I think I have already demonstrated that Perugia is a place where dietrologia, literally ‘behindery’, runs riot. And Mignini does not get his crackpot ideas from nowhere because the insane prosecution of Andreotti by Perugia magistrates was tied up with allegations about the P2 Masonic lodge, and Mignini believed subsequent nonsense by the head of the Florence Flying Squad, detective Michele Giuttari, about a Masonic lodge being a coven of Satanists commissioning the Monster of Florence killings, and investigated respectable people that included Florence prosecutors. So at best Mignini is a weak minded fool who is susceptible to the conspiratorial atmosphere in the Perugia prosecutor’s office and believes any ludicrous theory a detective comes up with.

This staring business all started becase I drew attention to the wild look of Rita Ficerra as she was bringing Knox out the police station on 6 November after the interrogation in which Knox said she was slapped by Ficerra.

Lets go back to the beginning of Knox’s interaction with the police. If a close up stare is the same in any country, well why was Napoleoni giving Knox such a hard look in this photo, which was taken about a hour after Napoleoni arrived at the crime scene on 2 November; she was already suspecting Knox was involved. The next day, 3 November, Knox went back to the house with the police, the looks she is getting here from the national serious crime squad (the ones who bounce Mafioso thugs off the police station walls) surrounding her show they were already treating her as a suspect. You can see for yourself that Knox has no injuries to her face or child-sized hands, so why was she suspect for a murder with a violent struggle that ended with the infliction of a gaping three inch deep and three inch long wound to Kercher’s neck. Look at the second from the left, it is Ficarra. Napoleoni Ficarra and that big lump Lorena Zugarini were where the idea that Knox was guilty came from and it happened within 24 hours. The one named as arguing for the arrest of Knox were Napoleoni, my bet is the others were her pal Zugarini, and Ficarra, and we can guess who was present when…

Immediately following her arrest for murder in 2007, the then-20-year-old exchange student was ordered to strip and stand spread-legged at an Italian police station while a doctor measured her vagina. “The doctor inspected the outer lips of my vagina and then separated them with his fingers to examine the inner. He measured and photographed my intimate parts�. Several female police officers witnessed her humiliation.

And then Ficarra and Zugarini took her out herewhere Knox was photographed en route to 4 years in prison.

And this was reasonable in view of Knox’s behaviour, eh? Yes, Italy is a different culture all right, and I do not envy those who live there.

If you think you have anything interesting left to say about Knox, maybe it’s time to find someone who agrees with you. As for me, we passed that mark long ago, and I’m done talking about Knox.

I will, however, repeat your little bigotry validation trick just in case anyone still reading this might have been taken in. You know the one I’m talking about, where you type “stare” and “Italian” into a search engine, and then cherry pick a few links and present that as evidence of Sicilian “crazy stares”:

Look — I’m guessing you’d also say the Germans have a death stare. Obviously, they’re the first culture we think of when we think of the wild-eyed:

http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t16167.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ha9sgBWhv4

Or maybe those hot-blooded Brits — yeah, there’s another crazy-eyed tribe if there ever was one:

http://www.dailyedge.ie/mary-berry-death-stare-1619724-Aug2014/

http://www.economist.com/node/21528220

And of course the Portugese — who could fail to mention them?:

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/european/cristiano-ronaldo-gives-death-stare-as-he-soaks-up-toxic-atmosphere-in-bernabeu-after-real-madrid-defeat-10099395.html

http://www.cucumis.org/translation_38_t/view-the-translation_v_278517.html

See? Wasn’t that easy? If this is how you back up your claims, then you and Mignini should team up — when it comes to cooking up flimsy theories based on over-reaching assumptions of other cultures, with far too little in the way of real evidence, you’re much more alike than you seem to think.

If you think you have anything interesting left to say about Knox, maybe it’s time to find someone who agrees with you. As for me, we passed that mark long ago, and I’m done talking about Knox.

I will, however, repeat your little bigotry validation trick just in case anyone still reading this might have been taken in. You know the one I’m talking about, where you type “stare” and “Italian” into a search engine, and then cherry pick a few links and present that as evidence of Sicilian “crazy stares”:

Look — I’m guessing you’d also say the Germans have a death stare:

http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t16167.html

Video Link

Or maybe those hot-blooded Brits — yeah, everyone knows about their legendary reputation for staring:

http://www.dailyedge.ie/mary-berry-death-stare-1619724-Aug2014/
http://www.economist.com/node/21528220

And of course the Portugese — who could fail to mention them?:

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/european/cristiano-ronaldo-gives-death-stare-as-he-soaks-up-toxic-atmosphere-in-bernabeu-after-real-madrid-defeat-10099395.html
http://www.cucumis.org/translation_38_t/view-the-translation_v_278517.html

Wasn’t that easy? If this is how you back up your claims, then you and Mignini should team up — when it comes to cooking up flimsy theories based on over-reaching assumptions of other cultures, with far too little in the way of real evidence, you’re much more alike than you seem to think.

Napoleoni giving Amanda the eyes just after the discovery of the body here Amanda has Sollecito’s coat on so the photo might show the moment when Napoleoni was told by Knox about the excrement in the toilet having dissappeared since her original vist to the apartment that morning. If that is Napoleoni looking normally, I would not like to she her glaring.

So, you still think the conveniently floating turd had nothing do with any suspicions? I think we’re done here

Excuse me, that does not make sense. The excrement was actually there, unless she had got some random person’s excrement and put it in the toilet, a guilty Knox would have been putting the police on the trail of her own accomplice by pointing out his excrement, which could identify him through DNA testing of the excrement (as did happen). Once arrested he would have immediately put the police onto Knox and he would have inside knowledge to collaborate his story. Any reasonable policewoman would have concluded Knox was innocent of involvement.

I am trying to focus on anything what Knox did that reasonable investigators could regard as suspicious. But unfortunately Knox ‘s verifiable activities were_

1) Calling a phone Kercher always answered, and that the killer who dumped it would know had not been switched of or inactivated thus risking (as actually happened) it being handed in to the police and bringing them to the murder apartment.

2) Immediately thereafter calling one of the the Italian woman she and Kercher shared the apartment with (Romanelli) to say there was blood and open entry door and something might have happened to Kercher.

3) Going to the house and kicking Kercher’s bedroom door hard enough to crack it, which could have easily broken open the door leaving them actually in the room with a dead victim when police arrived.

4)Through Sollecito’s translation, drawing attention to herself by more or less contradicting those concerned about Kercher’s bedroom door (as a result of Knox raising the alarm almost an hour earlier).

All these things were interpreted as evidence of her being guilty.

Believing that Knox’s behaviour was suspicious required the detectives to think that, being a resourceful and cunning killer who had spent the night selectively removing forensic traces of her presence in Kercher’s bedroom and faking a burglary to mislead the investigation into thinking she hadn’t been in the house, Knox decided to to go back to Sollecito’s apartment next morning and let everyone know she had been there alone before the body was discovered. Not only did she risk breaking opening the door without anyone else there, she went on to draw attention to herself by saying Kercher sometimes locked it. Then with Inspector Monica Romanelli, Knox got herself noticed as a provider of false information to the detectives about the excrement, and in doing this she was providing DNA and other evidence pointing to the identity of her her actual accomplice! And this was the person who hours earlier had committed murder and cunningly faked a burglary?

It was not rational to suspect Knox; Monica Napoleoni was the one who really started Mignini off. I’m afraid there is something about a female killer that opinionated women like Mercer and Coulter find more plausible that they should. And they all try to say knox was a racist for not withstanding mental torture.Wendy Murphy for example was still insisting there was strong evidence of her guilt in ,2013.

IF a person has the capacity to falsely accuse an innocent black man of murder, she has the capacity to kill because life behind bars is like death.”>If a person has the capacity to falsely accuse an innocent black man of murder, she has the capacity to kill because life behind bars is like death.

Not surprising Murphy took that line on Knox because she was a guilter in the Duke rape case

Former prosecutor Wendy Murphy supplied the case with some of the most inflammatory claims and supported Nifong’s withholding of evidence saying, “Nifong should be rewarded for respecting the defendants’ rights by not leaking the type of evidence that could help him personally respond to criticism.”[3] Murphy said “I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth.”[4]

Ilana Mercer approvingly cited Murphy’s opinion about Knox more than once. It was all ver ‘I redit ona net’. But Mercer knew her own mind about the Oscar Pistorius and Donald Sterling cases.. In a perfect world Nina Burleigh would be wrong about everything.

“Italians are compassionate people who love children and care for their poor and infirm. They watched the televised drowning of New Orleans in the fall of 2005 with horror and disgust. Most Europeans already have strong notions of American racism, implanted by years of televised imagery of police brutality, dogs set on civil rights marchers, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the ugly fact of slavery at the nation’s core. As they watched the waters rise around the Louisiana Superdome, Italians’ native compassion was offended by the United States’ disregard for its poorest.� ― Nina Burleigh, The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox

Burleigh talks a lot of sense about Iraq too.

A Sicilian woman:BUT once her eyes have fixed on you, her intensity is revealed.

And in your retelling, this gets translated to a “crazy Sicilian stare” that presages an oncoming fit or slapping or other physical abuse? Still want to claim you’re being objective?

you abore mention of the prosecutor who was supervising the preliminary enquiries.

For the very last time, I avoid mentioning the prosecutor because I am focusing on what Knox did that reasonable people could regard as suspicious. Unlike you, I’m not trying to whitewash her behavior by always and ever trying to point to what other people were doing.

The failure of Knox to do anything to clean up the toilet bowl had nothing to do with her being a suspect at all

And yet, you previously mentioned that:

When Knox mentioned the excrement to Inspector Monica Napoleoni, she checked, came back and glared at Knox and said ‘I’m going to remember this’.

So, you still think the conveniently floating turd had nothing do with any suspicions? I think we’re done here.

HA, many Italians in responsible positions have obtained them through family connection (Napoleoni is the daughter of a detective) and although some are very good, just as many simply don’t know what they are doing. See here. Italian prosecutors have powers that are inconceivable in other western countries, and if they are so inclined can supplant the professional police officers and decide the initial direction taken by the investigation. The preliminary investigation is very important in Italy, read Criminal Procedure in Transition: Observations on Legal Transplantation and Italy’s Handling of the Amanda Knox Trial and this.

A Sicilian woman:BUT once her eyes have fixed on you, her intensity is revealed. Let your gaze drift down to your notebook when she is declaiming something and you are abruptly reprimanded. “Look me in the eyes!”. About Falcone, a Silician prosecutor who Mignini keeps a of picture of on his desk: FALCONE related, ‘from time to time wewould say to each other, “Look me in the eyes”. His face was the liveliest of any person I have interviewed. Then he had a silver-streaked beard (later removed), which merely enhanced the pyrotechnic quality of the eyes.

After an attempt on his life Falcone received an effusive congratulatory phone call from Giulio Andreotti, causing Falcone to suspect Andreotti was behind it, just because of the call. Andreotti was later subjected to an absurd prosecution and guilty verdict, in Perugia not coincidentally. In the Perugia court his co accused included a Rome gangster close associate of the neo fascists who carried out the the Bologna train station massacre! The court acquitted the co accused, yet convicted Andreotti who was supposed to have ordered the killing.

People who don’t understand Italy thought there must have been some basis for the charges, but there wasn’t. It was just a irrational nest of vipers in Perugia making the country look like something in the third world, and not for the last time. Brusca the assassin of Falcone had no injuries when he was arrested, but looked like he had been in a car crash after some time with the serious crime squad that is the Seal Tam B of the Italian police, and the same one that dealt with the Kercher case. They beat Lumumba according to him. So why do you think Knox wasn’t subjected to hours of a dozen interrogation specialist bombarding her with questions which she was trying to answer in a language she didn’t understand until she didn’t know what was had happened, and then taken into a room with three women, where she was slapped to help her remember better?

Was it reasonable to give that treatment to Knox unless they had real solid basis to think she was in on what they had a lead suggesting was probably a killing by a black man.? And let me point out that Knox was told to get out of the house immediately when she told her mother about the excrement, and forget to mention the unflushed toilet to Napoleoni at first. It was not much of a clue by itself anyway because Guede had not actually left the basement toilet unflushed, he had passed out on it. The were looking for a black man, the north African who she and her friends went dancing with with was checked out, but they were slow to get on the trial of Guede who they knew Kercher met in the basement. Quite obviously the constant re-interviews of Knox showed she was the main suspect and that came came from Inspector Monica Napoleoni and Prosecutor Mignini.

The failure of Knox to do anything to clean up the toilet bowl had nothing to do with her being a suspect at all; though Knox trying to be helpful and mentioning the apparently disappearing excrement to Napoleoni (and getting a threat and crazy glare for her trouble) may have started something, because Napoleoni spoke to Mignini and told him Knox was saying strange things, which conceivably started him off. Also Mignini would have needed a senior cop agreeing with him to send the enquiry after Knox. You are saying the initial suspicions were legitimate but it is very difficult to come up with what the police had that could be a reasonable basis for subjecting her to such a tough interrogation, and you abore mention of the prosecutor who was supervising the preliminary enquiries.

According to the guilty verdict judges’ report, it was the calls Knox made that morning. These were cited as damming. She phoned one of Kercher’s two phones and let it ring a short time and then called Romanelli to report the signs of a break in and promised to call Kercher which she had already in fact done. But the English phone of Kercher’s that phone Knox called was always on Kercher and never switched off because she used it to keep in touch with her mother who was seriously ill, so her not answering it was a sign something was very wrong. And then Knox called her mother, the prosecution used a bugged prison visit conversation in which her mother asked her ‘why that call’ to infer that Knox had early guilty knowledge of what was behind Kerchers locker bedroom door. But Knox and Sollecito had tried to smash it in, so they were frantic by the time that call was made. The attempt to put the door in should have been exonerated them, but they couldn’t win.

As for Dershowitz, nemesis did not have long to wait after he tried use his status as legal commenator to get Knox sent to an Italian prison (where she would have not lasted long). No matter who you are, talking nonsense can never be done with impunity. It is not in my power to ensure that something similar will not befall you.

I do not believe the police waited for Mignini to come up with the multiple suspects assumption (and let’s be honest, neither do you, so that this is another red herring), and anyway, that assumption was not based on the fact that one person was not able to overpower Kercher by himself. Other aspects were involved, such as assumptions about how Guede got in, and who might have been trying to make it seem as if he were the sole assailant (there’s that mysterious turd again that just happened to sit around with no one so much as bothering to lift a latch and flush it away). That implies that whoever was trying to make sure he was the only one to take the fall had something of their own they wanted to hide. All these turned out to mistaken assumptions, of course, but not everything looks clear cut the first time around.

I have read that hard looks like that are very Sicilian.

Right. Are their hard looks always precursors of slaps or beatings? Did you read that, too, or is this some of your own expert investigative skills on display? You know, much of what Knox went through boiled down to cultural misunderstanding between Italian police and privileged West Coast exchange students. Given that, you might be a little more reserved when ladling out the crass generalizations about Sicilians in trying to make your case.

As for the rest, we get the general picture. Mignini, Mignini, Mignini….just keep rattling about him in an effort to deflect from what Knox herself did that raised suspicions even in the minds of people who don’t agree with Mignini. If that doesn’t work, pile on Policewoman Monica or the sentencing judge instead. Or maybe Dershowitz. Anyone but Knox. We get it. You say there is always the possibility of the toilet not having being flushed for some practical reason? Actually, in my estimation, if using a brush is what it takes to get rid of someone’s excrement in plain sight, then most people are going to get used to doing that. If people leave turds floating around for days, and then that turd just happens to be that of the killer, it’s going to smell like a set-up. As for leaks or blockages, those can be ruled out pretty quickly, too. But in the end, it boiled down to the fact that Knox just didn’t think it was that big a deal, which certainly might have at least raised a few eyebrows. If you can’t see that, well, we can leave it at that.

The prosecutor has authority over the investigation from the beginning. See here . The ridiculous cases in Italy, such as the Perugia conviction of Andreotti, started with that change. Italian prosecutors have a lot of power and when they use it aggressively the system just doesn’t work very well. Se here

Kercher was a small woman and would be no match for a young man of Guede’s athleticism . When caught had tell tale cuts across his fingers as if they had slipped over the handle onto the blade during some violent stabling motion. The fatal injury to Kercher was three inches long and three inches deep which is compatible with the bloodstained outline of a blade on the bed, and the jackknife Guede threatened a householder with a few weeks earlier. One man one knife .

It would require several people to hold someone still if they were standing but the easier way to immobilize someone is to pin then to the ground and get on top of them. One person can do that especially in they are much larger. There were bruises around Kerchers lower face and jaw where she had a hand clamped over her mouth, which is easiest to do to someone from behind.

She was cut then stabbed and had a hand clamped over her mouth. Being killed with a knife is violent and this murder was, but I don’t see that proves anything either way.

Mignini’s monster of Florence case was fabricated for him by detective Michele Giuttari, who is also Sicilian. I have read that hard looks like that are very Sicilian. But perhaps I am being unfair and Ficarra was just annoyed there was no chamomile tea and snack food left, because Knox guzzled it all during the interrogations. Or maybe she is just showing lack of sleep. I have read that the detectives did not sleep at all for a number of days. If that is true it explains some of the mistakes that were made

Italian toilets don’t just flush everything away, you have to use a special brush too. There is always the possibility of the toilet not having being flushed for some practical reason such as a block or leak. Anyway, if Knox was in on the murder and wanted to implicate Guede she would know there was a cast iron forensic case against him in Kercher’s bedroom. Or maybe she was just on her way out and it was a combination of all those things and an uneasy feeling about lingering there alone.

And of course if she was guilty she would be really keen for Guede to be caught because he couldn’t retaliate, except by saying she was involved.

(1) Nothing about the crime scene suggested multiple assailants.

Somehow, I don’t find your 20/20 hindsight assertion on this matter very convincing at this point. The multiple assailant theory was formulated early in the investigation, even before the departure of the one policeman for whom you seem to have respect.

(2)….the violence of the crime scene was irrelevant to the question of whether her killer knew her at all.

The violence of a murder is often cited as an indication the killer really had it in for the victim. Whether or not the violence of Kercher’s murder rose to that level is a judgment call, but don’t try to pretend it’s irrelevant. It is not. All you’re doing is discrediting yourself with your bias.

(3) Knox did not cry during interviews…

I never said she did. The link I provided cites her as breaking down during the knife search, and emitting various utterances at key points in the discussion of the SMS exchanges with Lumumba. Again, all you’re doing is throwing up a straw man to deflect from what Knox did. She didn’t cry during the interviews. She never confessed to actually killing Kercher. The turd she failed to flush away was in her flatmate’s bathroom. Etc. One smoke screen after another.

The video here at 1.06 shows the crazy Sicilian stare of detective Rita Ficarra. …

Yeah, there’s you being clinical, unbiased, and objective again. Because only Sicilians glare at a witness they suspect is giving them a runaround, and when they do, it’s with that “crazy Sicilian stare”. Of course, everyone knows about the crazy Sicilian stare — right up there with Mamma Mia’s and the organ grinder’s monkey. You know, you’re quite the conspiracy theorist yourself when you want to be. You and Mignini should write a screenplay or something.

The excrement had toilet paper over it, and was not in her bathroom it was in the Italian women’s. In any case not flushing some else’s excrement from someone else’s toilet was in no sense evidence of her being a viable suspect for murder.

The fact that she failed to do something so reflexive that 99.9% of the rest of the world with access to flush toilets (i.e. flush away a turd you observe in the residence where you are living) is freakishly weird behavior indeed, and I understand why the police would take note of it. Seriously, who sees a turd in a house where one lives and then passes it by without flushing it away so that one will not have to deal with the lingering stench? Oh, it’s her roommate’s bathroom, you say. As if that matters. If that’s the best you can do as a comeback, let it go.

In any case, I am guessing that the police therefore regarded this suspiciously convenient retention of evidence – evidence that pointed to Guede as the killer – as an indication that whoever might have acted in cahoots with Guede was now trying to see that he alone would take the fall. That’s not the only possible explanation, and in hindsight, it was the wrong one, but I find it understandable given what they were dealing with at the time. All you’re doing is digging your heels in deeper, but it’s not working, though maybe others will find you convincing. I think you’re grasping at any straw to deflect from what Knox did and did not do.

HA, it was outrageous for police to think Knox had been involved. In comment 309 you asked some basic questions, which you have come back to. I’ll try to be as clear as possible.

(1) Nothing about the crime scene suggested multiple assailants. Meredith Kercher had been stabbed and a sexual motive was very apparent, because she was found naked with her legs apart and a pillow under her hips. Most sex killings are not by multiple assailants and a man with a knife would not require any help to fatally injure and sexually assault a woman.

(2)Kercher’s boyfriend and others in the house had alibis, and the violence of the crime scene was irrelevant to the question of whether her killer knew her at all.

(3) Knox did not cry during interviews and she explained everything at great length. The police did not have any inconsistencies in the accounts of what happened on 1-2 November until they used coercive persuasion on Sollecito.

Quick recap of the events on 2 November. Knox’s initial call of the day was to Kercher, Knox then called Romanelli and said something bad might have happened at the apartment. Knox and Sollecito then went to Via della Pergola 7 and on getting no answer from Kercher unsuccessfully tried to break in the bedroom door, leaving it noticeably damaged. . At 12.47 pm Knox called her mother and was told to contact the police as an emergency.Solecitto called the Carabinieri getting though at 12.51 pm. He was recorded telling them there had been a break-in with nothing taken, and the emergency was that Kercher’s door was locked, she was not answering calls to her phone and there were bloodstains. Police telecommunications investigators arrived to inquire about an abandoned phone, which was in fact Kercher’s Italian unit. One of Knox and Kercher’s Italian roommate Romanelli arrived with three others and took over explaining the situation to the police who were meantime being were informed about Kercher’s English phone which had been handed in as a result of it ringing when Knox called it. (see comment 279 for more detailed version).

According to the prosecution what had got Sollicito called in on 5 November was allegedly the police getting information that the telecommunications department police officers had arrived at the house before Sollecito had called the Carabinieri. If that was true Sollecito had not reported the worries about Kercher to until the police turned up because someone found Kercher’s phones. Whether Sollecito was being told lies by the police or not, it wasn’t true that he had called the Carabinieri after 2 cops turned up about the phones, and they should have realised that, because Solecito would have had to sneak away and make this phone call in the apartment with the 2 policemen and Romanelli, and three others there not noticing. We will never know why this preposterous line of enquiry was take so seriously, but my bet is the police were told to get Knox, so someone played with the timings of the police arrival. (The police inspector who arrived about the phone was directly contradicted at the trial about another matter by witness Luca who said the cop had went into Kercher’s bedroom).

Back to the interrogation. Sollecito trusted the police and said OK I phoned later. That was the beginning of it. Sollicito, stripped naked and slapped according to him was quickly broken down. Then they went to work on Knox.

The video here at 1.06 shows the crazy Sicilian stare of detective Rita Ficarra. Knox said Ficarra slapped her twice in the head during the interrogation. At 1.11 it shows how screened off from view the entrance door was at that time. (at 1.30 the other woman detective in the interrogation of Knox is kicking in the basement door window).

The other points will be covered in what follows.

Not to mention her own and her boyfriend’s suspicious behavior and lack of credibility. Pot will do that to an alibi. A shifting story from Sollecito, leading to shifting story on her part, fits of breaking down and crying,( eventually, a signed confession), not to mention a crime scene that appeared staged (replete with magically appearing/reappearing turds that 99.9% of the civilized world would immediately flush away upon seeing in their bathroom without so much as a second thought, but Amanda Knox just happened to conveniently leave floating around for the police to find).

The excrement had toilet paper over it, and was not in her bathroom it was in the Italian women’s. In any case not flushing some else’s excrement from someone else’s toilet was in no sense evidence of her being a viable suspect for murder. Nor was anything else she did. In fact if anything she was not acting like anyone who was guilty of a murder Knox smoked pot; so what? She implicated herself in a somewhat more agitated state than cannabis use might bring to mind, her screams while she was being interrogated by Ficarra could be heard throughout the police station according to Giobbi of the national serious crime squad . This was before she was a suspect so she couldn’t be prosecuted with it, but she couldn’t access the truth by that time. As mentioned before, Knox knew that Lumumba had a strong alibi, being at his bar that night so when she gave the statement at around 5am she certainly was completely brainwashed because otherwise she would have been aware that the only person who could be prosecuted with what she said was herself.

All of this brings us back to why the police thought, or acted as if they thought, she was was a cunning murder, and gave a her manipulative interrogation, under the pretext that she was a witness. It would have broken down almost any innocent person in her circumstances. I’m afraid that Mignini, who actually did talk to Knox at the house and actually was in charge of the investigation (which let us not forget, the lead investigator quit after Knox was arrested and charged) is the where the idea Knox was involved must have came from. You can’t ask why the investigation went the way it did if not because of Knox’s behaviour, and then say I can’t mention the person who had authority over the investigation as exerting any influence on the decision to use the third degree and dissimilation on Knox on Sollecito.

Knox’s room had no ceiling light only the table lamp so it is most unlikely that they could have not noticed that they had left the lamp inside Kercher’s room. More importantly, this was a relatively flimsy bedroom door, and when Sollecito hit it hard enough to crack it (it’s not in dispute that he did so) there would be absolutely no way to know that he would not have broken it open, so it was a genuine attempt. But it didn’t make sense if they were guilty. That is probably why unlike the other missing items, no one was ever charged with stealing Kercher’s keys.

As mentioned repeatedly in my previous comments, the staging of the burglary to throw the investigation off of the track of someone known to Kercher was not a reason to suspect Knox had let the killer in with a key. As Chiacchiera, the most experienced detective, said almost immediately; it indicated that Kercher had opened the door to a man she knew, and that man had murdered her and faked a break in.

I thought my comments made it clear police knew immediately enough to make it very unlikely that Knox was in on the murder.

Yes, but only by a tendentious inability to consider the reasons to suspect her, which I have cited many times. I don’t know how many times I have to repeat that.

There were a number of things immediately bespeaking Knox and Sollecito’s innocence,…

Yes, and a number of things about Knox that were suspicious plus indications that parts of the crime scene had been staged. You don’t think guilty people also make an effort to present themselves as innocent?

…such as their undisputed attempt to kick in Kercher’s bedroom door; they would’ve had the key to that door if they were guilty).

Seriously? You are unable to consider the possibility (as the police might have done) that they were guilty but did not want people to know it and so pretended not to have the key? Is that really so difficult?

…Also, in an apparent sex killing police would be looking for a man. And they were.

And also any potential accomplices, such as police might have been searching for if they thought multiple people were involved in the incident.

…Knox was only considered a suspect because of Mignini’s conspiracy theorising.

Not to mention her own and her boyfriend’s suspicious behavior and lack of credibility. Pot will do that to an alilbi. A shifting story from Sollecito, leading to shifting story on her part, fits of breaking down and crying,( eventually, a signed confession), not to mention a crime scene that appeared staged (replete with magically appearing/reappearing turds that 99.9% of the civilized world would immediately flush away upon seeing in their bathroom without so much as a second thought, but Amanda Knox just happened to conveniently leave floating around for the police to find). You forgot to mention that. Why is it that you always dismiss or forget to mention things like that?

As for the rest of your post, you have an apparent inability to grasp the notion of analogy. I was not saying Knox was a racist or an anti-Semite, and really, no one with basic reading skills would come to that conclusion. If you’re going to bother to answer a post, try and read it first. Oh but wait, you only see things you want to see. As for Dershowitz, when did I even mention him? Is this again you regarding me as a proxy for all the other people who still feel uneasy about her innocence, so you need to introduce him? Is this another effort to insert people you don’t like into the discussion in an attempt to distract from what Knox herself did and failed to do that made plenty of people suspicious of her?

Finally, you mash together two quotes and attribute both of them to me, when I had nothing to do with the second, or the quote that follows, so I’m guessing that it’s yet another attempt to sidetrack the discussion from Knox by obsessing over Mignini instead. Or else, maybe some typo was involved. Regardless, if you want to rail against the prosecutor and his role in Knox’s detention, feel free. It still doesn’t begin to answer why someone who is not a conspiracy theorist might also have reason to question Knox’s behavior. When you can discuss that, bring it on. But if all you can do is rant about Mignini, don’t bother. It won’t whitewash what Knox herself did and failed to do that made plenty of people suspicious, not just the ones who eventually prosecuted her.

There are some cases where, although a miscarriage of justice later resulted from egregious failures, it was understandable that the police strongly suspected innocent people and gave them tough interrogations. The Central Park Five for example. But they had in fact been playing an early version of the knockout game by battering random white people unconscious with a steel pipe while a white woman was being attacked by someone unconnected to them elsewhere in the park that day.

But in Knox’s case she was chief suspect without good reason. I thought my comments made it clear police knew immediately enough to make it very unlikely that Knox was in on the murder. There were a number of things immediately bespeaking Knox and Sollecito’s innocence, such as their undisputed attempt to kick in Kercher’s bedroom door; they would’ve had the key to that door if they were guilty). Knox had raised the alarm so whatever she said (through Sollecito’s translation) about Kerchief locking her door was at best very weak evidence of an intention to delay the door being opened. Forensic examination merely confirmed they had nothing to do with it. I’ m glad you agree the prosecution and two guilty verdicts were perverse and nonsensical.

The remaining core issue is whether police had rational grounds to think Knox might be a murderer. I think we can all agree that Knox was a potential witness and should have been interviewed as one. Also, in an apparent sex killing police would be looking for a man. And they were.

After it was discovered on the morning of 2 November that Kercher had been murdered and the killer had faked a burglary, the police deduced the killer was known to Kercher, and had faked the burglary to conceal that he had got in through the apartment entrance door, which required someone to have unlocked the door with a key. The most obvious person to have unlocked the door was Kercher, who was the only resident staying in the apartment that night.

The police were looking for a man Kercher knew well enough to open the door to at night, which might be someone she met at the Halloween party or someone known at the house. And we know that line of enquiry was what the police were working on because the chief detective Chacchiera on 4 December was quoted saying they were checking on everyone known at the house, which maybe was an attempt to make the burglary-faking killer panic and (as we now know, Guede left town immediately that story appeared).

The police, who already had reports of a black man hurriedly leaving the area on the night of the murder, only had to identify Guede as the African who Knox had told them met Kercher in the Italian men’s basement apartment of the house(after being invited in to the walk-out basement by Kercher’s boyfriend) and who detectives knew had left excrement in the basement toilet (as the killer had in the murder apartment toilet). Discovery of Guede’s criminal proclivities and having left the city would surely have led to him being sought as a fugitive.

But instead of using the aforementioned leads, the police, who knew Knox’s mother, was about to arrive, decided to call Knox and Sollecitto in for the questioning sessions of 5-6 November that ended with her being charged and taken to prison. Now we will never know exactly what happened in the interrogation but I would point out that Lumumba saying he was stuck and roughed up by the police hardly adds credibility to the police denials and defamation suits against Knox for saying she was slapped.

The interviews turned into interrogation when Knox showed police her reply to a text that from Lumumba’ on the night of the murder saying the she was not required for waitressing at his bar that night, Knox had acknowledged the text with a claque of the parting phrase ‘see you later’. Police seized on this as a wedge and gave Knox the third degree until she did not know what she was saying. The proof of this is that during the interrogation Knox said she had overheard the crime, and accused Lumumba of committing it. But when she said that, Knox would have known full well that Lumumba had been working at his bar on the night of the murder, and would have alibi witnesses for that, as he did. So Knox knew enough at the time of the interview to realise that the only accusations she made in the interview that could stand up was the one she made against herself. If Knox was a cunning killer she would not have done that. More importantly, if she was simply being asked questions she would not have got into such a state either. She was being given the full treatment because she was already the prime suspect.

Now, the basis for that could only be the cops being in thrall to Prosecutor Mignini’s initial hunch that Knox was involved, which he formed a couple of hours after she had raised the alarm. There was no rational reason to think Knox was involved, because a killer did not require Knox’s key to get into the apartment; Kercher could have opened the door to him and hence it did not follow from a faked burglary that Knox was involved in the murder. Knox was only considered a suspect because of Mignini’s conspiracy theorising.

Likewise, one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to have initially suspected that Knox was guilty of more than she was admitting, and that means that droning on about how the prosecutor was a conspiracy theorist is not going to help you make your case, unless you are trying to sway people who are so illogical and irrational that guilt by association is all they need to be convinced of something.

The prosecutor in Italy is in a supervisory role over the preliminary investigation and can determine who becomes a suspect. Mignini had already charged a score of innocent people as members of a conspiracy in another case. I’ll link again

To take another example, many of the people who post at iSteve are racists and anti-Semites. But focusing on their stupidity (and many in the mainstream media who even bother to acknowledge that Steve Sailer exists do only that) does not address the matter of whether a reasonable person who is neither a racist nor an anti-Semite might also find value in the observations presented here.

Well Knox is neither a racist (in Perugia she asked a black guy for a date, and hung out with a north African) or an anti-semite (her friend Meredith was Jewish/Indian) and she is from Seattle which is very liberal. But the Alan Dershowitzs of this world are hostile to her and at this site we notice those kind of things. White privilege?

The Italian boys in the basement who introduced Guede to a couple of trusting young foreign girls, and had locker room conversations about them with him were not racists either. But perhaps it would be better if they had been a little more chary of a character like that. You can have a stupid theory about race in more than one way; you can be willfully naive for example.

HA you said

Everything else you’ve tried to throw at this case in the effort to see if something will stick (not to mention all the topics you have conspicuously avoided) has only served to make it more obvious that the initial suspicions against her were understandable.

“In this trial, slander has found a home, starting from that of Knox in respect of Lumumba and the police. Slander, slander and some of it will stick. It’s what the noted propaganda minister of the Nazis used to say in the 1930s,” Mr Mignini told the appeals court in Perugia

Then he went on to say “You can’t make a black boy pay for everyone”.

As informative as this may seem to you, pointing out that police and the prosecution did many unreasonable things does not answer the question of whether a reasonable might have also have had reason to suspect Knox was involved, at least at the start of the investigation. Given the reasons I have previously cited, I think they would have.

I have already said repeatedly that the suspicions against Knox should have ended once the DNA evidence came back the way it did, and after the police could find no evidence that Knox or Sollecito had indeed cleaned up the crime scene. And yet, that is still obviously deeply unsatisfactory for you. I suspect you consider me to be a proxy for all the people who actually doubt her innocence, and whose suspicions anger and torment you. If you want to continue to vent at them, feel free, but if you actually want to change someone’s mind as to whether someone has reason to initially doubt Knox’s story or to regard her actions as suspicious, I suggest you focus on that.

To take another example, many of the people who post at iSteve are racists and anti-Semites. But focusing on their stupidity (and many in the mainstream media who even bother to acknowledge that Steve Sailer exists do only that) does not address the matter of whether a reasonable person who is neither a racist nor an anti-Semite might also find value in the observations presented here. Likewise, one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to have initially suspected that Knox was guilty of more than she was admitting, and that means that droning on about how the prosecutor was a conspiracy theorist is not going to help you make your case, unless you are trying to sway people who are so illogical and irrational that guilt by association is all they need to be convinced of something.

The investigation was supervised by Mignini and zeroed in on a theory that the faking of the burglary was by an accomplice with a key who had opened the door to the killer. There were any number of people Kercher knew well enough to at least open the door to, and that possibility was surely more likely than a conspiracy involving a friend who had an alibi. In fact Guede met a friend in the street the day after the murder and told him that the victim in the news was the girl they had been watching in the pub a few days earlier. The police knew about Guede at the time of the interrogation.

Knox did not see her lawyer until the hearing on the 8 November. Ghirga said so what if they slapped you, and told Knox not to make a fuss. Her mother told her to keep quiet about it as well. The only one who did not complain of violent coercion was the proven killer.

Arresting her based simply on the interrogation- statement was clearly as bad a mistake as could be, because there was surely an excellent chance that an innocent person under the extreme stress of having her friend murdered and being in a foreign country would implicate herself during an obsessive interrogation in which she was being targeted as a suspect while thinking she was being questioned as a witness. An arrest would make it very difficult for the innocent person to get out of prison. And think about this: if she was really a cunning murderer and author of a fiendishly complicated plan to escape justice, she would have known what they were getting at in interviews and would not have been persuaded to implicate herself.

On 9 November 20077 Knox Sollecito and Lumumba were ordered to be held for a year. Chiacchiera left the investigation two days later.

Understandable that someone with Mignini’s proven ability to see a conspiracy where none existed did it again, and showed that he had learned nothing from his previous insane theories about a (non existent) satanic cult. (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/hunt-for-the-monster-of-florence-1657052.html) which impoverished twenty families of respectable people he accused of murder.

Mignini is the person who suspected Knox and as I already have explained his grounds were that she put her hands up to her head in a distraught gesture as she was talking to him not long after the body was discovered. She did the same thing when she voluntarily gave a statement in prison and he had it noted in the record. Mignini may think otherwise, but such a gesture signifies nothing except that a person is upset. It is not a sign they have heard screams

On 9 November 20077 Knox Sollecito and Lumumba were ordered to be held for a year. Chiacchiere left the investigation two days later. And Lumumba had already been cleared by his alibi witnesses by that time, they just kept him on prison because he was the way they were going to get Knox. The Rome forensic police finding Guede’s prints all over the crime scene on the 18 November led to led to Lumumba’s immediate release. But by then Mignini had a new theory, and the word of a psychopath to take against innocent people.

The police were not determining the investigation Mignini was the oficial supervisor of it. The chief of Perugia actually announced the case was solved after arrests of Knox Sollecito and Lumumba.

And yet, as you yourself note a few sentences later, no one apparently called the fingerprint analysis team to say “don’t bother, the case is closed�. So clearly, someone kept digging and analyzing and asking questions.

Who all complained of violence and coercion.

And yet, according to the above article I linked to, “Her lawyer Luciano Ghirga rejected the claims that she was ever hit by police back in 2008, stating, ‘We never said she was hit,’ and just last week the Italian courts ruled that Knox must face trial for further aggravated calumny for repeating these charges in her book and on TV.� Again, more inconsistencies.

And Knox was a NOT a suspect officially, she was a witness, and that is what they told her she was .

In the US, police are allowed to lie about things like that. I’m not saying I agree with that policy, but again, lying to potential witnesses/suspects does not happen only in Italy.

The lead investigator quit the case and left Mignini and the stupid Napoleoni, who didn’t keep digging they just were given incontrovertible fingerprint results….

They didn’t keep digging and yet some incontrovertible fingerprint results just magically appeared, all after the case had been closed? What, did a little tribe of CSI elves converge to help their good old buddy Amanda out of a jam? Clearly, someone kept digging and investigating, your denials notwithstanding.

She was not privileged by being pretty,…

I said the troubles she endured rarely befall pretty, privileged, white women. I already noted in my aside at #312 that her looks and her privilege may well have set off a chain reaction that was responsible for the case eventually careening into bizarro-world, so we’re apparently in agreement on that matter as well.

Everything else you’ve tried to throw at this case in the effort to see if something will stick (not to mention all the topics you have conspicuously avoided) has only served to make it more obvious that the initial suspicions against her were understandable.

The police were not determining the investigation Mignini was the oficial supervisor of it. The chief of Perugia actually announced the case was solved after arrests of Knox Sollecito and Lumumba. Who all complained of violence and coercion. And Knox was a NOT a suspect officially, she was a witness, and that is what they told her she was . The lead investigator quit the case and left Mignini and the stupid Napoleoni, who didn’t keep digging they just were given incontrovertible fingerprint results from Kercher’s room that their theory was wrong, yet they didn’t abandon that part of it concerning Knox, they were determined to get her. Sollecito had nothing against him at all, he was only arrested because he was an alibi for her.

True, such fates rarely befall pretty privileged white women
She was not privileged by being pretty, because Prosecutor Mignini said Guede had come back from the toilet and joined Sollecito and Knox in attacking Kercher because “there’s a competition between him and Raffaele to please Amanda” . The way she looked made that more plausible. And her whiteness was used against her At the second trial Mignini said the second trial said “We can’t make a black boy pay for everyone”.

The PR campaign Mignini mounted against Knox included a fake prison doctor drawing blood and telling her she had AIDS and tricking her into revealing her private life which was used for book of lies, which became a best seller in Italy. This was before the trial. And the fact her extended family cashed in their pensions and went millions into debt does not suggest they could afford lawyers and a PR firm. it suggests they thought they needed one after realising that Mignini had floated untrue pre-trial rumours in the media to prejudice the court against her.

The cannabis and Giacomo being her boyfriend were the only things Knox did not come clean about immediately. Everyone in that house male and female was smoking a lot of pot, and having casual sex, some more than Knox. She was told not to mention the pot by the Italian women and so was Kerchers confidante Sophie, who told lies about it at first. The police did not seem to know at first that Kercher regarded Giacomo as her boyfriend but they did by the 5 November. Knox knew Kercher for a month and in the police waiting room wasn’t as upset as Kercher’s best friends and Romanelli, who was coming down from being absolutely hysterical as Italian women are prone to be. Sophie and others testified Knox was calm. But when they saw her in the police station it was hours after the body had been discovered . She had broke down in tears and trembling in a car outside the house almost immediately after the body was discovered (that’s before she Sollecito gave her his parka to keep warm they were photographed kissing). She was also seen sobbing in the car on the way to the police station.

Anyway, her alibi was consistent for 40 hours of interviews from the afternoon of 2 November until the early hours of 6 November when she was manipulated and coerced into remembering things that didn’t come from her at all they were based on a lunatic theory. The police work was not incompetent (they competently got her to say what they wanted her to say) it was simply misdirected.

Legal experts including those with knowledge of international and comparative law protested about many aspects of the trial including character assassination of Knox, and the jury hearing in a separate contemporaneous false accusation trial with the same jury as the murder trial what Knox had said while having her rights violated in the interrogation although the statements had been adjudged inadmissible for the murder trial.

And the reasoning was silly . For example Knox called Meredith’s English cell phone that she always kept on her at 12.07pm on 2 November 2007. Illogical to deduce, as courts did, the call was because Knox was worried the cell phones had been found. the ringtone of the cell phone would be likely to get the phones found, as it in fact did (and why wouldn’t they have switched the phones off before dumping them). Then Knox phoned Romanelli and told her there were things in the house that were cause for concern about Kercher. At that point she had raised the alarm. The crap about what time the call to the Carabinieri was at was tangential, as was the accusation that what Romanelli’s friend Paola supposedly got told by Knox about Kercher always locking her door (though that was just Sollecito’s translation ) being an attempt to delay opening the door was irrelevant, as Knox had set in motion the concerns about Kercher 50 minutes earlier with the call to Romanelli.

Another one was the door, Knox and Sollecito had tried to break the door down, Paola’s guy Luca who actually did break it down saw the crack made in it . But the key was never found, and whoever killed Kercher took the key. So if as Mignini said they were trying to recover Knox’s lamp used in the clean up and accidentally left in Kercher’s bedroom after they had locked it behind them, they would have had the key.

The Kircher family were but, as I explained above, Guede’s light sentence was a result of Italian judicial sentencing procedures.

In the normal course of events he would have got the maximum 30 years which was his original sentence.

1 the professional climber is tall and unusually lithe.

2 he uses bars to pull himself up that were fitted after the crime.

3 the Italian girl who rented the room said she has closed the shutters making entry much more difficult.

4 post-murder break-in by possibly souvenir hunters used other, easier entry points.

5 to repeat the police quickly decided the break-in was fake because window glass lay atop clothes that had been thrown around to simulate a robbery (where nothing was in fact stolen).

When I said you said she was hit, I was referring to your previous post where you said this:

…images in her mind and formed after “many hours of confusionâ€�, exhaustion and being slappedwhen she didn’t remember to the interrogating police women’s’ satisfaction).

(Emphasis mine.) Again, I believe that statements that she was physically abused — since retracted, revised, or denied — are the basis of another defamation suit. And yet, you’re still claiming she was indeed manhandled (i.e. slapped), so that is why I asked. I apologize if my interchanging ‘slap’ and ‘hit’ were confusing.

I will assume that in the last two paragraphs of your post you are agreeing hat it was indeed legitimate to regard her as a person of interest, at least initially, so I think we are in agreement on that matter as well. However, you go on, yet again, to state there was nothing pointing to her in any way, which disregards the fact that police (understadably, though in the light of hindsight, inaccurately) thought that multiple people were involved, that the severity of the crime suggested that the victim was known (and disliked) by one of the assailants (or, at least one of them), and that Knox was known to Kercher, not on great terms to her, and had an alibi that seemed shaky, inconsistent, and containing lapses and large amounts of pot smoke, and numerous other anomalies in her account. That the police chose to focus on her black boss who seemed to have a thing for her, rather than the other black acquaintance Knox mentioned is regrettable, but again, not something I find particularly outrageous, especially since the cops did keep digging even after Lumumba and Knox were behind bars.

As understandable as those initial assumptions may have been, it is indeed tragic that she had to endure so much, and that those initially reasonable suspicions spiraled into something truly bizarre. And yet, in justly taking Italy’s police and legal to task for that, it is worth noting that many people in the West (certainly in America) routinely serve long sentences based on police and prosecutorial efforts with the same level of incompetence. True, such fates rarely befall pretty privileged white women, but rather people whose parents cannot afford PR firms and legal teams, but if that’s the primary source behind the outrage at Knox’s travails, that’s not saying much.

HA , Are you bothering to read this? I said Lumumba publically said he was hit, which speaks for itself. He was no more innocent than Knox. Also if points have already been answered above and you can’t be bothered to read them properly, don’t expect me to go over them as rejoinders for you specifically, just because you complain. Italian criminal procedure has an emphasis on the preliminary investigation and the dossier on the case (it ran to 10,00 pages ). The prosecutor has to seek permission to drop a case. Deciding to arrest someone in Italy is very serious step. There were oddly systematic errors by the female forensic scientist, after Knox was arrested.

A man killed and raped a girl, and faked a burglary to hide the fact she knew him: that was the initial briefing of the police team by Inspector Monica Napoleoni. They were looking for a someone known at the house, who might be black. Knox told the police that Kercher had socialised with a black acquaintance of the Italians in the basement (this was Guede although he gave Knox, at least, a false name).

Knox started as a possible person of interest for the investigation, but there was nothing pointing to her in any of what the police had established within a few hours. Quite the opposite.

As an another aside, in light of your eagerness to lead the conversation away from anything that might put Knox in an unfavorable light: it would not surprise me if at least a few of the male police were similarly eager to dismiss any suspicions against her. “I don’t think she did this — she’s way too hot.”

So, perhaps one of the problems that eventually took the case off the rails was the reaction of some of the women involved, who wanted to ensure that this type of good-old-boy stereotyping was not going to happen on their watch. They just took that notion and went too far with it. You have already noted the presence of the female replacement lead investigator and the female jailing judge. So that, too, may have played a part as well in why the case lasted too long.

1). You gave no direct answer as to whether it was simply wrong or outrageous to assume that more than one person was involved in the murder, so I’m guessing you’d admit that the answer is no. (Obviously, with hindsight, that assumption was incorrect, but given what the investigators had to work with, it doesn’t seem an outrageous assumption.)

2). As for whether it was a stretch to think that a woman Kercher knew had sexually assaulted her, that’s beside the point. Knox might have been an accomplice to a powerful male. So nothing particularly outrageous there, either.

3). As for you noting that “Knox told them everything that happened at very great length and repeatedly answered their questions…Consistently telling them she had been at Sollecito’s�, you conspicuously fail to note that Sollecito was unable to back that up, memory-wise, and in fact, both of them were high on pot, and as a result, their memories and their credibility on where they were did not amount to much. So again, I don’t find the police reluctance to go with those alibis to be unreasonable. More tellingly, I again point out that you have a habit of misleadingly omitting or twisting things that do not fit your views.

4). She noted excrement, but didn’t bother to flush it down? Pretty bizarre, eh? An indication that someone might indeed be angling for a set-up of sorts, wouldn’t you agree? (And you say it was sitting there for who knows how long and then it magically dropped down into the bowl to where she could no longer see it? Hmmm…)

And by the way, I’m guessing that originally, Knox had all the makings of a gay icon to many of the media paladins who run the gossip sheets at British tabloids: a pretty young college student sex-capading through Italy and landing on a cute local. That’s almost certainly living the dream for many a gay man (and mutatis mutandis, a few straight people as well). But once those same gay men got to the part about not bothering to flush away excrement that had been sitting around for who knows how many days, I’m guessing the consensus shifted to “Nah, they should definitely kill her. Right now. Guilty or not, we’ve heard enough.â€� I wouldn’t agree with that, of course, but as for Romanelli likewise thinking the excrement was something worth noting, and far more suspicious than you seem capable of admitting, I totally sympathize. In other words, nothing outrageous there, either.

4) Whether or not the break was staged is supporting evidence that other aspects of the crime were fiddled with as well, which would have a lot indeed to do with how to interpret the DNA evidence (and lack thereof). And again, this was obviously a judgment call which reasonable and competent people can dispute.

You say that the machinery of motion leading to Knox’s travails was the result of silly conspiracy theorising. I think the points above show that it was not. I think what you tell and selectively fail to tell likewise discredits your otherwise copious presentation of what happened. One did not need to be a conspiracy theorist to initially suspect Knox was guilty. You also said previously the police were not interested in the truth, and just wanted to close the case. However, they kept digging even after Knox, Sollecito, and Lumumba were incarcerated, which is why the latter was eventually released. So that accusation doesn’t hold water either. You also didn’t answer whether she was in fact slapped around during her questioning – which if I’m not wrong is the gravamen in yet another defamation suit being filed against Knox – so I’m guessing the answer is no on that matter too. (And I forgot to mention this last time, but the length of time between opening a bar and getting the first receipt that the accusing judge referred doesn’t seem to me to be as fanciful as you take it to be.)

I am not giving the Italian justice system a pass, and do not deny that it may well be far too biased against criminals. I am only pointing out that the initial suspicions about Knox were understandable and nothing you’ve produced has changed that, though perhaps you’ve changed a few other minds.

All that being said, I agree with you and all the other pro-Knox advocates inasmuch as I admit that those suspicions lasted much longer than they should have.

1). The victim was found lying naked with her legs apart and Guede’s size 11 footprints (in blood) visible. The pathologist’s preliminary findings on 4 November were not made independently because Mignini was present and suggesting more than one knife and hence multiple attackers. He had authority over the investigation. As already mentioned Mignini was there an hour or so after the body was discovered and formed the theory someone in the house had let the killer in, and Knox was guilty.

2). It was a stretch to think that a woman Kercher knew had sexually assaulted her. As I keep saying Chiacchiera was the head of the police investigation and he said they were looking for a man she knew. So the lead investigator didn’t rule out that that Kercher could have unlocked the door for the killer. But that contradicted Mignini’s theory, which required Knox to have opened the door for the killer.

3). Knox told them everything that happened at very great length and repeatedly answered their questions. She cried sometimes but not to avoid answering question; she answered questions for many hours each day. Over and over again. Consistently telling them she had been at Sollecito’s.

4). Knox showered in the bathroom she shared with Kercher and stood on the bathmat and waddled on the mat over the cold tiled floor into her room to dress then replaced the mat. She noticed there was a bit too much blood for womens problems at that time then she went into the Italian women’s bathroom to get a hair dryer, and noticed the excrement, which she knew no one in the house would have left, and was puzzled but not thinking someone was murdered.

When she came back with Sollecito around an hour later she had another look at the toilet and thought the excrement had gone, although it had in fact slid down into the bowl so that it was not as easily visible. They were not paying close attention to the toilet but concentrating on Kercher’s locked bedroom door, which Sollecito tried to break down, then they phoned the police When Knox mentioned the excrement to Inspector Monica Napoleoni, she checked, came back and glared at Knox and said ‘I’m going to remember this’. Napoleon I had never ran a major investigation. In Britain a police officer has to go on a special course before they are allowed to run a murder enquiry. Romanelli changed her initial story about how she left the shutters after being re interviewed by Napoleoni, six months later

4) I happen to think that the competent police officer Chiacchiera was correct and the break in was staged. (Knox seems to have thought that too). The break in being staged was not evidence that Knox was guilty of anything.

5). There were plenty of coincidences inasmuch as the forensic police mistakes all seemed to be oddly skewed toward helping the prosecution. Mignini said in his closing statement that ‘We can’t blame everything on a black boy’. By my way of thinking that would depend if he was wholly responsible. Guede was adopted by one of Perugia’s wealthier families, and has had a privileged upbringing, was living a hedonistic lifestyle and he was not being discriminated against; he was released a few days before the murder despite being caught trespassing with a knife on him.

You don’t mind it when court systems are stacked in favor of the defendant, but Italy’s isn’t. So an arrest there is very serious. And it was not reasonable to set that machinery in motion on the basis of silly conspiracy theorising.

“As for Knox’s supposed lies, a suspect-centered (sospettocentrico in Italian) investigation is driven by tunnel vision, which interprets every minor inconsistency as a gross lie…”

Minor incosistency? You think that was the problem they had with Knox’s alibi?

Again, I see a lot of misdirection here. I’m trying to understand why police first came to suspect Knox, and even after all this, I don’t see a lot there that strikes me as unreasonable.

Regurgitating a bunch of stuff from sources that make little mention of what those initial investigators were thinking (and rather, focus on the clown prosecutor’s case) miss that question altogether, and amount to deception by misdirection. I myself have been in the middle of situations that later became, articles, books and documentaries, and I have found even the best accounts to be flawed by virtue of the fact that reporters go with whomever wants to talk to them. (Duh.) In this case, that means the Amanda Knox side, and her PR firm and her lawyers, and whoever on the prosecutorial side wants to settle scores or further careers by claiming that he or she knew all along what we now see only in hindsight.

With regard to that question of whether the initial investigation, and the resultant suspicion that would have inevitably fallen on Knox, here are some things that I think you need to account for a little more thoroughly

1) Was it outrageous to suspect, given the crime scene, that more than one person was involved?

2) Was it outrageous to suspect, given the violence of the crime scene, that the assailant knew Kercher?

3) Was it outrageous to regard Knox’s fits of breaking down and crying, her (and Sollecito’s) memory lapses as evasiveness?

4) Was it outrageous, in light of the multiple-assailant assumption, to suspect that the abundance of Guede’s DNA (including a turd in the toilet bowl that had conveniently been left there for days without anyone bothering to flush it down) to suspect that someone had made an effort to make sure that Guede would be the suspect, and not any of those other supposed multiple assailants? Was it likewise outrageous from the start to suspect that a break-in (and therefore, other activities) had been staged?

5) Was it outrageous to try and put together some kind of a case that did not leave the jurors at Guede’s trial with the impression that some pretty strange coincidences were being ignored to the benefit of two privileged and pretty white people, and as a result, to think that Guede was simply a fall guy, thereby allowing him to walk free?

Maybe it was, and maybe a more experienced set of investigators would have acted differently on all those matters. But inasmuch as I agree that the case eventually spiraled into bizarre extremes, I don’t find that answering ‘no’ to all those questions amounts to a miscarriage of justice. (That would come somewhat later.)

What I see instead is the kind euphemization and legalese that only serves to explain why so many people hate lawyers. “Well, even if she had been in the next room over while Kercher was being, like all annoying, and harshing her mellow by screaming about how she was being raped and stabbed to death – I mean, talk about RUDE – that doesn’t mean Knox is guilty, technically speaking.� Not to mention classifying any of this as “minor consistency�. Seriously?

You seem to think that Knox’s shifting series of confessions is a sign only that the most serious thing she admitted to was not true, as opposed to the perhaps being a sign that she was not someone all that credible to begin with, or that what she really did that night was something she was very, very reluctant to come to grips with. If you can’t even see the alternate side of what you’re so desperately eager to argue, if you can’t even make the effort, then you’re not helping your case as much as you seem to think you are.

Inasmuch as I agree that Knox is innocent, I can at least admit that there was ample reason to initially suppose that she might have been guilty. On that basis alone, whose account strikes you as being more fair and less biased?

I don’t mind it when court systems are stacked in favor of the defendant. That’s fine. That’s the way it should be. But we’re not asking if Knox (or O.J., or Michael Jackson, or Lizzie Borden) are legally innocent. We know they are – we can look up the verdicts. What we’re really curious about pertains to what they actually did, not what some jury decided was or was not beyond some reasonable doubt threshold. I, too, strongly believe that Knox didn’t do anything. But I also think that your apparent inability to confront the questions I posed above doesn’t help the case you’re trying so hard to make.

Eliana De Cillis told untruths and was in possession of the victim’s keys See, in the real world innocent young girls don’t log their their everyday activities and so are easy to trip up on details, sometimes they get confused.

Italians have a word, dietrologia, literally ‘behindery’ for construing things in a conspiracy-theorising way.

…with hands over ears to shut out dying screams, no less

Knox used the gesture of bringing her hands up to her head in the manner of the The Scream a lot on the day the body was discoved . One might think it was pretty normal in the traumatic circumstances. But Mignini who was on the scene playing Sherlock Holmes, saw her doing this common gesture and formed the theory that she was subliminally trying to block out screams she had heard. The cops working for Mignini got Knox to say she had been trying to blot out screams, (Mignini also thought Knox crying during a prison interview with him highly significant.)

It is well established that trying to communicate in a foreign language is extremely tiring for the first few months. On the day she raised the alarm 2 November (when she broke down crying twice) Knox was at the police station police from 1pm to 6 am. The following day the 3 November, she broke down crying when with the police at the cottage the afternoon
The next day a she was taken back to the apartment and again broke down shaking so severely doctor present worried she was going to go into shock. So police interviewed her and got her story that he had been with Sollecito at his apartment, but that didn’t satisfy them. They wanted a different story. (There once was a crime of plagio, or brainwashing in Italy). She was complaining about exhaustion from repeated interviews before she turned up on the the 5-6 November and tried to help police by showing them all her phone messages. Then there were she was questioned in Italian (she says by by dozens of cops in a the room all questioning her her non stop) , on and on and on. The told her Sollecito had said she wasn’t with him that night. Crucially, the police told her that they knew she was a witness, and if she couldn’t remember she suffering from post traumatic memory loss. But at this time she was clearly not a witness and was entitled to legal counsel. That is a violation of her freedoms and rights under international conventions. Knox main mistake was thinking she was in a normal western democracy.

Perhaps others would stand up to the type of pressure and devious manipulation techniques Knox was subjected to, but I don’t think it was reasonable for detectives to think a already stressed 20 year old girl in those circumstances would. The police pressured and duped her into implicating herself in murder without realising what she was doing. She didn’t volunteer it. yet, as mentioned above she has been definitively convicted of false accusation the three and a half years she served were for that. She owes a small fortune. And by the way it wasn’t just Knox and Sollecito who said they were hit by police. Lumumba also said he was struck by detectives. The only one who didn’t get bounced around the police station was Geude. And he got a massively reduced sentence. He is a psychopath.

Every single detail in the statement was known to be inaccurate within a few weeks. She should have been released then. The prosecutor Mignini had several months to make a case dossier and then there was a hearing in front of a judge to see if the was evidence to detain them. The judge said Kercher would not have opened the door to Guede so Knox must have let him in. There were further hearing before the trial in which judges found the prosucution It wasn’t just the police and Mignini

The US would never have sent Knox back, mainly out of concern for what it would do to Italy, a economically fragile country, which has already suffered a lot of damage from the case.

Anna Donnino admitted on the stand that she was acting more like a “good cop” (as in the “bad cop-good cop” method of interrogation) than a translator, “a mediator” as she called herself, helping Knox “remember” things. She said she always acted like that to establish a “rapport” with the subject, “a relationship of trust.” She even shared a personal experience with Knox. She said she had once broken her leg and that was painful but one day she woke up and didn’t remember a bit about the broken leg. The implication was that Knox, too, should strain her memory and “recall” the truth.

To me, it looks like the cops didn’t care much about the truth – they cared about making arrests and declaring the case closed. They wanted to nab Lumumba and pressured Knox into naming him. It wasn’t hard for cops trained to squeeze confessions out of mafiosi. But Knox actually wrote her first note before she was taken to jail. Her interrogation stopped at about 6am and the first “memoriale” was probably 2pm to 3pm. The cops just didn’t want to read it; most had left the building anyway, their job done; some went back to Rome.

Some time before Nov. 7 though, the first DNA results came in and it was Guede’s DNA. I don’t know why they didn’t release Lumumba at once. There’s a theory that Rudy Guede had a special relationships with the cops, as an informer or an operative of sorts, so they took pains to protect him.

As for Knox’s supposed lies, a suspect-centered (sospettocentrico in Italian) investigation is driven by tunnel vision, which interprets every minor inconsistency as a gross lie, and finds inconsistencies where there are none. Facts are tuned to fit the narrative. Knox said that Meredith sometimes locked the door, that sometimes she did it when she left her room to take a shower. An Italian roommate said Meredith never locked the door. But in the cops’ version, Knox said that Meredith always locked the door, even when taking a shower. That supposedly proved she lied.

If you look at the reasons the investigating judge gave for Knox’s, Sollecito’s and Lumumba’s detention (without charge) on Nov. 8, most of them read like ravings of an educated idiot and the rest are based on false assumptions (e.g. they mistook Guede’s shoe prints for Sollecito’s; Sollecito’s pocket knife was later ruled out as murder weapon). Focus on how the judge justifies keeping Lumumba in jail. It’s precious.

These statements [by Knox] can be confirmed… by some objective facts concerning the time at which the Le Chic pub [Lumumba’s pub] opened. In fact while Lumumba stated during the review hearing that he opened the pub at about 17:00-18:00 on the afternoon of 1st November, it appears that the first till receipts began to be issued at 22:29. The suspect was not able to give any logical explanation for this…

It should further be noted that when the Court addressed this objection to the suspect, he remained silent for some minutes, trying to justify this “void� with the supposition that the till receipts are not issued at the time the order is made but when the customer leaves the pub.

This explanation does not hold up either in that it does not explain why there are no till receipts from 18:00 to 22:29, and why these start to be issued with increasing regularity from 22:29 up until closing.

Further confirmation that the pub was closed before the above-mentioned time can be found in the statements from one of the regular customers, Vulcano Gerardo Pasquale, who was heard on 7/11/2007…

In addition, there are discrepancies between the information reported by Lumumba and the girl with regard to the text of the message sent to Amanda by the suspect at about 20:30. While the girl spoke of a message informing her that the pub would remain closed and therefore that she did not need to go into work, Patrick recounted having written to her that there was no need for her help that evening as there were few customers.

This may seem a fact of little importance, when in truth it is not, there being a substantial difference between the two messages. It is likely that Patrick had actually intended not to open the pub, thinking that he would be able to spend the night with Meredith; then, given the way events unfolded, he considered it advantageous to open the pub specifically to create an alibi.

A pretty fanciful reconstruction, isn’t it? Especially as Lumumba had nothing to do with the murder and was in his bar all night. It gets better.

These disparities raise doubts about the actual text of the message, especially when set alongside the reply which Amanda sent to Patrick to the effect of “we’ll see each other later�, a logical response to the pub being closed in order to leave the evening free and to a later appointment.

Amanda tried to translate “see you later” into Italian and came up with a calque that means literally “see you later,” not “bye.” It’s a simple beginner’s mistake. But judge Matteini built her theory of the crime on it.

This assertion is supported by the way events subsequently developed, as Amanda met Patrick in Piazza Grimana, a place which the suspect himself reported he habitually used to arrange meetings with people.

This turned out to be pure fantasy. Patrick was in his bar all that time.

The fact that Diya Lumumba wanted to prevent the message he sent to Amanda on the evening of 1st November being traced back to him by investigators is apparent from the strange behavior he displayed in changing his telephone in the days immediately following the crime. This is an incontrovertible fact, since the phone records show that up until 2nd November he used a phone with the IMEI no. 354548014227980, while on the day of his detention he was using a phone with the IMEI no. 354548014227987.

Had he admitted it, this circumstance would have remained neutral, given that he continued to use the same phone number and so there would have been no difficulty tracing it back to him. What tends instead to give it importance is his obstinate denial of it, a factor which leads to the conclusion that he did it in the erroneous belief that this would make identifying him more difficult.

It’s pure paranoia, illustrative of the way Italian magistrates tend to think.

Therefore based on the facts currently known, it is possible to reconstruct what happened on the evening of 1st November… at about 20:30 in the evening, while Knox was at Sollecito’s house, she received the message from Diya Lumumba which, rather than simply letting her know not to go to work, confirmed their meeting for that evening, it obviously having been agreed earlier that the girl would help him to have an encounter with her friend Meredith…

Now it’s Lumumba telling Knox to meet him! Amazing.

…while for Diya [Patrick’s other name] it was the desire to have sexual intercourse with a girl he liked and who refused him. Faced with a denial from the victim, they did not have the strength to desist but instead tried to force her to submit using the knife which Sollecito always carried with him, managing to have some sexual contact with her but, given Meredith’s reaction, this was hurried and incomplete.

The lady judge has a vivid imagination. Too bad that the knife that Sollecito carried with him was soon proven to have nothing to do with the attack. (The cops were deeply unhappy with that and “found” Kercher’s DNA on another knife, violating multiple testing protocols.)

Well, you could because I am a former English major who is much smarter and better educated than the drones who craft definitions for dictionary.com (and, likely, Merriam-Webster, come to that); or, because we have other examples of dictionary.com definitions that are patently ridiculous– like that for, say, “racist”:

***

1.
a person who believes in racism, the doctrine that one’s own racial group is superior or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.

***

Since we all know that anyone who believes that “race” is anything other than a malicious and malignant social construction is a “racist,” and that “racist” also includes anyone who deviates from politically correct etiquette vis-a-vis race, at any time and under any circumstance, then the ludicrous limitation of dictionary.com’s own definition of the term “racist” surely discredits that site as a definer of any English word or term; indeed, it is obvious that the person(s) who crafted that definition, and everyone who has anything to do with him, her or them, are themselves “racists[s]”– and, thus, should be denounced, shunned, ostracized and, ultimately, driven into a permanent state of penury!

As for the definition at hand, supra, let me put forth another example– one fairly analogous to the SAT-IQ discussion:

If one knows a temperature on the Celsius scale, one can quickly calculate the identical temperature on the Fahrenheit scale, and vice versa, by the use of a simple mathematical formula. When one does so, one is not “extrapolating” to an unknown point; one is merely calculating a definite and exact analog, by converting– or “translating”– the reading on the one scale to the exact same temperature on the other scale.

I’m not sure what one has to do with the other, why should I take your opinion regarding word usage, over that of dictionary.com again?

In light of your displayed level of English literacy (“I’ll [sic] the definition…), and your self-confessed score on the SAT (since I must assume– per my discussion with our genial host, Mr. Unz, supra– that you did not have a Quantitative-portion score of close to 200), yes, you really ought.

In other words, you are not a lawyer, you have never been to law school, and you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about– ad nauseam. “Vaffanculo!” he explained.

“You think that there is a statute in Italy that makes it a crime not to phone the police when you hear someone screaming?”

Why all this blatant euphemizing from the pro-Knox contingent? We’re not just talking about indeterminate screaming here. We’re talking screaming as in “help me, help me, stop raping me, you’re killing me!” or whatever else it is a woman screams as she is being raped and stabbed to death. There’s screaming, and then there’s screaming. Capisce?

That being said, I don’t know if there is a statute that requires one to alert the police in such an instance, but I know there ought to be. In any case, simply sitting by in such an instance is most certainly vile and sleazy, and if Knox had indeed been guilty of that, I would have said she got pretty much what she deserved, and anyone who did think she was guilty of something would be saying “See? I told you she was in on this.”

And given that her account, however coerced, involved her going with Lumumba to her apartment, I suspect there are any number of jurisdictions where that does make her an accomplice of sorts. Obviously, such actions, or failure to act, would be judged less harshly if the killer had gone on to threaten the witness, which often happens in such situations (or so I would guess), but they didn’t get around to coercing that from her, and she apparently never bothered to volunteer it herself, so I won’t go there.

Thanks, I’ll the definition of an unknown blog poster on the internet over that of dictionary.com.

Dictionary
extrapolate
verb ex·trap·o·late \ik-ˈstra-pə-ˌl�t\
: to form an opinion or to make an estimate about something from known facts

“The following day the chief detective on the case, Marco Chiacchiera, was quoted in newspapers as saying that their line of inquiry was that Kercher had been killed by someone she knew,…”

This also seems understandable. (I mean, the suspicion that the killer was someone Kercher knew — whether it was a good idea to be blabbing this to the press is another matter.) The violence of the scene was, if I’m not mistaken, of a level that might have suggested to other investigators as well that the killer really had it in for her, as opposed to indicating a situation where someone just wanted to get rid of a witness to a break-in or something. Yet another reason to at least suspect that Knox was perhaps involved.

“And the police were entitled to take Knox ‘s allegation against Lumumba as highly significant only if it contained information that couldn’t have stemmed from the police feeding her with their theory.”

According to the translator, it was Knox who blurted out the initial suspicion that she believed he was guilty, as well as maybe/maybe-not having some communication and/or contact that night. Yes, police wanted to nail down Lumumba’s actions that night, and given the messages between him and Knox, they needed her to provide some more clarity on that point, but that, too, seems understandable.

And as you well know, being “confused” about the events in question is really a euphemism for having been too stoned to know which way was up for much of that night, a fact which seems suspiciously absent from your account, given that it was clearly a major source of the mistrust leveled at her and Sollecito. Omitting something that pertinent makes the rest of your account seem suspiciously one-sided. And do you know for a fact that she was slapped, or is this more he said/she said? It is my understanding that earlier reports that she was beaten were retracted or nonexistent.

Anyway, along with the rest of her weird behavior, police did extrapolate all that to the worst-case scenario of picturing her as a killer. Again, that’s something we now know was incorrect with 20/20 hindsight. But in the scripted words of the sage Mike Tyson “we all do dumb stuff when we’re stoned” (or something to that effect, but pithier), and that colors the perceptions others will have of those actions when they are unable to be recounted with clarity afterwards. Now, I’m sure that a town like, say, Chicago has murder investigators who are much more seasoned than those in a place like Perugia, and this added experience makes them less likely to make the mistakes that the Perugia police did, but I’m guessing a fair number places in the rest of Europe with a similar level of experience would have acted in much the same way as the police here did.

You think that there is a statute in Italy that makes it a crime not to phone the police when you hear someone screaming? You think that that law not only makes it a crime for you to fail to call the police, but makes you an actual accessory to whichever crime(s) might be taking place, as indicated by those screams? I am unaware of any such law– anywhere in the world!?! Even so called “Good Samaritan” laws apply only to helping people in danger when doing so requires no appreciable risk to the bystander– not to when the supposed criminal is a much-larger man, armed with a knife, who could easily and quickly do to you, another petite, young woman, the same thing that he is supposedly doing to your roommate, in a nearby room. Get back to us all, here, a.s.a.p., with an actual citation to that imagined law…. In the meantime, I must say, you have chosen a most-apt moniker to use here!

“…being an earwitness to a crime is not a transgression of any type…

Come now. Given so august a pedigree, I think that if you are being honest with yourself, you will indeed admit that stipulating to being in an adjoining room (with hands over ears to shut out dying screams, no less, though that part didn’t make it into print) while a rape and murder is in progress is indeed a confession of grave wrongdoing — not of murder per se, I grant you that, but of grave wrongdoing nonetheless, the kind that a former altar boy of all people should recognize.

I doubt the laws of Italy allow for the depraved indifference required to sit around, a cell phone within reach, while someone is getting raped and stabbed to death one room over. If they do, that is far more outrageous than anything that was done to Knox. Some might say, wait a minute: it’s unreasonable to expect an ear-witness in that situation to dial for help, because that would mean letting go of her ears, hearing those same death-screams in the next room, and experiencing some serious buzzkill. But I’m going to plant my flag somewhere on the other side of that line.

When people say “I still think she’s guilty”, I doubt most of them mean that she must have been the one who actually stabbed Kercher. I think they usually mean that they think she was involved to roughly the same level of culpability that is incurred by sitting in an adjoining room doing nothing while that murder took place. I think they’re wrong even to go that far, but again, I understand where their suspicions come from.

“Bizarre prosecution of the friends of murder victims happen in Italy”

I will assume this is true for the sake of argument. So what? It doesn’t change the fact that Knox’s story doesn’t add up.

I was an English major, long before I became a lawyer– and an altar boy, long before either! One confesses to a transgression of some type. Being an earwitness to a crime is not a transgression of any type– even if it were factual, which, in this notorious case, it most certainly was not! Her alleged statement, therefore, was not a confession, in any proper sense of the word in English. You might want to confess to our Ashanti warrior, here, that you need some tutoring in remedial English usage.

You interpolate between two points to estimate an intermediate point. You extrapolate from two points to estimate a point beyond them, but within the same domain. You translate from a known point in one domain to an analogous point in a separate domain.

The SAT is highly g-loaded, but it is not an IQ test per se. If you take a pair of identical twins, separate them at birth, and have one raised deliberately to maximize his mathematical skills, and the other raised deliberately to maximize his language skills, the chances are that their IQ scores will be extremely similar, and that their SAT scores will be extremely similar, overall, but that their SAT scores will be moderately differentiated on the two components, quantitative and verbal, because of their strikingly different childhood environments. Even then, you will not find one scoring extremely high on one half and extrememly low on the other, while the sibling’s scores are reversed, because g-loading will drive both of their scores, on both components, strongly in the same direction.

I have no problem believing that an average person, back in the day, would have scored around 400 per half, rather than 500, because the SAT was designed for the college-bound individual, rather than the average individual. I noted that caveat, above. Still, the average person who took the SAT, even in its earlier days, was not a gifted individual, as defined by psychometricians. He was merely moderately more intelligent than the average American of that same age.

I have no problem accepting that scoring at the 99th percentile on the SAT is roughly equivalent to scoring at the 99.9(?)th percentile on an IQ test. The tables that I have linked to show just what an earlier commenter, here, noted: +3SD on the SAT translates into roughly +4SD on an IQ scale.

The only reason that someone like Marilyn Mach vos Savant scores a 228 on a childhood IQ test is because childhood IQ scores are derived by calculating the ratio of “mental age” to actual chronological age, and then multiplying by 100. Such ratio-IQ tests, and the scores derived from them, are conflating g with maturation rate! Someone who has an extreme of g, but also has matured much more quickly than the average child, gets a markedly higher IQ score, at that age, than a normally matured child with the same extreme of g, let alone a slow-to-mature child with the same extreme of g. Ms. Savant’s reported 186 score on the Mega Test, as an adult, is about what I would have expected.

I have the perfect g-loaded rule of thumb for determining IQ. Anyone who says they don’t believe IQ tests measure a genetically determined and fixed cognitive ability has an IQ of over 130. Anyone who uses long complex argument to prove the aforementioned contention has a IQ of over 150. No one with a IQ over 180 ever argues for genetic determinism of IQ.

Well my IQ is about 120 and I am happy to say I can’t take any credit for it. I suppose if I had many impressive achievements I might want to take credit, but I don’t so I won’t . The price of success is a flattering self-delusion, that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.

But bizarre things do happen and here there is pretty strong evidence that something bizarre happened

Bizarre prosecution of the friends of murder victims happen in Italy Ask Eliana De Cillis . And bizzare investigative tecqnuiques (Forensic Expert Patrizia Stefanoni Gift Wraps A Mop) are nothing knew to Italy either. Perugia prosecutors especially Mignini have a history of bizarre theories as I have already detailed, The Prosecutor was the one directing the investigation and he thinks he is a real Sherlock Holmes.

At the questioning, the police were working under the (correct) assumption that a killer was loose, with the ability to either kill again, or else flee.

Guede did not leave Perugia immediately. After murdering Kercher he rounded the night off by going nightclubbing until 4am. The next night he again went to a nightclub, with three American girls he had met in a bar. The following day the chief detective on the case, Marco Chiacchiera, was quoted in newspapers as saying that their line of inquiry was that Kercher had been killed by someone she knew, maybe after contact at a Halloween party, and everyone who was known at the house would be investigated . (Guede probably got the idea for his later lies of having arranged a date with Kercher for the night of the murder the previous night at a Halloween night from reading what Chiaccheira said). Guede left Perugia the same day as that media reporting appeared, on the 4th December. While on the run he had Skype conversations and initially said some man he didn’t know killed Kercher and Knox had nothing to do with it . But his account evolved especially after Knox and Solecitto were not released along with Lumumba.

About the investigation. The police were entitled to take Knox ‘s allegation against Lumumba as highly significant only if it contained information that couldn’t have stemmed from the police feeding her with their theory. Right after the interrogation Chiacchiera, who had seen some of the massive pressure used on Knox (dozens of police shouting questions and telling her she was a stupid liar) wanted some collaboration for what Knox had said under interrogation and he wanted her released so they could place her under tight surveillance and bug her conversations to gather evidence. There was absolutely nothing against Solecitto and several police said there was no grounds for arresting him.

It was reasonable to think Knox was a possible person of interest for the investigation. It wasn’t reasonable to give her an obsessive one track interrogation of that length and intensity and when she caved in and went along with what they suggested believe that was enough to conclude the case was what they thought. There needed to be some independent confirmation. And the police were entitled to take Knox ‘s allegation against Lumumba as highly significant only if it contained information that couldn’t have stemmed from the police feeding her with their theory.

Knox had separate but contemporaneous cases against her; namely the murder, and Calunnia (slanderous accusation) against Lumumba . Both were heard by the same court (judges and jury), although one was a criminal case and the other was civil. She has been found innocent of the murder, but all courts have found her guilty of Calunia against Lumumba and sentenced her to three and half years imprisonment, which is around the time she served and makes it problematic for her to even recoup her outstanding debts for legal expenses by getting compensation for illegal imprisonment on the murder charge.

So she has been very severely punished for what she said, even though the ones who got her to say it have not (she composed a note for the cops before she was taken from the police station that said she was very doubtful that her statements were factually accurate (because the account was images in her mind and formed after “many hours of confusion”, exhaustion and being slapped when she didn’t remember to the interrogating police women’s’ satisfaction).

Several months after the arrests Knox Sollecito and Guede were all arraigned at a preliminary hearing for carrying out the murder together. The judge was Micheli who heard the evidence against all three. He granted Guede’s request for a fast trial Inquisitorial- style procedure. By this time Guede’s account was that after Kercher had complained about Knox stealing her money, shadowy figure similar to Sollecito and Knox had fatally injured Kercher while he was in the toilet with an upset stomach (Guede probably got that idea from what police said about Knox hearing the murder in another room). Michelli found him guilty, also deciding there was enough evidence for Knox and Sollecito to be sent for a trial.
I think we should remember that the Kerchers’ lawyer officially representing them in court helped Guede get a lighter sentence by accepting that Guede had showed remorse by apologising to the Kerchers after discovering Meredith bleeding to death and by giving assistance to Meredith in her last moments. the court that convicted him Guede was cleared of stealing anything from the house, and of faking a burglary, and of having a knife. He made a point of saying he went into Romanelli’s room before he left and there was no broken window. There was no hard evidence or clear reasoning for any of this. So when people try to imply that the courts have set in stone that Guede had accomplices, Guede’s trial and appeal are the judgements they are referring to, and these are hardly commandments on other defendants trials. The professional judge said there was nothing certain in the case at the beginning of the second Knox/Sollecito trial.

The Guede trial judgements which took place before all the forensic reviews and retesting collapsed the basis of the case surely carry little weight in law or logic against the Supreme Court’s findings on the basis of the up to date evidence and without cherry-picking of proven killer Guede’s account to fit into the prosecution accusations agaist Knox and Sollecito . For example, Guede said he had been let into the apartment by Kercher . This was taken by judges as collaborative of the account police attributed to Knox in the interrogation (of Knox letting Lumumba into the apartment ) and circumstantially tending to confirm she not Kercher actually was letting Guede in.

Apart from the police investigation, what happened was not particularly bizarre. Guede always said he got in by Kercher opening the door to him. He also said that the confrontation that ended in Kercher’s death started in the entrance to the apartment. As a black man Guede would be noticeable, and Kercher would be farmilar with Guede at least by sight from the Merlin pub where they both hung out and one of Guede’s pal worked. She had been present on at least one and possibly three occasions when Guede was invited into the basement apartment by her boyfriend, (whose canabis plants she was watering while he was away). She might not have asked Geude in but she probabaly would have opened the door to him and politely conversed. And Guede’s own pal said Guede would overpower girls and molest them.

Rather that Guede breaking in. I think it is likely that he just called at the door Kercher opened it and he used some pretext to talk and confirmed that she was alone in the somewhat isolated house, and became aggressive; Kercher retreated or was forced back to her room, where she was threatened with a blade at he throat was pinioned on her knees fatally stabbed, and sexually assaulted. He faked the break in.

Knox’s behaviour was just like Eliana De Cillis, another completely innocent friend of a murder victim who was thought to have said behaved suspiciously and convicted before the Supreme Court exonerated her. Innocent people exist you know.

“The statement contained only an admission to her being in her own apartment, at the time of the crime, and overhearing some part of the crime.”

Yes, when I say that she confessed, that is precisely what I mean. Confessing to hanging out in the vicinity of a murder is indeed a confession. You may be a lawyer, but with all due respect, you don’t own the exclusive rights to the English language. As for reasonable, I am referring to the investigators’ suspicions regarding the curious coincidences I noted, and their eagerness to initially spread the blame net widely as possible and then let the courts sort everything out. That’s not to excuse the corners they cut or the gaffes they made. But when murderers are on the loose, US and other police have likewise been known to turn the interrogatory heat way, way up even at the risk of making inadmissible whatever it is that they uncover.

And while I’m at it, didn’t she leave Guede’s turds floating in the toilet bowl for over a day? Who does that? Oh yeah, West-coast hippies with water conservation fixations and lax hygiene issues. But someone not familiar with that mindset might well have seen that as an indication that someone was making heavy-handed efforts to see that Guede’s DNA, and only Guede’s DNA, was prominently displayed. Yes, it looks different now, after a more thorough investigation revealed no efforts of a clean-up. And that is what I mean by 20/20 hindsight. You think that has “nothing to do with it”? That may work with whomever you eventually pick for your jury, but don’t try it on the rest of us.

“Of course it would be your assumption they were unacquainted with Guede and just about everyone else in Perugia”

It’s one thing to assume something as a baseline assumption before taking the evidence into account; it’s a different thing entirely to take the assumption that this assumption MUST be true.

Here’s what you said before:

“My point is that positing a collaborative project of this character between people who were completely unacquainted is a waste of your time and everyone else’s”

You take the position that your assumption MUST be true.

By analogy, it’s reasonable to assume without knowing more that Knox was not involved in the murder. After all, 99.9% of white girls do not get involved in murders. But it would be silly to ask the following question:

“Why would you suspect Knox is involved in the murder when it is clear that she wasn’t? After all, the vast majority of white girls do not get involved in murders.”

“it’s frankly bizarre”

Yes, any scenario in which Knox was involved in the murder is bizarre. But bizarre things do happen and here there is pretty strong evidence that something bizarre happened.

The main inference I am getting from this now rather long thread is that someone who is reputed to have an IQ over 200 got 1600 on his SAT’s. So let’s just call it 300 and be done with it.

Another poster confessed to getting an SAT score below 1000. That’s pretty low. But that just means that that particular poster has learned a lot since then.

I don’t even remember my SAT scores, or my ACT scores (I think I took one ACT unit?) all in the same day. I don’t remember my GRE’s either, except that I remember I got 790 on the verbal and I asked one of my teachers the next day if that was good and he laughed at me.

My only interest in IQ is how it is debated: but however it is debated we should be keeping an eye on what it is we really want. And I think what we really want is people who are more educated, thoughtful, well read, and involved in intellectual pursuits. For one thing, that makes for a better life (I am convinced.) But at the same time, politically, it will also make more conservatives, and better progressives, since the process of intellectual activity at least punches your ticket for the High IQ train, even if you don’t have one, and popular culture will always hover about 100.

I think this is an important thing to keep in mind. In my case, being told that I was gifted as a child helped me endure isolation and teasing, it gave me confidence throughout my life that I could master anything, if given enough time, and it also gave me a sense of responsibility to use that gift in a maximal and responsible way. I feel like I accomplished the mission.

On the other hand, having a lower IQ or a lower test score of some other kind shouldn’t be considered a death sentence. And I mean this in particular for our black brothers and sisters. Just pay the rent and study hard and at some point you will be a lot smarter than you were when you started out, and you will have a richer life. Your competition is not some guy who has a higher IQ, your competition is the body of knowledge, or, as Schopenhauer used to say, if no one tries to gather the knowledge of the universe into their heads, where else will it be gathered?

When I read these discussions the thing I think about most is some person who has only marginal (so far measured) intellectual skills and then concludes that they have sand in their gears or are otherwise unworthy to aspire to learning. It isn’t true.

It was 7 years ago, I think the scale was 2400.*

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extrapolate
verb ex·trap·o·late \ik-ˈstra-pə-ˌl�t\

: to form an opinion or to make an estimate about something from known facts
“Unboil an egg”: a phrase about the
impossible, which is not possible. »
ex·trap·o·lat·edex·trap·o·lat·ing
Full Definition of EXTRAPOLATE
transitive verb
1
: to infer (values of a variable in an unobserved interval) from values within an already observed interval
2
a : to project, extend, or expand (known data or experience) into an area not known or experienced so as to arrive at a usually conjectural knowledge of the unknown area
b : to predict by projecting past experience or known data

* Just kiddin’ Buddy, it was a 1600 scale.

PAR FOR THE COURSE:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-dursts-arrest-warrant-challenged-20150331-story.html

“20/20 hindsight” has nothing to do with it. You are claiming that the local police were being reasonable, under the circumstances, to suspect Amanda Knox. Well, if so, then they also were required to provide her with legal assistance (or, at least, with the opportunity to make her own arrangements for legal assistance), along with an impartial English-language translator, so that she could understand the process, both literally and legally.

The police obviously knew that, and they obviously did not do it. That was not something that they merely overlooked, understandably or not; it was something that they deliberately chose not to do, because they were hoping to get her to sign just the sort of statement which she ultimately did sign, without the benefit of either legal counsel or an impartial translator.

You continue to characterize the statement that she signed– which she quickly recanted– a “confession.” A confession, in criminal law, is an admission to personal culpability in the commission of a crime. There is no such admission in the statement that Amanda Knox signed.

The statement contained only an admission to her being in her own apartment, at the time of the crime, and overhearing some part of the crime. Even if that were true– which she quickly had, and ever since has, denied– it did not constitute an admission to any crime; thus, the statement, in Italian, which she was coerced into signing, without the benefit of either legal counsel or an impartial English-language translator, was not a “confession,” as you and others continue to claim.

A few other points to keep in mind:

At the questioning, the police were working under the (correct) assumption that a killer was loose, with the ability to either kill again, or else flee. That ups the pressure on any investigators, not just those crazy Italians. That does not condone the slipshod time-assignments, computer drive destruction and the other mistakes (it in fact makes them all the more egregious), but what led to Knox’s confession is partly the result of pressure that I am guessing is comparable in large parts of the West as well, regardless of what their supreme courts may determine subsequently procedure-wise. And it’s not as if the police stopped investigating once Knox and Lumumba were behind bars.

Also, imagine again what the defense lawyer’s case would have done had the screws not been applied to Knox. I’m guessing it would have involved questions like the following:

“With regard to your initial report that a furtive black man was reported in the vicinity at the time of the stabbing, did you also thoroughly investigate the victim’s roommate who the victim JUST HAPPENED TO HAVE issues with and whose boss JUST HAPPENED TO BE a black man who JUST HAPPENED to have a thing for the victim, and did this roommate also have a boyfriend who JUST HAPPENED TO BE fond of knives?â€�

How would the investigators have responded to that when called to the stand? Well, our lead guy was “unhappy� about all the time we were spending investigating Knox, and for us, it’s all about keeping our lead investigators happy, and besides, she kept having these strange fits of crying and shaking and breaking down, and we don’t want ever want to be seen as being mean to pretty entitled white American women. And also, the boyfriend who was her initial alibi eventually admitted that they were both really high that night to the extent that neither of them are 100% sure of what happened exactly, and who knows what a whole lot of pot and/or trauma and guilt can do to someone’s memory, so in the end, we just decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, ignore the confession, and focus on someone else.

How would that have worked out?

My point is, the report of a black man, the Lumumba connection and the pot haze and the exigent circumstances of a killer on the loose made a good deal of the initial police pressure on Knox inevitable. Maybe part of Knox’s guilty behavior arose from the fact that she did suspect that Lumumba was the killer (once the police mentioned reports of a black man) and felt guilt-stricken in the sense that she was in some sense part of Lumumba’s and Kercher’s connection, or maybe she was worried that all her drug use or some other dark secret was going to spill out or whatever. Yes, it should have ended much earlier than it did, but had that been the case, you can bet that what was revealed by that point would still have caused a shadow that I’m guessing will stay with Knox long after this. I’m not saying she should be grateful for everything that resulted in this last vindication (especially since some people still have questions), but the initial stages of the case were understandable.

People don’t like suspicious coincidences when it comes to murders, unless of course they happen to be the defendant of the real killer – in that case, they’re going to exploit every alternative angle of the case that is not completely tied up. And then, it is the jury of the real killer’s trial who has to weigh those additional doubts and possibly acquit him. Again, I’m not saying the prosecution (who tend to be rather dogged to begin with in assuming the worst of people with suspicious coincidences about them) did not take matters to ridiculous extremes, but I think even many of the people who still have doubts about Knox likewise put little credence in the scenario that the clown prosecutor put together. It’s possible to disbelieve both. And I say as someone who not only believes that the evidence against them never rose beyond reasonable doubt, I think the final assortment of evidence actually shows they are innocent of that murder with as near certainty as is possible. 20/20 hindsight is indeed a wonderful thing. But given the totality of what was being reported and what was going on at the time, I’m not going to slam anyone who believed for quite a while that she was guilty.

To the degree that the SAT is g-loaded– which is what we are talking about, when we are translating people’s SAT scores to IQ estimates– one would expect the SAT scores on the two halves (setting aside the writing part, which was added more recently) to be highly correlated, because they are both loading on the same underlying psychometric factor: g (or, innate general intelligence).

It is not like finding someone who is brilliant in two essentially unrelated fields– like, say, Leonardo in both the sciences and the arts– and saying that he is, overall, far more brilliant than either an equally brilliant scientist, who lacks special artistic ability, or an equally brilliant artist, who lacks a special knack for science.

Almost everyone who scores highly on one half scores highly on the other, even if some are better at Math and others are better at English. How often do you find anyone (who is a native English speaker) who scores extremely high on one, yet only mediocre on the other, let alone anyone who scores extremely high on one and extremely low on the other? That is because both halves are g-loaded, so g is driving the separate results in the same direction, even if not to the same extreme.

On other tests, that are not highly g-loaded, you might well find something like that; on tests that are g-loaded, however, g is largely responsible for the end result, and it is the same g underlying the results on different tests. That is why IQ, which attempts to measure g alone, is the single best predictor for success on any given task.

Where is the loquacious Carl Sagan when we need him?

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQtable.aspx

Only Guede has been ever been convicted of committing the murder.

There are a few holes in Sabril’s speculation . Firstly Kercher laughed when she told friends about Knox’s beauty case having a (little) vibrator in it. Knox only had sex once in the apartment she shared with Kercher (Knox’s bedroom room was claustrophobic, tiny and cold). On the single occasion Knox did have sex there, it was after she and Kercher had went to a dance club with the Italians from the basement and when they got back at 6am Kercher also took an Italian, Giacomo, to her bedroom and had sex. Giacomo became her boyfriend after that. This was two weeks before Kercher died. Later that day, Guede turned up at the basement and was let in.

A week before Kercher died they were still very friendly because Kercher went with Knox to a classical music concert, where Knox met Sollecito, going with him that night and virtually moving in with him at his comfortable apartment a 10 minute walk away. It’s true Sollecito had seen porn that included a bestiality video, so what ( I think Razib said a while back someone showed him one of those when he was at college). The manga magazines found in his apartment were a present from a pal and he hadn’t even unwrapped them.

Crucially a man in his early twenties who has had hit the sexual jackpot and gone from solo getting turned on by ‘ideas’ to getting it 4- 5 times a day (according to what he boasted to friends) from a girl who looks like a model is not by my way of thinking going to have the inclination (or energy) to swap such an idyllic set up for several years in prison by arranging the rape of a Jewish/Indian girl he hardly knows by a black man he has never met.

Knox was a beginner but tried to speak in Italian to everyone and it is well known that the real time translation involved in doing that is exhausting for the first few months. Her account was consistent and the only time she altered it was when the police got her to say things that fitted in with their theory about the case on the pretext she was a witness who was suffering from post traumatic memory loss. There was nothing that could be called a confession to participation by Knox, and the statement which was taken as 5 am (she had arrived at the police station at 10pm) was ruled a violation of her rights because she was not given a lawyer or translator . Once you are a suspect in Italy you can’t waive the right to a lawyer the police must give you one but they didn’t and the Supreme court ruled it inadmissible. The ‘jury’ in the case included the two presiding professional judges who would have ensured that the aforementioned statement was not given any weight in the guilty verdict. There was still a presumption of innocence even after that initial guilty verdict, she was still ‘the accused’ in Italian law.

Just after midday on November 2, Knox called Kercher’s English phone, which she kept in her jeans and could always be reached on, but the call was not answered. Knox then called Romanelli and in a mixture of Italian and English said she was worried something had happened to Kercher, as on going to Via della Pergola 7 apartment earlier she had noticed bloodstains and Kercher’s bedroom door closed. Knox and Sollecito then went to Via della Pergola 7 and on getting no answer from Kercher unsuccessfully tried to break in the bedroom door, leaving it noticeably damaged. . At 12.47 pm Knox called her mother and was told to contact the police as an emergency.Solecitto called the Carabinieri getting though at 12.51 pm. He was recorded telling them there had been a break-in with nothing taken, and the emergency was that Kercher’s door was locked, she was not answering calls to her phone and there were bloodstains.

Police telecommunications investigators arrived to inquire about an abandoned phone, which was in fact Kercher’s Italian unit. One of Knox and Kercher’s Italian roommate Romanelli arrived with three others and took over explaining the situation to the police who were meantime being were informed about Kercher’s English phone which had been handed in as a result of it ringing when Knox called it. Think about that. It was at this point that a man who was with Romanelli asked about the door and was told though Sollecito (who was translating for Knox) that Kercher always closed it. But Sollecito often over simplified and abbreviated what Knox said and Knox testified at the trial she had simple said Kercher didn’t always leave it unlocked.

On discovering Kercher’s English phone had been found dumped, Romanelli demanded that the policemen force Kercher’s bedroom door open, but they did not think the circumstances warranted damaging private property. The door was then kicked in by a strongly built friend of Romanelli’s, and Kercher’s body was discovered on the floor. The door kicker said the police Inspector went in the room and examined the body , the ‘postal police’ inspector totally denied that. This inspector who was contradicting a neutral witness on oath, and also gave varying time of his arrival was the same one who was given the job of determined the timing of calls made that morning, which were further confused by the wrongly calibrated automatic timing used by the police

Events before the body was discovered were said to demonstrate that Knox had prior guilty knowledge of what had happened to Kercher. According to the prosecution, Knox’s first call of 2 November, to Kercher’s English phone, was part of an attempt to delay the discovery of the body. Sollecito had tried to break in the bedroom door because after locking it behind them, they realized they had left something that might incriminate them. (Later charges against Knox and Sollecito included simulating a crime, and theft of items stolen from Kercher, with the exception of her keys which were never found but no one was ever charged with taking. Think about that. Knox’s call to her mother in Seattle, a quarter of an hour before the discovery of the body, was said by prosecutors to show Knox was acting as if something serious might have happened before the point in time when an innocent person would have such concern Prosecutors had no direct DNA evidence against Knox, but said she had cleaned the crime scene of all traces that incriminated her. DNA and fingerprints are is invisible of course and you can’t tell whose are whose to clean your’s off and leave someone else’s.

Finally if you want to point to similar cases, in the 1993 disappearance of Elisa Claps in Potenz Daniel Restivo (later revealed to have killed Claps) was put on trial. Restivo was tried for perjury along with two others: Gega, an Albanian man who said he had never met Restivo, and Eliana De Cillis a friend of Clapps who was the last one to see her before she went to meet Restivo in a church . The prosecution appealed against the acquittal of De Cillis’ friend, at a second trial she was found guilty on a charge of perjury and sentenced to 14 months imprisonment, the Italian supreme court later overturned the conviction. Subsequent to the 2010 discovery of Claps’s body in the attic of the church, Restivo was convicted of the murder of Claps by an Italian court.

Yes, I knew that you were. I was contrasting myself with your assertion about Ms. Horwitz, not with you yourself. Sorry for any misunderstanding!

An IQ score of 200 is 6.25 standard deviations above the mean on a Stanford-Binet IQ test (SD = 16), and 6.67 standard deviations above the mean on a Wechsler IQ test (SD = 15).

The SAT was designed with a total spread of only six standard deviations, with an expected median score of 500, and an expected standard deviation of 100, on any of its component parts. The SAT scores range from 200 (-3SD) to 800 (+3SD), on any one portion.

The notion that such a test– even though designed for those at least contemplating going on to college– could require an IQ of well over six standard deviations above the IQ mean in order to score a mere three standard deviations above the mean on the SAT itself is, shall we say, highly implausible.

When did you take the SAT? I need to know that before I can translate (not “extrapolate”) your score into an IQ estimate.

I disagree with your assumption that they were completely unaquainted; everyone has acquaintances for which there is little or no evidence of acquaintance.

Now you’re being perverse. Even in a small city like Perugia, you’re not going to be acquainted with more than a tiny minority of those resident. Sollecito was not a native and Knox had only been in town for about seven weeks. Of course it would be your assumption they were unacquainted with Guede and just about everyone else in Perugia, and it’s frankly bizarre to proceed under the understanding that people only casually acquainted would conduct a rape murder, most particularly when two of them are ordinary haut bourgeois with no history of criminal activity of any type.

I’ve taken an IQ test, but I will keep the scores to myself, just to give you something to ruminate upon, but I will tell you that, if I remember correctly, my SAT score was 979.

Extrapolate away!

I was talking about Sara Horwitz, not you. I wouldn’t have charged Guandique for the Chandra Levy murder. I would have had him deported.

Miss Levy was probably killed by a street thug type who was in Rock Creek Park looking for just such an opportunity.

“The law makes no inherent distinction between direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. It is the ultimate credibility of the evidence, in the eyes of the trier(s) of fact, be that judge or jurors, in conjunction with that evidence’s relative probative value, in light of all of the admitted evidence in the case, that is to guide a verdict.”

I agree with all of this. The trouble with the circumstantial evidence in this case is that it’s not sufficient to get a good handle one what actually happened. Not only that, but Knox’s conduct doesn’t fall into the usual murder scenarios of a spouse killing a spouse; a murder for life insurance; gang-retaliation; etc.

Here is a blog post I wrote a while back where I argue that Amanda Knox is probably guilty:

https://fortaleza84.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/is-amanda-knox-guilty/

I argue that the murder is similar to that of Janet Chandler, a white girl who was apparently murdered by her roommate, another white girl back in the 70s.

I am just the opposite: I am happy to have every legally deportable alien deported, post haste, at his own expense; but, when charged with a crime, in this country, anyone, including an illegal alien, is entitled to be represented by competent legal counsel– and, in our adversarial legal system, that counsel is ethically required to defend his client(s) zealously, to the full extent of the law and his ability!

I have no moral qualms about believing, on the one hand, that Robert Durst murdered his first wife (1982), his best friend (2000), and his next-door neighbor (2001), based on what I happen to know, yet believing that he is entitled to a zealous defense, from whatever legal team he can afford to assemble. That is what our having an adversarial system of criminal justice means and requires. If the prosecution cannot prove its case against him, in a fair trial, under the existing rules of evidence and criminal procedure, than it has an ethical duty not to bring the case to trial, in the first place.

DNA evidence IS circumstantial evidence. So are all of those bloody fingerprints, handprints, footprints, and the like. So is the ultimate exemplar of definitive proof: the hypothetical “smoking gun” scenario!

Direct evidence consists of the victim’s own accusation and account (if any), a suspect’s own confession and/or account (if any), the eyewitness accounts (if any), and the technological recording(s) of the actual event (if any).

The law makes no inherent distinction between direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. It is the ultimate credibility of the evidence, in the eyes of the trier(s) of fact, be that judge or jurors, in conjunction with that evidence’s relative probative value, in light of all of the admitted evidence in the case, that is to guide a verdict.

Ding ding ding. Steve give this guy a gold box outline pronto.

In one of the books I read, they did indeed note that the Italian female prosecutors wore stiletto heel boots and shoes, all carefully matched to their chic outfits. The raw material was rather ugly, though.

“Knox lying about Kircher always keeping her door locked”

Agreed, there’s really no legitimate reason to tell this kind of a lie to investigators. But it makes sense if she was panicked about the whole situation and worried that someone might ask her why she was not apparently concerned about Kircher’s possible disappearance.

Not only that, but right around that time she was calling her mother to express concern about Kircher being missing.

Yes, well, they probably swim better than you, Zippy. If you feel that you are smarter than I am, though, do feel welcome to let us all know what your current deviation IQ actually is (and, of course, the standard deviation for whichever test it was that your psychometrician used to measure it). I am sure that we here shall all be humbled (except for Nurit, wherever she might be hiding, these days!?!).

“My point is that positing a collaborative project of this character between people who were completely unacquainted is a waste of your time and everyone else’s”

I disagree with your assumption that they were completely unaquainted; everyone has acquaintances for which there is little or no evidence of acquaintance.

Besides which, I don’t see why it’s a waste of time. It does appear that Knox was involved in the murder; therefore it’s hardly unreasonable to speculate about how she was involved and what her motivations were.

” The authorities in Italy were relying on the most dubious and discreditable forensic evidence because that’s all they had.”

They also relied on the fact that Knox’s story did not add up. Of course, you might respond that the circumstantial evidence against Knox should not result in a conviction unless there is sufficient evidence to nail down what happened and how she was involved. Which is not an unreasonable position to take, but it doesn’t change the fact that she does appear to have been involved in the murder.

For odd behavior by innocent people see the Kay Mortensen case.

Well, if legal verdicts are so conclusive, should OJ get his good name back?

More seriously, Ron, the difference between OJ and Amanda Knox is simply … the evidence.

The evidence against OJ was pretty much rock solid–the DNA on socks (at his house) and gloves (her house and his), blood drops both places, hair, fibers (Bronco carpet), all the witnesses on the Bronco (missing at his house–limo driver– seen near the scene), Kato Kaelin, etc. Plus a decent theory of the crime–history of spousal abuse, wife separated, filed for divorce. Plus OJ running.

With Amanda Knox we have … uh … um … uh … nothing. Basically we have that Amanda and Meridith had some sort of roommate dispute. And Amanda didn’t behave as people wanted her to. And in questioning several days in–in what she claimed was a “how could it have happened” scenario she implicated Patrick Lumumba–a black guy who was hitting on Meredith. That’s it. The physical evidence–there’s a violent rape-murder crime scene in Meredith Kercher’s room–with lots of DNA from Rudy Guede, but nothing from Amanda Knox or Raffaele Sollecito. Nothing. By all appearances Amanda Knox was basically *never* in Kercher’s room–and certainly not during this violent attack. And there is simply no credible theory of the crime–which is why the bizarre nonsense is offered up.

If you want an answer to BillB’s post. The answer is … it’s junk.

I spent 15 or 20 reading the link he’s peddling, searching for anything really meaty, consequential. Basically their big claim is the killings required someone to restrain Meredith. (This is more of this same sort of nonsense about male\female strength differential. Razib had a post about it with some actual stats a couple weeks back. “Butt kicking babes” … that’s Hollywood. Women really are the weaker sex. Furthermore under physical threat women are much more likely to submit–not unreasonably!–to try and save themselves.) So these folks have decided Amanda was in there–Kercher’s room!–whacking away.

No one would remain still and allow themselves to be repeatedly cut. Since we know that the attack happened with Meredith upright the only way to explain these light cuts is if Meredith was restrained from behind while someone else attacked her from the front. This was probably Rudy since his DNA was found on her jacket arm and on the backside of her bra strap. The bruising on Meredith’s arms is from Rudy holding her from behind while either Amanda or Raffaele Sollecito|Raffaele]], or both attacked Meredith from the front.

My question: then where’s their DNA? In Meredith’s room? And where is Meredith’s DNA on them? Their clothes? Their bodies? They’d be covered in Kercher’s blood. Did Knox and Sollecito don Ebola moon suits … while leaving their new found best buddy Guede unprotected. Knowing, presumably, that in the very likely event Guede’s DNA lands him in the slammer … he testifies and they go down.

They also try and downplay Guede’s history. Hey he’s a bit of lowlife … but Sollecito (drugs) and Knox (some disturbing the peace type thingy) are no saints. Please. He’d done multiple breakins and had been caught just days before having broken into a nursery school packing a big knife.

Bill also trots out the usual nonsense: The window is unreachable! No, it’s actually quite reachable by an athletic young man. (And Guede had already done some 2nd story entry.) Furthermore if it was faked, it was not unreasonable for Guede to fake it, as he had befriended the guys downstairs and would likely come up in an investigation.

It’s all just ridiculous. The theory that is simple and matches the evidence is that Guede saw Meredith–or Amanda or both–and decided to break in and rape (her\them). And did so, and the rape–what’s the MSM term of art–“went wrong”.

Is it *possible*? Unbeknownst to anyone Knox and Sollecito actually got to know Guede? And Amanda so hated Meredith and was venting and Guede volunteered to give her a good raping and after a couple hits of hash or something Amanda and Raffaele thought that sounded peachy and opened up Amanda’s place–without anyone seeing them their–so Guede could get busy raping and chopping her up? While they–oops he was serious!–panicked and staged a phony break-in? Or something. (You can always dream up scenarios.)

Possible, sure. Likelihood–pretty much zero. Evidence for–nonexistent.

“At no time did Knox tell the police she had been in the room when Kercher was attacked.”

No, but according to the investigators, she said she was in an adjoining room, with hands over ears in an effort to shut out Kercher’s screams. That’s close enough. As for Chiacchiera, good on him, but it would have been a judgment call either way. Investigators have to tie up loose ends of the B-actors in the drama, or else defense lawyers for Guede could have pulled the old line about “I’m only in here because I’m black — you let the real murderers go because they were cute white people”, and given the suspicions Knox’s behavior aroused (and and continue to arouse), that defense might well have swayed a few jurors. As it is, Knox’s behavior was part of the reason Guede was able to flee the country for a while.

Again, once I learned that the bleach/clean-up story was a lien (and this goes to what Sean was saying in #260), that was when the case fell apart for me. I’m not saying it was rock-solid before then, but I understood why others believed they were guilty. But if there had been no clean-up afterwards, then the preponderance of Guede’s DNA over Knox’s and Sollecito’s (especially since it’s understandable that the DNA of the latter two would be there) should indeed have been the end of it.

But early on, their [police and prosecution] actions seem more reasonable

According to the prosecution’s reconstruction, which they had a year to come up with, Knox had attacked Kercher in her bedroom, repeatedly banged her head against a wall, forcefully held her face and tried to strangle her. Guede, Knox and Sollecito had removed Kercher’s jeans, and held her on her hands and knees while Guede had sexually abused her. Knox had cut Kercher with a knife before inflicting the fatal stab wound.

The prosecution admitted that no clothing fibers, hairs, fingerprints, skin cells or DNA of Knox were found on Kercher’s body, clothes, handbag or anywhere in the bedroom. They also admitted that a piece of the broken window was found beside one of Guede’s shoe prints in Kercher’s bedroom, his bloody palm print was on a pillow under Kercher’s hips, and his DNA was on the strap of her bra as well as a vaginal swab taken from her body. In addition, Guede’s DNA mixed with Kercher’s was on the left sleeve of her bloody sweatshirt and in bloodstains on the inside of her shoulder bag, which credit cards had been stolen from.

Good reasons Berlusconi had a lot of popular support when he took on the Italian legal system, not entirely selfishly motivated.

“Yes, my old idea was that in Philip Marlowe novels, murder investigations tend to shine a spotlight on a lot of non-murderous suspects with something to hide.

“Misdirected guilt” is now being claimed as the reason that Cameron Todd Willingham was sentenced to death and executed after being convicted of setting the house fire that killed his family. Subsequently, more modern forensic analysis indicates the fire actually started by accident.

Willingham, who seemed obviously guilt-stricken to the investigators, was, according to his defenders, actually guilt-ridden over not having the courage/foolhardiness to go into a raging house fire and rescue his family. From a rational perspective, he had no reason to feel guilty about that. But that guilty demeanor, along with his low intelligence and tattooed metal-head exterior, convinced investigators and jurors that he should be put to death.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/death-by-fire/

Well, if legal verdicts are so conclusive, should OJ get his good name back?

Hmm … after 20 years OJ can finally rest easy. The “real killer” is … Amanda Knox.

“If I confess to a crime”

But she didn’t, ever. At no time did Knox tell the police she had been in the room when Kercher was attacked.

after a few days in jail

She withdrew the statement (which ended because she broke down in tears) within hours of making it, before she ever left the police station. Police told her she was a witness suffering from post traumatic memory loss. She said she had let someone in the house, because the police got her to say that because they were were following a line of reasoning. They thought a faked break-in meant someone in the house had committed the murder or was in on it. Like I said above even after she made the highly incriminating statement the original chief investigator Marco Chiacchiera did not want to arrest Knox. His assistant, and the main one who wanted Knox arrested, was Monica Napoleoni, who took over after Chiacchiera dropped out because he was unhappy with the concentration on Knox.

Mignini had previously accepted the crazy theory of Michele Giuttari, the former head of Florence’s Flying Squad in the Monster Of Florence case, (Mignini started investigating judges in Florence apparently believing that they were members of a Satanic cult using serial killings to harvest vaginas to use as a sacrament in black mass rituals).

And the Perugia prosecutors office that Mignini was from were the same one that tried to convict the former prime minister of the county for murder. It seriously damaged Italy’s international reputation when that case was brought against Andreotti . There should have been corrective measures taken on prosecutions in Perugia. Now they have done it again.

“But was this some banana-republic kangaroo court from the start?” Everyone can make their own mind up about that I think.

Sara Horwitz was happy to see illegal alien Ingmar Guandique sent to prison on little or no evidence but would have fought with all her might to keep him from being deported.

It’s him, he did it, I can feel it.�

Right away, we are in flake territory. Notice (and the police should have noticed too) that she did not say “I saw him” or “I recognized his voice” or anything like that, but “I can FEEL it” – she has some sort of ESP or vibe that it is Lumumba. Real investigators would have nailed her down – what do you mean you can “feel” it?

What does it even mean to say that at the upper end IQ doesn’t follow a Gaussian distribution?

These days, IQ is basically standardized by forcing the numbers to fit the normal curve; that is, the raw scores are essentially mapped onto the normal curve via percentiles, and then the resultant SD scores translated into IQ points with either 15 or 16 as the standard deviation.

Now there may be a real question as to whether something the IQ imperfectly measures, such as g, actually conforms to a normal curve, but there are far too few real measures of g independent of IQ tests to get any legitimate sense of this.

I think the most sensible reason to think that g follows a normal curve is to consider its genetic base, which seems to be heavily additive, and which seems to show no set of genes of anything other than very small effect. If there were a gene that might induce extremely high g, and thereby inflate the number of people with very high g, it certainly seems we ought to know about it already, and we don’t. It might also be true, I suppose, that the actual mechanism that lies behind g might have a threshold effect at the upper range, so that relatively small changes in the additive genes might induce a large effect in the mechanism, but I see no reason to believe this.

By far the most sensible thing to believe by default is that g follows a normal curve.

From what I’ve read from you, Sport, I believe that you are, in fact, smarter than the average bear. Some of the more precocious Grizzlies, north of the border, and a few of the Arctic Polars, would probably navigate a maze a bit faster than you though.

“Knox wasn’t responsible for Lumumba spending 15 days in jail. First, she took back her “confessionâ€� in less than two days after the interrogation but Lumumba wasn’t released until two weeks later.”

Let’s assume that’s right. If I confess to a crime, and then, after a few days in jail say “actually, I really don’t like it in here; I’m changing my statement (again)”, I’m not going to be surprised if the police put less weight on my retraction than they did to my initial confession. Again, I’m not saying she’s guilty of the murder, I’m saying I understand why the police initially thought she might be connected. They were looking for a black guy early on, and it makes sense that they would want to nail down Lumumba’s timeline for the night in question, and therefore, to Knox’s communications with him and/or possible meeting, so one way or another, they had to get her to be exact about that. And then there’s this, from my previous citation:

Anna Donnino, an interpreter for the Perugia police, told the trial that Knox had an “emotional shock� on being shown her text to Lumumba, and said: “It’s him, he did it, I can feel it.�

After that, given the previous shifting of alibis, the fits of crying and shaking, I don’t find it ridiculous that the police would suspect that there was more to her involvement than what she was letting on and that they would tell her she needed to come clean or else she was going down for three decades herself. Even today, cops most everywhere tend to be stern once things get to that stage.

Later on, the Italian justice system did indeed become farcical: they fried the hard drive which might have exonerated both Knox and Sollecito, and there was the prosecutor’s weird sex-game scenario. (Sex game, you say? Really?) But early on, their actions seem more reasonable. (Recording everything is easier these days, and at the time, interviews of a more exploratory nature were allowed to go recorded. I suspect the Italians record a lot more interviews in these days of camera phones and GoPro).

And as Ron Unz and others have noted, they already knew that a black guy of some sort was seen leaving the scene. Without putting a fine point on it, that already seems like something they would regard as being from the “usual suspects” central casting office and an indication of smooth sailing right down to the conviction. Why would they subsequently decide that a computer geek local boy and a fresh-faced barmaid exchange student were also involved — not the most likely mix of criminals, I think you’ll agree — unless maybe it was the shifty actions of the latter two that had something to do with it?

Were they guilty of murder? No, Knox and Sollecito were not — 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. But was this some banana-republic kangaroo court from the start? I’m not willing to go that far either.

Yes that’s it, he looked very non plussed on losing and did not console her.

You have an issue with undemonstrative people? What’s your argument? That his demeanor indicates she’s guilty because he should look like he expected to lose or that his demeanor indicates she’s guilty because he should behave like her mother and not like a legal professional in court?

Not sure what your point is here, it doesn’t change the fact that Knox’s story doesn’t add up AFAICT

My point is that positing a collaborative project of this character between people who were completely unacquainted is a waste of your time and everyone else’s. Sollecito did not know Guede, Knox knew Guede only as a face in the neighborhood, and Sollecito and Knox were new to each other. The idea that these three people co-operated in some bizarre sex game attempting to enlist a 4th person (and killing her) or that Knox and Sollecito made themselves accomplices after the fact to Guede’s crimes cannot be taken seriously absent eyewitness testimony, forensic evidence, or documentation which indicates that they were acquainted with each other or left a trail which indicated they did collaborate. The authorities in Italy were relying on the most dubious and discreditable forensic evidence because that’s all they had.

There is strong evidence that Guede had an accomplice(s).

==

There isn’t. Even were there, you’d take an interest in people who were known to associate with Guede, which would not include either Knox or Sollecito.

According to these tables:

http://iqcomparisonsite.com/oldSATIQ.aspx

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx

a pre-recentering 1600 corresponds to an IQ of around 164+ on a 1 SD=15pts scale (e.g. the Wechsler scale) which corresponds to a rarity of around 1 person in 100,000. Note that because of ceiling effects, it really means that your IQ is 164 OR above – 170s, 180s, 200s – they will all get 1600 SATs and you can’t tell them apart using the SAT.

Regarding childhood (or at least pre-teen) IQ, according the Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent (SET), a modern SAT score of 700+ on either verbal or math, received before age 13, is achievable by about 1 child in 10,000, which corresponds to an IQ of around 156+. By the time you are 12 your intelligence is fairly crystallized and is not going to vary much later. Virtually all of the SET kids go on to graduate level education.

It’s hard to find really reliable data about very high IQ scores (say over 165) because there are so few people in that category to norm against and most tests ceiling out somewhere around there. The fact that it is not politically fashionable to concentrate on this area (in which virtually no NAMs are present) has not helped. I think SET itself has only survived because it is now abundant with Asians. If it was still a predominantly white male group they would have shut it down by now.

Given the lack of any psychiatric illness in Knox’s past, many would say this one was.

And these many would be wrong too.

I’m one of those people who was tested for IQ in a couple of tests in the early ’60’s. I had no idea what was going on, really. I’m also one of those people who was never told their scores; although I know it was very high. My son was tested 20 years ago and was in the 160’s, I still don’t understand how or why he was told his score. The IQs in general 1% terms (for both of us) have been validated by other tests, academic results, and so on.

But I have to reiterate my original point about the general meaninglessness of IQ’s above a certain threshold, at least as a predictive or determinative model. For example, I know in what my intelligence consisted: I started reading early and was way ahead of my peers. In addition, I made sure that if I heard or saw something I didn’t understand I would find out about it. The mechanical kinds of tests — how many things can you think of at the same time, how many words can you memorize at first glance — I’d say my skills in that area are perhaps above average but, when I read about chess players like Harry Nelson Pillsbury who could memorize a list of 24 words (mostly polysyllabic and arcane) with one perusal, and then give them back to you in order or in reverse a half hour later, I can’t do that. And it doesn’t make me feel bad that I can’t do that. But his “IQ” must have been way up there.

Marilyn vos Savant or someone else may have an IQ above 200, and they may be able to do the kinds of things Pillsbury could pull off, but is it really important? I don’t think so. I mean there’s only so many ways of reading a book, or opining on a court case. The bigger problem I think is when people tend to think that having an IQ off the charts confers some kind of authority. It shouldn’t. The only that matters is what you are doing, and what you have done, and as has been shown repeatedly the habit of thinking is more important than the gift of IQ.

Joseph Mach (descendant of superbrain Ernst Mach) and Marina vos Savant’s daughter is a good bet for top female IQ . She made a few mistakes in abstruse mathematical reasoning, but she showed astounding practical intelligence in the Monty Hall problem that confused experts in statistics.

“Well, if legal verdicts are so conclusive, should OJ get his good name back?”

OJ was found not guilty in a far weaker sense (the corollary of guilty verdicts in the US having to meet a far higher standard of proof than in Italy), and he went on to lose a civil case. The Italian Supreme Court could have sent Knox back for a retrial if there was any lingering suspicion, but it gave a judgement that is a complete exoneration. It is the final verdict in the case for the entire legal system, including civil courts.

I had never heard of Knox before I read this. It’s pretty good:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/an-innocent-abroad/

Americans ought to understand that they don’t come off very well as foreigners. She was a stupid kid who behaved in a way almost calculated to offend Italians. Further, American women (and maybe this is something Mr. Sailer might want to write about) don’t understand that when they leave the protection of their WEIRD cocoons, they are naked to the predatory instincts of the human tribe. Half of that tribe will be the women of the country they are trespassing in, who will hate their guts.

No, she shouldn’t have sung an aria, she should have behaved demurely and worn a little makeup. And skirts. She had to be persuaded to dress in skirts, insisting on coming to a court, which Italians take as seriously as going to the theatre, in her ugly Seattle grunge clothes. The times she came in a skirt she made a better impression. This matters. At one point one of her sisters came to court in shorts!

It’s something like white privilege, when you think of it. You don’t know you’ve got it until it’s gone.

PS – Sollecito’s lawyer was a woman, a real wolverine.

On the prosecutor:

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/Mignini.html

There is a class aspect to this as well. Peter Popham of the nice people’s Independent has known all along that the case was shit:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/amanda-knox-acquitted-finally-they-are-free-this-was-an-outrageous-miscarriage-of-justice-10140573.html

It’s was the stupid people’s paper that pushed the Foxy Knoxy meme.

Finally, the Kerchers, especially John, have vociferously advocated the 3 assailant theory because their 5’1″ daughter had taken a year of karate, and could “easily” have fought off an athletic man a foot taller than she. (Google it.) I mean, a year of karate. Meredith was a butt-kicking babe! A 5’1″ female can EASILY fight off a 6’1″ man at the height of his athletic power! Pow! Splat! Bam! Comics and movies say so, so it must be true!

For the anti-Knox loonies here (why are none of you anti-Sollecito? and why do you all misspell the names of the key actors?), that’s meant to be sarcasm. This was a sadly typical rape-murder, committed by one man, who had a history of this sort of behavior. Nothing much to see beyond that.

I don’t know what the standards of Italian justice are, but in the American justice system, as in any rational, fair system of justice, Amanda Knox does not have to prove her innocence – the prosecutors have to prove her guilt. I have never seen any plausible explanation for why Knox and her ex-bf were guilty. There’s not a single one that isn’t riddled with holes. Knox’s own story has fewer holes in it than the ones explaining why she is supposedly guilty.

When you combine that with the straightforward observation that a murder does not not fit Knox’s character, and that 22-year-old white, female college grads don’t tend to commit a whole lot of crimes, let alone murders – as well as the fact that Rudy Guede had every reason to implicate her in order to reduce his sentence – there is no serious reason to believe that Knox is guilty.