Amanda Knox was interrogated repeatedly in the five days following the murder of Meredith Kercher. Amanda consistently told the same story over and over again. She repeatedly told the truth.
In the early morning hours of November 6, 2007, the questioning became much more aggressive. Amanda was in a situation that she had absolutely no control of. She was thousands of miles from home, In a country where she had a very limited knowledge of the language. She was confronted by aggressive police officers who were accusing her of a horrible crime that she didn't commit. Amanda was terrified.
Amanda did not have a lawyer present during her interrogation. She was told it would be worse for her if she did. Amanda was told that she was being questioned as a witness but she was clearly being interrogated as a suspect. Italian law is very clear, no suspect is to be interrogated with out the presence of an attorney. The interrogation of Amanda Knox was illegal.
Interrogators are known to use several techniques to manipulate innocent suspects into self-incrimination. Over long periods of time, interrogators play mind games to confuse the suspect. One technique is to ask the suspect to imagine hypothetical scenarios. The interrogators feed the information that they want the suspect to imagine. Over long a long drawn out interrogation, the suspect gets confused and starts trying to comply with the request being made to imagine the scenarios. This is exactly what they did to Amanda Knox.
Physical force was also used on Amanda and she was lied to intentionally to make her believe the police had evidence against her.
Amanda stated in court testimony that she was repeatedly slapped on the back of her head and called a stupid liar. The interrogator who slapped Amanda told her that she was trying to help her to remember. Amanda was told that they had proof that she was at the crime scene at the time of the murder. This was a lie. She was told that she was going to prison for 30 years and she would never see her family again.
Amanda was told that her boss, Patrick Lumumba was the man that attacked Meredith. She did not give Patrick's name to the police. His name was suggested to her.
The police took a text message on Amanda's phone out of context. The text from Amanda to Patrick, "see you later" was taken literally by investigators. In the US, this phrase, in the context that it was written, simply means goodbye. The police told Amanda the text meant that she planned on meeting Patrick on the night of the murder. The police also left out the second part of the message, "good night." When you put the phrase together, it explains the meaning even more clearly. Amanda had no intention of meeting Patrick that night. She was simply saying goodbye to Patrick in the text.
The interrogators told Amanda to imagine she was at the cottage. She was told to imagine that Patrick committed the crime. None of it seemed possible to Amanda. She tried to explain to the police that none of what they were saying made any sense. She knew that she was not at the cottage at the time of the murder. She had repeatedly told the interrogators the truth and now they wanted her to imagine something completely different.
The interrogators kept telling her over and over again to imagine that she was there. When she still could not imagine what they were saying, she was slapped across the back of her head.
Once again she was told to imagine that she was there. She still could not do it. She knew what they were telling her was simply not true. She was scared and confused. After many hours of interrogation, with nothing to drink, exhaustion started kicking in. Amanda was trying to remember, she was trying to help but it just did not seem possible.
Then came another slap across the back of her head! You stupid liar! You were in the cottage! You will spend 30 years in prison! You are protecting a murderer! You will never see your family again! You will imagine that this happened!
This abuse went on for hours until Amanda was finally broken. She was desperate to end the questioning. She was extremely confused and she could not take anymore abuse.
Suffering from extreme exhaustion with no food nor water, after a long and grueling interrogation, twenty year old college student Amanda Knox gave in to the interrogators demands by describing an imaginary dream or vision. In this vision, she was in the kitchen covering her ears to block out screams while the man she worked for, Patrick Lumumba, was in Meredith's bedroom.
This so called confession was typed out by the police. The confession was not written by Amanda Knox. It was reported that over 30 members of the police force signed the confession. Why was it necessary for 30 people to interrogate a 20 year old female college student?
Click here to read an extensive analysis of the illegal interrogation of Amanda Knox including an audio recording of Amanda explaining the interrogation. You can also read the hand written letter Amanda wrote shortly after the interrogation that retracted her earlier coerced statements.
267 comments:
1 – 200 of 267 Newer› Newest»Obviously, the Italian police and prosecutor have little regard for their own laws and basic human rights, since they knew it was illegal to interrogate Amanda without her lawyer being there. Yet they kept it up for hours and hours and even had her sign their typed up "confession." The lack of morality and common human decency, the ruthlessness of it all, is just incredible!
Bruce,
Could you possibly post the timings of these interrogations. Your figure seems a lot higher than those posted elsewhere. I'm also interested in how you arrive at her signing her confession "[s]uffering from extreme exhaustion with no food nor water, and after 14 hours of intense interrogation". Do you mean the 1:45 signed statement, or the second one at 5:45?
Bruce,
just to clarify why understanding about the 14 hours. I had been under the impression that Amanda and Raffaele got to the police station having just finished dinner at around 10pm. There was then around two hours in which she did some homework, did some exercises/stretching, spoke on the phone and answered a few questions from police in the waiting room (like a list of male visitors to the apartment). She then went in to the interrogation room at around midnight after Raffaele had run into problem in his interrogation. Her first "confession" was then signed at 1:45am. She then had an hour or so not being questioned, interrogated, or asked to sign anything. She then made a declaration to/was interrogated by Mignini until 5:45am. She wasn't interrogated after that.
That's 7 hours and 45 minutes even if we ignore the fact that quite a bit of the time she wasn't being interrogated.
Clearly, after 1:45 a.m. she was a suspect. Regardless of how tired Amanda was or was not, after 1:45 am none of this stuff should have been happening. After 1:45 am, the police and prosecutor should not have been discussing this case with Amanda at all.
"Clearly, after 1:45 a.m. she was a suspect."
Sure. I think this is agreed by everyone.
"Regardless of how tired Amanda was or was not, after 1:45 am none of this stuff should have been happening. After 1:45 am, the police and prosecutor should not have been discussing this case with Amanda at all."
Perhaps this depends on whether you believe their explanation? Anyway, as you say nothing after 1:45am is of any relevance to the whole "accusation" of Lumumba thing.
Bruce, I see you've changed the text of this article to remove the claims about the length of the interrogations. Do you agree that they weren't accurate? How long do you now think she was interrogated for, particularly the interrogation that lead up to the whole Patrick thing?
Bruce,
You've still got the claims about 53 hours and 14 hours of interrogation dotted about on http://www.injusticeinperugia.org, the case summary contains them for example.
Also, the below quotes from this article say that she had many hours of abusive interrogation. I think we both agree that that is an exaggeration. She can't very well have been particularly hungry or thirsty and her interrogation only lasted 1hr 45 minutes before it was ended after the whole Patrick story came out. Given that she says the interrogation only got intense some while in after asking her questions about her exact movements and so on, wouldn't it be truer to say that whatever abuse she may have suffered lasted about an hour before she was broken?
"Over long a long drawn out interrogation, the suspect gets confused and starts trying to comply with the request being made to imagine the scenarios. This is exactly what they did to Amanda Knox."
"After many hours of interrogation, with nothing to drink, exhaustion started kicking in."
"This abuse went on for hours until Amanda was finally broken"
"Suffering from extreme exhaustion with no food nor water, after a long and grueling interrogation, twenty year old college student Amanda Knox gave in to the interrogators demands by describing an imaginary dream or vision"
I have all of the available information regarding the interrogation. The truth is, we will never have all of the facts in regard to the interrogation because we don't have video or audio of the interrogation. I have copies of both signed statements that were typed out by the police. I also have the hand written statement from Amanda. The time frames have been heavily disputed simply to distract people from seeing the actual truth. The truth is, the police scared the hell out an innocent girl and had her sign two statements that she didn't write. I took the times off of the article so they didn't provide more distraction. I will be adding additional updates to this information soon.
Bruce,
"I have all of the available information regarding the interrogation."
So post it so we can all judge for ourselves.
You say you removed the times because they were a distraction rather than because they were wrong? You think then that it's possible she blamed Patrick after being broken by a 14 hour interrogation in which she was denied food and water? You think it's possible the interrogation began at 11:45am on the 5th? Or maybe it wasn't really 14 hours until 1:45am, but 14 hours until 5:45am, so that would mean her having interrogation begin at 3:45pm on the 5th. Do you think this is possible? If you have no idea when her interrogation began are you simply taking her word for it that it was long and that she was broken over many hours? Do you think I can't provide links to reports of the time she arrived at the police station?
Your own site has her saying that the intense phase of the interrogation didn't begin until the early hours of the morning, and yet you also say the abuse went on for hours, and yet she had been broken by 1:45am. How can all these things be true?
She arrived at the police station sometime around 10pm having just had dinner. She sat around in the waiting room for a couple of hours. If she'd been hungry or thirsty she could have had something from a vending machine. She was then interrogated for around 1hour 45minutes, part of which she describes as being more intense. She can't have been particularly hungry, or particularly thirsty.
I understand you've been debating this case for quite a while Bruce. You know this stuff. None of this stuff I'm posting is news to you, yet you've written this article that you don't seem willing to either defend or correct.
Surely 40+ hours over 5 days IS many hours of interrogation. You can't just ignore the many hours she had been interrogated previously. And that particular interrogation started after 10 at night and went on until 5 in the morning; one of the previous interrogations must have done similar, since she went home and wrote her e-mail in the middle of the night. Interrogating someone overnight is abusive in itself.
I agree with Bruce that we will never know the exact hours of the interrogation, because they were not recorded (or more likely, the recordings have been 'lost'). But it's clear that she was interrogated for many hours, technically as a 'witness' but in reality as a suspect, without a lawyer, and without a proper translator (the translator was a police woman who spoke a bit of English and actively took part in the interrogation by telling Amanda of an experience she had where she'd 'blanked out' a memory. The good cop to the more aggressive bad cops).
What the police did and the tactics they used were text book ways to get a false confession (tell the suspect you have hard evidence to place them at the crime scene; give them a reason they may not remember it) and that's what they got. The Supreme Court threw out the confession, and we're only discussing it because it was brought in by the back door. I agree with Bruce that quibbling over the number of hours is a distraction. What is certain is that it was 40+ hours over 5 days, at a time when Amanda had to go to classes and worry about finding somewhere to live and cope with the shock of her roommate being murdered and hosts of other things, meaning she would have been exhausted and under a great deal of stress when she arrived at the police station.
"Surely 40+ hours over 5 days IS many hours of interrogation."
Well, this is a somewhat seperate issue to the alleged 14 hours leading up to her 'confession'. It afterall doesn't contribute to her being so starving and parched that she would have said anything. Also, none of the Patrick stuff or imagining what might have happened occured during that time. It's also clear from 3 of the quotes that the long hours being referred to are when she was deprived food and water and was abused. But even your interpretation, I don't think Bruce can support. I asked him to say when these interrogations happened and he removed the quote about 53 hours of interrogation. Previous times I've discussed this where figures of around 30 hours have been quoted it's been clear that people are counting every second in the company of the police, or on police property after the arrival of the postal police as "interrogation". So, sitting in her room while the postal police broke down the door is interrogation, looking over the downstairs appartment is interrogation, sitting in the waiting room at the police station doing her homework and a spot of yoga is interrogation. Is this being counted towards the argument for abuse and being deprived food and water? How much time were other people interrogated for if we take so loose a definition of the meaning of the word? I bet Fillomina is well into double figures, how about the boys from the flat downstairs? Of course they all had alibis that checked out which probably cut the time down.
"You can't just ignore the many hours she had been interrogated previously."
I don't. She certainly spent alot of hours helping the police with their enquiries. I'm sure that time wasboth boring, tiring and incredibly stressful. I certainly wouldn't want to go through it.
"And that particular interrogation started after 10 at night and went on until 5 in the morning; one of the previous interrogations must have done similar, since she went home and wrote her e-mail in the middle of the night. Interrogating someone overnight is abusive in itself."
But do you know why that interrogation was so late? Raffaele said he couldn't come to be interrogated ealier in the day because they had to go to the memorial to Merredith, but they didn't go. The interrogation could have taken place earlier if they'd wanted. In any case, the interrogation finished at 1:45am. She then made a seperate statement to Mignini at 5:45am. I'm not aware of anything additional coming out in that. The story there is that she asked to make an additional statement. I appreciate you probably don't believe this, which is fine, but it hardly matters since the important stuff had already been said and signed by 1:45am. Is 1:45am really so late for a student?
"I agree with Bruce that we will never know the exact hours of the interrogation, because they were not recorded (or more likely, the recordings have been 'lost')."
So, do you think it's possible that she was being interrogated from 11:45am, or even 3:45pm given that she herself says that the interrogation didn't get intense until the early hours of the morning? Or do you agree that Bruce was wrong? Do you agree that she can't very well have confessed because of hunger or thirst?
"But it's clear that she was interrogated for many hours, technically as a 'witness' but in reality as a suspect, without a lawyer, and without a proper translator (the translator was a police woman who spoke a bit of English and actively took part in the interrogation by telling Amanda of an experience she had where she'd 'blanked out' a memory. The good cop to the more aggressive bad cops)."
They suspected her. That is not at all the same think as being a suspect in the Italian legal sense. To make somebody a suspect you have to have enough evidence on them to take before a judge. Until 1:45am they didn't have enough evidence therefore they didn't make her a suspect. Since she wasn't a suspect no lawyer was required. Her rights were protected because her statements couldn't be used against her, unless of course those statements in and of themselves consitituted a criminal act... like falsely accusing someone. I appreciate you may well feel that the police are lying about the false accusation, but there is still nothing wrong or suspicious with her not having a lawyer at that point since she hadn't been declared a suspect.
What the police did and the tactics they used were text book ways to get a false confession (tell the suspect you have hard evidence to place them at the crime scene; give them a reason they may not remember it) and that's what they got. The Supreme Court threw out the confession, and we're only discussing it because it was brought in by the back door. I agree with Bruce that quibbling over the number of hours is a distraction. What is certain is that it was 40+ hours over 5 days, at a time when Amanda had to go to classes and worry about finding somewhere to live and cope with the shock of her roommate being murdered and hosts of other things, meaning she would have been exhausted and under a great deal of stress when she arrived at the police station.
I hadn't heard that the interpreter wasn't a proper interpreter. Do you have a source for this claim? In any case, I will go see if I can find anything on this.
"The Supreme Court threw out the confession, and we're only discussing it because it was brought in by the back door."
The Supreme Court didn't "throw it out". It was inadmissable because she wasn't a suspect when she was questioned. Everybody knew this. It has never been denied. To be a suspect there has to be a certain amount of evidence against you as once you are declared a suspect the police have to present the reasons for making you a suspect to a judge. Until 1:45am the police didn't have enough evidence.
"What is certain is that it was 40+ hours over 5 days, at a time when Amanda had to go to classes and worry about finding somewhere to live and cope with the shock of her roommate being murdered and hosts of other things, meaning she would have been exhausted and under a great deal of stress when she arrived at the police station."
She only went to classes on one day. Again, I haven't seen any serious attempt to justify 40+ hours, or even 30 hours as the total number. I wouldn't be at all surprised if using the same method of calculation Fillomina wasn't questioned for 20+ hours. Certainly she was tired, certainly she was stressed, this is inevitable. If the police had to investiaget murders without stressing anybody out they would have a difficult job indeed. However all this stuff about her being deprived food and water is clearly nonsense, or does somebody wish to defend it?
shuttlt, you are clearly hung up on this point. Today is Easter Sunday so my time is limited. I have done extensive research on this case. The truth is, we will never know exactly what happened that night at the police station. You and I will never agree on this topic. I removed the times because they simply aren't that important. My sources on this topic would be seen by you as biased. I would then be accused of being part of a PR team. This is one of the lies currently being spread throughout the Internet about me and many others. People like you simply refuse to step back and look at the big picture.
This is what I think happened.
Amanda and Raffaele arrived in the evening, and she sat around while he was questioned. Around 10:30 or 11:00 pm, they pulled her into a room and lowered the boom on her. They told her Raffaele was no longer giving her an alibi, and they had proof she was at the cottage when Meredith was killed. They scared the Hell out of her, and they said, "maybe you don't remember what happened because it was too traumatic." That is how they gulled her into this dream or false memory about Lumumba being at the cottage in Meredith's room, and covering her ears when Meredith screamed.
Everything was suggested by the interrogators. You are aware that Amanda didn't write the statements correct? The statements were typed out in Italian. I have copies of these statements. I know this is the truth.
The guilters are hung up on the length of the interrogation, it's not the length of the interrogation that matters - it's the approach they took:
1. refusing to accept the truth.
2. threatening the suspect unless they change their story.
An innocent kid, having no experience with this, tries to make the police happy.
In her diary, Amanda wrote, "I was trying so hard to know something."
Everything Amanda has ever said outside of that interrogation room is the truth. All of her writings suggest that she is an innocent young woman caught up in a nightmare. She was honestly trying to help the police.
They recorded her phone calls but somehow neglected to record the interrogation. I know, you believe everything the police say. She wasn't a suspect. Right! Amanda Knox was viewed as a suspect from day one. I don't care if they took her in front of a judge to make it official. They watched her every move and when the most important time came, they forgot to record it. My guess is, they did record it and it doesn't look good for them so it disappeared.
People like you even try to twist her hand written note. You claim that it confirms the signed statements made earlier that morning. You take words out of context and post misinformation all over the Internet. If you read the entire statement, it is very clear what she wrote. She was trying to explain to the police that those statements couldn't have possible been true.
"shuttlt, you are clearly hung up on this point. Today is Easter Sunday so my time is limited. I have done extensive research on this case. The truth is, we will never know exactly what happened that night at the police station."
But Amanda herself says the intense part didn't begin until after midnight. You really aren't prepared to defend you article?
"You and I will never agree on this topic. I removed the times because they simply aren't that important."
Not if you go on to make the same claims in a somewhat vaguer way, no.
"My sources on this topic would be seen by you as biased."
The family, yes? OK. They are a source, but as far as I'm aware even they haven't been claiming 14 hours as the total time of the interrogation, rather they say she was questioned over a 14 hour period. Newspaper articles do make these claims, but not very often as direct quotes I think. If your source is the family, perhaps it would give your readers a better understanding of where you are coming from if you made it clear that you were assuming that Amanda and her family were a reliable source. At the moment it reads like these are established facts.
"I would then be accused of being part of a PR team."
Not by me. I don't care very much if you are anyway.
"This is one of the lies currently being spread throughout the Internet about me and many others. People like you simply refuse to step back and look at the big picture."
OK. What is the big picture? At the moment all I'm seeing is that you aren't actually willing to defend any of the claims in your article and have backed away from the 14 hour one while denying that it is because it was wrong.
"Amanda and Raffaele arrived in the evening, and she sat around while he was questioned. Around 10:30 or 11:00 pm, they pulled her into a room and lowered the boom on her. They told her Raffaele was no longer giving her an alibi, and they had proof she was at the cottage when Meredith was killed. They scared the Hell out of her, and they said, "maybe you don't remember what happened because it was too traumatic." That is how they gulled her into this dream or false memory about Lumumba being at the cottage in Meredith's room, and covering her ears when Meredith screamed."
OK. But if this is the case, all the stuff about being denied food and water is a bit weak, isn't it? She accused Patrick partly because she was denied food and water for between 2 hours and 45 minutes and 3 hours and 15 minutes? I don't see how this translates to:
"After many hours of interrogation, with nothing to drink, exhaustion started kicking in."
or
"Suffering from extreme exhaustion with no food nor water, after a long and gruelling interrogation, twenty year old college student Amanda Knox gave in to the interrogators demands by describing an imaginary dream or vision"
Three hours without food just after eating dinner is not great suffering.
"Everything was suggested by the interrogators. You are aware that Amanda didn't write the statements correct? The statements were typed out in Italian. I have copies of these statements. I know this is the truth."
Certainly. Has she claimed that she never actually said the Patrick story? I appreciate that there are subtleties in the argument beyond that. You seem to be widening the discussion beyond the scope of your original article.
"The guilters are hung up on the length of the interrogation, it's not the length of the interrogation that matters - it's the approach they took:"
The argument in your article is based on the length, intensity and privations of the interrogation. You say repeatedly how long it was, how tired she was, how hungry and thirsty she was. If these things aren't important and aren't well supported by evidence, why are they in your article? If the family are saying that amongst the reasons for her statement are extreme hunger and thirst, are they reliable?
"They recorded her phone calls but somehow neglected to record the interrogation. I know, you believe everything the police say. She wasn't a suspect. Right! Amanda Knox was viewed as a suspect from day one. I don't care if they took her in front of a judge to make it official. They watched her every move and when the most important time came, they forgot to record it. My guess is, they did record it and it doesn't look good for them so it disappeared. "
Well, one possible reason is that all the things that they did record were almost by definition recorded. Intercepted and bugged conversations are electronic after all and you can't very well ask somebody to repeat themselves if you miss it. Interrogations where a written statement is drawn up and where contemporaneous notes are taken is somewhat different. I do agree though that it's a pity, and a bit crap that this wasn't recorded. I've no idea whether it is standard practice in Italy though. As I understand it it isn't a requirement in the UK to record interrogations of witnesses, though I have no idea if it is normal practice.
"People like you even try to twist her hand written note. You claim that it confirms the signed statements made earlier that morning."
No I don't. I think the handwritten note is complicated. Whether it confirms anything depends on what aspects of her statement one is talking about. She certainly says that she confirms her statement, but as I say he note is complicated.
"You take words out of context and post misinformation all over the Internet."
Please quote where I have taken words out of context?
"If you read the entire statement, it is very clear what she wrote. She was trying to explain to the police that those statements couldn't have possible been true."
I haven't been arguing about what she wrote. I've been concentrating on what she said at 1:45am since your article seemed to be seeking to explain why she said what she said. Remember, you said;
"Suffering from extreme exhaustion with no food nor water, and after 14 hours of intense interrogation from over 30 members of the police force, 20 year old college student Amanda Knox signed a so called confession stating that she was in the cottage at the time of the murder and that Patrick was the murderer."
According to you she signed her confession at 1:45am after 14 hours of interrogation, beginning at 10:30pm at the earliest. Will you at least admit this was wildly inaccurate? Now you have just introduced the issue of what she later wrote. We can talk about it if you like.
Look, if you want to discuss any of the issues I've raised, I'll back off and we can do it nicely.
Happy Easter.
Anonymous,
"I agree with Bruce that we will never know the exact hours of the interrogation, because they were not recorded (or more likely, the recordings have been 'lost'). But it's clear that she was interrogated for many hours, technically as a 'witness' but in reality as a suspect, without a lawyer, and without a proper translator (the translator was a police woman who spoke a bit of English and actively took part in the interrogation by telling Amanda of an experience she had where she'd 'blanked out' a memory. The good cop to the more aggressive bad cops)."
Where do you get your information?
Do you mean Anna Donnino? I've seen her referred to as Dr. Anna Donnino, but I don't know if that's reliable. She's referred to as an interpreter in the newspapers. She testified in court. Presumably there is some bit of court reporting that makes it clear that she wasn't really an interpreter but just "spoke a bit of English"? Could you post it please because all the reports I've been able to find describe her as an interpreter.
The time frames listed were very pro-Amanda. That information was written very early on and it was based on the entire time she was at the police station. Yes, every single hour was added up. These were times where Amanda was under severe stress and she was questioned in the waiting area. These things can be debated for hours and nothing will be accomplished. I have talked to people very close to this case. I believe them when they tell me what actually happened. Listing these sources will simply fuel the "PR team" lies. I would rather focus on the techniques and policies used by the police department.
You seem to be completely hung up on the interrogation. Is this simply because you know that there is no credible evidence at linking Amanda Knox to the murder of Meredith Kercher? You haven't commented on any other topic on this board. When I see your name online and you are often hung up on this one topic.
Do you think the police should have arrested Patrick based on the information they had?
Do you think they should have announced "case closed" long before they ever even heard of Rudy Guede?
Do you think the statements that were typed out by the police should be admissible evidence?
Do you think the police used the messages on Amanda's phone to suggest Patrick to Amanda?
Do you know that there was absolutely no mixed blood found in the cottage?
Do you know that every single footprint and shoe print found int the cottage belonged to Rudy Guede?
I will continue to talk to you about the actual time frame of the interrogation if you like but it simply provides a distraction from the truth.
"The time frames listed were very pro-Amanda. That information was written very early on and it was based on the entire time she was at the police station. Yes, every single hour was added up."
Again, the last time I discussed this for a 30 hour figure other things involving the police were included as well, but I think in general we are in agreement now. It isn't actually a figure for interrogation, which is presumably quite a bit less (although quite hard to put a precise figure to).
"These were times where Amanda was under severe stress and she was questioned in the waiting area."
She was certainly asked some questions in the waiting room, and she did her homework until her legs started to hurt so she did some exercises and she made at least one phone call.
"These things can be debated for hours and nothing will be accomplished."
But you said she signed her "confession" because of 14 hours of interrogation without food or water.
"I have talked to people very close to this case. I believe them when they tell me what actually happened. Listing these sources will simply fuel the "PR team" lies. I would rather focus on the techniques and policies used by the police department."
OK. But we've already established that you were wrong when you said that she named Patrick after 14 hours of interrogation. You were also wrong when you said that hunger or thirst can have had very much to do with it. Did the "PR team", or whoever your source is, tell you these things?
"You seem to be completely hung up on the interrogation."
I'm posting at the bottom of an article on the interrogation. In the past I've done a bunch of arguing on the knife. When I'm done on this article I may move on to that.
"Is this simply because you know that there is no credible evidence at linking Amanda Knox to the murder of Meredith Kercher?"
I'm not trying to argue that she is the killer (not that I have any great doubts about it). I am criticising your argument that she isn't. She could be perfectly innocent and you would have still said a lot of stuff in this article that I don't think you can defend. Again the 14 hours wasn't true in the way you used it and you still claim that she confessed partly due to hunger and thirst only a few hours after her dinner.
"You haven't commented on any other topic on this board. When I see your name online and you are often hung up on this one topic."
I have mainly discussed the knife in previous discussions, though I have recently paid more attention to the interrogation. There have been quite a few incorrect statements on perugia-shock about the interrogation that I have been correcting. If people had recently been discussing the knife I would have discussed that.
"Do you think the police should have arrested Patrick based on the information they had?"
I haven't got a problem with them arresting him. To have held him for two weeks a judge must have agreed.
"Do you think they should have announced "case closed" long before they ever even heard of Rudy Guede?"
Well, the case wasn't closed, and anyway they clearly kept investigating.
"Do you think the statements that were typed out by the police should be admissible evidence?"
I'm happy to deffer to the Judges in the case on this. I certainly don't limit my interest in the evidence to that which is admissable though. In so far as it being typed out by the police goes, I'm not sure that that is hugely important. Does Amanda claim that they lied to her about what she had signed? She certainly didn't claim this at any of the pre-trial hearings that I'm aware of.
"Do you think the police used the messages on Amanda's phone to suggest Patrick to Amanda?"
In the sense that they said here's a message that we think is suspicious, and the message was to Patrick, sure. You're presumably not suggesting that the message wasn't to Patrick, or that she wouldn't have been able to work out who the message was to without them suggesting the name? I'm not sure then how they would get her to explain the SMS without simultaneously suggesting Patrick. I have seen it stated that she was asked early on in the interrogation whether she had sent an SMS to Patrick and she said that she hadn't. If that's true then the police certainly mentioned him first.
"Do you know that there was absolutely no mixed blood found in the cottage?"
If you want I'll discuss the blood with you on the thread about the blood. I've never really been into the mixed blood though. I'm aware of the arguments about it though.
"Do you know that every single footprint and shoe print found int the cottage belonged to Rudy Guede?"
I believe this is disputed. If you want to debate the footprints, I would be happy to do so on the thread about the footprints. Again though, this isn't an issue I have got into particularly. Things will get confusing though if we debate the interrogation, the mixed blood and the she prints at the same time.
"I will continue to talk to you about the actual time frame of the interrogation if you like but it simply provides a distraction from the truth."
Well, you're now close enough to agreeing with my time frame for the interrogation ending at 1:45am that I'm quite happy to let it be. I am interested though how you can claim that she would have been suffering due to lack of food and water three or four hours after dinner to any degree relevant to the case.
Other issues I have with your article are:
1. Your claim that the interrogation was illegal.
2. Your claim that she was clearly being interrogated as a suspect in the sense that Italian law means a lawyer should be present for.
3. It's less of a clear cut issue, but I think your statements about the SMS aren't right. You don't make it clear that her SMS was in Italian. I don't speak Italian, and I don't think you do either, but from what I can gather from linguistic sites on the web, what you translate as "good night" carries quite a bit more connotation than you imply. More like "enjoy what you are going to be doing this evening". It isn't just a meaningless formalism like "good night".
There are probably other things, but that'll probably do.
Shuttit wrote: "I'm happy to deffer to the Judges in the case on this"
Not surprising that you agree with the judges. They did such a stellar job.
Shuttit wrote: "In so far as it being typed out by the police goes, I'm not sure that that is hugely important"
She was bullied into signing a document typed out in Italian. She didn't write any of it. This isn't important to you?
Shuttit wrote: "Does Amanda claim that they lied to her about what she had signed?"
Yes, Amanda says in her diary that she is upset that the police lied to her about Patrick.
Your comments in regard to the messages on Amanda's phone make no sense at all. The police read her messages and suggested to Amanda that she had intended to meet Patrick that night. We all know they never met that night. The messages on the phone had nothing to do with meeting up. She was saying good night. The police insisted that the messages said that she planned on meeting Patrick. With your line of thinking, do you actually think Amanda was saying in the message that she planned on meeting Patrick? This is nonsense. They never planned on meeting.
The interrogation did not end at 1:45. If the police felt they had what they needed, they would have stopped, the interrogation lasted throughout the night into early morning.
You are a guilter so you just skip right over the part about the interrogation not being recorded.
Did you know that the police listened to every conversation that Amanda had on her phone from the time the they found Meredith to the time Amanda was arrested?
The police heard absolutely nothing incriminating from any of those calls. Amanda was a 20 year old college student. If she had anything to do with the murder don't you think she would have said something incriminating to someone during all of those calls?
She was clearly being interrogated as a suspect. Her shoes were taken from her to be tested. You don't take shoes from someone that is a witness. She was clearly seen as a suspect by the police. The interrogaton was illegal. She was told it would be worse for her if she had an attorney.
I do not imply that Amanda was starving. I simply state that she wasn't given any breaks for food or water. Amanda said that she was offered food and water after she signed the statement at 5:45 am.
Keep repeating the 14 hours stuff though. Don't look at the actual facts. Stay hung up on your one little talking point. That is a typical technique of a guilter.
"Shuttit wrote: "I'm happy to deffer to the Judges in the case on this"
Not surprising that you agree with the judges. They did such a stellar job."
OK
***********************************
"Shuttit wrote: "In so far as it being typed out by the police goes, I'm not sure that that is hugely important"
She was bullied into signing a document typed out in Italian. She didn't write any of it. This isn't important to you?"
As I said before, does Amanda claim that they lied to her about what she had signed? What I mean by this is, does she was mislead about the text of the document that she signed? If not, the fact that it was in Italian makes no difference. I am not aware of her making any such claim. If she doesn't claim that it being in Italian makes no difference.
***********************************
"Shuttit wrote: "Does Amanda claim that they lied to her about what she had signed?"
Yes, Amanda says in her diary that she is upset that the police lied to her about Patrick."
They lied to her about Patrick in the document that she signed? You mean that she signed a document that said Patrick was the murderer, knowing that it was a document said Patrick was the murderer? That isn't really them lying to her about what she had signed, is it? Or do you mean something else?
***********************************
"Your comments in regard to the messages on Amanda's phone make no sense at all. The police read her messages and suggested to Amanda that she had intended to meet Patrick that night. We all know they never met that night. The messages on the phone had nothing to do with meeting up. She was saying good night. The police insisted that the messages said that she planned on meeting Patrick. With your line of thinking, do you actually think Amanda was saying in the message that she planned on meeting Patrick? This is nonsense. They never planned on meeting."
Of course they never planned to meet. However the actual text of her message “ci vediamo piu tardi, buona serata" implies in Italian that they were to meet up later on that night and that he was she was telling him to enjoy what he was going to be doing that evening. "buona serata" isn't the normal way of saying good night in Italian. Clearly the police guessed wrongly in choosing to take the literal interpretation of the message over the innocent 'ammanda's bad Italian' explanation. Your article however, makes it seem as though the literal interpretation of what she said was clearly innocent.
"The interrogation did not end at 1:45. If the police felt they had what they needed, they would have stopped, the interrogation lasted throughout the night into early morning."
She was not interrogated, or questioned or anything else until 3am. Her 5:45am statement, or whatever it was, has been described as a "voluntary declaration" by the judge at the supreme court. The police claim, as you know, is that this statement was made at her request. Do you have a quote with Amanda claiming differently? Anyway, nothing after 1:45am can have any importance with respect to her accusation, or whatever it was, of Patrick. All that must have happened before 1:45am.
"You are a guilter so you just skip right over the part about the interrogation not being recorded."
I didn't. I replied. I said it was crap. I'm not arguing that it was recorded, or that it wouldn't have been helpful if it had been. I think arguments like yours would be made a lot stronger if you demonstrated that in rest of Europe, or even the US, recording of witnesses interrogations was standard practice. Again, from what I can tell it isn't a requirement in the UK. Anyway, the whole recording thing didn't seem to be central to your argument. Your article seemed to focus on the many hours without food and water of abusive interrogation that Amanda suffered.
"Did you know that the police listened to every conversation that Amanda had on her phone from the time the they found Meredith to the time Amanda was arrested?"
Yes.
"The police heard absolutely nothing incriminating from any of those calls. Amanda was a 20 year old college student. If she had anything to do with the murder don't you think she would have said something incriminating to someone during all of those calls?"
Didn't she say anything incriminating? I haven't seen what she said in the calls and I'm still waiting to read the motivations report. Anyway, I'm not amazed that she didn't say anything desperately incriminating. What would she say, and to who? If the judgement of the court is correct, she was with her co-conspirator and didn't need to call him and Rudy didn't have a phone. She was hardly going to announce that she did it to anyone else.
"She was clearly being interrogated as a suspect. Her shoes were taken from her to be tested. You don't take shoes from someone that is a witness. She was clearly seen as a suspect by the police. The interrogation was illegal. She was told it would be worse for her if she had an attorney."
When were her shoes taken? In any case, as I said, Italian law doesn't say that an attorney is needed if the police suspect somebody. Italian law says that an attorney is needed if the police have made somebody a formal suspect. This involves publicly announcing that person X is now a suspect, along with the reasons for making them a suspect. It's kind of like, though not as serious as, being indicted, the police need a certain amount of evidence. I don't see why you keep providing arguments and evidence that she was suspected. Of course they suspected her, they admit that they suspect her, but suspecting her and formally declaring her a suspect are completely different things. You are blurring the distinction, why?
"I do not imply that Amanda was starving. I simply state that she wasn't given any breaks for food or water. Amanda said that she was offered food and water after she signed the statement at 5:45 am."
OK. So we are agreed that it is quite false to claim that hunger or thirst had any part in her statement at 1:45am and can't have had much to do with her statement at 5:45am.
"Keep repeating the 14 hours stuff though. Don't look at the actual facts. Stay hung up on your one little talking point. That is a typical technique of a guilter."
But the thrust of your argument was based on a claim that was completely untrue and not even claimed by her family. You still claim in your article that she made her accusation, or whatever it was, about Patrick partly because of hunger and thirst, yet you also say that she wasn't starving hungry. Should I interpret the argument in your article that being a little peckish contributed to her confession?
Why has the central argument in your article become “a little talking point” that I should be bothering with? Perhaps I am mistaken about what the central argument is and it isn't that she was worn down over many abusive hours into signing a false 'confession'. What is the central argument?
I am not blurring anything. The interrogation should have been recorded and it wasn't They took her shoes and left her barefoot during her final interrogation. She states this in her court testimony. You do not take shoes from a witness. She was a suspect from day one. You are trying to blur this fact. Amanda Knox should have been offered legal counsel. She was a college student visiting a foreign country on a student learning program. She should have been provided at attorney. Why can't you see that this was handled incorrectly by the police?
Have you you done any research on the behavior of people that commit violent crimes? People who have committed violent crimes tend to talk about them. Amanda Knox made or received over 60 phone calls from the time Meredith was found until the time she was arrested. Not one word that she said was incriminating. Nothing. You ask what the central argument is. The central argument is that the interrogation was illegal.
Amanda should have had an attorney present. The police knew they had to act quickly. Amanda's mother was on her way to Italy. She would have certainly insisted that Amanda be provided with legal council. The police knew Amanda's mother was on the way from the recorded phone calls. They aggressively attacked her as soon as they found out help was on the way. The police knew exactly what they were doing.
She never confessed to the murder. She signed a document prepared by the police in a foreign language that stated that she was sitting in the kitchen of the cottage during the attack.
The police suggested Patrick to Amanda. It is the fault of the police that Patrick spent time in prison. Amanda was sued by Patrick and given an extra year on her sentence for something that the police instigated.
Do you really need to ask what my argument is? I am amazed that people like you can actually try and defend the actions of the authorities in this case. Open your eyes and discover the truth.
There is no credible evidence linking Amanda to this crime. Yet you hold on to small details to try and make your arguments. Step back an look at the facts of this case.
You have built up a disturbing anger toward Amanda Knox. This is a young woman that you have never met. You have based this anger on news reports that you have read that have been filled with misinformation. I don't blame you for believing that Amanda is guilty. You have been reading about her for 2 years now. The media has treated Amanda horribly. You have read many lies about Amanda Knox. She is not the sex crazed killer that you think she is. Please stop being angry and discover the truth. Two innocent lives are being destroyed.
Before I go through the points in your last post, I want to respond this:
"You have built up a disturbing anger toward Amanda Knox. This is a young woman that you have never met. You have based this anger on news reports that you have read that have been filled with misinformation. I don't blame you for believing that Amanda is guilty. You have been reading about her for 2 years now. The media has treated Amanda horribly. You have read many lies about Amanda Knox. She is not the sex crazed killer that you think she is. Please stop being angry and discover the truth. Two innocent lives are being destroyed."
So, you accuse me of three things:
1. That I have a dusturbing level of anger towards Amanda Knox.
2. That my views on the case are based on misinformation from news reports.
3. That I have been reading about the case for two years.
I don't think you can support these accusations any more than you can support your claims about Amanda's 'confession' being partly caused by extreme hunger and thirst.
Shuttit, I am surprised, as soon as you are confronted with actual facts, you fold. The things you list above are simply the opinion that I have of you after I have spoken to you. You are clearly an angry person, you are posting information that comes directly from articles that have time and time again misinformed the public. The third one is pointless to even comment on. There you go again picking out useless information that has no relevance at all. I should have written that the information has been misrepresented for 2 years now. If you haven't read the information for that amount of time then so what.
The truth is, you didn't know that Amanda was upset that the police lied to her about Patrick. You didn't know that they took her shoes from her for testing when she was still considered a "witness." This point alone shows that she was already considered a suspect.
You are a guilter. We could talk for days and you will never change your mind. Mignini could call you on the phone and tell you he made a mistake and you would hang up the phone thinking Amanda was still guilty. Once again, these are simply my opinions that I formed from our conversation.
"Shuttit, I am surprised, as soon as you are confronted with actual facts, you fold."
I fold? How so?
"The things you list above are simply the opinion that I have of you after I have spoken to you."
They are based on your prejudice. I am not angry at Amanda.
"You are clearly an angry person,"
I am not angry at you. I enjoy a debate and more specifically unpicking other peoples arguments, that's all.
"you are posting information that comes directly from articles that have time and time again misinformed the public."
Which information have I posted that is incorrect?
"The third one is pointless to even comment on. There you go again picking out useless information that has no relevance at all. I should have written that the information has been misrepresented for 2 years now. If you haven't read the information for that amount of time then so what."
OK. An understandable mistake. However, let me make it clear that I have not been following the case for two years. I had no interest in it until a thread was started over on the JREF. I dimly remember hearing on the radio about the story about the scream and Amanda covering her ears, but sincethe end of 2007 I don't recall reading anything about the press. The UK press, certainly in terms of broadcast media hasn't really paid much attention to the case except in the first couple of weeks and to announce the virdict.
"The truth is, you didn't know that Amanda was upset that the police lied to her about Patrick."
I'd already read her statements on the subject. There is no "didn't know" about it. Even if I didn't, I don't see that it's important to your argument in the above article, or the case.
"You didn't know that they took her shoes from her for testing when she was still considered a "witness." This point alone shows that she was already considered a suspect."
I have no idea why you think this is important. You've got another thread about how the police say they suspected her from day 1. You don't need to make cunning deductions on the basis of her shoes being removed to demonstrate what the police have already told the newspapers. I may have read about the shoes before, but if I did they made no impression on my consciousness because I can't see any way in which they are important. Everybody agrees the police suspect her quite early on. You don't need to prove it.
"You are a guilter. We could talk for days and you will never change your mind. Mignini could call you on the phone and tell you he made a mistake and you would hang up the phone thinking Amanda was still guilty. Once again, these are simply my opinions that I formed from our conversation."
Nonsense. Mignini knows far more about the case than I do. There could well be information out there that changes the case completely. I haven't seen any evidence that is incompatible with any of their innocence. I'm not even convinced at the moment that there is a case beyond resonable doubt publicly available on the internet, but then again there doesn't have to be.
In any case, I haven't been posting here about her guilt or innocence. I'm not trying to convince you that she's guilty. I am trying to correct factual erros in your article, like claiming that she was so hungry and thirsty by 1:45am on the 6th that it played a part in her confession. We've already corrected the clearly untrue claim about the number of hours she was interrogated.
By the way, the name I am posting under is shuttlt with a lower case L as the 6th letter. It makes no difference, but shuttit does seem a little agressive to me.
"I am not blurring anything. The interrogation should have been recorded and it wasn't"
No law said it had to be. I have agreed, and continue to agree that it seems crap not to record it. If they normally record police interrogations of witnesses, or if you prefer... witnesses that they are suspicious of, in Italy then it may be evidence of something, either that the police are a bit slack in Perugia, or that they were indeed up to something.
"They took her shoes and left her barefoot during her final interrogation. She states this in her court testimony. You do not take shoes from a witness."
It's odd. Taking away the shoes made me think of taking away shoe laces to prevent suicides, that certainly would be odd to do with a witness. Taking away shoes to test doesn't seem impossible to me. Do you know what they were testing them for? To put a sinister light on it, would you like us to assume it was to make Amanda think they had found her bloody footprints and were hoping to put pressure on her. I'm happy to assume this for the moment. I still don't see that it is written anywhere that the police can't take the shoes of people that they haven't officially and publicly declared to be suspects.
"She was a suspect from day one."
Yes. I agree. The police say this to. Of course she wasn't a suspect in the official sense that would have involved making a public declaration of the fact, along with why.
"You are trying to blur this fact."
No I'm not. I've said it as simply as I am able several times now. The police say they suspect her from day 1. She was not made an official suspect until 1:45am on the 6th. Being suspected and becoming an official suspect are two completely different things. I defy you to find anywhere in the world where police are compelled to publicly make an announcement every time they feel suspicious about someone.
"Amanda Knox should have been offered legal counsel."
Which she was after she became a suspect. The police/prosecution/judicial line is that she requested to make the declaration that ended at 5:45am even though it was the middle of the night and her lawyer wasn't there yet. Do you have any quotes from Amanda or her defence saying that this declaration wasn't voluntary? The Supreme Court certainly describe it as such. Anyway, subsequent to that she was provided with free legal council.
"She was a college student visiting a foreign country on a student learning program. She should have been provided at attorney. Why can't you see that this was handled incorrectly by the police?"
Do you mean legally incorrectly? Perhaps they should have refused to take the declaration from her at 1:45am, it doesn't seem significant to me. Asside from that she was provided with an interpreter, her rights were respected with regards to lawyers because, until 1:45am a lawyer wasn't a legal requirement.
"Have you you done any research on the behavior of people that commit violent crimes? People who have committed violent crimes tend to talk about them. Amanda Knox made or received over 60 phone calls from the time Meredith was found until the time she was arrested."
She certainly said and wrote a lot of contradictory things in that period. If you have statistics to demonstrate that Amanda Knox would have been expected to tell start telling her friends and family that she was the killer, please link to them. There are certainly a lot of high profile murder cases where the killer hasn't told anyone.
"Not one word that she said was incriminating. Nothing. You ask what the central argument is. The central argument is that the interrogation was illegal."
But it wasn't illegal, or at least hasn't been demonstrated to be so. As far as I can see the only way that you can claim this is on the basis of her being slapped ?twice? on the back of the head. You seem instead to be basing you claim on a confusion between the police suspecting somebody and the police publicly declaring that somebodies status has been changed to 'suspect'. The two are not the same thing.
"Amanda should have had an attorney present. The police knew they had to act quickly."
It is possible that they hurried things along because of her mothers impending arrival. But then Amanda claims she turned up at the police station that night without being asked. Perhaps the police wanted her to turn up and forgot to ask, or were relying on her turning up even though she wasn't asked. In any case, it makes little difference to her reasons for making her statement.
"Amanda's mother was on her way to Italy. She would have certainly insisted that Amanda be provided with legal council."
This is probably the case.
"The police knew Amanda's mother was on the way from the recorded phone calls. They aggressively attacked her as soon as they found out help was on the way. The police knew exactly what they were doing."
Again, it may be that they hurried things along for this reason. I would find the argument more convincing if she didn't claim to have turned up at the police station without being asked, but what you say is not impossible.
"She never confessed to the murder. She signed a document prepared by the police in a foreign language that stated that she was sitting in the kitchen of the cottage during the attack."
You keep going on about it being in a foreign language. Are you saying that the statement contained things that she didn't realize it contained. Her "gift", written by her in English, makes it seem as if she did know what her statement said. If she knew what the statement she signed said, what difference does it make if it was in Urdu? She signed a document whose contents she knew.
"The police suggested Patrick to Amanda. It is the fault of the police that Patrick spent time in prison. Amanda was sued by Patrick and given an extra year on her sentence for something that the police instigated."
I agree that the police must have brought Patricks name up, or at least referred to the SMS and thereby implied Patrick. It's really not possible for them to have asked about the SMS without bringing him up. I don't see that them raising the subject of the SMS first is important. To take a silly example if we had the following conversation:
Me: Bruce, did you receive an SMS from Bob?
Bruce: Yes and then later Bob killed Fred.
The fact that I mentioned Bob first, or you did makes no difference to who is responsible for blaming Bob for killing Fred. Why is it important if the police named Patrick first?
"Do you really need to ask what my argument is? I am amazed that people like you can actually try and defend the actions of the authorities in this case. Open your eyes and discover the truth."
Your argument according to you is that the interrogation was illegal based on your refusal to see a distinction between the police suspecting someone and that someone being publicly made an offical suspect. For some reason this wasn't the focus of your article which, to me seemed mainly to be trying to explain why Amanda claimed to have memories of the murder.
"There is no credible evidence linking Amanda to this crime. Yet you hold on to small details to try and make your arguments. Step back an look at the facts of this case."
I didn't come her to argue about her guilt or innocence. I came to criticise the argument in your article. Late on I may move on to your article on the knife. Right now I'm sticking around here because you don't seem willing to defend the specific claims in your article.
"I have copies of both signed statements that were typed out by the police."
I wonder if you could publish these on your site? At the very least, how about showing us a scan of the page with the names of the police on who signed the statement. One of the things that seems to be lacking from your site is actual primary evidence. If you've got this stuff it is surely a good idea to make it public?
Shuttit, I like how you say that you are not trying to prove guilt or innocence. Do you go around to various blogs and suggest proper edits? You must have plenty of free time. Why not just admit the truth. You are here because you feel that Amanda Knox if guilty. It doesn't seem like there would be any reason to hide that fact.
I will not post the typed out statements online. Just like I will not show any footage of the crime scene that is disrespectful to Meredith. Some things are not meant to be seen by the general public. I show a lot of photographic evidence on my site. I show photos of the duvet, shoe prints, footprints, luminol stains, contaminated gloves, photographs showing contamination of evidence, knife evidence, bra clasp evidence and break in evidence. I could list more. That is just off the top of my head.
So how can you actually say that I don't show any evidence?
I will not post the signed statements because they will be taken out of context and the words will be twisted and used by guilters. I'm sorry, some photographs will not be made available.
"Shuttit, I like how you say that you are not trying to prove guilt or innocence. Do you go around to various blogs and suggest proper edits?"
No. For one thing it takes too much effort to do enough background reading to do this on more than one topic at a time. I'm interested in this case at the moment, there aren't very many websites dedicated to the case, so here I am.
"You must have plenty of free time."
No, I really should be doing other things.
"Why not just admit the truth. You are here because you feel that Amanda Knox if guilty. It doesn't seem like there would be any reason to hide that fact."
For along time I had doubts about the case. That's why I moved beyond the JREF to Perugia-Shock and started asking questions there. Really though I don't see what her guilt or innocence has to do with anything. There is not the slightest chance of anything we say or discover having any impact on the case. At best the image Amanda has on the web may have an impact on the sales of whichever of the bloggers happens to have a book deal and on the families ability to raise donations. In the UK media Amanda has been all but forgotten, though I'm sure a story or two will appear in the Mail during the appeal. I guess it's in some ways my reason for picking on you rather than, say TrueJustice is that it's more interesting and more fun to argue with people that you significantly disagree with. I don't agree with everything on the site, but unless I read a page and think "wow that's nonsense", it does end up being just proof reading as you imply.
Have you heard of SIWOTI? http://xkcd.com/386/ That's really why I'm here. Many of us on the JREF suffer from this syndrome.
"I will not post the typed out statements online. Just like I will not show any footage of the crime scene that is disrespectful to Meredith. Some things are not meant to be seen by the general public."
Not even the list of police who signed the statement? OK. It's a pity the Sollicito's aren't as respectful of Meredith's privacy as you.
"I show a lot of photographic evidence on my site. I show photos of the duvet, shoe prints, footprints, luminol stains, contaminated gloves, photographs showing contamination of evidence, knife evidence, bra clasp evidence and break in evidence. I could list more. That is just off the top of my head."
Sure. You have the same pictures that are available everywhere else. It's just that you implied you had all sorts of other evidence upon which you had based your claims. It's unfortunate for Amanda that we then end up in a position where we must simply take your word for what the evidence says. At least in so far as the interrogation goes you offer only assertions.
"So how can you actually say that I don't show any evidence?"
Apologies. You do have the photo of the luminol, the photo of the dust on the glove, etc..
"I will not post the signed statements because they will be taken out of context and the words will be twisted and used by guilters. I'm sorry, some photographs will not be made available."
How will the section with the signatures be taken out of context?
Anyway, we seem to be at an impass. You claimed her 'confession' was the result of a 14 hour interrogation, but have now removed that claim. You say that she was exhausted after a long and intense interrogation, that we have established lasted about three hours and in which the the intense phase lasted less than two hours. You still claim that extreme hunger and thirst played a part in her confession after she was denied food during this three hour period. You also claim that her confession was partly due to being prevented from sleeping for the three hours of the interview. You justify your assertion that the interrogation was illegal on the basis of her not being interviewed as a suspect even though the rules that dictate how a suspect is interviewed mean something very specific by 'suspect', not as you imply, anybody the police suspect. You accused me of having a disturbing level of hatred of Amanda, but were unable or unwilling to post any evidence to support this. Is there any part of this article that you are willing to defend, or provide evidence to support? If not, I'm quite willing to agree that there is no point in continuing. When I've had a chance to read the motivations report I may have a crack at one of your other articles.
I'm still baffled why you were trying to demonstrate, using the removal of her shoes, that the police suspected her when you've got another article complaining that the police have been saying they already suspected her.
If you do feel like defending your article, please do so and I will respond.
The post above is a mastery in manipulation and spin.
First of all it's perfectly understandable that the police construed Amanda's SMS as a message to someone she was going to meet that evening.
Amanda did not write "See you later. Good Night". If she had done so in English, that could be infact be interpreted as a "good bye". But she wrote that message in Italian, and in Italian it said: "Ci vediamo piu' tardi". That sentence in Italian literally means "we see each other later", and in Italian it leaves no room to interpretation: "ci vediamo piu' tardi" means that WE ARE DEFINITELY GOING TO SEE EACH OTHER THAT SAME DAY. It's not like "see you later, alligator", it's actually an appointment.
She also wrote "Buona Serata", which in Italian does not mean Good Night. Buona serata is actually different from even Buona Sera (good evening). Buona Serata means "have a good time this evening". So if, let's say, it's 8 pm and I'm having dinner, but I'm going to meet you at the pub for a drink at Midnight, I will probably send you a message saying: "Ci vediamo piu' tardi. Buona Serata."
In other words Amanda's message, which was not in English, but in Italian, is CONSISTENT with someone who's going to meet someone else later on, and it's not consistent with someone who's saying good night. If my intention was to say good bye, I would have written: CI VEDIAMO, BUONA NOTTE.
Amanda of course meant to say 'good bye', because it wasn't her intention to see Lumumba but she translated from the English "See you later, Good Night!" (meaning good bye, we are not going to meet tonight) literally into Italian "ci vediamo piu' tardi", which unfortunately in Italian has the meaning that the meeting will actually take place, and that very same night.
You can't fault the police for pressuring her to reveal whom she had met that night. She wrote that phrase, and although unintentionally because of her scarse knowledge of the Italian language, that phrase in Italian UNEQUIVOCALLY means she's going to meet someone.
Thanks Al-Fakh Yugoudh. I forgot to include that in my list of issues with his article that Bruce will not discuss. Your translation is the same as that I've seen when the Italian in her message is analysed elsewhere. It also tallies with explanations I've seen on linguistic sites unrelated to the case for the phrase "Buona Serata".
To be fair to Bruce, he didn't invent this presentation of the SMS only in English, nor did he invent the translation of it that he's using. Perhaps his sources can vouch for the accuracy of the translation he's using? Still, it's easy to check if anybody wants to do a bit of digging on Italian vocab and grammar.
It's good to see some of the PMF people on the board. Isn't it nice that I let you post here without censorship. Things run a little differently on your board don't they? Why don't you admit that PMF is completely censored and controlled to make sure that every single person that posts comments goes along with the campaign of lies that PMF promotes. I'm sorry for all of you that you buddy Barbie put out such a lousy book. You all know the book is tabloid trash. I know your all disappointed.
I will get back to you on the text messages. It's a moot point because Amanda and Patrick never intended on meeting. The interrogator's pressured her to sign a prepared document that stated Patrick was in the bedroom with Merideth. This was all suggested by the interrogators, not Amanda Knox. Amanda was very upset to find out that the police lied to her about Patrick. She was very happy when he was released. She wrote in her diary "Finally something is going right."
Keep spinning the facts guys. Go back to your PMF cult and dream up some more nonsense.
Shuttit, Sorry I just can't bring myself to changing the spelling of your name. I have completely defended my article. I don't claim that Amanda is extremely hungry and thirsty. I claim that she is extremely tired. These were her words. This is stated to show that she arrived at the police station in the evening and didn't leave until the next morning. She wasn't given food until after she signed the prepared statement at 5:45 am. She was extremely tired because she was questioned every day leading up to her final interrogation. She was obviously kept up all night. She was under extreme stress.
Keep in mind, the Italian supreme court ruled that the interrogation was illegal.
If 30 police officers threaten a 20 year old college student visiting a foreign country with 30 years in prison, hit her on the back of her head and tell her she will never see her family again, how long do you think she should hold out before she signs the prepared document? Is three hours not long enough?
I told you that the 14 hours was a pro-Amanda stance. It presumably add all of the hours she was at the station up to the point that she hand wrote her letter. I corrected it. Does this change anything at all? Does this mean that 30 police officers didn't rough up a young woman and coerce her into signing a prepared document?
As soon as she was out of that threatening setting, she tried to set the record straight. The police didn't care. They went and arrested Patrick Lumumba anyway.
Why is all of this okay with you? Would this be okay if it was your daughter being roughed up by a bunch of police officers? Can we please use some common sense here? Is that too much to ask?
Bruce,
"It's good to see some of the PMF people on the board. Isn't it nice that I let you post here without censorship. Things run a little differently on your board don't they? Why don't you admit that PMF is completely censored and controlled to make sure that every single person that posts comments goes along with the campaign of lies that PMF promotes."
I'm not aware of this censorship. If it exists, it is certainly wrong. Again, I hang on more on the JREF where there certainly isn't any censorship. As you know Charlie Wilkes of Friends of Amanda Fame and Chris Hallides of the View From Wilmington. The dominant position is definately the PMF one.
"I'm sorry for all of you that you buddy Barbie put out such a lousy book. You all know the book is tabloid trash. I know your all disappointed."
I agree that it didn't seem very good. I wasted a few pounds on the e-book.
"I will get back to you on the text messages. It's a moot point because Amanda and Patrick never intended on meeting. The interrogator's pressured her to sign a prepared document that stated Patrick was in the bedroom with Merideth. This was all suggested by the interrogators, not Amanda Knox. Amanda was very upset to find out that the police lied to her about Patrick. She was very happy when he was released. She wrote in her diary "Finally something is going right.""
OK. I look forward to your response.
Shuttlt, most of my comments above were directed at Al-Fakh Yugoudh. I have come to realize that you are not part of the PMF crowd. I appologize for labeling you a guilter. I am still amazed that you spend so much time simply trying to get someone to edit their comments. So I won't say that I have totally figured you out. Al-Fakh Yugoudh is a known PMF guilter. I have seen his posts on the cult site. So no retraction there. It's 3:30 am here. I need to go to sleep. I will find out more about those text messages.
"Shuttlt, most of my comments above were directed at Al-Fakh Yugoudh. I have come to realize that you are not part of the PMF crowd. I appologize for labeling you a guilter. I am still amazed that you spend so much time simply trying to get someone to edit their comments. So I won't say that I have totally figured you out. Al-Fakh Yugoudh is a known PMF guilter. I have seen his posts on the cult site. So no retraction there. It's 3:30 am here. I need to go to sleep. I will find out more about those text messages."
OK Bruce. After such a friendly post how can I do otherwise than try to be a little nicer back. I'll tone it down.
Regardless of where Al-Fakh Yugoudh (good name by the way! A distant relative of Sheik Yerbouti I believe) normally posts, I think his comments on the SMS are valid. I've seen quite a few less informed posters assert categorically that the SMS was written in English, so there is definately confusion about it from at least some quarters of the pro-Amanda camp. Also, the translation does strike me as questionable. At the very least the implications of "Buona Serata" are very different to the implications of "good night".
Bruce,
Now that we're friends again, I do have a question....
I appreciate you don't want to confirm who your sources are, though I think you're wrong not to be open about it, but I wondered just how much information you have access to. Mark Waterbury says he has access to all the information handed over by the prosecution to the defence (I think that may be limited to the forensics, but that's still a lot of documentation). Do you have similar access? The reason I ask is that I'm after documentation corroborating the claims that the prosecution didn't hand over all the information requested by the defence. Presumably the defence have copies of requests to the prosecution dating back to months before the trial, along with requests to the court and the responses they received. It seems to me that with access to that kind of documentation one could build up quite a solid case for Amanda not having had a fair trial. At the moment I think evidence on the subject is limited. One prosecution witness said they didn't know when a test had been performed and there was the request for additional information to the court before the summer break. This is really a very weak case in comparison to the one one could presumably make given sufficient access to documents that must surely exist.
shuttlt, send me an email. injusticeinperugia@yuahoo.com
Here is some background on the techniques used during a police interviews, pointing out how they can entrap an innocent person. A law professor explains why you should never talk to the police: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Kestrel,
I'll have a watch of the video tonight, however, surely the issue is false memories rather than entrapment? Is that covered in the video?
The interrogation is important to the extent that it can be used to measure Amanda Knox’s involvement and guilt. Let’s say she is guilty, and she is interrogated for 100 hours without break, without sleep, food, water, she is slapped on the back of the head, and she breaks and tells all. Then, the interrogation is unfortunate, perhaps illegal, but despite the poor treatment, in the end what matters is she is guilty. On the hand, let’s say she is not guilty, but is a spoiled brat with no respect for the police and her idea of fun is to blame her boss so he gets arrested for a crime she knows he did not commit. That sure would not make her look like anyone I would want to know, but the important fact here is despite this, she is not guilty of murder.
The point I am trying to make is, everything about the interrogation is largely irrelevant except that it can be used to gauge Amanda Knox’s likely involvement in the murder of her roommate. Was it four hours or forty hours? It’s not that important.
The lack of corroborating audio and video evidence forces everyone to consider the interrogation from a he (Manginni) said / she ( Amanda Knox) said frame work. For me, the lack of corroborating audio and video indicates that Amanda’s version of events is more likely to be closer to what actually happened. Manginni was so determined to show that he had the killer that if she had simply opened up and made a clear honest confession, the odds are pretty strong that that is something he would want on video tape, and the world over would have watched her confession again and again on CNN and other major news outlets. It would be a major triumph for him, and the fact that we aren’t watching that means to me that it probably did not happen.
So, let’s take a look at it from the point of view of what we can say and what we know. We can say that she is either guilty or innocent, and we know what documentary evidence we have.
Let’s remove the name Amanda Knox. Let’s start with an average twenty year girl, who does smoke pot ( illegally if commonly), on an exchange program in another country, who is in every other ordinary sense of the word law abiding and trusting of the police, but has found herself wrapped up in an extraordinarily tragic, shocking, and stressful situation. She is now being told by those same police that they know she was involved, and that her boyfriend says the same. She says that cannot be and they say that she is blocking it out. She says it can’t be and they say she can’t leave until she says it is. She says it can’t be and they say well at least they know he boss was involved and they just need her help to trap him. She says she does not understand and they say they just want her to imagine what it would have been like if she had been there and he was the killer, just imagine a story. She reluctantly imagines that for them and advises them this is her imagination. They say that’s okay, they just need a document that will place him there and then they can do their job and get the right man, and she can go home, and the only way she is going home is to sign the document. Reluctantly she signs the document, and within hours understands the actual implications of what she has done and recants.
Does that sound unlikely?
What about the opposite? Suppose she is guilty. She says no. The police say is all they need is a document that puts her in the house at the time of the crime. Does anyone think she would say yes to that? Especially one that blames someone who she knows will have an alibi? No one guilty would agree to sign the document she signed. What could be gained? In this scenario, she knows she is guilty, why would she implicate herself at all, but if she did, why wouldn’t offer an actual confession. It would be all or nothing at all.
Let’s face it, the reason that document involves her boss is that she does not have a clue what happened in that cottage and that’s because of the simple fact that she was not there.
Moodstream,
Your post doesn't address the fact that she claims she told the truth in her statements, in as much as she did have actual memories of Lumumba killing Meredith, all be it memories whose reliability she questioned to an increasing degree as time went on.
The other thing I'd like to mention is with the second to last paragraph. You are talking about what a guilty Amanda should have done with the benefit of hindsight under, I assume, relatively unpressurised conditions. She would have had to make a decision about what to say to the police very quickly, under very difficult circumstances without knowing what the police already knew and would know. Remember, they were asking her about the SMS. Perhaps guilty Amanda grabs hold of the idea that the police clearly have, that Lumumba was involved, and puts herself in the position of distressed bystander. I don't think it's implausible that the consequences of her statement wouldn't have been apparent to her until it was too late. Guilty Amanda makes the statement and hopes for the best because, in the heat of the moment, she can't think of another story quickly enough. Everything after that.... the request to make a declaration to Mignini, the "gift" a while later is an attempt to get the toothpaste back in the tube.
One thing more, you seem to imply that Mignini was present for the first interrogation. Is this the case?
Mignini was not present at the interrogation. He was called in after she made the self incriminating statement while being heard as a witness and became a suspect.
Italian law prohibits the police from questioning a suspect without the supervision of a magistrate.
So stop blaming Mignini for Amanda's involvement of Lumumba. He wasn't even there when she did so.
To shuttlt ,
Thanks for your comment. Neither of us can really know what happened during the interrogation nor its meaning. All opinions are equally valid or invalid in that we can only support them by supposition.
You write “Perhaps guilty Amanda grabs hold of the idea that the police have, that Lumumba was involved, and puts herself in the position of distressed bystander. .. the consequences of her statement wouldn’t have been apparent to her until it was too late.”
You may be right. It has a chess-like logic to it. The police posit another person committing the crime to get the suspect to place herself at the crime scene, and then pull out the other character leaving just the suspect, who has theoretically incriminated herself.
However, I do not agree (surprised, aren’t you?). For Guilty Amanda, the only way the police can hurt her is with real evidence in court demonstrating her guilt. Her goal is to prevent the police from learning anything about her involvement. Her natural course of action is to tell them nothing, and sign nothing. Why should she admit that she is there at all? Why even talk to them? Whatever evidence they have, they have. Nothing she has to say is going to make it go away.
The police convinced Amanda that they had positive proof she was at the cottage at the time of the crime. For Guilty Amanda, when the police started talking about Lumumba, she thought she saw a way to minimize her own involvement by claiming that Lumumba came over and committed the crime while she, horrified, did nothing.
But Amanda knew where Lumumba was that evening, at Le Chic. Which means Guilty Amanda knew he would be very visible while the crime occurred. That makes Lumumba an unlikely fall guy.
Perhaps she was scared and panicked. Perhaps, but Guilty Amanda just a few days prior had the temerity to viciously attack and cruelly destroy another human life on the spur of the moment for kicks apparently, and to top that, was able to induce two boys she hardly knew to participate in the deadly game, and then direct an attempt at a cover up, and generate a loyalty in her boys that has lasted several years up to now, despite their incarcerations. In my opinion Guilty Amanda is not going to be fazed by a couple of cops and a slap to the back of the head.
Another problem is the alleged cover up. Guilty Amanda staged a break in that mimics a technique that Rudy Guede actually used to break into and burglar homes. Just coincidence? But Guilty Amanda did not flush the toilet either, knowing full well that it was full of Rudy Guede’s poop. If she were planning on pinning the crime on Rudy Guede, okay. But if she had a plan to let Guede take the fall, why would she abandon that to pin it on Lumumba, especially since Lumumba would almost certainly have been at Le Chic and have an alibi? And, if Guilty Amanda was not planning on blaming the crime on Guede, for gosh sake’s, why didn’t she flush the toilet?
And finally (at least for now), why didn’t Guilty Amanda have a damn good lie to offer the police? Since Guilty Amanda has everything to lose from the truth, why not simply maintain an un-disprovable lie and force the police to prove otherwise? There is just no percentage in cooperation.
(continued)
As to your other comments, I don’t know enough about the document to reply to how it made a difference that she was in addition to signing it, signing also to the fact that it was the truth. Without knowing much about it I have to say I don’t get the difference. If the police want me to sign a document intended to show I am telling them something, if it contains language that it is also truthful doesn’t add much, as far as the decision to sign.
I was able to locate a news transcript of the hand written note Amanda gave to the police on Nov 6th, the day she was arrested. I guess that would be hours after the interrogation. I encourage you to re-read it. To me this is a message from a woman who trusts the police and wants to help them. The writing shows clearly not that she is unwilling to come to terms with her culpability in the crime but rather that she has yet to realize how roundly she is being abused by the police she still trusts.
I would be interested in your take on it though. The link is:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1570225/Transcript-of-Amanda-Knoxs-note.html
As to Manginni being present. I did not mean to suggest that, although for all I know he was. It is via his office as prosecutor that he wanted Amanda to confess, and if he had obtained one, I am positive we would have seen it on tv ad infinitum. I am also positive the interrogation was taped, but because it did not turn out the way they wanted, the tape was lost.
As regards the police's misinterpretation of the SMS, I firmly believe it was their responsibility to make sure they had the correct understanding of what it meant. They knew they were dealing with a young foreign girl who had a poor command of Italian. Amanda herself could (and I'm quite sure did, since she repeats herself in the handwritten note) have told the police what she meant by 'See you later', and would have told them it's a common English idiom. If she'd been provided with a proper interpreter, rather than a police offer who spoke a bit of English and took an active part in the interrogation, this interpreter could have clarified it too.
This didn't happen, probably because the police had some indication a black man was involved and therefore thought they'd hit the jackpot when they found Amanda's text to Lumumba. It's their fault they didn't stop to clarify it before going overboard telling Amanda they had evidence to prove she was there and that they knew she was covering for someone.
Moodstream, one thing you didn't mention in your summary of the interrogation is the suggestion made to Amanda that she might have repressed memories of the murder: the interpreter told her about an experience she'd had that was so traumatic she'd blanked it out, and suggested the same could have happened to Amanda here. I think this is crucial to understanding what happened, and why Amanda herself was uncertain of her own memories at this point. I've been doing a bit of reading on interrogations lately, and the tactics the police took with Amanda are classic ways to get a false confession: tell the suspect you have hard evidence placing them at the crime scene, then give them a reason why they may not remember being there. In Amanda's case the fact she had been smoking pot is an additional factor, since her memories would have been a little hazy anyway, and thus vulnerable to police suggestion that she had simply blanked out the memories of being present during the murder.
I agree with you that if the interrogation went as the police claim it did, they would have produced the interrogation tapes by now. Without knowing the full, unedited context, I think it is impossible to make a judgement on any statement Amanda made during it, particularly since the signed statement was written by the police. We've already seen how other statements made by Amanda were isolated and taken out of context, then used as evidence by the prosecution ("I was there, I can't deny it, there is no reason to"). I'm extremely reluctant to simply believe what the police claim without seeing the evidence for myself. I think everybody should be.
Also, I'll just add that if the interrogation tapes are ever released, I strongly believe there would be a huge groundswell of support for Amanda. In popular and media opinion, she would be exonerated. And that, of course, is why they will never be released.
Why do you call the interrogation "illegal"? I'd like to know the reason for your defining it "illegal". I'd like also to know your sources for defining it so.
Al-Fakh Yugoudh , the source for the question above is the Italian Supreme Court.
Anonymous said...
Al-Fakh Yugoudh , the source for the question above is the Italian Supreme Court.
April 8, 2010 2:35 PM
SHOW ME WHERE AND WHEN THE CORTE DI CASSAZIONE PRONOUNCED THE INTERROGATION ILLEGAL AND WHAT EXACTLY DID THEY SAY. SHOW ME!
DON'T MAKE GROSSLY INACCURATE STATEMENTS WITHOUT CITING CREDIBLE SOURCES, PLEASE!
THERE WAS NOTHING ILLEGAL ABOUT THE INTERROGATION! NOTHING!!
The Italian Supreme Court ruled that the Signed statements were inadmissible in court because Amanda Didn't have a lawyer present. They ruled this to be illegal.
This is widely known. I don't know if you know about this cool search engine called Google, it will lead you in the right direction.
Now don't go getting all angry. I can read your text even if you don't type it in all caps. Calm yourself.
I'm very calm, the caps were to distinguish my comment from the reported previoius comment by anonymous.
I know the Google (as McCain would say), but what you say is widely known is actually incorrect. Show me the Supreme Court said what you said. Use Google, Ask.com, Altavista or whatever you like, and show it to me.
The Corte di Cassazione during the Recourse by the defendants regarding the sentence of incarceration by the Tribunale del Riesame, simply reiterated a 2005 decision affirming the inadmissibility of self incriminating declarations rendered by an individual heard as a witness and not yet a suspect. This is simply ex art 63 comma 1 of the Code of Penal Procedure. Art. 64 however also provides that if such declarations implicate the responsibility of others (in her case Lumumba), those statements can be utilized in the case against the implicated person. That is why those statements could not be used against her, but could be used in the Knox vs. Lumumba criminal trial for slander (which in Italy are held simultaneously). The Suprema Corte di Cassazione simply reiterated these facts during the Recourse, they didn't sentence any illegality in the interrogation.
Find a legal argument against the above, if you can (and Google may not help you).
Posting in CAPS and provocative names aside, I am in complete agreement with Al-Fakh Yugoudh on the 'illegal' interrogation. I struggle to understand using the word 'illegal' unless one is either trolling, or referring to the disputed claims of being slapped. Perhaps this is a failure of imagination on my part. To illistrate my take on it, here is a hypothetical:
Mandy Knocks is being questioned by the police in relation to a murder. The police are under the impression she is a cross between Mother Teresa, St Therese, and Amilie. All of a sudden Many has an attack of conscience and says that she was present during the murder and her friend Paddy La Mumba did it. Her statement would not be admissable in any trial against her because she was being interrogated as a witness.
How is the situation different to that of Amanda Knox? Is it solely that the police 'suspected' Amanda? Do you acknowledge any difference between the police 'suspecting' someone and making them a formal 'suspect'? Is the interrogation of Mandy "illegal"?
I've been trying to get a meaningful answer to this for a little while and have so far failed. I genuinely don't understand what Bruce and others position on this is, assuming it's not a mildly trollish joke - in which case fair enough.
"As regards the police's misinterpretation of the SMS, I firmly believe it was their responsibility to make sure they had the correct understanding of what it meant. They knew they were dealing with a young foreign girl who had a poor command of Italian. Amanda herself could (and I'm quite sure did, since she repeats herself in the handwritten note) have told the police what she meant by 'See you later', and would have told them it's a common English idiom. If she'd been provided with a proper interpreter, rather than a police offer who spoke a bit of English and took an active part in the interrogation, this interpreter could have clarified it too."
How would they establish that? The SMS could be talking about meeting up and be related to the murder, or it could be an innocent error. Should they take Amanda's word for it, or just assume that most innocent explanation? Other than establishing there were two interpretations, I don't see what they could have done. Given the whole Patrick story (assuming for a second the police weren't working to a plan to frame Amanda) they may have felt that the first interpretation was confirmed.
As for her being "a police officer who spoke a bit of English", what is your source for this?
Moodstream,
Your post is a good one and covers many of the issues that I would like to address, but it is hard to seperate out into discrete points to handle seperately. A proper response is going to take me a little while.
The interrogation was illegal because in Italy a suspect cannot be questioned without an attorney present. After 1:45 am Amanda was a suspect. They continued to question her and have her sign an incriminating statement. How could that be legal if she had no attorney and she was a suspect.
I base my statement above on the findings of the Supreme Kangaroo Court of Italy, which stated that after 1:45 am she was a suspect. The Supreme Kangaroo Court (SKC) did not expressly state that the subsequent interrogation lasting till 5:45 am or so was "illegal", perhaps because that specific issue was not raised by the defense counsel, or perhaps they did not wish to offend their fellow Kangaroo Mignini by coming right out and saying what he did was illegal. But it is quite clear that under Italian law the police and prosecutor may not question a suspect without his or her attorney present.
MightyMouseMignini,
I had thought the illegal interrogation claim applied to the interrogation where she accused/or whatever Patrick. It seemed to me to be being mentioned as part of an argument to explain/invalidate her statement. You seem to be saying that the police behaved appropriately and it was Mignini in the 5:45am declaration who behaved improperly. The 1:45am statement was therefore obtained legally, yes? Does anybody disagree?
Statements like this confude me though if that is the agreed interpretation:
"She was clearly being interrogated as a suspect. Her shoes were taken from her to be tested. You don't take shoes from someone that is a witness. She was clearly seen as a suspect by the police. The interrogaton was illegal. She was told it would be worse for her if she had an attorney."
Why not just say that she had been declared a suspect? Why all this stuff about her being treated like a suspect, but told she was a witness? After 1:45am, it's not a question of her being treated like a suspect. The police could treat her like a witness, a plumb pudding, or whatever they please.... after 1:45am she IS a suspect. There's no treated about it.
As for the 5:45am interrogation, you agree then that the Supreme Court did not say it was illegal, though you think they thought it. They do describe it as a voluntary declaration though, which to me suggests they agree that it wasn't an interrogation and Amanda requested it.
Bruce though says:
"The Italian Supreme Court ruled that the Signed statements were inadmissible in court because Amanda Didn't have a lawyer present. They ruled this to be illegal."
Does Bruce mean they actually ruled it illegal, or they didn't, but he thinks that's what they thought?
I realize I'm getting combative again, but seriously! What's the position on this? Clearly your all individuals and there is no rule that you all have to agree, but I'm getting lost here. You all agree the interrogation was illegal, there just doesn't seem to be agreement as to why. Bruce?
Another reason I don’t put much weight on the confession comes from a story I read in the Washington Post years and years ago. I have tried to find a link to it on line, but I guess it’s just too old and I don’t remember the names involved.
Anyway, the story is about a man who was divorced and living in the D.C. area. His young daughter was on a weekend visit. His wife lived in another city. I believe his young daughter was somewhere between four and eight. She disappeared and her body was not recovered. The police blamed the father. So, after awhile, did his ex wife. After a great deal of police interrogation, the father confessed, and I think he even went to jail. However, later, a crazy man who lived in the woods was arrested for another violent murder of a teen age girl. He worked for the girls parents as a gardener off and on, and he encountered the girl home alone and brutally killed her. At some point in his incarceration he admitted to another inmate that he had killed the first little girl also. There was no doubt about it because he led the police to her body. Apparently the small child had the misfortune of walking through the backyard of a home of a relative of the crazy man on her way to visit a friend. The crazy man’s relative had let him stay there for a few days. It was just a terrible misfortune.
So, why did the father falsely confess to killing his own daughter? He said he felt so deeply guilty about the loss and as the police began to pressure him he began to question himself. How much did he really remember? Could he have committed the crime and completely blocked it out? Eventually he talked himself into believing he really was the killer. Due to the tactics the police used, he became convinced he had killed his own child, when in fact he had nothing to do with it.
When I read Amanda’s hand written note to the police the day of her arrest, I was brought back to the memory of that story and how they can use honest, innocent peoples sensitivity to the crime to create doubt and false guilt.
In trying to locate a link to that case though I came across another famous case. Here is the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisha_Meili
This is a famous American case that was a national scandal. The victim became known as the central park jogger. The case is excerpted below:
On April 19, 1989, the slightly-built 28-year-old investment banker was violently assaulted while jogging in New York City's Central Park. She was raped and beaten almost to death. When found about four hours later, she was suffering from severe hypothermia and blood loss from multiple lacerations and internal bleeding, and her skull had been fractured so badly that her left eye was removed from the socket.
According to a police investigation, the culprits were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as "wilding." New York City detectives said the word was used by the suspects themselves to describe their actions to police.
The suspects confessed on videotape in the presence of a parent or guardian, While the confessions themselves were videotaped, the hours of interrogation that preceded the confessions were not.
They retracted their statements within weeks, claiming that they had been intimidated, lied to, and coerced into making false confessions.[9]
In 2002, another man's confession, plus DNA evidence confirming his crime, led the district attorney's office to recommend vacating the convictions of the teenagers originally accused and sentenced to prison.
In short, all five convicted teenagers turned out to have had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime, despite the fact that all but one confessed on videotape to their involvement. They were psychologically just overwhelmed by the tactics the police used
The interrogation was illegal, period. She had no lawyer and they treated her like a suspect and she clearly felt like she was a suspect. They threatened her with a 30 year jail term if she did not cooperate. She was a suspect + no lawyer = illegal interrogation. shuttit thinks he is a magician who can fool people into not seeing the obvious. This is what might be described as British arrogance. He thinks: " I'm smarter than all these people so I can trick them into not seeing that the interrogation was wrong and illegal and violated Amanda's human rights. Come on shuttit, give us a break!
Common sense says that required to or not, the police would have recorded these interrogations. The fact that the tapes were not leaked or released by the police supports Amanda's version of events regarding what happened. If she truly had said something voluntarily that was incriminating, we would be hearing the actual words or seeing the video.
All the stuff about food and water, illegal or not, number of hours, whether police are "required" to record, ... are just red herrings.
Bruce,
Please confirm whether anonymous has expressed your view on the 'illegal' interrogations.
1. So far we've had it being illegal because there is no difference in Italian law between the police suspecting and somebody formally being declared a suspect.
2. The 1:45am interrogation was legal, the 5:45am declaration wasn't declared to be illegal by the Supreme Court, but it was illegal all the same. This is because at this point she had formally become a suspect and should have had a lawyer.
I hope I haven't oversimplified. It seems to me that MightyMouseMignini is clearly in disagreement with both Bruce and Anonymous. I'm not too far off agreeing with MightyMouseMignini. There clearly are problems with it. Whether it was illegal or not depends on why the session ending at 5:45am happened (did Amanda request it?), whether it was an interrogation or a declaration or what and a more detailed run down of Italian law than I've seen so far.
Juror,
"Common sense says that required to or not, the police would have recorded these interrogations. The fact that the tapes were not leaked or released by the police supports Amanda's version of events regarding what happened. If she truly had said something voluntarily that was incriminating, we would be hearing the actual words or seeing the video.
All the stuff about food and water, illegal or not, number of hours, whether police are "required" to record, ... are just red herrings."
She says in her "gift" that she genuinely had memories of Patrick, of course she says she doesn't think the memories are true. She says she was under pressure, hit a couple of times and asked over and over to remember, OK. Either it's true that Amanda developed false memories in an hour and a bit, or she's lying. Did the defence produce any psychologist to back up her claim of false memories? As far as I'm aware they didn't.
As for whether the interrogation was recorded. I have no idea whether interrogations of witnesses normally are in Italy. They can't ordinarily be used against the witness so maybe it's often not done. It would be nice to know how often witness statements are recorded in Italy, but my Italian is probably not up to the task of finding out. They had also been expecting to interrogate Raffaele hours earlier, not in the middle of the night. Perhaps dissorganization and the lateness of the hour have something to do with it. Personally I think this is the best argument against the interrogation and I don't have a strong argument against it.
The police can assume information from a suspect useful to the investigation even without the presence of a legal counsel (see art. 350 c. 5 of the Code of Penal Procedure).
However the information given without the presence of the legal counsel cannot be utilized (see art. 350 c. 6 of the C.P.P.).
The police can also gather spontaneous statements (i.e. not solicited by questioning) from the suspect without the presence of the defending legal counsel. However such spontaneous statements cannot be utilized in the trial against the suspect (see art. 350 c. 7 of the C.P.P.).
So what was done was done in accordance to the law, however the law doesn't permit that the information given without the presence of a lawyer to be used against the defendant giving that information.
That doesn't mean there was anything illegal committed by the police or the prosecutor.
You guys are a bunch of Sunday armchair lawyers who don't know anything about Italian law and yet you act like you do.
Why don't you stick to what you know, which is probably close to nothing.
Thanks Al,
do you have a link to where these bits of law can be accessed?
Hey Italian-lawyer-wannabe-with-the- pornographic-yet-Arab-sounding-name, how do the Italian police "assume" information from a suspect? Is that "assuming" done by satantic cult, by group sex orgy, or by Black Masses with the Cult of the Red Rose members? In America, the police cannot 'assume' information from a suspect. There must be an actual statement, oral or written, and crazy wannabe psychics with their own websites are not relied on by the prosecutors. As for the British shuttup guy, no I am not in agreement with you about anything.
Italian justice:
1) No freedom of the press
2) No protection of citizens or other individuals, the press, or other members of the government from wiretapping
3) No freedom from intimidation and harassment by police and prosecutors
4) No right to know the charges against you when arrested
5) No right to know the reasons for a search of your home
6) Individuals can be held in prison for up to a year, with no charges being brought against them, virtually no proof of wrongdoing needed, and what charges exist kept secret or undefined during that year
7) Welcome to Italy American tourists!
Bruce:
Would it be possible to add a new topic thread to cover the Italian criminal justice system in general? They way I look at it, the problems with the case against Amanda and Raffaele are not just rooted in the flimsly evidence and the interrogation, but need to be considered in light of the many serious problems in the Italian criminal justice system as a whole. Amanda's problems are not just case specific, but also systemic, as shown in Douglas Preston's excellent book Monster of Florence. So, I think this deserves its own thread, when you get a chance. See you later!
MightyMouseMignini said...
"Hey Italian-lawyer-wannabe-with-the- pornographic-yet-Arab-sounding-name, how do the Italian police "assume" information from a suspect?"
I'm very proud of my Arab-Italian ancestry, and so is my brother Yoras, who says hi!
Al-Fakh, my last name means "the trap" in Arabic and therefore it's perfectly suited for a Mouse like you.
I used the word "assume" probably inappropriately translating the verbiage used in the CPP "assumere informazioni" into the English "to assume information". "Assumere informazioni" actually it's more propriately translated into "gather information through inquiry". The word "to assume" in English is often used with the sense of "presume". In Italian it is used primarily with the meaning of "to take for oneself", "to get", "to adopt", and also "to hire" (by such action the employer "takes for himself" an employee). The etimology is the Latin "ad" + "sumere" (to take).
In Italy Information from a suspect is gathered through inquiry, not through satanic rites or other means as you described.
In America it's usually gathered the same way, through inquiry, but sometimes, also through waterboarding or other means of torture.
Shuttlt:
My sources are my own University law books, but I'm sure you can find plenty of Internet resources if you wish. Just use "the google". Unfortunately they're almost exclusively in Italian, so you must have knowledge of the language to read them.
Anonymous at 5:48pm
How can Bruce add a topic on the Italian criminal justice system if he doesn't know s**t about it?
I'm the only one qualified in this forum to post about that. The rest of you should stick to what you know and keep your day jobs.
Anonymous said...
"1) No freedom of the press"
There is freedom of speech and the press in Italy, and it's guaranteed by art. 21 of the Italian constitution. The only problem has to do with the excessive concentration of major newsmedia outlets in the hands of few companies, the largest of which is owned by the Prime Minister.
"2) No protection of citizens or other individuals, the press, or other members of the government from wiretapping"
Wiretapping must be authorized by the judiciary, like in America, in accordance to art. 266 of the CPP. It is authorized by the Judge for Preliminary Investigations upon a written motivated request by the Public Minister (Prosecutor). The law prescribes the circumstances upon which the wiretapping can be authorized.
"3) No freedom from intimidation and harassment by police and prosecutors"
If there is a country in the industrialized world where the police is notorious for intimidation and brutality, that country is the US. Actually the FBI probably should be renamed Federal Bureau of Intimidation.
"4) No right to know the charges against you when arrested."
That is totally false. An "Informazione di garanzia" is given to anybody who is subject to investigation, even when not subject to arrest. With this mandatory document prescribed by art. 369 of the CPP the prosecutor communicates to the person subject the investigation the reasons, the law violated, the time of such violation and the place of such violation. You should read the law before talking. No wonder you post under anonymous, you are ashamed of your BS.
"5) No right to know the reasons for a search of your home "
Incorrect. Before the start of the search, the police must give you a copy of the warrant ("decreto di perquisizione") where it's indicated the reason for the search. You also have the right to request that the search be conducted in the presence of your legal counsel, but only if such person can be called in within a reasonable time. Read art. 247 et seq. of the CPP, in particular read art. 249.
"6) Individuals can be held in prison for up to a year, with no charges being brought against them, virtually no proof of wrongdoing needed, and what charges exist kept secret or undefined during that year."
Nothing above is correct, not even a word.
Immediately after the arrest, the police must notify the Prosecutor and the attorney. The prosecutor, within 48 hours from the arrest, must request the judge to convalidate the arrest. The preliminary hearing is set within 48 hours.
The arrest is granted as a precautionary measure only if the following occur:
A: There is sufficient evidence to take the arrested to trial
and
B: One or more of the following circumstances apply:
1. There is danger of flight
2. There is danger of tampering of evidence by the arrested person
3. There is danger of reiteration of a crime by the arrested.
You should read art 380 et seq. on this subject which is too long to illustrate here.
Also read what I wrote above about the Informazione di Garanzia, where it's explained why you're being investigated.
"7) Welcome to Italy American tourists!"
Yes welcome to Italy American and all other tourists.
It's not a surprise that such a small country attracts every year over 36 million visitors from overseas. Good food, great history, great friendly people, beautiful sights, and very friendly law enforcement officers. You're even allowed to smoke pot without being arrested. Most people forget that in America Amanda would have spent that much time in prison just for the drug violation.
shuttlt said,
She says in her "gift" that she genuinely had memories of Patrick, of course she says she doesn't think the memories are true. She says she was under pressure, hit a couple of times and asked over and over to remember, OK. Either it's true that Amanda developed false memories in an hour and a bit, or she's lying. Did the defence produce any psychologist to back up her claim of false memories? As far as I'm aware they didn't.
As for whether the interrogation was recorded. I have no idea whether interrogations of witnesses normally are in Italy. They can't ordinarily be used against the witness so maybe it's often not done. It would be nice to know how often witness statements are recorded in Italy, but my Italian is probably not up to the task of finding out. They had also been expecting to interrogate Raffaele hours earlier, not in the middle of the night. Perhaps dissorganization and the lateness of the hour have something to do with it. Personally I think this is the best argument against the interrogation and I don't have a strong argument against it.
*****
Shuttlt,
Thanks for your thoughts.
My take on the "gift" statement is she is confused but starting to gain perspective, was still trying to cooperate with the authorities and wanted to let them know her doubts. I have no idea how the defense dealt with her statements.
I just don't buy the idea the questioning was not taped in some manner as they were taping everything else and I see no legitimate downside reason for them not to tape the event. It only makes me wonder what they would be trying to hide or why they would be so foolish not to tape an interview with a 20 year old girl from a different country in the middle of the night with no lawyer representing her and expose themselves to the accusations she may make against them regarding how she was treated. Why set the stage for a he said/she said battle when they could prove conclusively to everyone what really happened with a tape?
If you assume it was taped, then the fact that the tapes were not leaked or released by the police supports Amanda's version of events regarding what happened. Otherwise, we would be hearing the actual words or seeing the video.
If it wasn't taped, then why not? Assuming the police are acting in good faith and appropriately, what upside is there for the police not to tape the interview?
MightyMouseMignini,
My screen name is shuttLt with a lower case L as the 6 letter. There is no instruction to shut up in tended.
Juror,
The only thing I want to add about what you've just posted is that, from what I recall, the things that were taped were covert surveillance, which almost by definition one must record since it is very hard to get the people you are listening to to repeat themselves if you miss something and they are not going to be signing anything to confirm you took it all down correctly. I don't think one can use the fact that wiretaps were recorded to argue that the interrogations would have been as well.
It would be nice to have someone who knows Italian law on the pro-Amanda side to counter Al. Does anybody know of any posters we can ask?
Shuttlt,
That is a good point regarding covert surveillance would of course be taped and that in and of itself does not mean interrogations would be taped.
Putting that aside, I still see no good reason for them not to tape the interrogation. A recording provides a definitive record of what really happened, what was said and what the context was of the statements and "accusations".
Scenarior one: It was taped and the fact that it wasn't released or leaked supports Amanda's version of events.
Scenarior two: It was for whatever reason not taped and the police (or system) allowed a he said/she said situation to develop. This was their choice (or oversight as you suggest) - not Amanda's - and thus I am suspicious of why they would not document such an important interrogation. At a minimum it seems they would want to protect themselves from accusations they are up to mischief in a middle of the night interrogation of a foreign girl all alone in their country and without an attorney present.
Under either scenario, I walk away sympathetic to Amanda. This does not necessarliy make her "not guilty" but it does make me skeptical of the police.
Here is a response to the so called Italian "lawyer" with the pornographic name.
You must being attending a pretty Mickey Mouse law school to give a response like that. It is one thing to have laws on the books. It is quite another how they are ignored or implemented in real life. In practice (not in Mickey Mouse Law School), the Italian police and prosecutors ignore the laws and violate the civil rights of the citizens. The incidents set forth in the book Monster of Florence, the imprisonment of Mario Spezi, the repeated searches of his home without stated charges, and the recent convictions of Knox Prosecutor Guiliano Mignini, and Chief Inspector Michele Guitarri show just how things work in Italy. It is a joke system. Real evidence is not needed. What is relied on is superstition, hysteria, trial by media, demonization of the defendants. There is a shocking lack of common sense and serious ignorance of the basics of crime investigation and forensics. It is my opinion that given the problems with the Italian criminal justice system, it is too dangerous for Americans to travel there. The US State Department should be issuing travel advisories against travel to Italy.
"You must being attending a pretty Mickey Mouse law school to give a response like that. It is one thing to have laws on the books. It is quite another how they are ignored or implemented in real life."
Does this statement apply to the whole issue of whether the interrogation was illegal that we have discussing?
"In practice (not in Mickey Mouse Law School), the Italian police and prosecutors ignore the laws and violate the civil rights of the citizens. The incidents set forth in the book Monster of Florence, the imprisonment of Mario Spezi, the repeated searches of his home without stated charges, and the recent convictions of Knox Prosecutor Guiliano Mignini, and Chief Inspector Michele Guitarri show just how things work in Italy."
Do you know what they were actually convicted of? People talk vaguely of corruption, or abuse of power, but the only actual detailed statement I have been able to find comes from Mignini himself, clearly not the ideal source :-) The way he describes it, it really doesn't sound bad at all. I asked quite a bit over on Perugia-Shock a while back and came back with nothing.
"It is a joke system. Real evidence is not needed. What is relied on is superstition, hysteria, trial by media, demonization of the defendants. There is a shocking lack of common sense and serious ignorance of the basics of crime investigation and forensics. It is my opinion that given the problems with the Italian criminal justice system, it is too dangerous for Americans to travel there. The US State Department should be issuing travel advisories against travel to Italy."
Do you have any disagreement with Al's statements about what Italian law actually says? Clearly there is a discussion to be had on the extent to which it is actually followed, but, if Al is correct then the interrogations weren't illegal, or at least not in relation to the uncontested facts. Do you agree that in this sense the interrogations were not illegal?
"Like the interrogation, no one will ever know what happened , thanks to flub ups like Edgardo Giobbi not documenting the Interrogation correctly. It leaves everyone with speculation and suspicion.
How did the unknown DNA get on the Bra Clasp?
the same answer can be applied to Raffaeles DNA"
This is the DNA from two women that was too weak to be profiled? As opposed to Raffaele's DNA (one sixth as abundant as that of Meredith) that was described by Steffanoni, due to the quantity, as coming from vigorous contact?
Oops!Posted to the wrong thread there.
:-)
Anon says:
"it is too dangerous for Americans to travel there. The US State Department should be issuing travel advisories against travel to Italy."
It's unnecessary.
People who are so stupid to believe what you're saying in your post are not going to Italy anyway, because stupid people don't have decent jobs to be able to afford to travel.
What a totally ignorant comment by this Italian jerk "Al...." who posts on here repeatedly making things up and pretending that he knows how the Italian judicial system works, which clearly he does not.
shutit: the interrogation of Amanda Knox was clearly illegal under Italian law. She was a suspect when she was questioned. It was illegal to question her without her lawyer being present. It is really very simple and obvious that it was illegal.
"shutit: the interrogation of Amanda Knox was clearly illegal under Italian law. She was a suspect when she was questioned. It was illegal to question her without her lawyer being present. It is really very simple and obvious that it was illegal."
Do you mean in the interrogation ending at 1:45am, or the declaration ending at 5:45am? She was certainly not a suspect in the sense that necessitates a lawyer until the end of the 1:45am interrogation. As for the 5:45am one, I don't know enough about Italian law to say. Nothing in the judgement from the Supreme Court says that anything improper happened. Could you cite your source for believing it was Illegal, or the text of the law that was broken? I'm keen to track down a pro-Amanda source of legal knowledge to give another perspective to Al's, so far there haven't been any suggestions. A quote from Amanda's lawyers asserting it was illegal would be better than nothing.
shuttlt posted: "She was certainly not a suspect in the sense that necessitates a lawyer until the end of the 1:45am interrogation."
________________
Amanda Knox's Abusive Prosecutor, By Judy Bachrach
02/07/2010
"From the start, Knox’s rights had been so seriously abrogated that the highest Italian court (analagous to our Supreme Court) declared her first so-called confession should be thrown out. She was interrogated without a lawyer present. (She told her parents early on that when she asked for an attorney she was informed, "A lawyer would only complicate things.") When she insisted at first that she was innocent, she said she was slapped on the head – twice – by a policewoman, who ordered her to start remembering that she was the murderer of Meredith Kercher. Interestingly, there is no tape recording of these proceedings."
Anonymous,
Everything in that article is just an unproven assertion, aside from the bit about the Supreme Court "throw[ing] out" the confession (oh,and the lack of recording I suppose). On that point the judge said that what she said up until 1:45am was usable, just not against her, because she was only a witness.
Both she (or possibly her lawyers) and the judge say that her status changed to that of "indagata"(suspect) at 1:45am and that her rights changed at that point.
Anonymous said...
What a totally ignorant comment by this Italian jerk "Al...." who posts on here repeatedly making things up and pretending that he knows how the Italian judicial system works, which clearly he does not.
Are you calling me jerk because you don't agree with me? Or is it because you discriminate against Arabs?
How can you say I'm making things up? For everything I've said I quoted the exact articles of the Penal Code and the Code of Penal Procedure. If you think I'm wrong show me. I can also quote jurisprudence papers about interpretations of each. Show me wrong if you think you know better. You can't make assertions without showing proper sources. Show me a sentence of the Supreme Court of Cassation showing me I'm wrong, not articles in stupid Seattle newspapers from people who don't know anything about Italian law or law procedure.
CALLING ME AN IGNORANT ITALIAN JERK DOESN'T PROVE ANYTHING!
SHOW ME THE LEGAL SOURCE OF YOUR CRAP! ANONYMOUS JERK!
Yummi/Al, whoever: you should stop pretending you are Arab. You insult the Arabs by using a fake Arab sounding name to disguise the obscenity that you are directing to other posters through your name. And stop calling people jerks.
It it common to record the phone conversations of witnesses in Italy?
Amanda's phone call to Filomena at 22:29 on the night of Nov. 5th was recorded by the police. We know it was because the prosecutor played back the recording in court. Amanda didn't sign the statement until 1:45 the next day, so officially she was just a witness when that call was recorded.
They recorded her calls on the 5th? Wow, so she was already a suspect by November 5th! And how did they justify that wiretap? Oh, I forgot, they did not like the way she wiggled her hips when she put on the booties over her shoes. If they were recording her calls on the 5th, then I'd say they were already gunning for her before she even started that fateful interrogation. So....it turns out the interrogation was all just a TRAP!
Anonymous,
Everybody already knows that the police suspected them from very early on. The police say this quite explicitly and Bruce has an entire article dedicated to the topic. Deductions about wiretaps aren't required to prove that they suspected her.
As for her being a witness when the call was recorded.... clearly, since it was played in court, wiretapping witnesses is allowed. If they hadn't followed proper procedure I imagine we'd have heard about it.
Kestrel said...
It it common to record the phone conversations of witnesses in Italy?
YES.
Magistrates get permission from the judge to eavesdrop on a lot of people to aid them in the investigation.
When Anna Franzoni, suspected (and later convicted) in the murder of her child in the Cogne case, the police wiretapped members of her entire extended family, even people living far away.
That's how they discovered that some distant members of her family, along with her husband, conspired to plant evidence on an unsuspecting neighbor to save Ms. Franzoni from conviction.
It seems like virtually anyone in Italy can be bugged. They are probably bugging the Pope.
What is not clear to me is what a "life sentence" means in Italy. Does this mean that the person stays in jail until he or she dies? Or can a person with a life sentence get out in a certain number of years? Can a person with a life sentence get term reductions, such as reductions for good behavior or for number of years served, such as someone would get if they had a 26 year sentence?
Anonymous said...
It seems like virtually anyone in Italy can be bugged. They are probably bugging the Pope.
They certainly have bugged the Prime Minister many times and many of his conversations have been leaked to the press (that's why Berlusconi is so mad at Italian judges and prosecutors).
They probably aren't bugging the Pope since he's the head of a foreign State. But I wouldn't exclude that possibility. That'd be good though, we might find out about some of his pedophile priests and cardinals.
Maria said...
"What is not clear to me is what a "life sentence" means in Italy. Does this mean that the person stays in jail until he or she dies? Or can a person with a life sentence get out in a certain number of years? Can a person with a life sentence get term reductions, such as reductions for good behavior or for number of years served, such as someone would get if they had a 26 year sentence?"
It doesn't mean much. There are very few 'life sentenced' inmates in Italy. Only about 1,500 (compare with over 130,000 in California alone). And unless they're truly dangerous, they usually get released earlier and benefit from various forms of privileges, such as the semi-liberty regimen, which gives you permission to spend most of the day out to work and let you have permits to visit friends and family on weekends. Basically you go back to jail to sleep at night (that's not too bad, you can save on rent).
Italians are very nice people. They like to imprison innocent people but then they treat them well while they're in jail.
By the way, there is very little chance the appeal court will inflict the life sentence to AK and RS.
At most they'll confirm the years they got. There is no way the Appeal court would give AK and RS life in prison (which in Italy is given very rarely) while Rudy get's away with 24 year sentence (less the automatic 1/3 discount, which reduced it to 16).
Give the way the trials went, the most likely outcome is the same sentence for everybody (which is 24 years for murder, however Rudy gets the 1/3 discount because his lawyers were smart enough to go for the short trial). The Supreme Court, which must ensure the uniformity of application of the law, will not allow to have sentences materially different for the 3 of them, since the courts established they were all equally involved.
If Amanda and Raffaele get away with murder on account of insufficient evidence, then the judges will be subject to intense criticism if Rudy is the only one to take the blame. That would be seen as deeply unfair (and racist).
So my prediction is confirmation of the sentences, or maybe slight decrease. However they'll be all out free in about 8-10 years.
But there is a real difference in the evidence against Rudy and the other two. The evidence against Rudy includes his DNA all over the place, including in the victim, plus his fingerprints, plus his admission that he had sex with her and then was present during the assault and then left her there to die alone. The evidence against the other two is mostly very shaky DNA. Clearly, there is reasonable doubt as to their guilt given the absence of clear evidence that they were in Kercher's bedroom. But since the Italians just adopted the reasonable doubt standard in 2006, they apparently do not know reasonable doubt means.
Al-Fakh Yugoudh said: "That would be seen as deeply unfair (and racist"
Please tell me how race had anything to do with this case. This case had nothing at all to do with race.
Anon says..."But since the Italians just adopted the reasonable doubt standard in 2006.."
That standard has always been present. It was codified formally with the Law no. 46 of 20 Feb. 2006 which modified art. 533 of the Code of Penal Procedure, however such codification was merely a formal legal recognition to a principle that was already present in the Italian judicial system.
Bruce Fisher: nothing racial so far, but if Rudy gets convicted and Amanda/Raf get away with it, some will certainly accuse the judges to have let class and race play a role in their decision.
Oh, so the difference in evidence of Guede's guilt vs. the paltry evidence against the college students should not have an impact on the outcome! If the Italians had the reasonable doubt standard for a while, they sure don't bother to follow their own rules because there is a ton of reasonable doubt in this case, yet according to you, they will need to convict Amanda and Raff so that the Italians don't look racist! Your description of the way it should go would be almost comical if there was not so much human suffering being inflicted on two innocent families.
There is only one innocent family in this saga. That's the Kerchers.
Obviously the judges have no reasonable doubt since they convicted them UNANIMOUSLY.
It's not so much racism. It's the fact that Rudy's conviction by his judges (including the appeal judges) is based on the premise that he did it together with the other two because the evidence points (in their opinion) to a group crime. That's the rationale of his conviction.
If they acquitted AK and RS then the rationale of Guede's conviction would fall apart as well. Remember the judges (in both Rudy's and Amanda's trial) categorically excluded that murder was committed by a lone wolf.
So unless the mysterious killer dreamed up by Alessi surfaces, Amanda and Raffaele will be convicted in appeal as well. If not, there would be definitely some political hanky panky going on there and I don't believe it will happen.
I like what you post Al, because I think you have insight into how the Italian judicary thinks. However, the basis of the courts decision is not rational. You can argue all day about that, but there is simply no need for, nor reason to believe in, additional killers than Rudy Guede. Amanda and Raffaele are guilty because of a fantasy the court wants to believe in.
My understanding of the appeal though is that it is like a new trial. They do not have to accept the prior jury's conclusions or rationale. In fact, I think I read on this site somewhere that the jury is better educated on the appeal, which certainly will help Amanda and Raffaele.
Also, I am hoping the defense will be able to present evidence to refute the dna claims of the prosecution, which I am told they were not allowed at trial. Plus, it would be interesting to find out what is on those hard drives, wouldn't it be. Perhaps that will be allowed.
In short, on appeal, at least there is hope they will receive a fair trial based on evidence before an impartial, educated jury. In that case, they are as good as free.
Moodstream you can believe that the court's rationale was fantasy, but actually both Rudy's conviction (including the appeal) and AK/RS are consistent in their motivations: the murder was perpetrated during a group sexual assault. Also don't forget that the Corte d'assise d'appello which convicted Rudy in the appeal is the same court that will judge AK+RS (although not necessarily the same judge).
Regarding the education level of jurors I don't think it will have an impact. The education requirements are just 'de minimis', meaning that the appeal jurors must have at least a high school diploma, whereas at the first trial they're required to have completed at least middle school. However It's possible that all of the jurors at the first trial might have met the requirements for the appeal as well, i.e. it's possible that even at the first trial all of them had at least a high school diploma. There aren't too many Italians under 50 without one, and those who are older, when high school education was less prevalent, probably had a better education anyway since schools were much more rigorous. So don't assume that the 6 who were part of the jury at the first trial were not educated. One was a lawyer, so he certainly knew a thing or two, maybe even more than the judges, one was an executive secretary to a school principal, and one was an entrepreneur. I don't know about the others, but those 3 alone don't strike me as being illiterate peasants.
Regarding the hard drives I don't know what they would solve. The damaged hard drive belong to AK's computer (which she wasn't using that night) and Raffaele's second computer. The hard drive to his Mac Notebook wasn't damaged and we know that's the one that would have been used that night. That's the one used for the movie and the one that was always online. Why would Raf use the other computer to go online and surf if we know that the MAC was already on and connected to Internet at all times. That's not reasonable to believe. The other computer, which he kept off as a back up wouldn't help much to the investigation of his computer activity. The analysis of the MAC shows the use until 9:10 and then again at 00:58 am. Between those times the computer was on and online, however there was no human activity, no visiting of websites etc. Why would he have used the other computer to surf the net, if that one was already on and connected.
"Why would Raf use the other computer to go online and surf if we know that the MAC was already on and connected to Internet at all times. That's not reasonable to believe."
I'd still like to find out. It may seem less likely, but it's far from impossible. It would certainly free them if so, and, so, why not make them available? What's it to the prosecution?
Hi Moodstream,
When I read your recent post,
"I like what you post Al, because I think you have insight into how the Italian judicary thinks.",
well, it got me thinking, A LOT,
about "Al-Fakh Yugoudh".
I think this person is simply a knowledgable TROLL, the name this person is posting under is bulls**t, for who posts on forums over the Internet using their real name, as this person claims it is above.
Do a Google search, he/she is on sooo many different website forums spreading the same bulls**t about Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox!
This person seems to be from Italy, but strangley, recently posted in some "California High Speed Rail Blog" about "San Francisco-San Jose Alternatives Analysis Revives the Berkeley Solution", and seems to know ALOT about Caltrans here in California, and the "Peninsula residents".
Check out the post on the bottom of this link:
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2010/04/sf-sj-alternatives-analysis-revives-the-berkeley-solution/#comment-73767
_______________________________________________
And please, DO NOT feed the TROLL!!!
Thanks,
Randy in Los Angeles
"I'd still like to find out. It may seem less likely, but it's far from impossible. It would certainly free them if so, and, so, why not make them available? What's it to the prosecution?"
The ISP can tell what if any websites were visited and when. They don't need the computers to tell this. If Raffaele or Amanda start claiming they were using one of the other computers to do something other than surf the internet they would probably be worth a check.
I realize I'm probably the only one interested in the whole "Suffering from extreme exhaustion with no food nor water, after a long and grueling interrogation," business, but the following quote interested me:
"Amanda venne trattata bene, le vennero date camomilla, merendine e venne anche accompagnata a fare colazione al bar - fa notare la Napoleoni -. No, nessuna pressione. Certo, è stata trattata con fermezza ma non maltrattata"
"Amanda was treated well, were given chamomile tea, snacks and was also accompanied to breakfast at the bar - notes the Napoleons -. No, no pressure. Sure, it was dealt with firmly but not abused."
http://lanazione.ilsole24ore.com/perugia/2009/02/28/154670-uccisa_scena_inguardabile.shtml
So? What fool would believe these people. Amanda had no lawyer, no interpreter, those two facts are beyond dispute and profoundly unfair. She was heard crying. She wanted to call her mother but they refused to allow her. They discouraged her from calling a lawyer. They would not allow her to leave and kept her up all night. They hit her on the head and threatened her with 30 years in prison if she did not give them information on a suspect. Who the hell cares about tea and snacks! They were raping her rights and setting her up for disaster and the loss of liberty for 26 years. Tea and cakes my ass!
Still, why not release the computers? The defense wants them and the prosecution says it's meaningless. Why not?
Moodstream,
Personally, I have no problem with the defence knocking themselves out getting the computers analysed. Having said that, so far as I'm aware, the only things the defence claim might be on them are some pictures of Amanda and Meredith together. Do you know of any more significant claims?
Hey Anonymous Randy in Los Angeles. I never denied of being an Arab-Italian living in San Francisco. That's well known to anybody who's exchanged posts with me in the blogs about Amanda Knox.
My post on the High Speed rail proves that, unlike you, I have other interests besides this case.
Hi Al-Fakh "THE TROLL" Yogoudh,
Let's see, you say above that Al-Fakh Yugoudh is your name. So you post on forums with your real name.
So I Googled your name, which brings up your garbage that you continuosly post on many websites about Raffaele and Amanda, and then I found your California Caltrain post.
You are not posting from Italy,
as you seem to appear.
A person, such as yourself who posts on so many different websites is a "TROLL" with an agenda,
for what other reason would YOU spend so much time reading, posting, and replying on these many websites?
I just did a USsearch.com name search using
"Your real name" Al-Fakh Yugoudh, it does not exist.
I also did a MSN White pages name search,
and once more, it does not exist.
I even gave you another chance and tried variations of it, with no success.
"I'll-F*ck YouGood" oops, I mean Al-Fakh Yugoudh,
you are a lying Troll, crawl back into wherever the h*ll you came from...
Randy in Los Angeles,
a surfer who enjoys reading up about this case, who at first thought that Raffaele and Amanda were GUILTY 1 1/2 years ago, but who changed his mind after much research...
PS-Being proud of your Italian/Arab heritage, why do you mention you post on blogs about Amanda Knox, souldn't your focus be on Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian brudda?
Let's hear some more spewage, bro...
My guess is that Al Fuck Ya Good is an Italian lawyer who is associated with prosecutor Mignini.
Does anybody have any actual criticism of the legal content of Al-Fakh Yugoudh's posts. Perhaps he is Mignini himself, but if it is going to be claimed that the interrogation is illegal shouldn't it be possible for someone to specifically point to the law that was broken, or quote a legal judgement where the interrogation was found to be illegal? Otherwise this claim is just anonymous people on the internet quoting other anonymous people on the internet and has no source or authority.
Hey Randy in LA.
I also did a search on the White Pages, couldn't find any Randy in LA.
I guess you don't exist.
Al-Fakh means 'the trap' in arabic.
Where I write from, or under which name shouldn't be your focus.
Your focus should be the validity of my statements.
Find me a legal document where the interrogation was declared illegal.
There isn't one. Because the Suprema Corte di Cassazione never made that statement.
The statement that the Supreme court declared that Amanda's civil rights were violated came from Edda Mellas on a TV interview which I watched.
If that is your source, poor you! You're really eating bait, line and sinker.
The Knoxes, under the advice of some savvy PR and marketing people, know very well by now, that if you keep feeding lies to the media, they'll publish it, because journalists are too lazy to check. And if they publish your lies, a lot of people out there will actually believe it's true.
I still remember another big lie told by the Knoxes on TV: "If the 8 judges/jurors have a tie vote (4 guilty and 4 not guilty), the presiding judge will get a second vote and break the tie".
Do you remember that one? It was so well told, that I heard it in many outlets, even Andrea Vogt on the Seattle PI bought it and reported in an article of hers.
Well, if these lazy journalists have bothered to check the facts instead of buying everything they're told, they would have found out that it was hogwash.
There is no second vote by the presiding judge. If the jurors are equally split on the sentence, the sentence which prevails is the one that is more favorable to the defendant.
Hi Al "the Troll",
Because you post here, and elsewhere, with such authority, I had thought that your posts where full of true information.
But by using, what you say is your "real name", you were then ID-able, so you fell into your own "Arabic" trap.
With regards to the following statement:
"Al-Fakh means 'the trap' in arabic.
Where I write from, or under which name shouldn't be your focus.
Your focus should be the validity of my statements"...
I will pass on trying to focus on their "validity", since you lie about your name, you'll lie about other things too...
Since I luv to read, not watch TV, I have read, in depth, this forum, Perugia Shock, TJMK, PMF, etc.
After first believing the written media word, I then started to question things, and my opinion changed, as did Frank Sfarzo of Perugia Shock and many others, from guilty to innocent, regarding the conviction of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox.
Frank Sfarzo, from what I have read, went to the trial DAILY, and it was very interesting to see him change his opinion about Raffaele and Amanda's involvement. Strangely, the kind folks at PMF now direct some of their hate at his website for not agreeing with them anymore...
Randy in Los Angeles
Randy.
You shouldn't trust everything I say. I might be a compulsive liar like Amanda and look how much trouble she caused to a lot of people because of that.
But you can check on your own if what I wrote is incorrect. You shouldn't do like journalists who take what they are told by the Knox family or lawyers at face value.
Article 527 of the Italian Code of Penal Procedure would be a good start.
Al-Fakh Yugoudh,
Do you mean this (apologies in advance for the Google translate):
" 1. After Article 527 of the Criminal Procedure Code shall be inserted:
"Article 527 - bis (Decision of the jury in the judgments of competence of a single judge of first instance) - 1. The jury decided in closed session by majority vote expressed pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article 527.
2.The determination of the sentence provides the president of the jury. "
http://www.camera.it/_dati/leg14/lavori/stampati/sk4000/articola/3649.htm
Wow... I gave up trying to follow the history of back and forth comments trying to catch up.
We can believe Amanda's testimony at trial. Why? Because she and her lawyers knew that if she said anything relevant that was false they would magically find the tape of that "questioning" and prove her wrong.
She had to be under the advisement to absolutely say everything to best of her ability and accuse them of wrong-doing only to the extent that they did wrong.
They don't want that tape to see the light of day for good reason. They are hiding the proof of their misconduct.
Shuttlt:
I don't know what you posted. What you got is from the website of the lower house of Parliament. From what you wrote, I think it's some kind of bill meant to introduce some changes to the CPP in particular the insertion of a new article (527-bis). It's probably still sitting in Parliament, or maybe it never passed. There is no art. 527-bis currently (maybe there will be if that bill passes into law).
Below is art. 527. Comma 3 explains the voting procedures of the judges in a Court of Assizes, in case of disagreement.
Fire up your Google.
Art. 527.
Deliberazione collegiale.
1. Il collegio, sotto la direzione del presidente, decide separatamente le questioni preliminari non ancora risolte e ogni altra questione relativa al processo. Qualora l'esame del merito non risulti precluso dall'esito della votazione, sono poste in decisione le questioni di fatto e di diritto concernenti l'imputazione e, se occorre, quelle relative all'applicazione delle pene e delle misure di sicurezza nonché quelle relative alla responsabilità civile.
2. Tutti i giudici enunciano le ragioni della loro opinione e votano su ciascuna questione qualunque sia stato il voto espresso sulle altre. Il presidente raccoglie i voti cominciando dal giudice con minore anzianità di servizio e vota per ultimo. Nei giudizi davanti alla corte di assise votano per primi i giudici popolari, cominciando dal meno anziano per età .
3. Se nella votazione sull'entità della pena o della misura di sicurezza si manifestano più di due opinioni, i voti espressi per la pena o la misura di maggiore gravità si riuniscono a quelli per la pena o la misura gradatamente inferiore, fino a che venga a risultare la maggioranza. In ogni altro caso, qualora vi sia parità di voti, prevale la soluzione più favorevole all'imputato.
"We can believe Amanda's testimony at trial. Why? Because she and her lawyers knew that if she said anything relevant that was false they would magically find the tape of that "questioning" and prove her wrong.
She had to be under the advisement to absolutely say everything to best of her ability and accuse them of wrong-doing only to the extent that they did wrong."
ForTruth. Your justification for believing Amanda relies on an assumption that the Amanda's lawyers believe the interrogation was taped and that the police are liars who set out to force a confession out of Amanda and conceal the evidence. Would you agree that if either of these assumptions are false that we have no reason to believe her? As for the tape that you think exists, if indeed it contains evidence of a prolonged interrogation in which she was exhausted, denied food and water, threatened and hit to the point where she developed false memories, don't you think it would be more damaging to the police than Amanda?
"...Would you agree that if either of these assumptions are false that we have no reason to believe her?..."
I'm not ForTruth, but I wanted to point out that this is a false choice. If the two assumptions are false, that would not in and of itself make her testimony untrue. Further, you are suggesting that ForTruth's reasoning is flawed, but have not demonstrated how. It makes sense that Amanda's lawyers would advise her not to indulge in demonstrable lies. Why the rush to dismiss this, unless to undermine the credibility of her testimony? You need stronger support to do this convincingly.
Who cares if interrogation was "illegal".
If Amanda's version is made up, then it is reasonable to assume the police don't have a video that would prove her wrong. They don't have a video, so Amanda is correct or it was not taped and we just have an endless "he said/she said" with both sides having a motivation to lie - hardly useful as evidence of anything.
Simpleton,
I think it depends on why one says it's illegal. If it's the abusive treatment that she says she received and the police says she didn't, then it is, as you say, a case of "he said, she said". That's not what Bruce and some others are saying though. They say that the interrogation as documented by the police was illegal (because they suspected her, but didn't grant her the rights of somebody that they had publicly and formally declared to be a suspect) and was found to be illegal by the Supreme Court.
Shuttlt,
With all due respect, you are losing the forest through the trees.
Whether it was technically legal or illegal or whatever - who really cares? Anything coming out of the interrogation is not useful as it boils down to a "he said/she said". It is unfortunate the cops chose not to tape such an important interrogation (and I could care less if they are required to or not).
The fact is that the issue of the interrogation worked against Amanda at the first trial. This whole thing about Amanda pointing at Lumumba was viewed as incriminating against Amanda. That was stated in the Sentencing Motivation report.
But that seems very unfair since the interrogation was illegal and in violation of her basic rights. If Mignini and crew had not illegally interrogated her--and instead allowed her to have a lawyer there--she would never have lost it like she did, would never have been allowed by her attorney to make such statements, would never have been allowed by her attorney to sign anything. Likely, her attorney would have dragged her right out of there immediately.
Mignini and crew knew that, which is why they did not want her to have an attorney there. Instead, they wanted to take advantage of her, and were very successful at that. But hey, she was only a 20 year old girl, not a big Mafioso, so the cops really shouldn't feel so proud that they could take advantage of her. It was a little bit like taking candy from a baby.
"... This whole thing about Amanda pointing at Lumumba was viewed as incriminating against Amanda. That was stated in the Sentencing Motivation report. ... "
It was, indeed. And consistent with the tendency of observers to subject anything Knox has said or written to self-indulgent pseudo-psychoanlaysis. Virtually everything is subject to misquoting, being taken out of context, and selective paraphrasing. (Take the latest "bombshell" about how Knox has admitted guilt in her letter to her friend. Never mind that the citations concern her feelings about having given in to the police pressure during her interrrogation and not, as theorized, an admission of guilt for anything more than that.)
I find the reasoning behind all of the speculations to be fascinating! Tortured, convoluted, overly-complicated, and far more revealing of the mindset that needs to attribute guilt to this single person than of the crime itself.
BRUCE FISHER.
It is misleading for you to title this session the ILLEGAL interrogation.
The interrogation was not declared illegal by any courts of law.
For the sake of truth in reporting, you should change it to "THE INTERROGATION", or at most "the CONTESTED INTERROGATION".
For the sake of truth in reporting, the title to this section should be changed to "THE INTERROGATION", or at most "the CONTESTED INTERROGATION".
How about the Interrogation which the Supreme Court ruled to be inadmissible in the Knox/Sollecito trial, but, in a mockery of justice and a violation of basic rights, was admitted anyway due to the Lumumba defamation/slander case?
Bob
Thanks Bob - I think this sums it up nicely.
1.The evidence is inadmissible - jurors shouldn't hear it.
2. It is admissible in the Lumumba case.
3. Both cases are tried together, so the jurors hear evidence ruled inadmissible.
Add 1,2, and 3 together and you get Italian Justice - or a good South Park episode.
Not only was the information about the interrogation admitted into the trial, the judges expressly relied on that information in reaching the criminal verdict, as stated in the Motivation report. It does indeed make a mockery of the Italian legal system, given that the Italian Supreme Court had already ruled that the information was inadmissable in the criminal trial.
Perhaps this discussion should be called "The forced confessions"? Sure, it's not illegal to question witnesses, but it is illegal to question suspects without allowing them opportunity to exercise their rights. So, the outcome was, despite the protests, inadmissible.
I find it tragic folks don't understand that a person will say anything when under the control of others.
A young girl, surrounded by police, kept up all night...
On this alone the case should be thrown out!
Here is a very interesting passage from Nadeau's book on Patrick Lumumba:
"Amanda, pressed on the point in her late night interrogation, under intense questioning, finally fingered Patrick Lumumba, who was quickly arrested.
But a Swiss professor named Roman Mero came forward to say he had been at Patrick's bar the night of the murder, giving him an ironclad alibi, and the police "eventually" let the bar owner go.
But for months they tormented Patrick, auditing his books, and checking his residential and financial status.
In an attempt to save face - and to avoid a false imprisonment suit - the police had hoped to charge Lumumba for something, but they never could."
In other words, even Nadeau admits the police were on a witch hunt to save face - they knew Amanada's so-called confession meant absolutely nothing.
They couldn't get Patrick, but they got Amanda and Raffaele.
This case has been all about saving face, and most unfortunately, will continue to be about saving face during the appeal. This is why I fear for Amanda and Raff, and why the US government MUST get involved. There needs to be an organized campaign to get the US government involved.
This would be the worst thing to do. Although completely unjust, the trial was procedurally correct.
If our gov't attacked the Italian system, they would circle their wagons.Any chance of an acquittal would disappear. The Italian authorities could never look like they caved in to U.S. pressure!
However, we must hope that there is enormous pressure behind the scenes, that can never be made public, to free Amanda and Raf. We will never know this till way after they are home.
From trial transcript it appears that AK named Lumumba voluntarily when told that RS blew her alibi. Why some people say that police forced her to name Lumumba?
My best guess is that you are one of those pseudo-intellectual 'translators' from the Dark Side. "Why some people say"? Please. If you can't speak English, how can we trust your translation skills? You are boring everyone with your knee-jerk regurgitation of Dark Side talking points.
Anon 8:44: listen to AK's testimony in English. She explains very clearly how she did not volunteer Lumumba's name: only her phone, which had the text from Lumumba on it, and which the police used to concoct the story that they forced her to corroborate.
Read Candace Dempsey's account of the interrogation, based on interviews with the police officer's involved.
They virtually mentally beat it out of her. She was alone, and surrounded - didn't stand a chance.
That's why she took up pen and paper and, in her own convoluted way, said it was all fantasy. If you understand how to read it, it is a complete denial.
My best guess is that you are one of those pseudo-intellectual 'translators' from the Dark Side. "Why some people say"?
the person writing is not in the translation team. I don't know who he is. But I know the translation team.
No - I simply understand how a confused, terrified young girl, with no sleep, would express herself.
Realizing she was forced to create a fantasy that never happened to please her captors, but still in their control, Amanda attempted best she could to express this.
That note clearly says what she remembered for the police was fantasy, if you understand the conditions under which she wrote it - and the kind of writer she was.
I posted this link in the Guilters thread, forgot about this one. The slander trial in regards to what she said at the trial about the interrogation, is about to begin.
http://www.king5.com/news/local/Knox-facing-slander-trial-defense-crying-foul-93737119.html
On the one hand, it's clear that the prosecutor is using this to discredit Amanda and her defense in anticipation of her appeal. On the other hand, he's putting himself under the same microscope that he's been subjecting others to. Let's see if this double-edged sword cuts one way or the other...
Will be interesting to see what happens, although by doing it now, and the appeal is successful, he could lose this last avenue of keeping her in Italy. Still, with the prosecution being able to sue for slander every week at times, if acquitted under that system, can she sue them for a change, like militious prosecution?
I will write a complete description from Dempsey's book later, right now I am too upset. The police knew her mother was arriving next morning, and had to get Amanda in isolation before they could meet.
If Amanda had a lawyer, she would be home now, and none of this would have happened. Guede would have been identified a few day later, and that would have been it - the police would have completely forgotten about Amanda & Raffaele.
The police called them in at 10pm on the evening of the 5th, knowing they were at friends having dinner and smoking pot, to make sure Amanda did not meet her mother the next day.
Amazingly, Amanda & Raffaele did not suspect a thing. Why - because they were totally innocent - in every way imaginable.
Its saddening to think the police would stoop so low as to drain down someone enough and then accept their statement.
I think the police was hurrying, the pressured interrogation, knowing the Mom and soon an attorney would show up.
If only a legal defense support was allowed it would have broken this severely forced "fast track" interrogation.
If the Perugia police had only waited..
for Rudys evidence to surface Amanda and Raffaele would not have been needed to close their case, in record time, via the interrogation.
I guess I expected more fomr those in uniforms, expected
...and now the same "uniforms" want to indict Amanda for slander!
Is slander the actual crime that she's being charged with? Frank at Perugia Shock suggested (in his posted interview with Commodi) that there would have to be a named victim of the slander for the charge to be valid. It would be nice to have a legal perspective on this. There are those who charge that, because Amanda did not identify the police officer who slapped her in the back of her head (not 'beat' her, as the UK press has reported), that she must not be telling the truth. If what Frank suggested is true, then her lawyers would have rightly advised her not to name anyone in open court.
I really wonder about the probability of a conviction on this charge, given what I've read. First, there is the possibility that the charge may be dropped, or the requested change of PM and judge may be allowed. I also have seen some cynical reports of this charge in the Italian press, which suggests that the prosecutor may be overplaying his hand in this case.
Would work well if Italians finally realize Amanda is being persecuted!
I have just reread the chilling details in Candace Dempsey's excellent book - do they really want this to come out?
I just read the documents Charlie Wilkes posted, and its just unimaginable to be a foreigner in a interrogation like that, without any support.
The Italian squad, numerous shouting, pressured...
and then to sign these papers, thinking they would let you go home finally, if you gave them something.
This is bad enough in the US, but in a foreign country it smells of corruption to move forward without getting Amanda and Raffaele some legal support.
I don't care what the "accepted legal procedure weasel hole" is. It wasn't right and the police know it wasn't right what they did.
...but will never admit it!
I wish someone could post more about the Supreme Court decision and also how it will affect the court June 4th.
Obviously shuttlt is pro Mignini.
Which is a shame as he is a smoldering pile of donkey dung.
The interrogation was totally illegal.
Mignini's presents does not make it legal,because he is a prosecutor.
Therefore he is not looking out for the interest of the accised.
The argument by Shuttlt is obsurd.
Migini set his sights on Amanda from the getgo and never changed his mind,he did however change his motive several times.
Get off of you igh horse Shuttlt.
Mignini is a fraud.
Your support of Mignini is bordeing on a schoolgirl cruch just like Barbie Nadeau.
Obviously shuttlt is pro Mignini.
Which is a shame as he is a smoldering pile of donkey dung.
The interrogation was totally illegal.
Mignini's presents does not make it legal,because he is a prosecutor.
Therefore he is not looking out for the interest of the accused.
The argument by Shuttlt is obsurd.
Migini set his sights on Amanda from the getgo and never changed his mind,he did however change his motive several times.
Get off of your high horse Shuttlt.
Mignini is a fraud.
Your support of Mignini is bordeing on a schoolgirl cruch just like Barbie Nadeau.
This threat made for an interesting read. There may be a case to be made that AK's admission that she was at the house were coerced, but if there is a case, why not make it? Why the need to make things up? Does Bruce himself not believe that a couple of hours rough, but legal questioning would be enough to make AK be susceptible to fantasies etc. Obviousy he isn't convinced, hence the need to invent an "illegal" interrogation over many hours with words like "extreme exhaustion", "without food or drink".
Shuttlt attempted bravely to get an answer from Bruce about the use of the word "illegal", and Bruce's failure to respond adequately is poor. Unless the only purpose of this site is to preach to the converted.
I'm genuinely open-minded about AK's guilt or innocence, but it can't help her cause when there are clearly lies and misrepresentations used to make her case. If the truth will set her free, it's probably time to start deploying this weapon and time to stop relying on buffoons like Steve Moore etc making silly arguments based on untruths. Just a thought.
A few clarifications, if you please:
-what threat?
-the case that the statement was coerced has been made, many times;
-the statement was determined by the Italian Supreme Court to have been obtained illegally, and therefore, was not admissable as evidence, and the characterization of 'illegal' is valid;
-shuttlt has demonstrated 'bravery' by advancing an argument on the Internet, by insulting other posters, or by declaring his/herself the sole authority on Italian law to post on this site? (Not one of these rises to the characterization of 'brave' IMO.)
-Steve Moore is making statements voluntarily: no one is 'relying' on him.
If you are genuinely open-minded, then seek meaningful answers to questions such as: why is there so little physical evidence of either Amanda or Raffaele in Meredith's room, and no evidence at all of a clean-up? Why did the police rush to judgement before completing the investigation? Why is there no record of the most critical interrogations--the ones that led to the arrests of Amanda and Raffaele?
Re What threat? I meant "thread" which may be a UK and/or old-fashioned description of email banter. Apologies for the typo.
You confuse illegal with inadmissible. As I understand it, AK's statement was ruled inadmissible, but not because it was obtained illegally. Maybe I'm wrong about that, I'm not sure, but my impression is that FOA consistently exaggerate and misrepresent. As I said, I am genuinely open-minded about whether AK is innocent or guilty. I've no idea. How could I? But what leads me to suspect she is guilty is AK's own lies and the lies of FOA to explain away those lies. I.e. All the rubbish about all night interrogations, extreme hunger, thirst etc. Lumamba was fingered as the murderer within a couple of hours of AK being questioned after she went to the police station voluntarily. That may well have been the result of stress on AK's part, devious questions and even police violence. But that isn't the argument that Bruce made. Bruce made up a load of rubbish about hours and hours of questioning and painted a picture of a young girl at the point of physical breakdown. Now that was obviously a pack of lies and does a disservice to AK. So my point was just this: If the truth will set Amanda free, there's no need to make things up, is there? Or is there?
Re your questions, there isn't all that much physical evidence of Rudy either. But there's RS's DNA on the bra strap of course. There obviously is evidence of a clean-up. How else could drops of Meredith's blood have got there unless as a result of a clean up operation. No idea why the critical investigations aren't on record. That's one of the various factors that make me doubt the prosecution case.
I've no idea about DNA evidence. FOA keep saying it's weak, as does every defence team of somebody who is convicted. I know nothing of the science and so can't form much of a judgement on that.
Re Shuttlt, by brave I meant phenomenally patient and persistent. He was consistently abused and yet abused nobody in return. His posts stood out as a beacon of intelligence and good manners on this site (and other barmy and abusive sites on which this case is debated).
Sorry, re evidence of a clean up, I meant to say drops of Meredith's blood "in the bathroom".
And why would Rudy lock the door? Or pu
Whether the interrogation is legal or not is a purely technical issue. What is transparently clear is that there must have been some pressure placed on Amanda during these interrogations for her to sign incriminating statements. The police seem to claim that she merely “buckled” after they told her that Raffaelle was no longer providing her with an alibi. To confess being at the cottage and accuse Patrick is a strange thing to do as a response. If the police did lie to her about having evidence of her at the cottage then this might have induced her to confess to being there but then why mitigate one risk by exposing herself to another one by claiming Patrick was there? She knew Patrick, who was a family man, was working that night and very likely to have an alibi. Surely it would have been more sensible to make up a complete stranger and let the police chase a phantom? But, anyway, do the police admit that they lied to her about having evidence?
What undermines the credibility or competence of the police and prosecution most of all is their reaction to her retraction in the voluntary note she wrote less than 24 hours after signing the earlier statements. They ignored it and left Patrick in prison for 2 weeks until an alibi finally corroborated Amanda’s note. What is worse, they profoundly misunderstood the note, claiming it confirmed her earlier accusation of Patrick, by plucking the phrase “I stand by what I said” out of the context of its sentence and the retracting expressions it was part of. Incredibly, this perverse interpretation seems to have been accepted by judges who allowed the trial for slander to proceed in parallel with the trial for murder, and the judges and the jury who ultimately decided Amanda was guilty.
If the police are capable of misunderstanding the voluntary note, mistaking an expression of doubt for an explicit accusation, they would have been perfectly capable of transcribing her equivocal verbal testimony as an explicit accusation as well. If they are capable of this, they cannot then find fault in Amanda for signing a statement explicitly asserting Patrick as the murderer when she had only ever suggested this as a remote possibility because of what seemed to be memory. Of course she should not have signed these statements, but then, if she had had the benefit of a lawyer, she would not have done, and therefore her signature is far more understandable and excusable than the actions of the police and prosecution.
MGI, the legality of the interrogation isn't a technical issue insofar as this description is used by campaigners as the main plank of their case. I.e. Statements such as "breach of human rights", "no food or drink", "52 hours of questioning", "exhaustion", "water-boarding" are invariably used, because the campaigners presumably don't believe that a person would confess with a relatively short interview and they feel they have to make things up. In fact, the naming of Lumumba happened less than 3 hours into the interview. Yes, it's a long time, but it shouldn't result in exhaustion and delusions. It might be that the police used these 3 hours to beat and torture her into confessing, but it's implausible and not argued by campaigners.
Regarding your point that naming Lumumba was "strange", the scenario may have been as follows: The police backed AK into a corner saying that her alibi didn't hold because of mobile records and the fact RS had cracked and was no longer saying he was with her all night. So, boxed into a corner and being grilled about the text from Lumumba she used it as a diversionary tactic. The aim wasn't to stitch up Lumumba, but she just took the opportunity to throw the investigation off the rails and give herself time to think. By saying something ludicrous (as opposed to saying she didn't know the attacker), she's aware that that doesn't actually put her at the scene of the crime. By all accounts, she gave it the full theatrics when naming him, presumably aware as she was doing it that she could later recant and say it was "a dream" or the result of exhaustion/delusion/suggestion.
Under your scenario, it doesn't make sense that the police make her confess to Lumumba being the murderer. They didn't know who he was, so why would they fix on the idea of his guilt before AK mentioned it? They might have pressed her for answers and even clipped her on the back of the head (though unlikely), but the aim couldn't have been getting her to name Lumumba as the killer.
I agree though that it was a typical piece of police incompetence that led to Lumumba spending 2 weeks in prison (when his alibi could have been checked in hours). Unforgiveable really and the people responsible would be jailed themselves in a just world. But the point is Lumumba was released because he was innocent and there was no evidence. There's plenty of evidence that AK is guilty.
MGI, the legality of the interrogation isn't a technical issue insofar as this description is used by campaigners as the main plank of their case. I.e. Statements such as "breach of human rights", "no food or drink", "52 hours of questioning", "exhaustion", "water-boarding" are invariably used, because the campaigners presumably don't believe that a person would confess with a relatively short interview and they feel they have to make things up. In fact, the naming of Lumumba happened less than 3 hours into the interview. Yes, it's a long time, but it shouldn't result in exhaustion and delusions. It might be that the police used these 3 hours to beat and torture her into confessing, but it's implausible and not argued by campaigners.
Regarding your point that naming Lumumba was "strange", the scenario may have been as follows: The police backed AK into a corner saying that her alibi didn't hold because of mobile records and the fact RS had cracked and was no longer saying he was with her all night. So, boxed into a corner and being grilled about the text from Lumumba she used it as a diversionary tactic. The aim wasn't to stitch up Lumumba, but she just took the opportunity to throw the investigation off the rails and give herself time to think. By saying something ludicrous (as opposed to saying she didn't know the attacker), she's aware that that doesn't actually put her at the scene of the crime. By all accounts, she gave it the full theatrics when naming him, presumably aware as she was doing it that she could later recant and say it was "a dream" or the result of exhaustion/delusion/suggestion.
Under your scenario, it doesn't make sense that the police make her confess to Lumumba being the murderer. They didn't know who he was, so why would they fix on the idea of his guilt before AK mentioned it? They might have pressed her for answers and even clipped her on the back of the head (though unlikely), but the aim couldn't have been getting her to name Lumumba as the killer.
I agree though that it was a typical piece of police incompetence that led to Lumumba spending 2 weeks in prison (when his alibi could have been checked in hours). Unforgiveable really and the people responsible would be jailed themselves in a just world. But the point is Lumumba was released because he was innocent and there was no evidence. There's plenty of evidence that AK is guilty.
MGI, the legality of the interrogation isn't a technical issue insofar as this description is used by campaigners as the main plank of their case. I.e. Statements such as "breach of human rights", "no food or drink", "52 hours of questioning", "exhaustion", "water-boarding" are invariably used, because the campaigners presumably don't believe that a person would confess with a relatively short interview and they feel they have to make things up. In fact, the naming of Lumumba happened less than 3 hours into the interview.
Regarding your point that naming Lumumba was "strange", the scenario may have been as follows: The police backed AK into a corner saying that her alibi didn't hold because of mobile records and the fact RS had cracked and was no longer saying he was with her all night. So, boxed into a corner and being grilled about the text from Lumumba she used it as a diversionary tactic. The aim wasn't to stitch up Lumumba, but she just took the opportunity to throw the investigation off the rails and give herself time to think. By saying something ludicrous (as opposed to saying she didn't know the attacker), she's aware that that doesn't actually put her at the scene of the crime. By all accounts, she gave it the full theatrics when naming him, presumably aware as she was doing it that she could later recant and say it was "a dream" or the result of exhaustion/delusion/suggestion.
Under your scenario, it doesn't make sense that the police make her confess to Lumumba being the murderer. They didn't know who he was, so why would they fix on the idea of his guilt before AK mentioned it? They might have pressed her for answers and even clipped her on the back of the head (though unlikely), but the aim couldn't have been getting her to name Lumumba as the killer.
I agree though that it was a typical piece of police incompetence that led to Lumumba spending 2 weeks in prison (when his alibi could have been checked in hours). Unforgiveable really and the people responsible would be jailed themselves in a just world. But the point is Lumumba was released because he was innocent and there was no evidence. There's plenty of evidence that AK is guilty.
Responses to Pipov’s comments (2)
By all accounts, she gave it the full theatrics when naming him.
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By the account of the police and the signed statements I presume? My understanding of the word “All” would also include Amanda’s account as well, which I believe were far from theatrical.
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So, boxed into a corner and being grilled about the text from Lumumba she used it as a diversionary tactic.
I fail to see how signing a statement accusing Patrick is a better diversionary tactic to making up a complete stranger. I would have thought less time and energy on the case would be spent arresting Patrick and locking him up than spent chasing a phantom.
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Under your scenario, it doesn't make sense that the police make her confess to Lumumba being the murderer. They didn't know who he was, so why would they fix on the idea of his guilt before AK mentioned it? They might have pressed her for answers and even clipped her on the back of the head (though unlikely), but the aim couldn't have been getting her to name Lumumba as the killer.
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I do not think that Amanda ever claimed the police deliberately forced her to make a confession. She just said their aggressive interrogative technique and her exhaustion induced a vision that she was at the cottage with Patrick which she thought but doubted was a real memory. It was their suspicion of the text messages that could have influenced Amanda to thinking that they suspected him. After all, she would have known that the text messages were innocent and would have been surprised that the police thought them significant. It would not then be an unreasonable inference that the police had other evidence against him.
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There's plenty of evidence that AK is guilty.
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There is plenty of evidence, but it is all of an appallingly poor quality and wholly insufficient to justify the incarceration of two human beings.
What I would like to know is - why you think the police ignored her retraction and why the prosecution claimed it confirmed her accusation of Patrick and why the Judges and jury believed this?
Responses to Pipov's comments (1b)
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The aim wasn't to stitch up Lumumba, but she just took the opportunity to throw the investigation off the rails and give herself time to think.
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If Amanda is guilty she would have had a few days to think what to say in case any evidence was found. If she had been surpised by Raffaelle’s ratting on her she could have just said she was not going to talk anymore until she had seen her lawyer. It would have been the simplest step to take, unless of course she was somehow persuaded to co-operate without one.
How does admitting to be in the cottage with Patrick on the night of murder throw the investigation off the rails? If she was involved, she was keeping the investigation on at least one side of the track. The side that was off the rails – her accusation of Patrick - would only serve to incriminate her further.
One might argue ( like Shuttl ) that she needed to think quickly, so came up with something that was not well thought through. But thinking of a stranger rather than Patrick was surely the more obvious choice if she felt obliged to admit being at the crime scene. Even a child knows that the best excuse for no homework is to blame a dog that cannot speak for itself. But then, why was there any need to think quickly if the police were not putting any pressure on her to say something different to her claim to being at Raffaelle’s flat all night?
Responses to Pipov’s comments: (1c)
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By saying something ludicrous (as opposed to saying she didn't know the attacker), she's aware that that doesn't actually put her at the scene of the crime.
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I am unclear about your point here. My point is it would have been more sensible for her to claim she was at the cottage with a stranger rather than Patrick to minimise the number of necessary lies that could be proved as such. Both claims still put her at the scene of the crime and both claims could be considered as equally ludicrous. Only the assertion of Patrick as the murderer increases her risk of exposure as a liar.
Apologies for the multiple posts previously!
If we assume AK is guilty for a moment, saying she didn't know the attacker would have cooked her goose. She knew there was plenty of physical evidence of Guede (faeces, footprints etc), so if he was caught, Knox would be finished because there were plenty of witnesses that could testify that she knew Guede. And that's leaving aside the obvious point about how she could have explained leaving Meredith to die and not calling police etc?
It comes down to what we each see as plausible, but a drowning man (or woman) will grab hold of whatever comes their way. By naming Lumumba she invented a fantasy scenario that she knew could never be proved and enabled her to say she was forced into a "faux confession".
Are you referring to the handwritten note? I've always read it as an admission of guilt in that she still claims to be troubled by "dreams" (though I've forgotten the detail). If she'd had no sleep for 2 days and had been questioned for 3 days solid, then it might be plausible, but after a relatively short interview, it just read like a guilty woman trying to blame police for her confession.
No worries about the multiple posts. Mine were in the wrong order.
Response to Pippov 2.1
If we assume AK is guilty for a moment, saying she didn't know the attacker would have cooked her goose. She knew there was plenty of physical evidence of Guede (faeces, footprints etc), so if he was caught, Knox would be finished because there were plenty of witnesses that could testify that she knew Guede.
1)From guilty Amanda’s perspective the chances of Guede being caught must have been lower than the chances of Patrick having an alibi. He was only caught because he left finger prints and these were in police records. Even if were caught, she could have given a vague enough description that was consistent with his appearance and claim she hardly knew him sufficiently to recognise him. As it happens he was caught and she did claim she did not know him very well, so if she is guilty, the strategy of denying knowing him could be presumed as a part of a more plausible strategy of accusing a stranger to derail the investigation.
2)Plenty of witnesses? Do you mean all those people who did not know Amanda, who only came to know who she and Guede were after their faces were on TV and in the newspapers and whose testimony was made after all this so could only be connecting the two of them restrospectively? Also bear in mind that Amanda had not been in Perugia very long, so it is unlikely any of these witnesses could have formed a sufficiently clear memory of her from seeing her around the town before the murder. This is what I mean by appallingly poor evidence. The only reliable evidence about their connection is Amanda herself, who confirmed she met Guede once or twice. As far as I know, nobody who knew Amanda personally before the murder testified that their acquaintance was anything stronger than this.
Response to Pippov 2.2
It comes down to what we each see as plausible, but a drowning man (or woman) will grab hold of whatever comes their way. By naming Lumumba she invented a fantasy scenario that she knew could never be proved and enabled her to say she was forced into a "faux confession".
So if I understand you correctly you are saying this. She accused Lumumba because she knew or at least believed he would be proved innocent and she planned to retract her accusation later before his innocence was proved, so that when his innocence was proved, her retraction and claim to have been forced into a confession would be believed.
1)This seems to be a highly risky strategy, especially in light of the way her retraction was actually interpreted. First she has to depend on Patrick having an alibi, which, admittedly is a small risk. But she has to also depend on people believing she was forced to confess rather than lying. She never claimed she was forced to confess, only that the aggression of the police induced what she later realised was a false memory, but I suppose this serves your argument just as well. She is also however risking being uncovered as a liar by saying something different to the police. It would have been sensible of her to assume the interrogations were being recorded so why lie about being hit over the head in her retraction 24 hours afterwards?
2)This strategy seems too convoluted to be compared to the desparate act of a drowning man or woman. It is too thought out, albeit badly so. If she felt obliged to incriminate herself by admitting to be at the murder scene, but wanted to minimise her culpability & derail the investigation, it still seems more plausible that she would invent a stranger.
Response to Pippov 2.3
Are you referring to the handwritten note? I've always read it as an admission of guilt in that she still claims to be troubled by "dreams" (though I've forgotten the detail). If she'd had no sleep for 2 days and had been questioned for 3 days solid, then it might be plausible, but after a relatively short interview, it just read like a guilty woman trying to blame police for her confession.
I cannot find anything in her voluntary note relating to her being troubled by dreams or anything that might indicate an admission of guilt. If you find anything please let me know.
Even if there is a suggestion of guilt in the note there would be nothing surprising in this. If you had what seemed to be a memory of being involved in a murder I trust that you would feel guilty as well.
Your interpretation of it being the product of a guilty woman trying to blame the police has been imposed on it from her guilt you have inferred elsewhere. You mention the relatively short interview as convincing you of her guilt. I infer from this that you think it implausible she could have had a false memory and so was deliberately lying. I am not sure I see why the shortness of the interrogation should make the latter more plausible than the other. If she was under sufficient stress to lie as guilty Amanda, there was sufficient stress to induce a false memory in an innocent one.
Even if you think she was lying deliberately, this does not alter the fact that her voluntary note was a retraction. You cannot deny it was a retraction just because you suspect her motive for writing it.
I agree that there is no admission of guilt in the note. Equally there is no retraction of the accusation that Lumumba was the murderer.
"In these flashbacks that I'm having, I see Patrik as the murderer, but the way the truth feels in my mind, there is no way for me to have known because I don't remember FOR SURE if I was at my house that night".
So innocent Amanda is naively attempting to help her abusive interrogators. Guilty Amanda is attempting subtley to explain away her confession and put the blame on police who had physically assaulted her.
You ask why would Amanda say she'd been hit in the letter given she thought it might be recorded. The obvious answer to that is that an audio recording wouldn't necessarily pick up the sound of a slap to the head. I'd ask you why she didn't mention the role of police questioning in her "false memories". No mention of the "just imagine you were there" stuff. She puts the blame for the false memory on the old favourtie "I can't remember, I was stoned".
We're not going to agree, but it's refreshing to discuss this without abuse flying round. On the TJMK website I was told I was a conspiracy theorist and banned after 2 posts for asking a question about police behaviour that the editor didn't like!
Regarding the point about witnesses who would testify that Guede and Knox knew each other. The male students living downstairs from Knox were friendly with Guede. One of them played basketball with him regularly. Knox and Guede had met at least once in the downstairs flat. Guede had asked one of the boys whether Knox had a boyfriend because he fancied her. All that is in the Massei report. Knox also admitted to having met him a couple of times in the trial, despite her family initially saying they were total strangers.
I don't think that Knox is guilty because of the statement (or even the email home which is very odd at best). My point was really just that it's instructive that campaigners for Knox actually feel they have exaggerate and even lie about the interrogation, in order to convince people that she was coerced into making statements about Lumumba etc.
I think she's guilty because of the many and various lies she told (from telling postal police that Meredith always locked her door all the way through to changing alibis), and, in particular the mobile phone evidence.
Response to Pipov 3.1
Equally there is no retraction of the accusation that Lumumba was the murderer.
No retraction? I think you need to explain why you think this. The statement she signed is an explicit assertion that she was at the cottage with Patrick and that he murdered Meredith. In the voluntary note she says she has what seems to be a memory of this but doubts that it is a real memory and is more inclined to believe her memory of being at Raffaelle’s flat. As she is no longer explicitly asserting that she was at the cottage, she can longer be claiming that Patrick was the murderer. What is it about this that fails to qualify as a retraction?
Response to Pippov 3.2
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You ask why would Amanda say she'd been hit in the letter given she thought it might be recorded. The obvious answer to that is that an audio recording wouldn't necessarily pick up the sound of a slap to the head. I'd ask you why she didn't mention the role of police questioning in her "false memories". No mention of the "just imagine you were there" stuff. She puts the blame for the false memory on the old favourtie "I can't remember, I was stoned".
1) It could have been a video recording, but she said other things that an audio recording could have confirmed. More serious than the slap is Amanda’s suggestion that she never unequivocally asserted Patrick was the murderer. She suggests that in her actual verbal testimony she only said he could have been the murderer because of her vision which she was never sure was real, but the police transcribed this into an explicit accusation.
2)In her court testimony I believe she said that the police suggested to her that she had suppressed a traumatic memory. In her voluntary note she thinks her false memory is the result of the aggressive police interrogation and her exhaustion. It was midnight when they started. I don’t think she says that she had a false memory because she was stoned. I believe this was the excuse she used for not being able to superhumanly recollect accurately and in detail what she did at Raffaelle’s flat on the night of the murder.
Response to Pippov 3.3
We're not going to agree, but it's refreshing to discuss this without abuse flying round. On the TJMK website I was told I was a conspiracy theorist and banned after 2 posts for asking a question about police behaviour that the editor didn't like!
I’d like to think we will eventually agree on Amanda’s innocence, or at least the insufficiency of the evidence to establish her guilt. I agree with you already about the TJMK site so I remain optimistic.
Response to Pippov 3.4
Regarding the point about witnesses who would testify that Guede and Knox knew each other. The male students living downstairs from Knox were friendly with Guede. One of them played basketball with him regularly. Knox and Guede had met at least once in the downstairs flat. Guede had asked one of the boys whether Knox had a boyfriend because he fancied her. All that is in the Massei report. Knox also admitted to having met him a couple of times in the trial, despite her family initially saying they were total strangers.
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As she said, she had met Guede once or twice, and what she said was consistent with what the boys in the downstairs flat said. These meetings are not evidence that she knew him sufficiently to hang out with him let alone help him rape Meredith. If she was guilty and lied about a stranger who turned out to be Guede, she could have plausibly claimed not to recognise him without fear of this evidence contradicting her.
Response to Pippov 3.5
I don't think that Knox is guilty because of the statement (or even the email home which is very odd at best). My point was really just that it's instructive that campaigners for Knox actually feel they have exaggerate and even lie about the interrogation, in order to convince people that she was coerced into making statements about Lumumba etc.
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There may be some campaigners who exaggerate and lie, but I think this is not a deliberate attempt to do so. The closer these people are to Amanda or Raffaele, the more understandable this is. I suspect most of us would do almost anything to help a close friend or relative in serious trouble. In our passion, it would be easy to conflate our beliefs with undoubtable truths. I do not think that Bruce exaggerates or lies in his site. He may get some things wrong, but his site is a brilliant collection of facts about the case and is sufficiently open-minded to allow people like yourself to challenge these facts in his blog.
Response to Pippov 3.6
I think she's guilty because of the many and various lies she told (from telling postal police that Meredith always locked her door all the way through to changing alibis), and, in particular the mobile phone evidence.
Where is the evidence she is lying? Why is telling the Postal police that Meredith always locked her door a lie? I suspect you think so because it contradicts her flatmates. But so what? Why should you believe them to Amanda? Could they not just have had different perspectives on this? Amanda had not lived with Meredith as long as the other flatmates. Perhaps Meredith only began to adopt the habit of locking her door when Amanda moved in and started bring back strange men to the house and only did so when only she and Amanda were in so that the other flatmates - who I believe were often out and had jobs - would never have noticed this.
What mobile phone evidence suggests she is lying? The timings that are more consistent with the police log book and garage CCTV camera than the postal police testimony? What is odd about the email home? What are you referring to regards her changing alibis? Her consistent claim to be at Raffaelle’s flat the night of the murder except for the claim to have a vision of being at the cottage with Patrick which seems to be a memory but doubts that it is one?
I don’t think there is a clear-cut case of her lying anywhere in the evidence. Certainly, if you presuppose her guilt, then all these innocent statements suddenly become models of mendacity.
Well a couple of lies off the top of my head. I believe she said she couldn't remember what she'd done on the night of the murder because she'd smoked so much cannabis. Having smoke a fair bit of dope myself, that's obviously just daft. And she said she slept in until 10am on the night after the murder, but (I think) her phone came on at 5am.
Yes, Filomena's absences from the cottages could explain her mistaken belief that Meredith never locked her door. Presumably that was covered by Amanda's defence team when they questioned her in court?
Regarding the e-mail, what she says and the way she says it is odd. If I remember correctly she's writing to a mass audience. Given her flatmate had just been violently killed, you'd expect her to assure recipients that she is okay, how she is dealing with the trauma, the loss of her friend and how she is feeling re a violent killer being in her house and the fact it could have been her. But what she does is:
a) Describe in minute detail her movements before and the murder. It reads like a statement for the defence.
b) She is extremely disrespectful to the victim. Saying she'd been asked about MK's sexual habits and the detail in the email around that was awful. What other purpose would that have other than to suggest to all these people MK's sexual practices? The police had supposedly been asking her hundreds of questions, so why fix on that one to share with the world at large?
And the expressed disgust at MK leaving menstrual blood in the bathroom ("ew") is downright peculiar given the actual reason for hte blood.
Regarding the veracity of Bruce's account, he still hasn't said what aspects of the interrogation he thought were "illeagel", yet that's what he continues to call it.
We'll have to agree to differ on Guede. If I'd been in a room with 2 people for any length of time over the last couple of weeks and one of them said they'd never set eyes on them, I wouldn't believe them. And Amamda, if guilty, would be aware that there would be people with similar knowledge of their acquaintanceship. Amanda would want Guede to take the blame if caught, but it clearly wasn't in her interests to help the police catch him.
Regarding MGL Response to Pippov 3.1,
Again we'll have to agree to disagree. I think we've got different ideas about what retractions look like.
If, for example, I said that I had a run over and killed a pedestrian this morning and then wished to retract this statement, I'd say, "what I said was totally wrong. I don't know why I said it. Maybe exhaustion, maybe confusion, maybe temporary insanity or maybe I just wanted to be the centre of attention, but it is definitively not true. I absolutely did not run over, let alone kill, a pedestrian". What I would not say is "I'm no longer sure if I ran over a pedestrian. Maybe it was a dream. I'm not sure". That is an equivocation not a retraction.
Yes, it could be that Amanda was hit and the police used methods rarely seen outside Guantanomo Bay to break her psychologically and force her into a false confession and there's now a police cover-up about what actually happened. It just seems incredibly unlikely from where I'm sitting.
You said that Amanda said things in the voluntary statement that, had she been lying, could have been shown to be false if there had been an audio recoring. Such as? I can't see anything. Nothing about the techniques supposedly used by the police re "imagine you were there" or "Suppressed memory" etc. Just "dreams".
Response to Pippov 4.1
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I believe she said she couldn't remember what she'd done on the night of the murder because she'd smoked so much cannabis. Having smoked a fair bit of dope myself, that's obviously just daft.
1) She was offering an answer to a daft question – why could she not remember things sufficiently clearly. She actually describes the night at Rafaelle’s flat in more specific detail I could muster for any recent evening, yet she was asked to account for what she did in hourly segments and explain trivial inconsistencies with Raffael’es recollection. Deterred from challenging the inquisitors on their high expectations of human memory she offers the best explanation she can think of.
2)Why is the answer so daft? Certainly if she was claiming it gave her full blown amnesia - that she could not remember anything - then it would be daft. But she is not claiming that - just that she could not remember things to the degree of detail and accuracy that satisfied the police. And how do you know that cannabis does not effect your memory in this way? If it does, you would not be able to remember that you forgot things, if it does not, how could you be sure you had not forgotten anything? The only way to know for sure is to conduct scientific experiments. The fact that there is no scientific evidence that cannabis effects memory in the quantities that Amanda consumed cannot be something she can be presumed to have known.
Response to Pippov 4.2
And she said she slept in until 10am on the night after the murder, but (I think) her phone came on at 5am.
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In her court testimony she says she used her mobile like a clock. It is perfectly conceivable that she woke up at 5am and wondered what the time was, then going back to sleep after she had turned the mobile on to find out.
Response to Pippov 4.3 Re Oddness of Email Home
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If I remember correctly she's writing to a mass audience.
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Her close friends and family.
Response to Pippov 4.4 Re Oddness of Email Home
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Given her flatmate had just been violently killed, you'd expect her to assure recipients that she is okay, how she is dealing with the trauma, the loss of her friend and how she is feeling re a violent killer being in her house and the fact it could have been her.
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This was a few days after the murder. It could be assumed she had done this already and I think she says she made a lot of such calls in the email.
Response to Pippov 4.5 Re Oddness of Email Home
But what she does is:
a) Describe in minute detail her movements before and the murder. It reads like a statement for the defence.
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- Or the determination of someone who thinks their evidence is important and is determined to be as helpful as possible. Notice there is very little in the email home about where she was on the night of the murder.So no rehearshing her alibi.
Response to Pippov 4.6 Re Oddness of Email Home
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b) She is extremely disrespectful to the victim. Saying she'd been asked about MK's sexual habits and the detail in the email around that was awful. What other purpose would that have other than to suggest to all these people MK's sexual practices? The police had supposedly been asking her hundreds of questions, so why fix on that one to share with the world at large?
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She fixes on that for the same reason you are. She thinks it is peculiar that the police were asking these disrespectful questions about MK’s sexual habits. Should I now question your taste for bringing this up?
Response to Pippov 4.7 Re Oddness of Email Home
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And the expressed disgust at MK leaving menstrual blood in the bathroom ("ew") is downright peculiar given the actual reason for the blood.
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She is not expressing by “ew” her current reaction to the blood but her reaction at the time when she discovered it, when she did not know Meredith had been murdered.
Response to Pippov 4.8 re Guede
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If I'd been in a room with 2 people for any length of time over the last couple of weeks and one of them said they'd never set eyes on them, I wouldn't believe them.
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Neither would I but Amanda never said she had never set eyes on Guede and I only suggested she could plausibly claim not to have recognised him.
Response to Pippov 4.9 re Guede
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And Amanda, if guilty, would be aware that there would be people with similar knowledge of their acquaintanceship. Amanda would want Guede to take the blame if caught, but it clearly wasn't in her interests to help the police catch him.
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If she did not want Guede to get caught why did she not flush his crap?
If Amanda actually – in real life – claims she hardly knew him ( irrespective of your mistaken belief that the evidence suggests otherwise) , how can you possibly argue that she would not try to deny knowing him as part of a strategy of accusing a stranger rather than Patrick?
Response to Pippov 3.1.1
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Again we'll have to agree to disagree. I think we've got different ideas about what retractions look like.
If, for example, I said that I had a run over and killed a pedestrian this morning and then wished to retract this statement, I'd say, "what I said was totally wrong. I don't know why I said it. Maybe exhaustion, maybe confusion, maybe temporary insanity or maybe I just wanted to be the centre of attention, but it is definitively not true. I absolutely did not run over, let alone kill, a pedestrian". What I would not say is "I'm no longer sure if I ran over a pedestrian. Maybe it was a dream. I'm not sure". That is an equivocation not a retraction.
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Your understanding of a retraction is conveniently too narrow. A retraction is the withdrawal of an assertion. It can be effected explicitly by a statement that says it is withdrawing an earlier claim or it can be effected implicitly in two ways. One is a contradiction – what you have used above and confused with retraction. The other is an equivocation.
Imagine you are trying to find a bar in an unfamiliar city and you come to a T junction. You ask a stranger the way. He says “Turn left”. Then he says “Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t actually know which way it is”. Are you seriously saying you think this stranger has not retracted their direction to turn left? If you do, then presumably you would turn left and only have yourself to blame when you fail to find the bar.
Response to Pippov 4.10
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You said that Amanda said things in the voluntary statement that, had she been lying, could have been shown to be false if there had been an audio recoring. Such as? I can't see anything. Nothing about the techniques supposedly used by the police re "imagine you were there" or "Suppressed memory" etc. Just "dreams".
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The crucial point that Amanda makes in her voluntary note is the suggestion that her earlier verbal statements were just as equivocal as the voluntary note. If this was the case then the police transformed an equivocation into an accusation. This is a far more serious charge than merely slapping her on the head. In the voluntary note she also suggests they told her they had evidence she was at the cottage. It is not clear to me whether the police dispute this or not, but it is a key tactic in interrogation techniques to exaggerate the evidence against a suspect to persuade them to confess.
But it is in her court testimony that Amanda talks about the police asking her to imagine what happened, suggesting she had forgotten because of a traumatic event. Everything Amanda says about the interrogation is highly consistent with the Reid interrogation technique which is widely used to persuade suspects to confess. The manual - Criminal Interrogation and Confessions (Inbau, Reid, Buckley and Jayne)- recommends interrogators exaggerate the evidence against the suspect, ask the suspect to imagine what happened and suggest their inability to recollect was due to trauma.
Response to Pippov 4.12 Re Amanda’s Lies
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If I understand you, you are convinced of her guilt because of the evidence you see of of her lies. Can I remind you that you got some facts wrong in some of your earlier comments. You suggested that she claimed in her voluntary note she was troubled by dreams. You suggested she blamed her false memory on cannabis. If you were to apply the same standards of evaluating evidence to your own statements that you apply to Amanda's you would have to conclude that you were lying yourself. The examples you have presented as evidence of her mendacity are no such thing. They are merely consistent with the presumption she is lying, but are just as consistent with the presumption of her innocence, which I hope you agree, should take at least moral precedence over the former.
Response to Pippov 4.11 from MGL
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Yes, it could be that Amanda was hit and the police used methods rarely seen outside Guantanomo Bay to break her psychologically and force her into a false confession and there's now a police cover-up about what actually happened. It just seems incredibly unlikely from where I'm sitting.
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1) I am not suggesting, nor was Amanda I believe, that the police were trying to force a FALSE confession from her. They were certainly aiming to persuade her to confess and used intimidating methods to do so, and in this sense they forced her to make a confession and this would be true even if she was guilty. When they got an equivocation they decided this was good enough, convinced as they were already of her guilt. After all, the prosecution makes the preposterous claim in a public court of law that the voluntary note confirms her accusation of Patrick so they don’t seem to mind advertising their willingness to interpret an equivocation as an unqualified accusation. It is quite possible the police and prosecution were and still are convinced of Amanda's guilt and are only trying to cover up the methods they used to extract her confession because it would destroy their case. What is unclear to me is how much of Amanda's testimony they dispute so I can't say how much they are covering up. The only thing I know they are denying for sure is that they slapped her on the head.
2) The interrogation methods suggested by Amanda in her court testimony has all the key features associated with techniques that scientific research has shown to be associated with internalised false confessions. The article “Memory Distortions in coerced false confessions” (Linda A. Henkel and Kimberly J. Coffman) is an excellent summary of this research as at 2004. Now of course this does not prove Amanda’s story, but it establishes the credibility of her claim to have had a false memory.
3) As Patrick claims he was kicked and beaten by the police when he was arrested, it is not an enormous leap of faith to accept that Amanda was slapped.
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