Just something about the defamation (Or Calunnia?) aspect of the case, my readings have led me to believe that the conviction and 3 year sentence for that was actually due to some of Knox’s claims about the interrogation, and her public claims that the police tortured her. This is certainly the case with similar charges against Knox’s parents, who publicly questioned the police.
Her claims against Lumumba, are said to have been handled as a civil defamation case and he was awarded a bunch of Euros as compensation.
You are honestly asking why the family of a person brutally raped and murdered are desperate to believe that the killer/s of their daughter have been caught and brought to justice?
You really can’t see why they need to believe that the authorities investigating this crime are competent, and accept the case that the authorities have made?
All I see are a family who have desperately wanted to believe justice was done for their poor daughter, and now 4 years later are left with what little closure they had ripped away. I find the stance portrayed in the comments of Snowboarder Bo and yourself to be incredible.
Let me try to give a comparison. Do you find it similarly repugnant that the relatives of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 are also quite happy to accept the guilt of al-Megrahi? Are these people hysterical idiots pursuing a vendetta?
All right, always thought the calunnia thing (I’m picturing cannelonni every time I write it) was because of false accusations agains Lumumba (do you have a cite for this apart from wiki? This case is a mess, it’s hard to find the precise info you’re looking for). That said, 3 fucking years of hard time for badmouthing the Italian police looks even more like judges whitewashing the whole process.
I think you’re mixing up two different aspects of the case. From what I gather, there were two prosecutions for calunnia against Amanda Knox: the first regarding her false accusation against Patrick Lumumba, the second having to do with her statements about being mistreated by the police. She was found guilty of the first, not the second. And three years is not an excessive sentence: the Italian penal code states provides for “two to six years” of jail time. So three years falls into the low end of that scale.
I don’t blame you. It’s not easy to keep things straight, not even for me. There’s a lot of mistaken and incomplete stuff in the news coverage. Ideally, one would be able to read the court documents, but that’s not possible at the moment. The actual opinion of the Court of Appeals (which explains the reasons for the Court’s decision) will probably not be filed for a couple of months. After that, if the opinion gets published in the various legal data bases (and I assume it will be), I’ll be able to read it and hopefully understand things better.
Al-Megrahi is the guy who was convicted and is almost completely certainly not the right guy, right? Then of course I think it’s repugnant for the victims’ families to insist on upholding his guilt. Believing something because you want to believe it is always repugnant, and when it’s a belief with fairly serious consequences (by which I mean something like believing X is guilty where if X is guilty X will go to prison for life) then the repugnancy is thereby exacerbated.
Compassion for victims is foundationally basic, and in cases like this compassion is called for not only for the victim of the crime but for the victim of the false accusation as well.
I’ll confess I’ve got a case of the I’d never do thats here. If my family were murdered, I’m certain I would make absolutely damn certain I had the right person in my sights before I thought about insisting on that person’s guilt. First you figure out who did it, THEN you punish them. You don’t punish the first suspect and decide they’re guilty based on that.
I know Nathan S has addressed this to some extent, and not knowing a thing about Italian law I won’t venture to add any insight there.
But if you’re interested, I can offer some examples where, under U.S. law, evidence obtained illegally may be admissible in some circumstances but not in others.
A great example is fruit of unlawful searches. A warrantless search of your property is presumptively an offense against your Fourth Amendment rights, and evidence found in violation of your Fourth Amendment rights may not be admitted against you.
But if your friend Steve gives you his ledger and packages to hold, and the first page is “Steve’s Cocaine Deliveries,” in his handwriting, showing the deliveries you’re responsible for and the ones he’s responsible for, and the packages contain the cocaine in question, then here’s how the law would work:
The police break down your door without a warrant and search your house, finding the cocaine and ledger. They charge you and Steve with cocaine distribution.
You move to suppress the cocaine and ledger, because they were seized in violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. The court agrees, because… well… they were.
Then Steve moves to suppress the cocaine and ledger as evidence. Not so fast, says the court. Crawlspace’s rights were violated – not Steve’s. Steve can’t assert a privacy interest in Crawlspace’s house, and so the evidence is perfectly admissible against Steve.
I’m nothing to do with anything legal, and I’m sure the lawyers on board will be able to set me straight if I’m talking gibberish - but I do see a difference in the two uses of the statement.
When it comes to the murder, that statement is evidence of the crime. If it’s inadmissible as evidence, then it’s gone.
When it comes to the calumny, that statement isn’t evidence of the crime - it *is *the crime. I agree that it shouldn’t be a crime if it’s extracted under duress, but the fact that it’s crime rather than evidence might make a difference to the admissibility.
I am willing to accept the possibility that many of Knox’s statements should be disregarded as having been made under duress.
I am also willing to accept that some of the forensic evidence may have been trumped up.
But have she and Sollecito ever been able to provide a reasonably coherent account of their actions and whereabouts for the night in question and the following day; an account which is consistent with the evidence which is not in dispute?
If the answer is “no” (which I think is probably the case) then it’s reasonable to conclude that they were involved in the murder.
I may be wrong but I thought the discussion had jumped up a level of abstraction. In my post I’m not talking about the Kerchers. What I’ve said about the Kerchers is that I don’t take myself to know enough about them to say anything about their character or the nature of their response to these events.
Having posted that, though, now that I take a closer look at this question, I guess I’d say that if the Kerchers don’t know anything more than what I do about the case, then yes, accepting the verdict as accurate was an immoral act.
If I had to guess, I would say she’s probably guilty. I’ve not followed this all that closely, but from what I’ve seen it looks like one of these cases where you can explain away this and that, but if you add it all up, it’s more likely than not that she was involved.
I would note:
[ul]
[li]It’s not just she who came up with a bogus alibi that she later had to retract - it’s also the boyfriend as well who had his own false alibi.[/li][li]It’s hard to get away from the fact that her behavior in the aftermath of the murder was very weird. Cartwheel and canoodling in the police station, lingerie and love talk in the shop - it’s just strange. The thing is though, that it’s strange any way you look at it, whether guilty or innocent. Frankly if I had just committed a murder and was being brought in for questioning, I would be pretty stressed out and would not be carrying on in that manner. Still, it does is make it hard to rule out other weird actions. (More below.)[/li][li]I don’t know if the DNA evidence is completely irrelevant, even after the expert’s report. DNA evidence if done properly has a very high probative value, and experts in this analysis are used to testifying in court that “the likelihood that this DNA came from someone other than so-and-so is one in 17 billion”, or something to that effect. Once the evidence is contaminated, they can no longer be sure to nearly that extent, and what’s more is that they can no longer be sure to what extent they can be sure - there’s simply no science that says once the evidence is “contaminated” the probability changes from X to Y. Contamination of the evidence is a very broad category that covers a very wide range of situations, and the extent to which the probability changes would vary similarly. But that doesn’t mean that in any given circumstance the fact that police failed to follow proper procedure means that the victim’s blood being on a knife in the accused’s possession etc. means nothing at all.[/li][li]The fact that the prosecution has an apparently weird scenario for the crime doesn’t mean a whole lot, IMHO. The prosecution wasn’t there. They only know what they know, and the rest is pure speculation. If their speculative aspects are silly that doesn’t mean that the actual evidence they introduce can be dismissed as well.[/li][/ul]
So my best guess is that Knox is not a Natural Born Killer but is/was a silly airheaded girl, and was head over heels in love with - and intimately involved with - some guy she just met a week or so ago. And as a result of some unknowable weird situation that went awry or got out of hand, the roommate ended up being killed. And Knox, still airheaded and on a high with the boyfriend, didn’t appreciate the seriousness of the situation. I think this is the best fit for the totality of the evidence.
That said, I would not vote to convict based on this level of evidence. More likely than not, yes. Beyond reasonable doubt, no, based on what I’ve seen of the case.
[One another note: I’ve seen repeated claims on this MB that the guy in jail confessed to the crime. This is inconsistent with all media reports I’ve read, which uniformly state that the guy confessed to being in the house but claimed to have not been involved in the murder - he is currently appealing his own conviction.]
In your post, you gave as the reason for thinking her guilty that she doesn’t have a coherent story about where she was at the time. (I don’t know if you’re right about that or not, but I’m just noting it’s the one and single thing you said is sufficient for thinking she’s probably guilty.)
My response is to note that this isn’t evidence for anything at all. It provides no positive reason whatsoever for thinking anything about what she was doing that night.