Category: CNN Network
How Saul Kassin Hoaxed The American Psychology Law Society
Posted by Ergon
Knox and Kassin at the American Psychology Law Society Conference 2017
1. Post Overview
Serial misrepresenter of the Knox “interrogation” Saul Kassin has made yet another false claim, once again to a large audience.
This time it was to the American Psychology Law Society Conference in Seattle, Washington, March 16th-18th, and it suggests he simply cannot count.
2. Kassin Already Shown A Fraud
SIX prior posts correct numerous Kassin “mistakes”.
2. Saul Kassin: An Example Of How The Knox Campaign Is Misleading American Experts And Audiences
3. Correcting Saul Kassin’s Massively Inaccurate Description Of Amanda Knox’s So-Called Confession
5. On Saul Kassin: Our Letter To Dr Douglas Starr Who Wrote An Effusive Profile In The “New Yorker”
6. How Saul Kassin Framed Many Fine Italian Justice Officials - And Then Played Victim When Corrected
3. Interrogation Already Shown A Hoax
EIGHTEEN prior posts on the Knox interrogation hoax describe what actually took place.
It is very important to understand that as the defenses conceded in court under the strict Italian legal definition of “interrogation” Knox was really only ever interrogated twice.
Both times this was by Dr Mignini (Dec 2007 and June 2009) and both times it was at Knox’s own request.
All of her other discussions with investigators early in November 2007 were merely “verbale di sommarie informazioni” or written-up discussion with a person with possible useful information. Notes exist in the record of all these discussions - none remotely coercive - and they were summarised by prosecution witnesses at trial.
See my quote below of the defense lawyers in Italian, where they use the correct Italian legal term. These written-up discussions with Knox carry precisely the same status as the “verbale di sommarie informazioni” with Sophie Purton and numerous others in the records of the case.
Accordingly I use “interrogation” a couple of times in quotes below in rebutting Kassin’s wrong claims.
4. The 45-50-55 Hours Hoax
Quoting Amanda Knox and Saul Kassin at the American Psychology Law Society Conference in Seattle in March 2017:
Kassin: “Knox was questioned for over 50 hours but none was recorded”.
Kassin: “I’ve never seen a case more steeped in misinformation than Amanda Knox’s”.
So, where did the magical 50 hourrs interrogation in 5 days that ‘inevitably lead to false confessions’ first appear?
Professor Kassin will not say, or provide background information to the crowded rooms of trainee law psychologists to which he and Amanda Knox have been repeating this claim.
So, here’s some vital background Kassin seems to have missed which spirals in to the truth.
Steve Moore: “In the five days after the murder of Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox was interrogated by detectives for 43 hours.
Amanda’s focus was the appeal - and she soon had a world-renown ally.
“This case horrifies me. I’d like to say it shocks me. But I’ve seen others like it,” said psychologist and professor Saul Kassin, an expert on police interrogations.
On his own initiative, Kassin filed a report with the Italian (appeals) court on Amanda’s behalf. It outlines some of the psychological reasons why Amanda could have confessed to a murder she did not commit.
“Amanda Knox, like everybody, has a breaking point. She reached her breaking point,” he explained. “Eight or 10 or 12 police officials in a tag team-manner come in and interrogate her… Their goal is a confession and they’re not leaving that room without it.”
Er no, there’s no record of any report by Kassin in the Hellmann court files, and Amanda Knox never released one either.
But regardless, Judge Hellmann ruled Knox should have known Patrick Lumumba was innocent and upheld her 3 year conviction for criminal defamation (calunnia) anyway.
3. American Psychologist/Innocence Project
From “Why Confessions Trump Innocence” by Saul M. Kassin, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, April 2012
Armed with a prejudgment of Knox’s guilt, several police officials interrogated the girl on and off for four days. Her final interrogation started on November 5 at 10 p.m. and lasted until November 6 at 6 a.m., during which time she was alone, without an attorney, tag-teamed by a dozen police, and did not break for food or sleep.
CNN May 8, 2011
CURT KNOX, FATHER: Between the time that they actually found Meredith and when Amanda was arrested, there was roughly a 90-hour timeframe. And I’m ball parking the numbers there. During that time, Amanda was in the police station for questioning for—I believe it was 52 hours.
Now we’re getting a little closer to the truth. Knox was possibly at the police station for maybe 52 hours. But actually she wasn’t ‘interrogated’ for that long.
Then going back to when those figures first came out:
5. King 5 News
Amanda Knox’s family says confession coerced
By LINDA BYRON / KING 5 News
Posted on November 13, 2009 at 12:16 PM
She was just flat scared to be alone,” Curt said. “So she went down to the police station with him and they were split into two rooms and then they started going at them.
With physical and mental abuse for 14 hours. No food, water, no official interpreter.”
Prosecutors say Amanda’s accounts swung wildly: She wasn’t at the cottage the night of the murder. She was there, but drunk in another room.
But her parents say she was coerced by police.
“(They said) you know, you’re never going to see your family again,” Curt said. “You’re going to jail for 30 years. You need to come up with something for us, you’re a liar. Come up with something for us. Envision something; throw something out there.”
6. Della Vedova/Ghirga appeal to Hellmann
There’s a summary of a defense analysis of the discussions here - note the “verbale di sommarie informazioni” which is NOT the Italian for “interrogation”.
(p.12) Amanda Knox è stata sottoposta ad esame ed attività investigative e tra il 2 e il 6 novembre 2007, fino al momento del fermo, ha fornito sommarie informazioni e risposto a domande della A.G. come segue:
2 novembre 2007, ore 15.30 VENERDI’: totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦..12,00
Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox, senza indicazione della chiusura.
Testimoni fino alle 3.00 am del 3 novembre 20073 novembre 2007, ore 14.45 SABATO totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦8,00
Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox, senza indicazione della chiusura.
Testimoni indicano fino alle 22,00.4 novembre 2007, ore 14.45 DOMENICA: totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦.12,00
Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox, ed accesso alla villetta di Via
della Pergola dalle ore 14.45 alle ore 21. Telefonata di Amanda alla zia dice 5 ore
di interrogatorio in questura5/6 novembre 2007, ore 01.45 LUNEDI’/MARTEDI’: totale ore “¦”¦.5,00
Verbale di sommarie informazioni della Knox inizio alle ore 22.00 del 5
novembre 2009.6 novembre 2007, ore 05.45 MARTEDI’: totale ore “¦”¦”¦”¦”¦”¦.3,45
Verbale di “spontanee dichiarazioni” della Knox con successivo breve
memoriale. Dalle ore 1,45 alle 5,45 e memoriale alle ore 14,00.In 5 giorni la Knox è stata sentita per un totale di circa 53,45 h.
Except, here above I count a total of 40.45 hrs, hmm, not all of which was spent being “interrogated”.
She was in the waiting room with the others, as confirmed by her own phone records, e-mails home, texts, etc. Not to forget headstands, cartwheels, yoga poses and general faffing around with Sollecito.
The defense realized their math was off so they included an additional 13.0 hrs. to the time of her memoriale though they counted their own figures twice, Lol.
Keep in mind her attorneys never argued the time was unreasonable, only that the accusation should not be considered for the calunnia charge.
Their summary was only to show how long she had been ‘present for examination’ in that time she was at the Questura till her arrest. And even then, their figures were wrong..
7. From Rita Ficarra’s Testimony
Knox was let go by the evening of the first day so the 12 hours interrogation figure is incorrect. She also had an official interpreter by 12:30, was fed and allowed to rest in between, wasn’t slapped, and there were only two detectives present.
8. Case follower Soletrader4U analyzed her phone records and case files and came up with a more realistic figure of 17.45 hrs of actual “interrogation”.
5. My Conclusions
It looks like Kassin is still spinning his hoaxes. I invite Professor Kassin to correct his figures and explain how, according to his research, Amanda Knox could have produced a “False Confession” over the span of 17.45 hours of “interrogation” over 5 days?
[Everything in this post applies equally to the ludicrously inaccurate claims of ex FBI “mindhunter” John Douglas in his books and lobbying at the State Department.]
Posted by Ergon on 04/10/17 at 11:31 PM •
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Archived in Defendants in court, Amanda Knox, Hoaxes against Italy, 2 Italian mileu hoax, 9 Mignini v Knox hoax, Hoaxes Knox & team, 16 Interrogation hoax, 17 Fake memory hoax, Hoaxers from 2007, Knox-Marriott PR, Hoaxers from 2009, Saul Kassin, Hoaxers from 2011, John Douglas, Hoaxers: media groups, CNN Network •
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Knox-Mellases And Candace Dempsey Display Extreme Contempt Of Court On CNN
Posted by Hopeful
[Candace Dempsey and Frank Sforza who in court soon may disavow her numerous false accusations]
Horrible horrible CNN story tonight on “Crimes of the Century”, in which they featured the Knox case. CNN shredded the case with dozens and dozens of half-truths and outright errors.
They did show some sympathy to Meredith using decent photos of her and some complimentary verbiage from various speakers, but CNN aimed to convince viewers that poor Amanda was persecuted by evil tyrants bound to medieval mindsets. They actually delighted in casting aspersions on Mignini for being an honest and devout Catholic as if that is some horrid slur.
The miserable program which aired at 8:00 pm Central Standard Time her on Sunday night in the U.S. showcased the malevolent faces of Candace Dempsey, Anne Bremner, Nina Burleigh and Dr. Mark Waterbury spewing out garbage and error, and they gave them so much face time on camera, it was awful.
The video footage of Mignini was trash photography with angles and poses meant to make him look bad, but it was an utter fail. His dignity was intact despite the worst they could throw at him. Yet it wasn’t hard to make the pro-Knox forces look ignorant on the show. Dempsey almost sounded mentally afflicted and looked very odd while Anne Bremner couldn’t say much with a straight face nor stop nervously batting her eyelids.
Everyone on the Knox bandwagon looked positively shifty. Thankfully Curt and Edda did not star in this production much, we were spared their serial nonsense. They were shown more as background figures.
Even Amanda was treated rather poorly despite the theme of “poor girl, she’s innocent and has been railroaded”, because they took bits and pieces from her recent TV interview in her sleeveless blue dress and they pulled out her most irrelevant and salacious remarks loosed from any context. They shredded her comments, using such junk as her remark that she was sexually active but not sexually deviant and thet she wasn’t dressed in leather and cracking a whip.
Tawdry stuff, and nothing in context. They used, “I wish I’d stood up to them more” and never showed her squirming and looking discomfited at many questions. No, the truth wasn’t well presented.
They only showed Mr. John Kercher once early in the show in a fleeting shot. Later they used footage of Arline Kercher alone, and had her saying, “We need to know what happened.” It was an absolute debacle of a news program if truth were the aim, and a total assault on Mignini from start to finish. They attacked all the DNA evidence. Attorney Ghirgha was shown briefly and so was Dalla Vedova surrounded by the press pack with microphones at his mouth.
Rudy Guede was again made to take the brunt of the entire murder, and CNN planted the false idea that he had his sentence shortened due to rolling over on Knox or cutting some deal with the prosecution. Courtroom scenes of the first trial in Perugia were abundant, with Sollecito being paraded in with his long hair and white jacket in the early days. Bongiorno was shown hugging him after the acquittal, and Amanda’s crying jag as she was acquitted.
The cameras were fixed on Mignini making him look like a sinister plotter of retribution, it was all so predictably malicious and unfair toward him. A complete abomination instead of accuracy in reporting.
I was appalled at the audacity and insolence of Candace Dempsey when she said Mignini is the kind of man who after finding a lovely British girl on the floor in blood could make up an entire scenario of a sex crime out of his own fantasies. She deviously left out the glaring fact that Meredith’s body was found with physical signs of sexual assault and half-nude. What a con artist she is.
The only piece of truth in the entire episode was a trite one when the male speaker (forgot his name, Darren? Kolinky?) he said Knox was extremely stupid. STUPID. As if we didn’t know that already. This grinning fellow seemed a silly adjunct to the other silly billy goats gruff namely Bremner, Dempsey, Waterbury, Burleigh. I give it a zero. It was a pathetic attempt to cover the Kercher case as one of the “Crimes of the Century”. An epic fail, and nobody fooled but the self-deceived cast of the show.
The program was nauseating to anyone who knows the facts. Nina Burleigh lamented the celebrations in the street at midnight when Knox’s guilty sentence was announced, as they yelled in Italian “American assassin!” Burleigh claimed it was as close as she’d ever get to seeing a mass mob use a scapegoat, this time the dear sweet Amanda, shudder.
Nina Burleigh and the other two women were set up as some kind of ludicrous experts. The more contained yet equally in the wrong Dr. Waterbury said that Meredith’s DNA was not on the knife. It was just one outlandish falsehood after another.
Posted by Hopeful on 08/19/13 at 06:45 AM •
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Judy Bachrach Appears THE Most Adamant That Mr Mignini Has Somehow Hoodwinked All Of Italy
Posted by The Machine
Hmmm. Isn’t Mr Mignini already suing people for hurtful claims about him not unlike those made very dogmatically in the video above?
And the similar hurtful claims made very dogmatically in the two videos down below here? Certainly Mr Mignini would seem to have what you might call a not-unstrong case.
- First, the numbers of police, investigators and judges hoodwinked would have to have been truly huge. This case has a VAST cast of characters in Italy seeking true justice for Meredith - a jury, for example, and twenty judges by present count, and a nationally known and respected co-prosecutor.
- And second, nothing in the judges’ sentencing report, which PMF and TJMK are in the final laps of translating into English, appears to back up her claims. Judge Micheli’s report a year ago, which explained Guede’s conviction and the reasons for sending Knox and Sollecito to trial, was already an almost unassailably tough document. And the report by Judges Giancarlo Massei and Beatrice Cristiani? It is even tougher.
Judy Bachrach has popped up repeatedly to straighten out us lesser beings on the case. For her, it appears to be almost a small industry. She is perhaps the most vehement and impervious of all the proponents of the notion that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are somehow being railroaded, by a corrupt prosecutor, Mr Mignini, and an incompetent legal system.
Wouldn’t you expect Judy Bachrach, as a professional journalist and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, to research her articles more meticulously? And to verify every single one of her claimed facts? In the same way that the Italy-based reporters we like to quote have incessantly managed to do - really quite brilliantly?
We have been analyzing Judy Bachrach’s many, many articles and TV commentaries about the case, and they all seem to point to the following conclusions.
- That she hasn’t ever read the Micheli report and doesn’t seem to have actually ever mentioned it.
- That she hasn’t had full access to the prosecution’s 10,000-plus pages file of evidence, and maybe she has had no access at all.
- That she didn’t attend the key court sessions in which highly incriminating forensic and circumstantial evidence was presented.
- That she hasn’t absorbed the numerous factual newspaper and magazine reports about the key forensic and circumstantial evidence.
- That she seems to rely either a lot or totally on sources with vested interests who feed her wrong theories and false information.
- And that she comes across to us as the reporter most often showing on US media outlets the most complete ignorance of the case.
Quite a track record. We wonder if she is really very proud of it. She seems to sound so. Now to examine the details of some of her small jungle of wrong claims.
False Claim #1
Judy Bachrach made the following claims in an article entitled “Perugia’s Prime Suspect” for for Vanity Fair.
Rudy Guede’s DNA would be found all over her dead body the next day….“His DNA was found not only all over the British girl’s body but also in his bloody fingerprint staining one of her cushions and on the straps of the bra she wore the night of her death.
Judy Bachrach’s claims that Rudy Guede’s DNA was all over Meredith’s body have long been demonstrably false. According to the Micheli report here quickly translated here there was only ONE instance of Rudy Guede’s DNA on Meredith.
Where exactly did Judy Bachrach get that false information from? It clearly wasn’t from the DNA results from the tests carried out by Dr. Stefanoni and her team, or any official court documents, or the Micheli report.
And why exactly did she propagate it? Was she perhaps deliberately trying to exaggerate the evidence against Rudy Guede? Whilst playing down or completely ignoring the forensic and circumstantial evidence against Knox and Sollecito?
False Claim #2
In the same Vanity Fair article, Judy Bachrach makes the claim that “Amanda had tried three times to reach Meredith by cell phone, without success.”
If Judy Bachrach had examined the mobile phone records which are part of the prosecution’s 10,000 page report, as the court did and as we have done, she might have concluded otherwise - that Amanda Knox never ever made even one genuine attempt to contact Meredith.
Two of Knox’s phone calls lasted only 3 seconds and 4 seconds.
Judy Bachrach would have also realised that Knox’s claim that Meredith’s Italian phone “just kept ringing, no answer” was in fact a lie. And that Knox’s e-mail version of events at the house on 2 November is totally contradicted by what is in those mobile phone records.
Our poster Finn MacCool rather brilliantly drew attention a year ago now in this post here to how very, very incriminating those phone records are. (They also seem to incriminate Amanda Knox’s mother. Why doesn’t a good reporter actually ask her about this?)
Judge Massei and Judge Cristiani certainly don’t believe that Knox made a genuine attempt to contact Meredith. And they provide a very detailed explanation of why they don’t, in the sentencing report we are now translating.
And as you will soon see in that report, they also pull totally apart Knox’s email version of the events on 2 November to her friends and family in Seattle.
False Claim #3
Judy Bachrach has claimed that the bra clasp in Meredith’s bedroom was “discovered” only in January 2008.
But to complicate matters, a forensics team took a second look around the House of Horrors in January; this time they discovered a clasp that had been cut off the same bra. On that clasp they found Raffaele’s DNA.
House of Horrors? A callous way to refer to the sad place where a remarkable girl with a grieving family and many grieving friends was tortured and then deliberately left to die.
And in actual fact, Dr. Stefanoni was fully aware that the bra clasp was missing from the time she reviewed in the Rome labs the evidence collected from the crime scene - early in November. The clasp couldn’t be collected until the defense experts had agreed upon a date.
There was no other cause to the delay, and the bar clasp was never simply “discovered” at the second evidence visit in January. The forensic team went there specifically to get it. And it was actually recovered on 18 December 2007.
False Claim #4
Perhaps the reason why Judy Bachrach gets so many of the basic facts like those above wrong is that she seems to rely very heavily on sources who feed her false information. One example:
But three legal sources in Perugia (two unfriendly to Amanda) tell me the injuries sustained by Meredith were inconsistent with the blade of that knife.
All of Judy Bachrach’s “three legal sources” provided her with wrong facts.
The double DNA knife found in Sollecito’s apartment is fully compatible with the deep puncture wound on Meredith’s neck. This has been widely reported by a number of journalists in the British and American media. For example “According to multiple witnesses for the defense, the knife is compatible with at least one of the three wounds on Kercher’s neck, but it was likely too large for the other two.” (Barbie Nadeau in Newsweek).
The sentencing report of Judges Giancarlo Massei and Beatrice Cristiani also now confirms that the knife is absolutely compatible with the large wound on Meredith’s neck.
False Claim #5
Judy Bachrach claims that when Knox and Sollecito changed their versions of events they did so because things got rough.
Simultaneously, in a separate room, Raffaele, too, was questioned by police. Like Amanda’s, his version of events seemed to change whenever things got rough.
Raffaele Sollecito actually changed his version of events most dramatically on 5 November 2007 when he was confronted with the telephone records that proved that he and Knox had lied. It was then that he in effect threw Knox under the bus, and he has never really backed her versions of events on the night fully ever since.
And Amanda Knox in turn changed her version of events most dramatically when she was informed that Sollecito had admitted that they had both lied, that he was wrong to go along with her version, and that he was in effect no longer providing her with any alibi.
Knox and Sollecito’s multiple conflicting alibis did NOT happen because “things got rough”. They actually happened because Sollecito and Knox were both repeatedly caught lying. And they changed their stories periodically merely to fit the new information as it became known - and at pretty well no time after they were first caught out in their lies did the stories of the two ever match. .
By the way, wait for something of a bombshell. Judges Giancarlo Massei and Beatrice Cristiani in their sentencing report expose more lies and contradictions by Knox and Sollecito which haven’t as yet been reported in any of the English-language the media.
False Claim #6
Judy Bachrach wrote an article about the case for the website Women on the Web headlined Amanda Knox’s Abusive Prosecutor.. (Hmmm. Smart title.)
Amanda was also told if she didn’t confess she would get the maximum ““ 30 years in prison. And ““ oh yes ““ at a time when, having just arrived in Italy, she spoke pitifully little Italian, she wasn’t provided with a translator.
Judy Bachrach clearly wasn’t in the courtroom when Amanda Knox’s interpreter, Dr. Anna Donnino, gave her evidence as to all the work she did on the night of the interrogations. And Judy Bachrach clearly hasn’t read the numerous articles that actually describe the interpreter’s testimony.
False Claim #7
Judy Bachrach claims that an Italian reporter was thrown into prison for being critical of Mignini. She is clearly referring to Mario Spezi.
Mignini is no special friend to journalists. One Italian reporter who especially upset the prosecutor a while back was thrown into prison “” in isolation. An American journalist who was that reporter’s friend was interrogated so harshly that, fearing incarceration himself, he hopped the next plane back to the United States, where he started a campaign (ultimately successful) to free his friend. Their crime? They were critical of Mignini.
Spezi is currently on trial for disrupting the investigation into the Narducci case. He has NOT been charged with criticising Mr Mignini.
Judy Bachrach has made a number of television appearances on CNN and other networks in which she was scathing towards Mr Mignini and the Italian legal system. As with her articles, Judy Bachrach makes many wild and inaccurate claims.
False Claim #8
She incorrectly asserts that the defence teams weren’t allowed to produce evidence of their own DNA experts - despite the fact that the Knox and Sollecito defenses each had large teams of DNA experts testify. From the videos in this post:
The defence wasn’t even allowed to produce evidence of their own DNA experts.
Gino Professor, Carlo Torre and Walter Patumi were some of the DNA experts who testified at the trial on behalf of Amanda Knox. Professor Vinci, Adriano Tagliabracci and Francesco Introna were some of the DNA experts who defended Raffaele Sollecito.
False Claim #9
Judy Bachrach has repeatedly claimed (you can see her do so in these videos) that Amanda Knox was kept in prison for two years before her trial.
They kept her in jail for two years even before trial [although] there isn’t an ounce of real hard evidence against her” And “It was decided to keep Amanda Knox in jail for two years prior to her trial.
If Knox and Sollecito had been kept in prison for two years before their trial as someone “decided” their trial would have started in November 2009. The reality is that their trial started in January 2009 and it was originally scheduled for December 2008, just two months after Guede’s.
Judy Bachrach is not the only American journalist who is ignorant of the basic facts of the case, and responsible for some of the serious misinforming of the American public, both about the crime and about Italy.
But she sure does seem to be the only one to have made it into a little industry..
By the way, we sure look forward to the YouTubes of Candace Dempsey and Nina Burleigh propagating their own books on the case when those books are released. Will they now finally be describing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but?
Don’t hold your breath.
Posted by The Machine on 04/15/10 at 01:56 PM •
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