like. Thanks for sharing. Others have expressed thoughts similar to mine. Let me know when you find the protocol for GD that requires me to elaborate on every post of mine expressing an opinion whenever a random poster wants me to. Good luck.
NO, NO, NO. It is this kind of idiotic reasoning that gets innocent people convicted.
If you were trying to build a plank across an open ravine, and you had a bunch of pieces of wood lying around, you can’t take eight or nine pieces of differing lengths, thickness, strength etc and try to lay them across in such a way that gets you to the other side.
Trying to get to the other side = trying to arrive at a guilty verdict. The planks of wood are the evidence. A piece of evidence that is only 50% reliable is conjecture. You can’t take one conjecture, bootstrap it to another piece of conjecture, lather/rinse/repeat until you get to the other side.
You can’t take 100 pieces of evidence with faulty credibility and somehow decide that combined, the whole is stronger than the sum of the individual parts.
It’s the same faulty reasoning that people use when they here a bunch of bad things about someone - ‘well, it can’t all be untrue’. ‘Something must have happened’. It’s how the mind works, and people use this to their advantage far, far more than most people realize.
I believe In My Humble Opinion is the place you can post opinions without having to substantiate them. Whereas, this being Great Debates and all, I think that if you happen to post that the family of the victim are inhuman, you might reasonably be expected to back that up.
And seriously, you somehow think that the Kercher family, having perhaps suffered more than anyone else in this other than Meredith, having absolutely no chance that their daughters fate can be appealed…you think they deserve rebuke for their anguish at being no closer to closure. You think that, having been told that more one than one person was involved, but just what happened “will remain an unsolved truth”, they should not be dismayed and desperate for a retrial?
That speaks volumes about your humanity.
I have never understood why so many families of victims insist that the first person the police haul in are guilty - any ‘not guilty’ verdict is ‘tragic’ and a ‘miscarriage of justice’. When families do that, it sounds to me more like the family is more interested in revenge, not justice.
But at least in this case, I don’t think the Kerchers are being ‘inhumane’. Some of their statements raise an eyebrow with me, but overall I think they’re trying very hard to be fair in the midst of what is a horrible ordeal. Knox lost four years of her life. The Kerchers lost their daughter; I’m willing to give the a little bit of the benefit of a doubt.
To echo my earlier comments, it’s based on my general knowledge, common sense, and simple observations. So I don’t have a cite.
By the way, if your position is that it’s pretty common that someone cannot provide a coherent account for their actions and whereabouts, would you mind giving a couple examples of how this might happen?
I disagree, and I can give a hypothetical to show you are wrong.
Suppose that a man is stabbed to death in his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. The police learn that his business associate Mac took out a million dollar life insurance policy on him a couple weeks earlier. Standing alone, is this solid evidence that Mac is the killer? Of course not; people take out life insurance policies on business associates all the time. A certain percentage of those insureds will die for whatever reason shortly after the policy is bought.
The police next learn that Mac claims to have been home reading all night at his apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Standing alone, is this solid evidence that Mac is the killer? Of course not, many people stay up reading and do not have solid alibis.
The police then check out Mac’s EZ-pass records and see that his car was driven across the bridge to New York at 1:00 am on the night in question; and that at at no time in the past did he make a similar trip. Standing alone, is this solid evidence that Mac is the killer? Of course not, there are any number of innocent reasons why Mac may have gone into New York that night and then failed to tell the police about it.
The police then search Mac’s house and discover a knife which is later tested and found by police forensics to match the stab wounds on his business associate. It’s an unusual type of knife but not super-rare. Probably there are 10,000 similar knives in the United States. Standing alone, is this solid evidence that Mac is the killer? Of course not, since there are thousands of other similar knives floating around out there.
The police interview the victim’s neighbor who states that she saw the victim give entry to and greet another man at around 2:00 am on the night in question. Shortly thereafter she heard shouting and then she saw the visitor flee the apartment building. The visitor is described as a tall slender white male, with a beige trenchcoat and a limp. Mac is a tall slender white male; has a limp; and is known to wear a beige trenchcoat. Standing alone, is this solid evidence that Mac is the killer? Of course not, there are thousands of tall slender white males with beige trenchocats and limps throughout New York City.
Standing alone, each piece of evidence is not solid evidence that Mac is the killer. But when you put it all together, one can be reasonably confident that Mac is the killer. This would certainly be enough evidence to convict Mac and people are convicted on this kind of evidence all the time.
The prosecutor can file a “ricorso” with the Supreme Court. However, the review of the Court is limited to violations of the law, gross incoherencies in the reasoning by the Court of Appeals, and that sort of thing. The Supreme Court can’t take another look at the facts of the case. I doubt very much, from what I’ve been able to read about the case, that the Supreme Court will overturn the Court of Appeals’ sentence.
The prosecutor will keep his job. It’s not an elective office. The prosecutor is a magistrate and gained that position by passing an exam. Once they’re in, it’s tough to get 'em out unless they have serious problems with the disciplinary board.