Political & economic headsup: US is demonstrating unsorted systems problems in spades. Do watch your investments. As Washington DC policy gets more & more off-target, big New York investors are betting very heavily that stocks will soon crash. Gross systems mismanagement 2017-20 tanked stocks several times.

Saturday, December 09, 2017

Exoneration Hoax: Murder Apologists Should READ The Supreme Court’s Final Words

Posted by The Machine

Emory Law Dean Schapiro; Martha Grace Duncan; Harvard Law Dean Manning

1. Overview Of This Post

This flows from our first post ten days ago.

Martha Grace Duncan credits many dozens for their research help. Really? For precisely what?

This is more about the research that Martha Grace Duncan and the huge group she thanks (see Part 4 below) should have done. We will see here how she makes false claims that even a mere hour or two of checking if the courts actually said what she claimed would have stopped those claims dead in their tracks.

Did neither Duncan nor any of those hapless dozens now associated with her fraud think to do that? Below, with quotes, I will show how it is done.

2. Misrepresentation Of Supreme Court

It is blatantly apparent from reading Martha Grace Duncan’s academic paper bizarrely titled “WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN YOUR ROOMMATE IS MURDERED IN ITALY: AMANDA KNOX, HER “STRANGE” BEHAVIOR, AND THE ITALIAN LEGAL SYSTEM” that she hasn’t actually read Judge Marasca’s final Supreme Court report.

She is ignorant of what that court actually said, and so she thoroughly misrepresents it.

Remember: (1) An acquittal under paragraph 1 of article 530 is a definitive acquittal or exoneration, the much stronger outcome. (2) An acquitted under paragraph 2 of article 530 is an insufficient evidence acquittal or dropping of charges for now.

Also remember: Knox received TWO convictions: (1) for murder and (2) for calunnia. Duncan falsely claims in her academic paper that Amanda Knox has been “fully exonorated by Italy’s highest court” implying both. Knox was not exonerated for either conviction in fact.

If Martha Grace Duncan had read the final Supreme Court report, she would have known that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were merely acquitted for murder for now under paragraph 2.

(That is appealable, as is overuling of the Nencini court and dabbling in the evidence, as both are against the code.)

Martha Grace Duncan further highlights her ignorance with regard to the contents of Marasca’s Supreme Court report by falsely claiming that the Supreme Court dropped all charges against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.

“March 29, 2015: The Supreme Court of Cassation overturns the murder convictions of Amanda and Raffaele and drops all charges against them.”

The Supreme Court actually reconfirmed Amanda Knox’s conviction for calunnia. She served three years in prison for repeatedly accusing Diya Lumumba of murder despite the fact she knew he was innocent.

“It is restated the inflicted sentence against the appellant Amanda Marie Knox, for the crime of slander at three years of prison.”

Judge Marasca pointed out in his report that Amanda Knox’s conviction for calunnia cannot be overturned.

“On the other hand, in the slanderous declaration against Lumumba, which earned her a conviction, the status of which is now protected as a final judgement”.

There is a common misconception amongst Amanda Knox’s supporters that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) might overturn Knox’s conviction for calunnia.

However, she is believed not even to have asked for that. And the ECHR cannot quash or reverse verdicts anyway, it can only recommend. In other words, Amanda Knox will remain a convicted criminal, a felon, for the rest of her life. That cannot be wound back.

Appeal Judge Nencini pointed out in his report that Amanda Knox didn’t retract her false and malicious allegation against Diya Lumumba the whole time he was in prison, and the motive for her allegation was to deflect attention away from herself and Sollecito and avoid retaliatory action from Rudy Guede.

“Amanda Marie Knox maintained her false and malicious story for many days, consigning Patrick Lumumba to a prolonged detention. She did not do this casually or naively. In fact, if the young woman’s version of events is to be relied upon, that is to say, if the allegations were a hastily prepared way to remove herself from the psychological and physical pressure used against her that night by the police and the prosecuting magistrate, then over the course of the following days there would have been a change of heart. This would inevitably have led her to tell the truth, that Patrick Lumumba was completely unconnected to the murder. But this did not happen.

“And so it is reasonable to take the view that, once she had taken the decision to divert the attention of the investigators from herself and Raffaele Sollecito, Amanda Marie Knox became fully aware that she could not go back and admit calunnia. A show of remorse would have exposed her to further and more intense questioning from the prosecuting magistrate. Once again, she would bring upon herself the aura of suspicion that she was involved in the murder.

Indeed, if Amanda Marie Knox had admitted in the days following to having accused an innocent man, she would inevitably have exposed herself to more and more pressing questions from the investigators. She had no intention of answering these, because she had no intention of implicating Rudy Hermann Guede in the murder.

“By accusing Patrick Lumumba, who she knew was completely uninvolved, because he had not taken part in the events on the night Meredith was attacked and killed, she would not be exposed to any retaliatory action by him. He had nothing to report against her. In contrast, Rudy Hermann Guede was not to be implicated in the events of that night because he, unlike Patrick Lumumba, was in Via della Pergola, and had participated [100] in the murder. So, he would be likely to retaliate by reporting facts implicating the present defendant in the murder of Meredith Kercher.

“In essence, the Court considers that the only reasonable motive for calunnia against Patrick Lumumba was to deflect suspicion of murder away from herself and from Raffaele Sollecito by blaming someone who she knew was not involved, and was therefore unable to make any accusations in retaliation. Once the accusatory statements were made, there was no going back. Too many explanations would have had to be given to those investigating the calunnia; explanations that the young woman had no interest in giving.”

The Marasca/Bruno court took no issue with that. Judge Marasca also believed Amanda Knox wanted to avoid retaliatory action from Rudy Guede and stated it was a circumstantial element against her.

“However, the said calunnia is another circumstantial element against the appellant, insofar as it can be considered a strategy in order to cover up for Mr. Guede, whom she had an interest to protect because of fear of retaliatory accusations against her.”

Apart from these two significant factual errors concerning the Supreme Court’s rulings in her academic paper, it’s clear that Martha Grace Duncan is labouring under the misapprehension that Amanda Knox was “fully exonerated” by the Supreme Court because there is some exculpatory evidence that provides definititve proof that Amanda Knox is innocent. However, she never explains what this exculpatory evidence is.

If Martha Grace Duncan had taken the time to read Marasca’s report, she would have known that the Supreme Court didn’t fully exonerate Amanda Knox at all. On the contrary, it actually implicated her in Meredith’s murder.

It ascertained the following: (1) there were multiple attackers (2) it’s a proven fact that Amanda Knox was at the cottage when Meredith Kercher was killed (3) she washed Meredith’s blood off in the small bathroom (4) she lied to the police (5) she falsely accused Diya Lumumba of murder to cover for Rudy Guede in order to avoid retaliatory action and (6) the break-in at the cottage was staged.ï»¿

I’ll substantiate each and every one of the claims above with quotations from Judge Marasca’s report to show Martha Grace Duncan how it is done and to give her the full picture of what’s in the report rather than the partial one that has been given to her presumably by Amanda Knox and her supporters.

1. There Were Multiple Attackers On The Night

“The [court’s] assessment of it, in accord with other trial findings which are valuable to confirm its reliability is equally correct. We refer to multiple elements linked to the overall reconstructions of events, which rule out Guede could have acted alone.

Firstly, testifying in this direction are the two main wounds observed on the victim’s neck, on each side, with a diversified path and features, attributable most likely (even if the data is contested by the defense) to two different cutting weapons. And also, the lack of signs of resistance by the young woman, since no traces of the assailant were found under her nails, and there is no evidence of any desperate attempt to oppose the aggressor, the bruises on her upper limbs and those on mandibular area and lips (likely the result of forcible hand action of constraint meant to keep the victim’s mouth shut) found during the cadaver examination, and above all, the appalling modalities of the murder which were not pointed out in the appealed ruling.

“And in fact, the same ruling (p323 and 325) reports of abundant blood found on the right of the wardrobe located in Kercher’s room, about 50cm above the floor. Such occurrence, given the location and direction of the drops, could probably lead to the conclusion the young woman had her throat literally “slashed” likely while she was kneeling , while her head was being forcibly held tilted towards the floor, at a close distance from the wardrobe, when she was hit by multiple stab wounds at her neck, one of which - the one inflicted on the left side of the neck - caused her death, due to asphyxia following the massive bleeding, which also filled the breathing ways preventing breathing activity, a situation aggravated by the rupture of the hyoid bone - this also linkable to blade action - with consequent dyspnoea” (p.48).

“Such a mechanical action is hardly attributable to the conduct of one person alone.” (p.49)

2. Amanda Knox was there when Meredith was killed

“Given this, we now note, with respect to Amanda Knox, that her presence inside the house, the location of the murder, is a proven fact in the trial, in accord with her own admissions, also contained in the memoriale with her own signature, in the part where she tells that, as she was in the kitchen, while the young English woman had retired in the room of same Ms Kercher, together with another person for a sexual intercourse, she heard a harrowing scream, so piercing and unbearable that she let herself down squatting on the floor, covering her ears tight with her hands in order not to hear more of it. About this, the judgement of reliability expressed by the lower [a quo] judge [Nencini] with reference to this part of the suspect’s narrative, [and] about the plausible implication from the fact herself was the first person mentioning for the first time [46] a possible sexual motive for the murder, at the time when the detective still did not have the the cadaver examination, nor the autopsy result, nor the witnesses’ information, which collected only subsequently, about the victim’s terrible scream and about the time when it was heard (Nara Capezalli, Antonella Monocchia and others), is certainly to be subscribed to. We make reference in particular to those declarations that the current appellant [Knox] on 11.6.2007 (p.96) inside the State Police headquarters. On the other hand, in the slanderous declaration against Lumumba, which earned her a conviction, the status of which is now protected as a final judgement [giudicato] [they] had a premise in the narrative, that is the presence of the young American woman, inside the house in via della Pergola, a circumstance which nobody at that time - except obviously the other people present in the house - could have known (quote p.96).

“According to the slanderous statements of Ms. Knox, she had returned home in the company of Lumumba, whom she had met by chance in Piazza Grimana, and when Ms. Kercher arrived in the house, Knox’s companion, directed sexual attentions toward the English woman, then he went together with her to he room from which the harrowing scream came. So, it was Lumumba who killed Meredith and she could affirm this since she was on the scene of the crime herself, albeit in another room. (p.97)

3. Amanda Knox washed Meredith’s blood off in bathroom

“Another element against her [Amanda Knox] is the mixed traces, her and the victim’s one, in the ‘small bathroom’, an eloquent proof that anyway she had come into contact with the blood of the latter, which she tried to wash away from herself (it was, it seems, diluted blood, while the biological traces belonging to her would be the consequence of epithelial rubbing).

“The fact is very suspicious, but it’s not decisive, besides the known considerations about the sure nature and attribution of the traces in question.”

4. Cassation confirms Amanda Knox lied to the police

“Elements of strong suspicion are also in the inconsistencies and lies which the suspect woman [Amanda Knox] committed over the statements she released on various occasions, especially in the places where her narrative was contradicted by the telephone records which show different incoming SMS messages”.

5. Knox accused Lumumba of murder to avoid Guede’s retaliation

“However, the said calunnia is another circumstantial element against the appellant, insofar as it can be considered a strategy in order to cover up for Mr. Guede, whom she had an interest to protect because of fear of retaliatory accusations against her.”

6. The break-in at the cottage was staged

“And moreover, the staging of a theft in Romanelli’s room, which she is accused of , is also a relevant point within an incriminating picture, considering the elements of strong suspicion (location of glass shards - apparently resulting from the breaking of a glass window pane caused by the throwing of a rock from the outside - on top of the clothes and furniture) a staging, which can be linked to someone who as an author of the murder and flatmate [titolare] with a formal {“qualified”] connection to the dwelling - had an interest to steer suspicion away from himself/herself, while a third murderer in contrast would be motivated by a very different urge after the killing, that is to leave the dwelling as quickly as possible.”

3. Duncan’s Misrepresentation Of Supreme Court

Writing an academic paper on the Amanda Knox case without having read Judge Marasca’s Supreme Court report is akin to writing an academic paper on the assassination of JFK without having read the Warren Report and relying on Oliver Stone’s film and some books written by conspiracy nuts.

The fact Martha Grace Duncan hasn’t even read Marasca’s Supreme Court report, but has instead relied primarily on Amanda Knox and her PR and partisan supporters for her information is embarrassing, to say the least.

Amanda Knox admitted lying to the police in her Waiting to Be Heard. She was convicted of lying by all courts, including the Italian Supreme Court. Since when did the word of a convicted liar trump the official court reports?

Martha Grace Duncan is a professor of law, although you couldn’t tell that from reading her academic paper. Her mistakes e.g. getting basic facts wrong and not bothering to read Marasca’s Supreme Court report or any other official court reports for that matter are unforgivable.

An early version of this Article received the Judith Siegel Pearson Award for Nonfiction in 2014. I am grateful to the judges. Previous versions of this Article were presented at the Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza, Università degli Studi di Torino; the European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy; the Emory Law Faculty, the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program, and the Emory Workshop on Geographies of Violence. My thanks go to the participants. My thanks also go to Robert Ahdieh, Giulia Alagna, Cathy Allan, Flavia Brizio-Skov, Michele Caianiello, Elisabetta Grande, Joe Mackall, Stefano Maffei, Alice Margaria, Claudia Marzella, Gaetano Marzella, Colleen Murphy, David Partlett, Lucia Re, Bob Root, Elena Urso, and Liza Vertinsky. Deep appreciation goes to my research assistants: Stefania Alessi, Mary Brady, Andrew Bushek, Peter Critikos, Sarah Kelsey, Tess Liegois, Zishuang Liu, Mike McClain, Jon Morris, Kaylie Niemasik, Sarah Pittman, Faraz Qaisrani, Deborah Salvato, Shannon Shontz-Phillips, Anthony Tamburro, and Michelle Tanen.

Posted by The Machine on 12/09/17 at 06:07 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Various hypotheses, Faux feminism, The officially involved, Supreme Court, Hoaxes against Italy, 2 Italian mileu hoax, 8 No motive hoax, 9 Mignini v Knox hoax, Hoaxes Knox & team, 13 AK persona hoax, 16 Interrogation hoax, 17 Fake memory hoax, 18 No drug use hoax, 22 Exonerated hoax, Hoaxers from 2007, More hoaxers • Comments here (18)

Thursday, November 30, 2017

The Academic Fraud By Martha Grace Duncan Enabled By Emory & Harvard Law Schools

Posted by Our Main Posters

Emory Law Dean Schapiro; Martha Grace Duncan; Harvard Law Dean Manning

1. Yet Another Major Academic Fraud

Our main poster The Machine has spotted yet another academic fraud.

She is Martha Grace Duncan of Emory University, in Atlanta USA.

She joins a long line of other academic fraud we continue to expose. She follows and freely borrows from such other academic charlatans as Doug Bremner, Chris Halkidis, Greg Hampikian, Saul Kassin, Michael Krom, Michael Wiesner, Peter Gill, and Mark Waterbury.

She especially emulates the quack law-school psychologist Saul Kassin. He also could not explain the equal official focus on Sollecito by way of the madonna/whore complex which the PR shill Nina Burleigh also propagated hard.

Christine Corcos runs the blog where the Martha Duncan notice that the Machine spotted appears. She tells us in an email that the article will appear in a scholarly legal journal. Christine Corcos is not certain whether peer review has already happened or is still ahead but it is expected.

But Duncan’s flippant, xenophobic, callous, me-me-me paper is already widely published without peer review. By Harvard University Law School! Those who failed to vet it include Nasheen Kalkat, Alexa Meera Singh, and Brianne Power.

Duncan promotes the paper avidly and seems to have already duped thousands. She beats the drum about the paper on these lines.

Previous versions of this Article were presented at (1) the Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza, Università degli Studi di Torino; (3) the European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy; (3) the Emory Law Faculty, (4) the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program, and (5) the Emory Workshop on Geographies of Violence.

2. Duncan’s Simplistic, Self-Serving Thesis

Large parts of the paper are about Duncan herself. In the passages devoted to the case. Duncan seeks to make readers believe that Knox was demonized, charged and convicted.

Why? Because she was “free-spirited”. We get endless tortured examples. That’s it, apparently. Nothing else. There was no real case against Knox at all. Foolish prosecutors. Foolish judges. Foolish juries. Foolish Italy.

And the demonizer who amazingly swayed all of them? One of the prosecutors, Dr Mignini, an Italian and a Catholic (both groups Duncan tars as anti-women).

3. Duncan’s Appalling List Of Omissions

Duncan’s flippant, xenophobic, me-me-me paper with its dozens of false Knox PR talking points omits even more than she fraudulently includes.

1. Duncan ignores the victim, Meredith (mentioned only briefly and pretty callously).

2. Duncan ignores that Knox was not an exchange student, that she was perhaps the only American student who turned her back on available funding and any possibility of course credits.

3. Duncan ignores the bizarrely grubby, noisy, sharp-elbowed, tin-eared, self-absorbed behavior that was making Knox so unpopular in Perugia.

4. Duncan ignores Knox’s proven over-the-top drug use, extending back to Seattle and that Knox was stinking of cat-pee on the morning of the murder, a sign of cocaine use (and of no recent shower).

5. Duncan ignores the breaks Dr Mignini gave Knox. She ignores what he actually said. She ignores that he have her several breaks which her lawyers urgen her to take.

6. Duncan ignores Knox’s endless trail of incriminating behaviors.

7. Duncan ignores the co-defendant Sollecito (mentioned only once, because he doesnt fit the demonizing-of-Knox theory).

8. Duncan ignores the kind boss Knox maliciously framed, put in prison for two weeks, served three years for framing, and still owes $100,000 (Patrick).

9. Duncan ignores that two courts were provably corrupted and known to be so in Italy and that the mafias had a major role.

10. Duncan ignores that Knox’s so-called “interrogation” was a hoax, she was treated well, and she did not confess.

11. Duncan ignores or advances over 30 other hoaxes as listed in our right column.

12. Duncan ignores that the 30-plus judges who handled the case published extensive lists of evidence.

13. Duncan ignores that there were two unanimous pro-guilt juries (and one corrupted one).

14. Duncan ignores that Knox was NOT exonerated by the Supreme Court, bent though it was, and she was placed at the scene of the crime. .

15. Duncan ignores Knox’s promotion of the stalking of the victim’s family (a felony).

16. Duncan ignores that Italy’s murder and incarceration rates are 1/6 those of the US.

17. Duncan ignores the co-prosecutor Dr Manuela Comodi, never once mentioned, presumably because a very bright woman prosecutor doesnt fit the demonizing-of-Knox theory.

18. Duncan ignores the huge wave of court documents or trial transcripts which of course support none of her thesis.

More? Please see here.

Posted by Our Main Posters on 11/30/17 at 08:00 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Various hypotheses, The psychology, Faux feminism • Comments here (15)

Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Not Everyone Works To Excel By Their 20s, But Meredith Did; And They Do

Posted by Our Main Posters

For her tenth-year commemoration…

Olga Pashchenko (wait for it…!)

Amy Turk

Anastasia Huppmann

Hanine

Tine Thing Helseth etc

Kristina Novello

Ana Vidovic

Posted by Our Main Posters on 11/01/17 at 03:08 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (12)

Monday, October 30, 2017

Sollecito Has Some Company: Another Mafia Relative Broke And Begging… Good Luck With That

Posted by Peter Quennell

Anthony Ciavarello with his wife, the daughter of Toto Riina

How very touching….

Son-in-law of Italy’s most feared mobster reduced to begging for money on Facebook…

“Hello everyone. Unfortunately, I need to ask for help to those who know me” Ciavarello said in a Facebook post that linked to a fund-raising page.

“I promise you that I will give you everything back when I get back on track with work, or we will help others who are in need.

“I am in a disastrous situation. They took everything and I don’t even have a job now as they took my business. Who can help me, please do so as I have three children.

I am looking for a job but nobody gives one to me. Please give me a hand. Thank you and may God bless you.”

That International Business Times (UK) report was about Anthony Ciavarello.

Toto “Boss of All Bosses” Riina was the former head of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra who was locked up in the 1990s and recently his release on health grounds was denied.

Ciavarello had married Toto’s daughter. Obviously not such a good career move, although we don’t see signs that Anthony himself was a made man.

It’s widely recognised in Italy that the beleaguered mafias and other public nuisances sustain an endemic three pronged campaign to pervert justice and turn trials in their favor.

Over 100

In Sollecito’s case there was apparently a fourth angle, which has resulted in himself and Amanda Knox walking free but has left them too without much in the way of incomes. We reported on the growing proof here.

Both often have their hands out for cash. Far from the only panhandlers in their campaigns.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 10/30/17 at 08:06 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (8)

Friday, October 20, 2017

Given The Semi-Public Tensions, Could Someone Close To Knox Blow Her Cover At Last?

Posted by Cardiol MD

By request, image of victim Laci (center) with husband and his half-sister

1. The Minefield Knox Inhabits

Amanda Knox is not exactly surrounded wall-to-wall with friends. There were family tensions going way back which even Knox mentioned in her book.

Since returning to the US her reaching out to those who supported her 2007-11 has been selective and cursory at best.

There have been frequent differences and jealousies among the bandwagon of opportunists which exploded into view when Frank Sforza laid a trail of violence among supporters in the United States.

Her whole family took a financial hit. Many at her high-school didnt appreciate her putting that school under a cloud. When she was first arrested, only a few among her circle at the University of Washington spoke for her.

Unnamed others at her school and university talked about Knox frequently acting wild and being on drugs, and how to them her involvement in a death caused minimal surprise.

She defamed many in Italy and was the direct cause of her drug dealer ending up in prison. In her paid presentations and TV appearances she continues to defame and actively tries to inflict hurt.

2. Examples Of Potential Threats

Here is a partial list of those who know enough of the truth to sell Knox out in their own name or secretly by proxy - we have already had several nibbles.

1. Rudy Guede

2. Raffaele Sollecito

3. Knox’s mother: Edda Mellas

4. Knox’s father: Curt Knox

5. Knox’s step-father: Chris Mellas

6. Knox’s younger sister: Deanna

7. Knox’s best friend in Seattle: Madison Paxton

8. Knox’s two step-sisters: Ashley Knox and Delaney Knox

9. Knox’s lawyers: Carlo Dalla Vedova and Luciano Ghirga

10. Raffaele Sollecito’s Father: Francesco Sollecito

11. Raffaele Sollecito’s Sister: Vanessa Sollecito

12. Raffaele Sollecito’s Lawyer: Luca Maori

13. Chris Robinson?

Could any of those turn? Probably not, but all those and quite a few other people close to Amanda Knox do know she is guilty in the killing of Meredith Kercher.

It may seem to some of them that Knox and Sollecito may have intended “only” to “teach-her-a-lesson” violently torturing and humiliating Meredith using knives.

And that the stabbing-to-death occurred “only” after Meredith screamed, when Knox and Sollecito impulsively silenced Meredith by driving in their knives.

They may open up to a halfway point seeking sympathy which they think is better than seeing Knox live under a black cloud of suspicion all her life.

Or the incessant stalking of Meredith’s family led by the Mellases may come to seem too much. Or they may simply dislike Knox and her family for their callousness and greed. Who knows?

3. Scott Petersen Is Sold Out

Main poster Giustizia explained the case and the many parallels in this post here.

Now see this book Blood Brother: 33 Reasons My Brother Scott Peterson Is Guilty by his half-sister Anne Bird.

Scott’s natural father is Lee Peterson. Anne Bird’s natural father is apparently unlisted, but is not Lee Peterson.

Anne Bird is now the adoptive daughter of Jerri and Tom Grady. Anne Bird did not meet Scott until June 1997, when Anne was 32 and Scott was 24. (Born: July 8, 1965, age 52, San Diego County, California, CA).

In summary: Spouse: Tim Bird (m. 1998). Parents: Jackie Peterson. Books: Blood Brother: 33 Reasons My Brother Scott Peterson Is Guilty. Siblings: Scott Peterson born October 24, 1972)

4. Why Did She Speak Out?

The list provided by Anne Bird of her “reasons” is very subjective, and does not coincide with those of the Peterson Jury.

1. On our last day at Disneyland, when Ryan went missing and everyone panicked, Scott stayed on his cell in his own world. Total disconnect. *

2. While at Tommy’s christening on January 12, 2003, Scott sat and held Tommy entire time and looked uncomfortable. Rector seemed to get bad feeling about Scott, like he knew something or wasn’t buying it.

3. Scott upgraded his porn channel later that day.

4. In interviews with Gloria Gomez and Diane Sawyer, Scott said Laci knew about Amber. No way she knew he was having an affair! No way she would have put up with it.*

5. On Ryan’s third birthday, Scott stayed with us. He had just returned from his P.O. box in Modesto and had hate mail with him. There was a praying mantis on one, and another had a birthday cake picture with three candles and it said “Happy Birthday Ryan.” This made me scared, and I do not know where it came from or how anyone else would know about Ryan’s birthday. Also, there was a letter””the one he thought was from the Rocha family””that was definitely a death threat. He seemed to be able to joke about it.

6. Scott partying, celebrating while Laci is missing. A lot of “carrying on” the entire time I was with him.*

7. When he was at our house and the news came on, he watched and asked if he should get rid of his goatee. Did not seem to recognize how serious it was that he was a “person of interest.”

8. Flirting with our babysitter. Made “flirtinis.” Babysitter felt uncomfortable and left.

9. Jackie and Lee telling me that if asked about babysitter incident, I should just deny it or “not recall” it, suggesting to me that they didn’t want anybody opening that can of worms.

10. The girl he got pregnant in Arizona””was this the reason he left college? The girl had an abortion; then Scott came home.

11. Scott often arrived in different cars. Was he switching cars to avoid being followed?

12. Scott borrowing the shovel up at Lake Arrowhead. He said, “I have a shovel I borrowed that I need to return.”Is it possible he buried something?*

13. Scott did not have money, according to Jackie. Yet he purchased items from REI and North Face outlets while here.

14. Appeared uninterested in search for Laci. I brought up several ideas/ leads (from the news), but he had no direction/ interest in them. I asked if there was anywhere anyone should be looking and brought out map of Modesto. He pointed to Mape’s Ranch (?) like he was very annoyed with me. “Maybe there,” he said.*

15. I saw the table setting from the People magazine photograph and it looks like Scott set the table for Christmas Eve dinner. I have set a table with Laci at a Latham family reunion, and she sets the table correctly. The Christmas “crackers” are a finishing touch””not the only thing you put on a table. There is also no tablecloth and it looks absolutely not up to Laci’s high standards of table setting (something she excelled at).*

16. When I asked about his (new) hair color he said that it was bleached in the swimming pool up in Mammoth when he was there skiing.

17. Scott used alias””Cal, short for California, a name he said that he and Laci originally chose for Conner(IC-insert: on Dec 24th, 2002 Conner was 227 days post-conception, or in his 33rd post-conceptual week, and 53 days or nearly 8 weeks pre-EDD. Therefore he satisfied the SCOTUS requirement for Personhood.) “”to look at apartments for rent so that he didn’t have to give his name. But that wasn’t the name I heard (they wanted).

18. He left our house two to three times to go to Modesto to clean the pool and mow the lawn. He said he did not want the neighbors seeing the pool turning green. Did anyone check the pool for any evidence?

19. Chilling story about the overgrown cemetery in Mendocino. Made up? Possibly. On verge of confessing? Looked like it.

20. Two [of Scott’s] cousins said he was investigated in connection with the disappearance of Kristin Smart, the girl from SLO (missing since 1996).

21. Cousins said somebody must have been helping Scott flee if there was all the stuff in the back of the car.

22. Scott tried to get help removing GPS device from truck. Very annoyed to be tracked at all.

23. Despite what Jackie [The natural mother of Anne and Scott who had given Anne away for adoption soon after Anne’s birth] said on television about Scott and Laci’s “perfect marriage,” on three separate occasions (before Laci disappeared) she told me Scott and Laci were having problems.*

24. Scott claimed he’d had a delusion of speaking into the mirror at their house with Laci. He said this after I told him I had seen Sharon Rocha on the news saying she saw Laci on their couch. [Such visions] are apparently brought on by “extreme grief” or “extreme guilt.”

25. Scott told me that he had another affair before Amber Frey, someone in SLO, and did not give a time when that one occurred. Also, had slept with someone (or two?) on an airplane flight. On that flight he said he “took turns” between two airplane bathrooms. I have no idea when this occurred and did not ask any other details.

26. In L.A., gay relatives took Scott barhopping, went to a gay bar. Scott said he was bummed that no one hit on him.

27. Every time there was a search in the bay, Scott’s voice and reaction was more heightened, and he would say things like “They are wasting their time when they could be out looking for her,” “Time would be better spent looking for her somewhere else.” He was louder and more emotional when they were looking in the bay. *

28. Drinks at the Ballast. At the bar, Scott pulled Mexican pesos from his pocket. When [Gordo] asked if he was going to Mexico sometime soon, Scott didn’t respond. *

29. Dinner at the SD Yacht Club with some of my friends. At 9: 00 P.M. I told Scott that we had to get going, and he said that it was ridiculous””” Who cares?” I called home and said we would be late; kept getting “Who cares?” attitude from Scott, and finally said we had to leave about 10: 30 or 11: 00 P.M.

30. I was the first to call and let him know they found a body of a woman in the bay. He said “They’ll find out it’s not Laci, and they will keep looking for her.” *

31. When I said they’d found the body of a baby the day before, he said “What?!”¦ That’s terrible. Who would do such a thing?!” Seemed very disturbed and voice was loud and emotional again. *

32. On April 17, 2003 Scott stayed at my parents’ house in San Diego. When I asked him why he didn’t go to the Lake Arrowhead house he said his car spun out. I don’t believe he ever went there. I think he went straight to my parents’ because he thought the police knew about the Lake Arrowhead house. *

33. On last prison visit to Redwood, Scott waited till end of visit and said: “You know I didn’t kill my wife.” Couldn’t look me in the eye, then checked for my reaction.*

* indicates “plausibly relevant to Meredith’s case.

Tick tick tick…

Posted by Cardiol MD on 10/20/17 at 03:25 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in The legal followups, Sollecito followup, Knox followup, The wider contexts, N America context, Hoaxes Knox & team, 13 AK persona hoax, 14 AK/RS got-on hoax, Hoaxes Sollecito etc, 25 RS persona hoax, 26 RS/AK got-on hoax, Hoaxers from 2007, Knox-Marriott PR, Raff Sollecito PR • Comments here (4)

Thursday, September 07, 2017

Being Reported: Significant Developments In The Sollecito Crime Family

Posted by Peter Quennell

1. The Sollecitos And The Rizutto Crime Family

This is all widely reported in the Italian and Canadian media and known to the average Italian.

That photo above was taken in a Montreal court in January of 2016. Rocco Sollecito’s son Stefano was being charged with a number of crimes, and Rocco the head of the Rizutto family was there to manage and observe.

Five months later, Rocco was dead, gunned down by a hitman still not identified, and Stefano was temporarily free on bail, but still facing numerous charges and soon to go back inside.

The Rizutto clan was possibly the largest mafia family in the world during the whole time of the Perugia judicial process, with operations in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Rocco was believed to have muscled his way to the leadership of the clan not too long after this happened back in 2010.

On November 10, 2010, [crime boss Nicolo] Rizzuto was killed at his residence in the Cartierville borough of Montreal when a single bullet from a sniper’s rifle punched through two layers of glass in the rear patio doors of his Montreal mansion. His death is believed to be the final blow against the Rizzuto crime family.

Nice shooting. But it was actually not the final blow to the family clan. Today Stefano Sollecito and Leonardo Rizzuto, grandson of Nicolo, are considered to be the joint heads of the Rizutto clan.

The relevance to the judicial process in Perugia becomes apparent if you know that:

a big loss at trial

even more ruthlessly

major exposure of progress and pushback

Taking justice down a peg

very useful waypoint

even Italy.

sizeable gambling interests

2. Raffaele Sollecito visits the DR twice in 2013

Posted by Peter Quennell

This important post is vital reading here - it connects up the dots of the Perugia process to the wider Italian context.

Raffaele Sollecito first headed to the Dominican Republic quite ostentatiously - sending a threatening signal maybe? - in the summer of 2013, some months before the Nencini repeat appeal that the Supreme Court had mandated commenced in Florence.

Raffaele Sollecito then headed there a second time “secretly” (see below) right in the middle of that appeal when it seems to have appeared to him (correctly) that the outcome would go against Knox and himself.

Very tellingly, both Sollecito and his family tried hard to keep the destination of that trip a secret. But (again see below) the very curious Italian media finally figured it out (through not immediately why).

Here is how we reported that drama on 4 December 2013.

[Prosecutor Crini had finished summarizing the case against RS and AK unrelentingly over two days.]

Dr Francesco Sollecito was reported as being shocked by the unrelenting tone of the indictment. However, Sollecito’s plight is not nearly as bad as the ever-stubborn Amanda Knox’s.

Knox has already served three years and was fined heavily for obstruction of justice. She could face another year for that if it is found to have been aggravating. And as the post below mentions, she could face as many as three more charges for aggravating obstruction of justice.

Sollecito in contrast has respected the court by actually showing up, and, unlike Knox, has lately shown restraint in accusing his accusers.

However, the day after Dr Crini ‘s startlingly powerful summary of the case against him, it looked like Sollecito was hastily taking off out of Italy for somewhere.

La Nazione reported that police at Florence Airport had held back a fully loaded Air France flight to Paris while they checked with the prosecution that he was indeed allowed to leave the country. La Nazione said the prosecutors have some concern that he might skip and not come back, but he did voluntarily come back previously from the Dominican Republic, and his family has always ensured some presence in court.

But next TGCom24 reported that Sollecito’s father had claimed that Sollecito had already gone home to Bisceglie, although he is a free citizen still in possession of a passport and can travel anywhere if he wishes.

But then TGCom24 reported that he had indeed flown to Paris, but had turned around and come straight back again, to stay with family friends. And that on 8 December he will sit his final exams in computer science at the University of Verona.

However, soon after that La Nazione reported that Sollecito’s father had been contradicted by his lawyers, and his erratic son had slipped through his fingers and flown “for his work” back to the Dominican Republic. Translation by Jools:

1 December 2013 ““ SCOOP. Denials, lies, game by the defenders. But in the end it’s up to the lawyer Luca Maori to admit: “Raffaele Sollecito returned to Santo Domingo, as anticipated on Friday by La Nazione”

He embarked from Florence’s Peretola Airport and made a stop-over in Paris, from where he then flew to the Caribbean island where he spent the last few months that preceded the start of the new appeals process. “But there is nothing strange - minimizes the lawyer - Raffaele went back to pick up the things he left there, will be back in ten days for the final exams and to await the judgment. With anxiety, but self-assured.”

No escape, just a normal “work” trip. Permissible, since there is no measure that prevents the accused to leave Italy. But the departure of Sollecito, accused of the murder of Meredith Kercher along with former girlfriend Amanda Knox (already sheltered in the U.S.) caused some sneering. And even the agents of the Border Police, when they saw him in front of the [departure] gate, made a phone call to the Procura to be sure whether the journey in the midst of the appeal process was really “normal.”

IN FACT. Sollecito ‘s father, in an understandable effort to defend his already too overexposed son, slipped on the so-called banana peel, placing the young man within a few hours in various locations, but never in the true destination across the ocean: in Verona, preparing for the final exam in computer science in regard to the thesis, or in Paris, but just for a flash-stay from which he was back the day after. At Christmas, maintained the father, Raffaele will return from abroad. Maybe for the last break before the final rush of the Mark II process, which, according to calculations by the Assize Court of Appeal, could be concluded on January 15.

Meanwhile, the hearing on 16 December is for the remaining civil parties, then double date for the defence, (December 17 and January 9) and hearing on the 10 dedicated to counter-argument. With Sollecito in the courtroom, assures the lawyer.

Nothing strange?! Doctor Sollecito never explaining to the media where Raffaele went, or why he went there, or why it was a huge secret, should have official minds very seriously wondering why.

No prizes for guessing what Raffaele had to do so secretly in the Dominican Republic - where his notorious mafia relatives from Montreal occupy a town there.

What if the judge had stopped Sollecito from going to the Dominican Republic when the airport police called to check if that was alright with the court?

It now seems certain that RS and AK would be sitting in prison, the Kerchers would have some peace, and none of us would be laboring away here.

3. Taunting New Tone From Sollecito Defense

Posted by Peter Quennell

It was observed among other things by those who do observing professionally that Amanda Knox and Sollecito and his lawyer Bongiorno became exceptionally macho upon his return and for the next 12 months

Sollecito was downbeat only briefly twice in 2014, first when he and his Italian girfriend scampered northward before Nencini’s verdict, and second when he was trying and failing to get American girls to marry him. Remember this and also this about the macho press conference in mid 2014?

Mostly the pair were exceptionally macho right through to the Fifth Chambers “mysteriously” being assigned the final appeal, and two judges inexperienced in murder cases mangling the evidence and breaking Italian law in the written judgement which sort-of cleared RS and AK.

That’s some of what is out in broad daylight so far. There is much more under official wraps for now. That both the Hellmann appeal and the Marasca/Bruno appeal were bent seem dead-certs to officialdom.

4. And More On The Saga

Posted by James Raper

I’ll add some summary points here which are considerably expanded upon in my book.

The 5th Chambers’ judgment, which had Knox at the cottage at the time of the murder, but not necessarily Sollecito, pretty much reflects Francesco’s own thinking.

Remember how intensely critical he was of Knox in private. She was the one who had something to do with it and had got his precious boy into trouble. In fact he would not have been that bothered if she had been convicted provided his son was acquitted.

He was going to deliver for his boy come what may, and whatever his involvement, and Bongiorno was to be his instrument.

An aspect of the Italian judicial system that needs to be looked at, in my opinion, is the final stage of proceedings.The fact that each case has to be signed off by the Supreme Court places a considerable administrative burden on the system, which is why there are, at the last count, some 396 SC judges.

This allows IMO for a measure of under the radar judge shopping, inconsistencies in judgements, rivalries and factions, and judges who are susceptible to improper influence in a country where mafia influence and corruptability stretches even into respectable institutions.

You just have to know how to go about it, and Bongiorno and Vedova tick the boxes.

5. Footnote: The Latest News From Montreal

Posted by Peter Quennell

Meanwhile, back in Montreal, Leonardo Ri”Žzzuto and Stefano Sollecito remain locked up awaiting trial. Bail was denied them - no surprise there, the state does need its witnesses to remain alive.

Here as of a week ago is their trial status.

The last of the leaders accused of the mafia in Montreal, Stefano Sollecito and Leonardo Rizzuto, will be entitled to a mega-trial, which will be specially reserved [for them alone].

The judge Eric Downs has just confirmed that the two men, charged with gangsterism and conspiracy to traffic cocaine, will be judged separately from the 15 other accused in the operation Nest Egg… The dates of this trial will be held before a judge and jury, in Montreal, will be fixed within two weeks.

Stefano Sollecito, whose father Rocco has already led the clan Rizzuto, before his murder by a professional killer… had long sought a trial as early as possible since he is fighting a serious illness.

Note “fighting a serious illness”. Hmmm. The presumed end of that branch of the family as a fighting force. There is also another development of the maybe-not-good-news variety for Raffaele.

Events described above might have evolved quite differently if Sammy Nicolucci had not been put away a few year ago by the Canadians.

Both Sammy Nicolucci and Rocco Sollecito had once been on a career path to head the Rizzuto crime family. But Sammy was put away in prison, opening a clear way forward for Rocco.

As Rocco was gunned down, while Sammy walks free, maybe Sammy thinks he has the last laugh? Could he have Raffaele Sollecito looking over his shoulder these days, or at least not vacationing in Canada any time soon?

6. Implications For Sollecito Going Forward

Posted by Peter Quennell

Rocco’s silencing by death was clearly to Raff’s and Amanda’s advantage, even assuming they had no hand in it. It is likely if Rocco had managed to stay alive that the Italians would have figured out a way to nab him and squeeze him dry.

It’s their experience-based and effective way with the mafias: dont ever talk about it, just do it: keep up a relentless pursuit without ceasing until there are clear grounds to isolate and take down some bad guys. See this latest example and also this one here.

If you think about it, it’s a great pity for our case that Rocco did get gunned down. He got off easy and our case remains messy. Damn you Rocco!

The silencing of Rocco does close off the easiest way forward, of extraditing him to Italy and putting the screws on him. But it does not close off ALL roads forward. Work goes on. Someone will talk.

Stay tuned. It may take a while, but it ain’t yet over.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 09/07/17 at 07:19 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (8)

Friday, August 18, 2017

Kercher Lawyer Dr Maresca Slams Tin-Eared Knox Over “Inopportune Plans” To Visit Perugia

Posted by Hopeful

Dr Maresca welcoming Meredith’s family to trial court in 2009

1. Today’s Reporting

The Daily Mail headline today 8/18/17 says this:

Murdered Meredith Kercher’s family condemn Amanda Knox over “˜inopportune plans’ to revisit Italian town where the British student was killed

Subheading: Ms. Knox, 30, wants to return so she can overcome the trauma of imprisonment

The Kercher family lawyer, our dear Francesco Maresca, the lion of Perugia who never wastes words, condemns the nutter Knox, the eternal troublemaker that she is.

Knox told People magazine of her evil plans: “The only way that I’m going to come full circle is by physically, literally, coming full circle.”

Knox said, “I know that Perugia is probably the least welcome place for me in the entire world. And that’s scary, but it also means a lot to me, not to be afraid of a place and see Perugia through my family’s eyes.” (can you believe it, she uses her family as an excuse to return to the scene of the crime, unrivalled ingrate)

“My family lived in Perugia for years to support me and they made relationships. I made a relationship with the priest at the prison, and those things still matter to me.” (what gall, has she been to see a priest in Seattle since 2015?)

Francesco Maresca the Kercher family lawyer said that Ms. Knox is NOT WELCOME in Perugia. Amen to that.

Maresca told The Telegraph: “I believe Amanda Knox’s choice to return is totally inopportune because the death of Meredith was very painful for Perugia and people there feel they have never had a satisfactory response from the Italian justice system.”

Maresca said, “That is why Knox should think about her life without continuing to return to this sad affair from which she has been the only one to profit, both in terms of fame and money.”

2. My Commentary

What Insolence and Unbridled Triumphalism of Evil

The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. Why? because he has so much invested in it of himself and his moment of power.

Knox is a moth to a flame, she can never learn.

The valiant Attorney Maresca condemns her motives and tells her in gentler words than mine to “GET A LIFE” and to not parade her sorry self through the streets she tormented and flout the Perugians who she ripped off of so much money to investigate her crime.

Perugia had to pay judges and police and lab techs and a myriad of costs, thousands and millions$ of euro to give that young imposter and troublemaker and promiscuous idiot her courtrooms and to house her and feed her in Capanne prison only then to be made the brunt of street riots and shouting mobs at doors of courthouse after verdicts were announced.

More importantly Perugia suffered the heartless loss of lovely Meredith in their formerly happy village. They suffered the jaundiced eye of the American PR steamroller trying to find fault with their sincere and earnest investigation. Perugia had endless patience with the animal known as Knox whose father and loudmouth mother paraded in and out of their decent streets while paying PR firms to paint Knox a misunderstood Madonna instead of the kicking goat they had raised.

Perugia got the awful reputation of the beautiful Meredith’s murder and the seamy underbelly of drug crime that Knox the dopehead brought to light.

Then the Sollecito family rose up to condemn the Perugian police and justice officials as country clowns, and after all the Perugians’ costly hard work to give Meredith peace and a just outcome to punish those who destroyed her, the American PR hydrogen bomb blasted over them like an evil Goliath before David put him down. I hope she meets a David in Perugia, the arrogant twerp.

I hope Knox gets more than she bargains for, much much more and worse if she sashays her shameless self once again in the town that she used as a platform to show her tail, and as Maresca says, to profit from all the fallout of her own evil, her ill gotten fame and some money with it. She still owes Lumumba, pay him if you walk by the crumbled Le Chic on your drunken journey with your foolish compatriot Robinson, a blind man if there ever were one.

She adds insult to injury and proves to the world she is an absolute moron yet a cunning and deceitful enemy who revels in the triumph of her will over others, her daring over what is right.

Maresca tells the beast to “˜GET A LIFE’ and stop cruelly dancing at the scene of the crime.

She was given mercy, not justice. Now she lies about the motive for her visit to Perugia, shielding herself by suggesting her family’s friends and the priest there mean so very much to her. Right. Has she been to mass twice since her release? Has she donated to Seattle Prep? Has she donated to the Catholic Church? let me guess”¦but now the tenuous relationship with the Priest of Capanne is the ruse she uses to excuse her return to Perugia to further slap them in the face.

Liar liar, don’t trust a word she says.

Posted by Hopeful on 08/18/17 at 09:16 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (25)

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Yet More American Lawyers Get Duped By Knox: Now Los Angeles’s Westside Bar Association

Posted by Hopeful

Duped? WBA founder and Beverley Hills lawyer Daniel Forouzan

The previous instance of this - in front of the Kentucky Bar Association - occurred only one month ago.

We shot Knox’s anticipated false claims down very extensively.

There may have been an effort to have this one fly under the radar - there was no advance media notice that we could see, only this Facebook notice which may soon scroll (or be deleted) away.

This new instance is reported by Ann Schmidt in the Daily Mail today 7/29/17. Headline: “˜Prison changed me forever’: Amanda Knox speaks about how the murder trial and four years in prison defined her

Knox spoke Thursday in Los Angeles to the Westside Bar Association, about her “two wrongful convictions” for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, before she was acquitted. She spoke about the pain she went through.

Knox: “I went into prison as not yet a woman and I came out an adult woman, and that period defined me, “ she told KTLA Thursday.

In her appearance the Seattle native was also promoting her memoir and the Netflix documentary about her trial. “I realized the courtroom was actually a battleground for storytelling where the most compelling story and not necessarily the most truthful wins, “ she said.

Zohreen Adamjee of Fox 11 reported her saying,

Amanda Knox, sharing her story of how two wrongful convictions for the murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy have changed her.

“I realized the courtroom was actually a battleground for storytelling. Where the most compelling story and not necessarily the most truthful wins,” said Knox.

In a rare L.A. appearance, Knox confronted the image the world has painted of her - addressing a room full of lawyers who fight for the wrongly convicted.

“The truth doesn’t fit in a headline or a tweet or a fairytale format,

At one point, she says prosecutors lied, telling her she tested positive for AIDS, making her make a list of every person she had ever slept with.”

“The unfortunate thing about this case is that the prosecution decided before the evidence came in, that I had to be guilty,” she said.

“Everyone in my family suffered, and the worst thing of all””they didn’t feel like they could share that with me, because I was in trouble.”

She told the L.A. law panel that she wants to use her experience to help the wrongly convicted and the Innocence Project. From the Daily Mail:

“I have to tell my story so that the echo of it can reach people.”

“I just want to show that it’s not this distant, difficult to understand thing. It’s a human thing that can happen to anyone at anytime. No one is safe, but we can understand it.”

The article is accompanied by a photo of Curt Knox wearing a black leather jacket inside the courtroom in 2009; a selfie of Knox and new beau Chris Robinson wearing matching gray felt hats during their recent trip to the Black Forest in a quaint European tourist town, I think.

There’s a stock photo of Rudy being escorted by four blue beret wearing Italian policemen in dark navy blue uniforms.

The Daily Mail comments are vitriolic, with only a few fans rooting for Knox.

“Guilty as H”¦”

“I get really bad vibes from this woman.”

“I am still not sure about her. I suspect she was involved but I’m not clear how.”

“no, committing murder changed her forever.”

The current photo of her assuming it was taken at the Los Angeles Westside Bar Association speech, was grainy and small.

It appeared she had teased her hair into a more sophisticate upswept style for the event, seemed to wear a white collared blouse, was hard to tell from bad tiny photo or maybe just my laptop distortion.

My main reaction to the blah blah blah Foxy usual speech, is that she is so wrong to condemn the prosecution for what amounts to criminal bias against her before evidence came in.

She’s a branded liar as the duped lawyers could very easily have found out. Click on the link at the top for our disparagement.

Posted by Hopeful on 07/29/17 at 10:25 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (19)

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Where Should You Have Invested This Year? The US Or Italy?

Posted by Peter Quennell

Where should you have put your nestegg at the start of this year for maximum gains?

Sorry to those who picked the US (and Trumponomics).

(1) The chart above shows a bundle of Italian stocks (EWI) against a bundle of US stocks (DOW).

As of today US stocks have gone up around 10 percent - but Italian stocks (green curve) have gone up 12 percent above that.

(2) The chart below shows the dollar against the Euro (Italy’s currency).

As of today, the Euro is about 10 percent up on the dollar for the year.

So you would have been much better off in Italy. It wins hands down - it has gained overall about 20 percent compared to the US.

The overall value of the US - stocks and currency combined - is actually under water.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/26/17 at 06:52 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (3)

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

Why The Italian Court System Is Very Unlikely To Do Any Favors For Sollecito & Knox Ever Again

Posted by Peter Quennell

1. Context

By any standards the ruling by the Supreme Court’s Fifth Chambers in 2015 springing RS and AK was a confusing bit of legal work.

The statement from the Bench in March was unquivocal but the written report six months later was a lot less so.

We have taken it apart in numerous posts, for example here and here. Also here and here and here.

The other day we corrected the Kentucky Bar Association when, in promoting a talk by Knox, they stated that Knox was “definitively acquitted”.

No she wasn’t.

Read here. The Fifth Chambers was assigned the case through quite open defense manipulation. It does not normally handle murder cases, and neither the lead judge nor the writer of the sentencing report had previously handled murder cases. Their reasoning was torturous, evidence was cherry-picked, and it seems certain any experienced and trained murder-case judges would have found for guilt here.

Read here Knox was in fact found to have been at the scene of the crime, and with blood on her hands. The Supreme Court’s Fifth Chambers in fact handed down the weakest possible “not guilty” sentence, not guilty due to “insufficient evidence” (though see below; most of it they ignored, and the trial prosecution was not even at the Supreme Court) which allows an appeal if the prosecution or victim’s family wish to take up that option.

So the 2015 report was not THAT confusing, and really only gave RS and AK half a break.

2. New Development

So why is the Italian Court System unlikely to do any favors for Sollecito & Knox ever again?

In a nutshell: too many lies. In fact it is a crime in Italy to lie about a court outcome. Judgements are only ever issued in non-editable photocopies so they cannot be monkeyed with.

Knox and Sollecito and their foolish lawyers and apologists have been very publicly lying about the true outcome for two years. They have mangled a translation, cherrypicked repeatedly, and ignored half of the truth. They have made numerous claims like “definitively acquitted” which the report itself does not support.

This lying on a grand scale is believed to have finally touched a real nerve in the Italian courts. Just way too many lies. Already the defamations by Sollecito in his book had been ruled against by the Florence court, and some negative outcome seems to be in the works.

Now we see Sollecito’s appeal seeking major damages for having been locked up so very sharply shot down.

Any past mafia influence seems to have waned. And it looks like the incessant very public lying by Sollecito and Knox and their lawyers and apologists will cost them in future in court.

Amanda Knox’s numerous defamations and toxic PR are expected to cost her big soon too. Wise move? Mislead no more.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/05/17 at 05:16 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (3)

Monday, July 03, 2017

Here’s Something Important That Factors Into Our Interest In Cool-Headed Rational Communities.

Posted by Peter Quennell

Simple walking is rather startlingly proving to have health benefits beyond the obvious, and also major community benefits.

The main new finding for important health benefits is that the balancing required in walking adds neuron capacity to the hippocampus - a hybrid brain gland which also handles key components of memory, diminishment of which is behind memory loss and dementia.

Now there is also a new finding for the positive effects on community building and by extension better environmental and economic-growth prospects, as for both teamwork is vital.

The anti-twitter… !!

Cruising the US one can see in large areas decaying towns and failing communities. In places stark poverty. Often little mingling, and other than the local Walmart, no very enticing walking, either for locals or to entice any visitors.

Get walks going, guys?

Already there’s begun a big push in the US to open up many more trails for walking. New York city, one of the world’s most walkable, is still adding or enhancing walks like the elevated Highline Park and the paths around the edge of Manhattan.

Trails hundreds even thousands of miles long are being created - by way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal one can already walk or bicycle from NYC to Toronto or vice versa (think about it Ergon!).

The economic effect all along the way of these trails is becoming obvious.

Italy probably remains a very smart and creative country not least because places like Rome and Florence and Perugia become more walkable even as they become less drivable.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/03/17 at 03:38 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (2)

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Sollecito Loses Supreme Court Appeal Against Florence Court Ruling Refusing $0.55M Damages Claim

Posted by Peter Quennell

No Big Bloodmoney Payday

Our previous posts on this can be seen here and here and here.

UK reporter Krissy Allen of Blasting News kindly summarises the Italian reporting.

Here are some excerpts. Emphasis is added to key sentences confirming a rebuttal of Knox claiming “vindication” in the post just below and in those earlier posts.

Raffaele Sollecito has today been denied any compensation for the four years he spent in prison, one year on remand, and three years until the final Supreme Court Appeal decision in March 2015.

The problem is, although acquitted, it was on the grounds of ‘insufficient evidence’ and not a straightforward exoneration.

After having to wait six months for the written reasons, in Sept 2015, Sollecito then had the way clear to put in a claim for compensation, which Italian law allows for wrongful imprisonment

However the statute that allows compensation for wrongful imprisonment specifically excludes defendants who lie to the police, described as ‘gross misconduct’.

In other words, the Florence Appeal Court in January this year dismissed Sollecito’s claim for this reason.

It deemed that Sollecito had committed ‘willful misconduct’ or ‘at the very least, gravely negligent or imprudent.’

It found it ‘implausible’ that he could not account for the movements of his then-girlfriend, Amanda Knox. It states that both he and Amanda Knox lied many times and that it was an ‘indisputable fact of absolute certainty’ that Knox was at the murder scene ‘when the young Meredith Kercher was murdered’.

Sollecito through his lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, citing the fact of Rudy Guede’s shoeprint being mistaken for his. However, this was never the point of law for which Sollecito was refused his demand for the maximum 517,000 Euro compensation….

It means the written reasons of the Florence Court of 10 Feb 2017, stands. It is damning and scathing of the pair’s behaviour throughout the investigation.

In effect, it blocks any compensation claim Amanda Knox might have had her eye on from Italy….

Sollecito’s lawyer, Bongiorno has made a statement that he now plans to take it to the European Court of Human Rights. This would not be an appeal as the ECHR has no jurisdiction to overturn the verdict. Rather, it can make an award should it decide there was unfairness in the procedure.

The average award of the ECHR is circa 3,500 Euros - a far cry from the 517K Euros Sollecito was demanding.

Also in La Republica the increasingly hapless Sollecito claims that he is near broke and he is unable to find a job because of the cloud hanging over him.

Maybe we’ll see yet another burst of anger against Knox for dropping him in this. It may actually gain him some sympathy, though it is hard to see that paying any bills.

In his ongoing Florence book trial he is going to have to admit publicly that he lied and defamed - defamed both numerous people and Italy and its justice system - the felony crimes of diffamazione and vilipendio.

Either that or end up with a huge award against him, maybe leaving him deeply in debt.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 06/29/17 at 03:38 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (12)

Monday, May 22, 2017

See Taormina In Sicily, Host Town For The G7 Summit This Next Weekend

Posted by Peter Quennell

This was of course the G8 group prior to Mr Putin being disinvited. Sorry about that Vlad. Mr Trump is being welcomed, sort of, though security is intense and satires in the media ever moreso. Sorry about that Don. Mr Obama is also in Italy, cycling around somewhere further north, with what seems like zero security detail.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 05/22/17 at 10:54 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in The wider contexts, Italian context • Comments here (5)

Sunday, May 14, 2017

One Special Kind Of Journalism On the Grand Scale Italy Uniquely Inspires

Posted by Peter Quennell

MILANO from Davide on Vimeo.

If you keep a watchful eye on reporting on Italy, every few weeks you’ll see a report like this.

Jay Nordlinger went to Italy as a student - specifically to Milan - and just revisited it. He once again found a LOT to like.

There are many beautiful things in Milan, of course. Many beautiful works of art. But the city itself is a beautiful thing: a work of art. In my music criticism “” concerning both compositions and performances “” I often say, “Beauty isn’t everything. But it’s not nothing either.” The same is true of cities, I think. Beauty is not the be-all, end-all. But a little beauty “¦ can make a nice difference. I recall what Ed Koch said about cities: Paris, the most beautiful. London, the most interesting. New York “” his own “” the most exciting, or dynamic.

The Milanese have style. For heaven’s sake, they’re Italian: The Italians have style. There is often a casual formality about them. And, among the older people, a certain courtliness. Can they be drama queens? Well, they wouldn’t want to betray their nationality, would they? Many of the women look and act as though they consider themselves to be works of art “” and they are. Men in suits and ties, riding motor scooters, are a sight. I hear a dog not barking: I see just about no one wearing short sleeves, on a warm day.

Mirabile dictu, the window in my hotel room opens. How civilized. Unlike in America. Hang on, I will soon find out this is a mistake. The window is not supposed to open. Someone locks it. And I prevail on someone else to reopen it. Ah, civilization again. (I have promised not to jump out of this window.) (Much to the disappointment of my severest critics.)

Out my window, and all around the city, you hear the squeal of trams. It is a kind of music in Milan. Milanese risotto is a famous dish, yellow in color. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. But, when it’s good, it’ll bring tears to your eyes (not because it’s spicy). When I was a student, I practically lived on stracciatella “” not the soup, but the ice-cream flavor (which, in short, is their chocolate chip). It hasn’t gotten any worse “¦

Posted by Peter Quennell on 05/14/17 at 01:49 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (3)

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Multiple Attackers and the Compatibility of the Double DNA Knife (Exhibit 36)

Posted by James Raper

Our YouTube whiz DelPergola’s video of November 2010

Ed note: This evidence area is enormously compelling - but also emotionally difficult. It is why initially we did not publish our translation of the Micheli Report. And why a quarter of the trial was behind closed doors with the media excluded. That well-meaning decision has bedeviled the case ever since, because only the jury and others in court then - including the white-faced and tongue-tied accused pair - were exposed to the full power of the prosecution testimony.

Material from some of my previous posts on TJMK (link at bottom here) was incorporated into my Justice on Trial book. From Chapter 15, this is the second of several posts setting out further material.

Before looking at the forensic evidence, which is the final theme I identified earlier, it will be helpful to take into account the wounds suffered by Meredith, and whether these suggest anything as to the dynamics of the murder, and whether any of them were compatible with the knife recovered from Sollecito’s kitchen, Exhibit 36, called the Double DNA knife because the DNA of Meredith was found on the blade and the DNA of Knox on the handle.

As mentioned earlier the autopsy was carried out by Dr Lalli.

It was observed that there were no significant injuries to the chest, abdomen or lower limbs.

The significant elements in the examination were described as follows :

A fine pattern of petechiae on the internal eyelid conjunctive.

The presence of tiny areas of contusion at the level of the nose, localised around the nostrils and at the limen nasi [threshold of the nose].

Inside the mucous membranes of the lips, there were injuries compatible with a traumatic action localised in the inner surface of the lower lip and the inner surface of the upper lip, reaching up to the gum ridge.

Also found on the lower side of the jaw were some bruising injuries, and in the posterior region of the cheek as well, in proximity to the ear.

Three bruising injuries were present on the level of the lower edge of the right jaw with a roughly round shape. In the region under the jaw an area with a deep abrasion was observed, localised in the lower region of the middle part at the left of the jaw.

Once the neck had been cleaned it was possible to observe wounds that Dr Lalli attributed to the action of the point of a cutting instrument.

The main wound was located in the left lateral region of the neck. A knife would be compatible provided it had one cutting edge only which was not serrated. The wound was 8 cms in length and 8 cms deep. The width could not be measured because the edges had separated due to the elasticity of the tissues both in relation to the region and to the position of the head, which could have modified the width. The wound had a small “tail” at the posterior end. The wound penetrated into the interior structure of the neck in a slightly oblique direction, upwards and also to the right.

Underneath this large wound, another wound was visible, rather small and superficial, with not particularly clear edges, “becoming increasingly superficial until they disappeared”, in a reddish area of abrasions. The knife had penetrated both Meredith’s larynx and the cartilage of the epiglottis, and had broken her hyoid bone. A consequence of that damage is that Meredith would be unable to vocalise, let alone scream.

There was also a wound in the right lateral region of the neck, also attributed to a pointed cutting instrument. This was 4 cms deep and 1.5 cms wide (or long). It had not caused significant structural damage.

The presence of two relatively slight areas of bruising, with scarce colouring and barely noticeable, were detected in the region of the elbows.

On Meredith’s hands were small wounds showing a very slight defensive response. A small, very slight patch of colour was noticed on the “anterior inner surface of the left thigh”. Another bruise was noticed on the anterior surface, in the middle third of the right leg.

The results of the toxicological analyses revealed the absence of psychotropic drugs and a blood alcohol level of 0.43 grams per litre.

Tests of histological preparations of fragments of the organs taken during the autopsy were also performed. They revealed the presence of “pools of blood” in the lungs.

The cause of death was attributed to asphixiation and loss of blood, the former being caused by the latter.

There was nothing in the pathology which confirmed that Meredith had been raped, though we should recall that Guede’s DNA was found on the vaginal swab, though not of a spermatic nature. For Massei this was confirmation that she had been subjected to a sexual assault.

—————————————

There was argument in court as to whether Exhibit 36 was compatible with the main wound. There was no dispute amongst the experts that it could not have been responsible for the wound on the right. The knife had an overall length of 31 cms and the length of the blade from the point to the handle was 17.5 cms. The width of the blade, 4cms from the point, exceeded the width of the right hand wound. The wound on the right was more akin to a pocket knife, or perhaps a flick-knife.

I shall look at the arguments advanced by the defence as to why the knife would not be compatible in a moment, but before that there is a simple logical point as to incompatibility based on measurements.

A knife would only be incompatible if the length of the wound was greater than the length of the blade of the knife, or if the width of the wound was less than the width of the blade. Exhibit 36 was therefore a priori compatible.

On this basis I would also have to concede that a pocket or flick-knife is not a priori incompatible with the main wound, unless (though we would not know) the length of it”˜s blade did not exceed 8 cms.

It should however be recalled that the width of the left side wound was also 8 cms. That is over 5 times the width of the wound on the other side of the neck. The width of the blade on Exhibit 36, 8 cms from it’s tip - and being approximately 3.5 cms wide- was over twice the width of the blade on the “pocket knife”. This fact, and the robustness of the larger weapon, particularly with regard to the observed butchering at the base of the left-sided cut, makes Exhibit 36 a far more likely candidate, in my submission, than a “pocket knife”, and that’s without taking into account Meredith’s DNA on the blade.

We can also enter into a numbers game as regards the experts (8 of them) who opined on compatibility. Massei tells us that Dr Liviero concluded “definite compatibility”, Dr Lalli and Professors Bacci and Norelli “compatibility” whilst “non- incompatibility” came from the 3 GIP experts nominated at a preliminary hearing. The latter were Professors Aprile, Cingolani and Ronchi.

As far as I am concerned “non-incompatability” is not hard to understand. It simply means compatible.

Professors Introna, Torre, and Dr Patumi, for the defence, opined that Exhibit 36 could be ruled out. Their argument was twofold. First, the length of the blade was incompatible with the depth of the wound had the knife truly been used with homicidal intent. Indeed, if it had been thrust in up to the hilt then the point would have exited on the other side of the neck. Secondly, they said that the smaller wound or the abrasions beneath the main wound, mentioned earlier, were in fact caused by the hilt of a knife striking the surface of the neck. Obviously if that were so then the main wound was not caused by Exhibit 36.

Their argument does not consider, because we do not know, what may have been the actual dynamics of the knife strike. We cannot know what was the cause of the underlying wound or the reddish area of abrasions. As to that wound it may have been the result of the knife edge being run across the surface of the skin and the abrasions may have had a different cause in the prior struggle for which there is ample evidence. Hence their argument seems very weak.

We cannot leave the topic without considering that there may have been more than two knives involved. This possibility arises from the evidence of Professor Vinci, for the defence. He considered blood stains that were on the bed sheet in Meredith’s room. These stains very much resembled the outline of a knife, or knives, laid to rest on the bed sheet.

It was Professor Vinci’s contention that the bloody outlines (a dual outline from the same knife he said) was left by a knife with a blade 11.3 cms long, or a knife with a blade 9.6 cms long with a congruent blooded section of handle 1.7 cms long (9.6 + 1.7 = 11.3), and having a blade width of 1.3 to 1.4 cms.

Taking these measurements as read they may seem incompatible with a pocket knife (such as Sollecito had a proclivity to carry) and they certainly are as regards Exhibit 36. It follows, he argued, that one has to infer the presence of a third knife in any hypothesis and if a pocket knife and Exhibit 36 are already accounted for by Knox and Sollecito then a reasonable inference is that the third knife would have to be Guede’s. Professor Vinci’s blade is not incompatible a priori with either of the two wounds.

The problem, and without going into detail on the matter, is that Professor Vinci’s contention and measurements are somewhat speculative depending on what one thinks one sees in the stains. It is rather like reading tea leaves. One could just as well superimpose Exhibit 36 over the stains and conclude that it was responsible for them.

Massei only briefly commented about the bloody outlines on the bed sheet. He opined that the blood stains were certainly “suggestive” but insufficient to establish any clear outlines from which reliable measurements could be established. Clearly then he did not accord any reliability to Professor Vinci’s measurements.

—————————————————-

We can now turn to the issue of whether Meredith’s injuries tell us anything about whether her attacker was a “lone wolf” or not.

Massei believed that Meredith’s injuries lay at the heart of the matter. It seemed inconceivable to him that she would first be stabbed twice and that she would then be strangled. The amount of blood, being very slippery, would make maintaining pressure on her throat difficult. So Meredith was forcibly restrained and throttled first. The hypothesis of a single attacker requires that he continually modify his actions, first by exercising a strong restraining pressure on her, producing significant bruising, and then for some reason switching to life threatening actions with a knife, thereby changing the very nature of the attack from that of subjugation to that of intimidation with a deadly weapon, and finally to extreme violence, striking with the knife to one side of the neck and then to the other side of the neck.

Massei described the first knife blow, landing on the right side of her neck, as being halted by the jawbone, preventing it from going any deeper than the 4 cms penetration. The court considered that this was an action to force Meredith to submit to actions against her will. The same hypothesis could also, of course, in view of the injuries to the jaw, apply as to the lack of penetration with Exhibit 36 on the other side

What surprised Massei about Meredith’s wounds was that in spite of all the changes in approach during the attack she somehow remained in the same vulnerable position, leaving her neck exposed to attack.

Massei paid particular attention to the paucity and lack of what can be regarded as defensive wounds on her hands by comparison with the number, distribution and diversity of the impressive wounds to her face and neck. He found this disproportion to be significant, particularly with regard to what was known about Meredith’s physicality and personality.

Meredith was slim and strong, possessing a physicality that would have allowed her to move around with agility. She liked sports, and practiced boxing and karate. In fact she had a medium belt in karate. She would, had she been able to, have fought with all her strength. How then would a single attacker have been able to change hands with a knife to strike to both sides of her neck, let alone switch from one knife to another? He would have had to release his grip on the victim to do that, unless she had wriggled free and changed position, in which case he would have to subdue her all over again, but this time, if not before, she would be ready.

Since the attack was also sexual in nature, at least initially, how could a single attacker have removed the clothes she was wearing (a sweater, jeans, knickers and shoes) and inflicted the sexual violence revealed by the vaginal swab, without, again releasing his grip? It might be suggested, as the defence did, that Meredith was already undressed when the attack began, but for this to be the case one of three possible alternative hypotheses has to be accepted.

The first is that Guede was already in the flat, uninvited, and un-noticed by Meredith, which can only mean that the break -in was genuine but un-noticed by her. The second is that Guede was there by invitation and that their relationship had proceeded by agreement to the contemplation of sexual intercourse when Meredith suddenly changed her mind, unleashing a violent reaction from Guede. The third is that, having been invited in Meredith then thought that he had left, although he had not.

Having looked at the staging we can surely rule out the first hypothesis. As to the second, it does not fit with what is known about Meredith’s personality and the relationship she had been developing with Giacomo. As to the third it is difficult to imagine that in a small flat Meredith would not have checked before securing the front door and preparing for bed.

Massei found it was highly unlikely that one person could have caused all the resulting bruises and wounds by doing the above, including cutting off and bending the hooks on the bra clasp. The actions on the bra clasp alone would necessitate someone standing behind her and using a knife to cut the straps, requiring the attention of both hands from her attacker, during which time Meredith would have had the opportunity to apply some self-defence. It has to be conceded though that this could have happened when she was concussed, though there is no persuasive physical evidence of a concussive blow, or during or after she had been mortally wounded.

Massei concluded that there was little evidence of defensive manoeuvers on Meredith’s part, which to him meant that several attackers were present, each with a distribution of tasks and roles: either holding her and preventing her from making any significant defensive reaction, or actually performing the violent actions. He concluded that the rest of the body of evidence, both circumstantial and forensic, came in full support of such a scenario. He concluded that two separate knives had been used and that one was from Sollecito”˜s bedsit.

Although, at the trial, the defence had attempted to explain a scenario whereby a single attacker might have been responsible for the injuries, that there had been multiple attackers was not a scenario with which any court, other than the first appeal court presided over by Hellmann, demurred.

Posted by James Raper on 04/27/17 at 06:58 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Evidence & Witnesses, Real crimescene, Faked breakin, The pack attack, The two knives, DNA and luminol, Trials 2008 & 2009, Massei prosecution, Hoaxes against Italy, 4 No firm DNA hoax, 5 No pack attack hoax, Hoaxes re Guede, 33 Sole attacker hoax • Comments here (17)

Friday, April 21, 2017

The Suspicious Behaviour And Evidence Contradicting the Mutual Alibis Of RS And AK

Posted by James Raper

Material from some of my previous posts on TJMK was incorporated into my Justice on Trial. From Chapter 11, this is the first of several posts setting out further material.

Suspicious behaviour is not proof of guilt but it is an addition to the mix and, if there is enough of it, it can be weighty. I have already mentioned in Chapter 6 reservations as to the motive for Knox’x E-mail in view of certain things that did not make much sense.

Now we can consider what else arises from the testimony of witnesses, from what Knox and Sollecito had to say for themselves in their own words, and from the evidence concerning the phone records and computer analyses.

I have included the Court Exhibit log of calls made and received on the mobile phones for Knox and Sollecito, for the days the 1st and 2nd November 2007, in Appendix C. I did consider whether I should have done this given the telephone numbers referred to. However it is now eight years since the murder and I think it very unlikely that these numbers have not since been changed. In addition, Knox herself has had for some time, and may still have, a similar log for her mobile, covering the period from the beginning of October until a few days after Meredith’s death, on her website.

The relevant behaviour to be covered is from the day before the discovery of the murder up to the time of their arrest and we will discuss how this reflects upon their mutual alibi. As to that alibi we have in evidence Knox’s Memorial but not Sollecito’s statement to the police.

We also have the testimony of Antonio Curatolo and Marco Quintavalle.

Curatolo was a tramp who says that he saw Knox and Sollecito in the square at Piazza Grimana after 9.30 pm on the 1st November, having, as it appeared to him, an argument. They were at the end of the square from which the gates leading to the cottage could be seen.

Quintaville was the owner of a store who said that he saw Knox there at 7.45 am on the morning of the 2nd November.

Both were amongst witnesses unearthed by an enterprising local reporter, Antioco Fois, who stole a march on the police’s own investigation.

I will look more closely at their evidence in the next Chapter.

Knox and Sollecito would certainly have an alibi up until 8.40 pm on the 1st November, and later as it happens. That is because a witness, Jovana Popovic, knocked on Sollecito’s door at that time and spoke to Knox.

We need, however, to backtrack a bit. Popovic had knocked at Sollecito’s door between 5.30 and 5.45 pm. She wanted to ask Sollecito for a favour. Would he be kind enough to drive her to the train station in his Audi to collect some luggage that would arrive for her there later that night? Knox answered the door and invited her in and she spoke to Sollecito. He agreed he would do that.

Sollecito then started to play a film, Amelie, on his computer at 6.27 pm, which he says he and Knox watched. It would appear (See Chapter 30) that Knox then went out (whether with or without Sollecito is not clear) and that before returning to Sollecito’s flat, she (at 8.18 pm) received the text from Lumumba saying that she did not have to go to work that evening. She replied by text at 8.35 - “Sure. See you later. Have a good evening”.

Sollecito”˜s varying versions, be it in his statements to the police, was (in the first version) that after leaving the cottage, he and Knox returned to his flat between 8.30 and 9 pm to eat, watch the movie and smoke some pot. That version then changed, of course, during his interview with the police on the 5th November, when he told them that before he got home Knox had left him to go to go and see friends at Le Chic and did not return until 1 am.

Popovic returned to Sollecito’s flat at 8.40 because she had been told that the luggage was not in fact being sent that evening. Knox, whom she described as being in a very good mood, told her that she would pass the message to Raffaele.

From this point on, of course, both Knox and Sollecito had an evening free to themselves.

At 8.42 pm Sollecito received a call from his father on his mobile. That this call was within 7 minutes of Knox’s text to Lumumba, and that there was no further activity on their mobiles until the following morning, is what had sparked the interest of the police and had resulted in Sollecito being called to the Questura on the 5th.

As mentioned Curatolo claimed to have first seen Knox and Sollecito in Piazza Grimana shortly after 9.30 pm. However that was contradicted by Knox’s trial testimony as to when she and Sollecito had eaten a meal at his flat.

From Knox’s trial testimony on the 12th June 2009 -

GCM: Can you say what time this was?

AK: umm, around, umm, we ate around 9.30 or 10, and then after we had eaten, and he was washing the dishes, well, as I said, I don’t look at the clock much, but it was around 10. And”¦he”¦umm”¦well, he was washing the dishes and, umm, the water was coming out and he was very bummed, displeased, he told me he had just had that thing repaired. He was annoyed that it had broken again. So”¦umm

LG: Yes, so you talked a bit. Then what did you do?

AK: Then we smoked a joint together”¦”¦we made love”¦..then we fell asleep.

The next day, on the 13th , on cross-examination by Mignini, Knox testified -

GM: So, I wanted to know something else. At what time did the water leak?

AK: After dinner, I don’t know what time it was.

GM: Towards 21, 21.30?

AK: 21, that’s 9? No, it was much later than that.

GM: A bit later? How much?

AK: We had dinner around”¦”¦10.30, so that must have happened a bit later than that. Maybe around 11 [slow voice as if thinking it out]

The alibi also now covers the prosecution’s first indication of the likely time of death at around 11 pm, but which was then moved to around 11.30 pm during the prosecution summing up at the trial.

Unfortunately Sollecito’s father himself torpedoed this dodge by telling the court that when he phoned his son at 8.42 pm Sollecito had told him that there had been a water leak while he was washing the dishes. Taking into account Knox’s testimony that they had eaten before the dish washing, this places the meal and dish washing before that call.

Sollecito told the police that at about 11 pm he had received a call from his father on his land line. Not only is that not confirmed by his father but there is no log of such a call. There were no landline calls at all for the relevant period of an alibi.

There is no log of a call to his mobile at that time either though his father had sent a text message then but which Sollecito did not receive until 6. 03 am the following morning. We know that he had received it at that time because that is the time at which it is logged in the phone records. Sollecito had just turned his phone on and clearly the phone had been off when the text message was sent.

There is no record of any phone activity for either of them from after the 8.42 pm call until, in Sollecito’s case, receipt of that text message at 6.03 am, and in Knox’s case her call to Meredith’s English phone at 12.07 pm the next day.

A word about this here because, as mentioned, Knox released her phone records on her web site. In her case it has to be said that this is not so unusual. Up until the 30th October there is no regular pattern of late or early morning phone activity.

Sollecito is different as his father was in the habit of calling at all hours just to find out what his son was doing. This is backed up by his phone records.

In the case of Knox she said that her phone had been switched off so as not to be disturbed and to save the battery.

——————————————————

We can now consider Sollecito’s computer, a “MacBook - PRO” - model Apple Laptop. This had been seized by the police on the 6th November and was then handed over to the Postal Police on the 13th November. They cloned the hard disk which is standard practice.

Massei -

“Of the 124 files (or “reports”) with “last accessed” in the referenced time period (from 18:00 on 1/11/07 to 08:00 on 2/11/07) only two were “human interaction”; the remaining 122 reports were actions carried out automatically by the Mac OS X operating system installed on the Apple MacBook PRO.

In particular the evidenced human interaction occurred at :

21:10:32 [ 9.10 pm] on the 1/11/07
and at
05:32:09 [ 5.32 am ] on the 2/11/07

Furthermore at 18:27:15 [6.27 pm] on the 1/11/07, there was human interaction via the “VLC” application, software used to play a multimedia file for a film “Il Favolso Mondo Di Amelie.avi”, already downloaded onto Sollecito’s computer laptop via P2P (peer to peer) some days earlier.”

There is thus no record of any human interaction with Sollecito’s computer from 9.10 pm on the 1st November until 5.32 am the next morning, when music was played on the computer for half an hour.

There was computer evidence for the defence at the trial and further attempts were made to try and force an alibi from his computer later on appeal. I think it would be appropriate, and convenient, to include a discussion of all this here.

At first Sollecito had maintained that he had been sending e-mails and surfing the web but that account was quickly demolished. However, a defence expert called Antonio D’Ambrosio did give very clear testimony at the trial. He was generous enough to acknowledge that the investigations carried out by the postal police were accurate, and well interpreted, but he said he had been able to uncover a bit more information about the computer because he was not limited by forensic protocols (and could therefore reveal information not visible to the Encase software used by the police) when he examined a copy of the cloned disk. This information was an interaction with the Apple website at 00.58 on the 2/11/07 which he did believe was a human interaction.

Unfortunately, whether there was or was not a human interaction with the computer at that time, does not provide Sollecito with an alibi.

D’Ambrosio also said that he noticed an interaction at 9.26 pm on the 1/11/07 but was unable to be certain whether a human interaction had occurred or whether a pre-requested download of a film, Naruto, had commenced.

The first defence expert report was in fact one prepared by Angelucci, in March 2008, at the request of Knox’s lawyer, Dalla Vedova. It does not appear to have been submitted in evidence but the salient point from this was that the data from both Sollecito’s Asus computer (he said he had another which was broken) and Meredith’s computer, was recovered.

Then there was the D’Ambrosio report followed at the first appeal by another report from Professor Alfredo Milani. In his book Sollecito mentions Milani as one of his professors at the college at which he was studying computer science. Milani credits D’Ambrosio with a lot of the content but his report was gratuitously offensive as regards the work of the postal police and he said that they had made “grave methodological errors” which had resulted in the concealment of information and which led him to conclude that it could not be excluded that there had been an overwriting of the time data was stored.

Firstly he spends much time outlining the Mac OS, in every release, and tells us that because the postal police used an “analogous but not identical” MacBook a tiny difference in the release number in the operating system renders their analysis unreliable. This is impossible to accept for two reasons - firstly, that the OS employed resided on the cloned disk from Sollecito’s own MacBook, but more importantly the precise OS release would not affect in any way the reading of the log files.

Secondly, he unwisely reminds us of inodes (log files). These files are regularly archived, in compressed form, and the archive is not over written. The archive is not very easy for an ordinary user to search but it is certainly not beyond the capabilities of “an expert computer consultant”.

He also unwisely provides a play list of the music which Sollecito had been playing when he opened his ITunes app: at 5.32 am in the morning.

The Report was in evidence but it is unlikely that the Court had before it an analysis of the music. The music app featured, amongst others, songs by the Seattle based punk rock band Nirvana, but more interestingly the app opens with the head banging introductory music (entitled “Stealing Fat”) to “The Fight Club” cult movie: with it’s own rendition of the iconic stabbing sound from the Hitchcock movie “Psycho” and introducing a background wailing sound. An interesting choice of music at 5.32 am in the morning and within hours of Meredith”˜s brutal murder. There is clear evidence of manual interaction as some tracks are paused and then clicked through to the next.

One track on the app was not given any play time. This was “Polly” by Nirvanna based on the true story of the abduction, torture and rape of a 14 year old girl. The culprit is still serving time in jail.

Knox and Sollecito claimed that neither woke until Knox rose at 10.30 am. Not only are the two of them trapped by a blatant lie but if one’s choice of music is a reflection of mood, or to facilitate a change of mood, then their choice of music (and some of the lyrics, such as “I killed you, I’m not gonna crack”) is disturbing.

In the event the defence reports seem to have done little to impress the appeal judges. Perhaps Sollecito knew that they never would. In his prison diary on the 11th November 2007 he wrote -

“I have been very anxious and nervous in the last few days, but to see my father who tells me “do not worry, we will get you out”, makes me feel better. My real concerns are now two: the first one derives from the fact that if that night Amanda remained with me all night long, we could have (and this is a very remote possibility) made love all evening and night only stopping to eat”¦. It would be a real problem because there would be no connections from my computer to servers in those hours.”

———————————————-

Knox falsely claims in her book that having had her shower at the cottage she called her mother on her way back to Sollecito’s apartment (a 5 minute journey) as she was beginning to have concerns as to what she had seen at the cottage. She writes that her mother tells her to raise her concerns with Raffaele and the other flatmates and Knox says that she then immediately called Filomena Romanelli. Romanelli tells her to get hold of Meredith by phone which she tries to do by calling Meredith’s English phone first, then her Italian one.

(a) How does this correlate to the contents of her e-mail of the 4th Nov?

(b) How does this correlate to Knox’s phone records?

(a) There is no mention of a call to her mother at all in the e-mail. This from her e-mail -

“”¦.and I returned to Raffaele’s place. After we had used the mop to clean up the kitchen I told Raffaele about what I had seen in the house over breakfast. The strange blood in the bathroom, the door wide open, the shit in the toilet. He suggested I call one of my roommates, so I called Filomena”¦”¦”¦..
Filomena seemed really worried so I told her I’d call Meredith and then call her back. I called both of Meredith’s phones the English one first and last and the Italian one in between. The first time I called the English phone it rang and then sounded as if there was disturbance, but no one answered. I then called the Italian phone and it just kept ringing, no answer. I called the English phone again and this time an English voice told me the phone was out of service.”

(b) the phone records are as follows -

02/11/2007

Ist call @ 12.07.12 (to Meredith’s English phone) - 16 seconds

2nd call @ 12.08.44 (to Romanelli) - 68 seconds

3rd call @ 12.11.02 (to Meredith’s Italian phone) - 3 seconds

4th call @ 12.11.54 (to Meredith’s English phone) - 4 seconds

(The 5th, 6th and 7th calls are by Romanelli)

8th call @ 12..47.23 (first call to her mother) - 88 seconds

Â© the discrepancies are as follows -

1. The accounts in the book and the e-mail differ materially but at least the phone records enable us to establish facts. The first call to her mother was not just after leaving the cottage but 40 minutes after the call to Romanelli, and the call to Romanelli had been placed (on the basis of the e-mail) after she had returned to Raffaele’s place and after they had used the mop and had breakfast. If we add on 20 minutes for that activity then we can say that she called her mother at least an hour after she had left the cottage.

2. The first call to Meredith’s English phone (and it rang for an appreciable time - 16 seconds) was placed before the call to Romanelli, and not after as Knox would have it in her e-mail and in her book. A minute before, but Knox did not mention this to Romanelli, as confirmed by the e-mail and Romanelli’s testimony.

3. The call to the Italian phone did not just keep ringing (See 5 below). The connection was for 3 seconds and this was followed by a connection to the English phone for 4 seconds.

4. The English phone was not switched off, nor (as Knox has claimed -see email) out of service. Mrs Lana’s daughter had found it. She said that she would not have done so but for it ringing (the 12.07 call for 16 seconds?). She picked it up and took it into the house where it rang again (the 12.11 call - 4 seconds?). A name appeared on the screen as it rang : “Amanda”.

5. The 3 and 4 second calls are highly suspicious. The Italian phone was already in the possession of the postal police. Because of it’s discovery before the English phone the postal police had been dispatched to the cottage at about midday. According to Massei it’s answering service was activated, accounting for the log. Clearly Knox did not even bother to leave a message for Meredith as it would take longer than 3 seconds just to listen to the answering service. This is not the behaviour of someone genuinely concerned about another. By contrast Romanelli had called Knox three times, spending no less than half a minute on each call, and on the last one being informed by Knox that her room had been burgled and ransacked.

Observations -

In her e-mail, and repeated in her trial testimony, Knox says that she woke up around 10.30 am, grabbed a few things and walked the 5 minutes back to the cottage. If the first call to her mother (at 12.47) was about an hour after she left the cottage (see before) then she left the cottage at about 11.47 am, which means that she spent over an hour there. Either that or she spent much more than 20 minutes at Raffaele’s place before calling Romanelli. One might think that the latter would be more likely as it is difficult to conceive that she spent over an hour at the cottage just showering and blow drying her hair, is it not? She did not (Knox’s testimony) have the heating on when she was there. If that were the case then one has to wonder why she dallied, without any concern for her flatmates, in an empty and cold cottage, the front door to which she had found open.

Either way there is a period of up to about an hour and a half between when she might have tried to contact Meredith (if she believed she was there, by knocking on or trying her bedroom door or by calling her phone) and her calling Romanelli, effectively to raise the alarm.

That we are right to be incredulous about this is borne out by the false claim in Knox”˜s book. That false claim is significant and can only be because Knox is acutely aware that the phone records show that her original story does not stack up.

That it is incredible is even belatedly acknowledged by Sollecito’s feeble but revealing attempt to distance himself from Knox in a CNN interview on the 28 Feb 2014. “Certainly I asked her questions” he said. “Why did you take a shower? Why did you spend so much time there?”

That she makes that false claim and has constantly stonewalled and/or misplaced the 16 second call to Meredith’s English phone is indicative of a guilty knowledge. Her guilty knowledge with respect to the 16 second call was that it was made to ascertain whether or not the phones had been located before she called Romanelli, and hence for her it was not (incredulous though this is without such explanation) a pertinent fact for her to bring up with Romanelli. More than that though she also sidestepped the specific question put to her by Romanelli -

Massei -

“Amanda called Romanelli, to whom she started to detail what she had noticed in the house without, however, telling her a single word about the unanswered call made to Meredith despite the question expressly put to her by Romanelli.”

As to the 12.47 call to her mother (4.47 am Seattle time and prior to the discovery of Meredith”˜s body) Knox not only did not mention that in her e-mail but in taped conversation with her mother and in her trial testimony she steadfastly declined to recall that it had occurred. Ostensibly the call would have been, of course, to report the break in. So what would be the problem with that? However she clearly did not want, or could not be trusted, to discuss her motive for the call and what had transpired in conversation with her mother (and stepfather) before the discovery of Meredith’s body.

Not only was the timing of the 12.47 call inconvenient to her mother but I found it interesting to note from Knox’s phone records (covering 2nd Oct - 3rd November) that mother and daughter do not appear to have called or texted each other once by phone up until that 12.47 call. It would appear then that in so far as they remained in direct communication with each other for that period it must have been by e-mail or Skype. Indeed Knox has referred to such communication being via internet café. One can therefore imagine that her mother was very surprised to receive that call. It is also very difficult to accept that Knox could not recall a phone call she was not in the habit of making.

Until Knox published her book the only information that was available about the 12.47 call (apart from the phone log which showed that it lasted 88 seconds) came from her mother (who reported that her daughter was concerned about the break in) and her stepfather Chris Mellas. Mellas says that he interrupted the conversation between mother and daughter to tell Amanda to get out of the cottage. In her book Knox tells us (her memory now having returned) that he yelled at her but that she was “spooked” enough without that. But what had really happened to spook her? Readers will already know where I am coming from, and may think I am pushing at bit hard here, but I believe that the call to her mother was both a comfort and a rehearsal call, not simply because there had been a burglary, but because she knew a set of events was about to unfold on Romanelli’s arrival at the cottage. Would her explanation about having been there earlier for a shower be credible? Would Romanelli and subsequently the police, detect anything suspicious? The fact that her mother and stepfather already had the jitters was not a good omen.

The testimony of Edda Mellas was as follows ““

“Yes, in the first call she said that she knew that it was really early in the morning but she had called because she felt that someone had been in the house. She had spent the night at Raffaele’s and she had returned to take a shower at her house, and the main door was open. That had seemed strange to her, but the door had a strange lock and sometimes the door didn’t close properly, and when she entered the house everything seemed to be in place. Then she went to take the shower, and when she came out of the shower she noticed that there was a bit of blood but she thought that perhaps someone was having their period and had not cleaned up properly after themselves. She then went to her room and dressed and then went into the other bathroom to blow dry her hair and realized that someone had not flushed the toilet., and she thought it was strange because usually the girls flushed. Then she had to go to meet Raffaele, and she told him of these strange things in the house. Thern she tried to call one of the others who lived with them to find out something,, and had the number of another Italian roommate that was in the town, the others were there no longer and she tried to call Meredith several times but there was no response, They returned to the house, and she showed Raffaele what she had found and they realized that there was a broken window, Then at this point they began to knock on Meredith’s door trying to wake her up and when there was no answer they tried to enter her room.”

This is a lot of information to cram in to an 88 second phone call when surely Knox’s mother must have been feeling confused, concerned, and with questions of her own. At what point did Chris interrupt and yell at her to get out of the house? Edda’s testimony is very much a reprise of Knox’s e-mail. How could Knox not have remembered such a detail packed conversation, a prelude to her e-mail, and triggered by, on the face of it, a burglary?

Knox’s phone records also correct a previous misapprehension of mine. I had regarded it as rather unlikely that Knox would have tried to contact Meredith first on her English phone rather than the Italian phone which she knew Meredith had and used for local calls. However the records show that it was not at all unusual for Knox to call Meredith’s English phone. In fact she did this most of the time. But also, if the purpose of the first call to Meredith (after midday on the 2nd) was to check as to whether or not the phones had been located by anyone, then calling Meredith’s English, rather than her Italian, phone would make sense, because of course Knox would know that was the phone by which Meredith and her parents remained in frequent contact with each other, and that the parents would surely have raised the alarm had the phone been discovered and a call by Meredith’s parents been answered by some diligent but confused citizen in Italian. This, of course, could have happened and the alarm could have been raised by Meredith’s parents well prior to Meredith’s phone being called by Knox the first time, but such an eventuality would not have been a matter of concern to Knox in the event that she had not been to the cottage earlier.

At the cottage, and prior to the above call, Sollecito received a call from his father at 12.40 am. Do we know what they discussed? It would in any event have been after the discovery of Romanelli’s broken window and (allegedly) Sollecito’s (rather feeble) attempt to break down Meredith’s door. Did the responsible adult advise his son to do the obvious and call the police? One would think so, but then why was there a 10 minute delay before he called his sister in the Carabinieri at 12.50 am? Indeed, why call his sister at all? Why substitute the formality of calling the police to report a break in with a personal call? They are not the same thing - clearly, as immediately afterwards he did call the 112 emergency services to report the break in. Romanelli had also urged Knox to call the police when she called at 12.35.The 16 minute delay from that call might be accounted for by the unexpected arrival of the postal police and if this was the case then it was before Sollecito called the 112 emergency services.

The issue of whether Sollecito was lying when he told the postal police that he had already called 112 is an interesting one. It would take up too much time and space to discuss in detail here. See Chapter 13. Suffice to say that the prosecution set out to demonstrate that the postal police had arrived before the call and the defence set out to demonstrate the contrary.

Neither Knox nor Sollecito saw into Meredith’s room when the door was broken down and her body discovered on the floor under a quilt. Yet in the immediate aftermath it is as if they have wanted others to believe that it was they who discovered her body and in the bragging about this there have been disclosures, not only as to what they should not have been aware but also suggestive of disturbed personalities. This behaviour was remarkable for all the wrong reasons.

(a) The police were suspicious about the fact that Knox had alluded to Meredith having had her throat cut at the Questura, but we now know from Luca Altieri”˜s testimony that Knox and Sollecito had heard about this directly from him during the car ride to the police station.. However her bizarre and grotesque allusion in the early moments of the investigation to the body being found stuffed into the closet (wardrobe) is not just factually incorrect (it was lying to the side of the closet) but bears a striking correlation to later forensic findings based on blood splatter in front of and on the closet door, that Meredith had been thrust up against the closet after having been stabbed in the throat.

(b) The behaviour of Knox and Sollecito at the police station is documented in the testimony of Meredith’s English girlfriends and of the police. Whilst it is true that people react to grief in different ways it is difficult to ascribe grief or a reaction to shock to some of Knox’s behaviour. Emotionally she was cold towards Meredith’s friends and occasionally went out of her way to upset them with barbed and callous remarks. The fact that Knox was not observed to cry and wanted to talk about what had happened is not of itself indicative of anything but remarks like “What the fuck do you think, she bled to death” (Knox acknowledged a similar comment to this in her tv interview with Diane Sawyer - See Chapter 27) and her kissing and canoodling with Raffaele (including them making smacking noises with their lips when they blew kisses to each other) in front of the others was not normal. Rather chilling in retrospect was a scene between the pair of them when Knox found the word “minaccia” (in english - threat) amusing and made a play of it with Sollecito in front of witnesses.

Â© Grief is in any event reserved for friends and relations, or people one much admires. The evidence is that the initial short friendship between the two had cooled to the extent that Meredith was studiously, if politely, avoiding being around Knox. For the narcissistic and attention seeking american girl this would have been difficult to ignore and may well have offended her.

(d) The next day Sollecito was willingly collared by a reporter from the Sunday Mirror and told her about the horror of finding the body.

“Yes I knew her. I found her body.”

“It is something I never hope to see again,” he said. “There was blood everywhere and I couldn’t take it all in.”

“My girlfriend was her flatmate and she was crying and screaming, ‘How could anyone do this?’”

Sollecito went on the tell the reporter (with reference to the night of the murder) that -

“It was a normal night. Meredith had gone out with one of her English friends and Amanda and I went to a party with one of my friends. The next day, around lunchtime, Amanda went back to their apartment to have a shower.”

This was not in evidence which is as well because about the only thing that is true here is that he knew Meredith.

Posted by James Raper on 04/21/17 at 06:09 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (9)

Monday, April 10, 2017

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”.

1. Claims Amanda Knox’s Confessions Resemble “False Confessions” Not Backed Up By Any Criminal Research

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

4. Questions For Knox: Do You Really Think “False Memories” Claim Framing Italians Yet Again Will Help?

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.

1. Injustice in Perugia

Steve Moore: “In the five days after the murder of Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox was interrogated by detectives for 43 hours.

2. CBS News-48 Hrs

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.

4. CNN Transcripts

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 2007

3 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 questura

5/6 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 • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (25)

Thursday, April 06, 2017

Eight Evidence Items Beyond Reasonable Doubt: How Honestly Did Marasca & Bruno Address Them?

Posted by Cardiol MD

1. Post Overview

You might recall that the Fifth Chambers Sentencing Report was (illegally under Italian law) published two months late in 2015.

Machiavelli posted the panel’s spoken verdict late in March 2015 and I posted a series of tests of the final report’s honesty in April 2015.

Thereafter the Perugia and Florence prosecutors posted a critique in May 2015. The Sentencing Report was finally published in August 2015, and our translation was posted in September 2015.

Finaly Catnip’s extensive critique was posted in September and James Raper’s even more extensive series in November 2015.

2. The Obvious Shortfalls And Dishonesties

I might mention first my credentials for this series. My screen-name indicates a Doctorate of Medicine, but I have also a Doctorate of Law and have professionally appeared often in American courtrooms. My purpose here is to revisit my tests of honesty of April 2015 and to complete our record here on how Marasca and Bruno shaped up on them.

A “shortfall” results when the actual benefits of a venture are lower than the projected, or estimated, benefits of that venture. I conclude that the cherry-picking ruling of the cherry-picked SCC panel, the Marasca/Bruno panel, one of 79 possible pickable SCC panels, was a huge shortfall, even more brazen than the U.S. jury-ruling in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

The first publicised sign of the pending shortfall came in March, before the Marasca/Bruno proceeding had even begun on AK/RS’s involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher, when Judge Bruno was quoted as having said that the trials had “not many certainties beyond the girl’s death and one definitely convicted.”

It was this premature and unethically prejudicial statement that immediately triggered my April posts. I offered over 50 tests for assessing how honest the pending sentencing report (which pended for over 5 months) could prove. Eight tests were of items that for any objective panel of lawyers or judges should have been Beyond Reasonable Doubt and 43 tests were of Certainties or Certainly-Nots.

Machiavelli, Catnip and James Raper later did excellent post-publication reviews leaving the corruption of the court exposed. In all probability this corruption was really only aimed at getting RS “off-the-hook”. AK was included only because it would have been too complicated not to do so; AK is a lucky secondary beneficiary.

AK&RS are as guilty as hell, as we all know. To me it is obvious that M&B know that also. So how badly DID they fail my tests?

3. The Reasonable Doubts

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 1

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Accepting Massei’s conclusion, Knox and Sollecito were standing-up and facing Meredith in Meredith’s room. Knox, Sollecito and/or Guede, were participating in the restraining of Meredith.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 2

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Sollecito (or Guede) was holding the smaller Knife, probably in his right hand. This smaller knife made Stab B.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 3

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Stab B preceded Stab A, and caused Meredith’s scream.

When Meredith screamed Knox plunged Knife36 into Meredith’s neck in the above long-axis direction, from left to right, transecting Meredith’s Hyoid bone, first opening Meredith’s airway to the atmosphere, then transecting Meredith’s Right Superior Thyroid Artery.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 4

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Knox was holding Knife36, probably in Knox’s right hand, holding Knife36 against the left side of Meredith’s neck with Knife36’s point directed slightly upwards to the right side of Meredith’s neck, the blade-label facing towards Knox, the palm of Knox’s right hand also facing towards Knox and the long-axis of Knife36 angled a few degrees above horizontal.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 5

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

A thin stream of bright-red oxygenated blood spurted from this artery to its exterior environment, probably through the cuts made in her skin to the outside by both knives.

(Consistent with bleeding from both cuts, Follain, in his book “A Death In Italy” wrote that Guede stated that he saw blood coming out of the left side of Meredith’s neck. Follain also wrote that Francesco Camana of the Rome forensic police, in Camana’s written report, that spurts of blood in the middle of Meredith’s chest made her sweatshirt more bloody on the right side than on the left side)

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 6

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

The large knife was Knife-36, which had been brought to the murder room from Sollecito’s kitchen

Marasca/Bruno constructively-dismissed all the above references to Knife-36, ruling that Sollecito’s Kitchen Knife cannot be The Murder Knife because “it was illogical to state that the kitchen knife, used for the homicide” was “re-placed in its place, with previous cleaning” to Sollecito’s Kitchen Drawer!?

And further,that it is “objectionable” to state such a thing!?

Also, Marasca/Bruno state that Sollecito would never have given his “concurrence” to Amanda’s “unjustified carrying of knife”!?

Marasca/Bruno’s specious “reasoning” is equivalent to ruling that O.J. Simpson could not be guilty because it would not be logical for him to have committed the crime.(or “Psychopaths act logically-only; therefore they cannot be guilty of committing a crime that we think is illogical.”)

The Massei Motivazione devoted Pages 77-86 (9&1/2 pp) to a meticulous analysis, integrating all the facts, not considering them only in isolation, taking into account not only the (sworn?) testimony of these 2 witnesses, but also that of other witnesses, including Knox, and the relevant circumstances. Their rulings justify the Conclusion that:

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 7

WITNESS CURATOLO

IT IS BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT THAT CURATOLO SAW AMANDA KNOX AND RAFFAELE SOLLECITO IN PIAZZA GRIMANA ON THE EVENING OF NOV.1st, 2007 ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS. A FEW YARDS FROM THE COTTAGE AT NO. 7, VIA DELLA PERGOLA, WHERE, IN THE SAME SPAN OF TIME, THE MURDER TOOK PLACE.

Marasca/Bruno, after an unmeticulous analysis dismissed the testimony of Curatolo & Quintavalle with these (Translated) words:

“Nevertheless, the presence of intrinsic contradiction and poor reliability of witnesses [ ed: ie the above named] do not allow unreserved credit to be attributed to (their) respective versions, to the extent of proving with reasonable certainty the failure, and therefore the falsity, of the accused’s alibi, who insisted she stayed in her boyfriend’s home from late afternoon on the 1st November until the following morning.” As if Knox’s “insistance” proves she was not lying?

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 8

WITNESS QUINTAVALLE

IT IS BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT THAT MARCO QUINTAVALLE SAW AMANDA KNOX IN HIS CONAD SHOP AT AROUND 7:45 am ON 2 NOVEMBER 2007.

Amanda Marie Knox was lying when she claimed to have slept at Mr. Sollecito’s house in his company until 10am in the morning on 2 November 2007, and no court seems to have ruled otherwise.

(Marasca/Bruno’s above reference to Knox’s insistance, while probably not a ruling, betrays their underlying dishonesty.)

4. Footnote

Nine BARDs were originally listed in the relevant 2015 post but #3 was mistakenly duplicated in #6 during the settingup of the post.

Posted by Cardiol MD on 04/06/17 at 11:59 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Cassation critiques, Cardiol critique, Hoaxes against Italy, 3 No evidence hoax • Comments here (0)

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Running On A Mudslide, The Seemingly Freaked Sollecito Team Tries Again Not To Be Overwhelmed

Posted by Peter Quennell

Sollecito just lost big in a way we are asked not to post about just yet. Italian media has made no mention of it.

This request, rare from the open Italian system, has been made a few times before in this case, to try to block corruption and dishonest PR before they can get up to speed.

Meanwhile, it is safe to assume that a great unraveling of the huge body of lies must be freaking the Sollecito and Knox team’s minds. A new development that the Italian media IS reporting suggests this is so.

By way of context, Guede is now out on parole but has some time still to serve, including three years awarded by the Florence court for possession of stolen property, a notebook computer taken by two persons still unknown from a law-firm in Perugia, late in 2007.

(There is zero hard evidence that Guede ever did any break-and-entering, ever, and he has never been charged or convicted of that.)

His Rome team has filed a Supreme Court appeal against the Florence court’s decision not to grant him a retrial for grounds based on the 2015 Supreme Court outcome of the Sollecito and Knox appeal which said in part (1) Guede did not act alone and (2) Knox and Sollecito were both there.

And his interview broadcast nationally by RAI could be followed up by a book damning to RS and AK.

Okay. Now the Italian news service ANSA reports this.

“Once he has finished his full term in prison, Rudy Guede must be expelled from Italy” the lawyer Luca Maori, one of the defenders of Raffaele Sollecito, has asked.

The Ivorian these days is in Perugia, at the home of his former elementary school teacher where he is taking advantage of a possible reversal of the condemned’s sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment, which he is serving for the murder of Meredith Kercher.

Sollecito was finally acquitted for the same crime. “I will ask the police headquarters in Perugia - said Maori - to take steps to undertake the removal procedures of Guede, who is not an Italian citizen, who is now finishing serving his sentence (in prison in Viterbo - Ed.)

Many foreigners are expelled from our country for far less serious offenses to murder for which the Ivorian was sentenced” he said.

Any such expulsion order, considered unlikely, would be put on hold while Guede appeals - and presumably does maximum harm.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/18/17 at 06:01 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (17)

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Florence Court Report Now In English: Why Sollecito Gets Zero Compensation For “False Imprisonment”

Posted by Peter Quennell

Highrise Florence courts are just visible at left background

Please download here the English translation by unpaid volunteers on PMF dot Org of the adamant Florence judgement against Sollecito for State compensation.

Important context posts by KrissyG here and by James Raper here with more to follow.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/07/17 at 09:10 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (0)

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