Headsup: To those many lawyers amazed that Knox did not get on the witness stand to head off a certain re-conviction: the best guess among Italian lawyers is that Knox's own lawyers feared ANOTHER calunnia charge if she repeated the crackpot and highly disprovable claims that she was tortured. The tough calunnia law is primarily a pushback measure against mafia meddling which is widely suspected in this case.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

Wedding Of The Ghouls

Posted by Hopeful

The gruesome news in the online Daily Mail for July 22 2019:

Amanda Knox and her fiance launch crowd-funding appeal to make their wedding the “best party ever”—and promise donors a book of love poems in return

Knox, 32 and Christopher Robinson, 37 have asked for donations towards their wedding. AK said she had to use her wedding funds to pay for the trip to Modena in June.

Donations may cover food, decor and puzzles. The wedding will be space themed.

Galactic donors ($1,000) and temporal patrons ($2,000-$10,000) will receive a special video from the future, with reading of an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Galactica.

Other donors $25 and up will receive a copy of love poems entitled, “The Cardio Tesseract”.

Stellar patrons who donate $500 will get a shout out on the dance floor “when Madonna’s ‘Lucky Star’ comes on.”

Knox said, “I am getting married! How? Oh so weirdly! Time travel and so forth. Check out our wedding story at knoxrobinson.com/coalescence.

The Daily Mail story includes a photo of Knox in light pink dress leaning sadly on her mother’s shoulder as Edda puts an arm around her daughter in the seating at the Criminal Justice Festival of University of Modena.

Seems Edda was there, along with Chris, to support the fragile Knox who seemed to have a very very hard time coping with a return to Italy now that she has wised up.

At the Modena Justice event, Knox said she still fears further criminal charges against her despite the 2015 acquittal.

I’m afraid today, now, I’m afraid of being harassed, mocked, stuck and I’m afraid that new accusations will be addressed to me just because I come here (Modena) to say my version of the facts. But above all, I fear I will lack the courage.

I know that despite my acquittal by Court of Cassation I remain a controversial figure…above all and especially here in Italy.

Knox’s fiance Chris Robinson was in evidence at the Modena conference wearing a loud patterned shirt of yellow and black, and in one photo with his beloved Knox, wearing a grey felt hat, large sunglasses, and displaying a tattoo of a sword along what appears to be his left forearm, from elbow to wrist, an arm he has wrapped warmly around his fiancee Amanda.

On her June 13, 2019 arrival in Milan, Knox was swarmed by media, held her head down and wore an off-white jacket and hair in topknot bun.

Story in Mail says “Earlier this year a European court awarded Knox $20,000 in damages after finding that Italy had “violated her human rights.”

Photos of her at the justice conference where she represented the Innocence Project, show Knox dismal and unnerved, in my opinion.

Whether the tormented waif appearance was all a cunning act, or real, one can only guess, with the known liar and consummate actress and mask wearer.

It seems there will also be “costumes” at the wedding—no doubt a wild Mardi Gras affair. Let’s hope the confetti is not rocks or broken glass.

Frankly, Knox is looking unhinged these days and under the sway of the strange Mr. Robinson who appears quite kooky to say the least. imho….

Thursday, June 20, 2019

Knox’s Modena Catastrophe: Explaining Some Major Threats That Knox’s Foolish Rant Has Fired Up

Posted by KrissyG

Sarcastic graphic; Italian media is now negative toward Knox

Long Post. Click here to go straight to Comments

1. How Knox “Onshored” The PR’s Greatest Lies

David Marriott must be rolling over in his grave.

Remember what we said about his barbaric “public relations” in Post #1 below?

This case is riddled with dogs-that-didnt-bark examples. It was the core modus operandi of the scorched-earth public relations campaign run by Curt Knox and David Marriott. Ignore the damning 95 percent of the facts that can’t easily be explained away. Instead concentrate on misrepresenting the other 5 percent.

Given what we explained about live TV and documents in the first part, this would not have worked at all in Italy.

But it was never meant to. It was not beamed at Italy - it was beamed at British and Americans who (1) could not observe Knox for days and days on TV and (2) could not read court documents readily available online in Italian. Then hopefully they would react politically, as in the US they did of course.

So to Marriott it was vital to success that the PR’s myriad lies and defamations beamed at Americans and Brits REMAIN OFFSHORE!

The last thing Knox or anyone was meant to do was go half way round the world to Italy and ONSHORE the attacks.

But this is what Knox just did.

And she attacked two of Italy’s most liked and trusted institutions: (1) the world-class law-enforcement and justice system, and (2) the mostly restrained, quite elegant media.

Why Knox did this is not (or not only) the me-me-me obsession of a pathological narcissist at work. We’ll explain why in Post #3.

Here we explain which major risks for herself Knox may have set in motion, which to any smart mind would say at minimum “Imperious trips to Italy are at an end.”

2. Ten Of The Many Threats Knox May Have Fired Up

1. Guede Could Rebut Her All Over Italian Media

Guede is due to be released any day now. He will be free to give interviews, write his memoirs, point the finger at Sollecito or (more likely now) Knox. Knox obviously will not be in Italy and unable to respond.

In his televised interview with RAI in April 2017 and described by the DAILY BEAST as presenting himself as ‘extremely cultured if not intellectual’ he:

“[Guede] maintained his innocence, pointed the finger at Seattle native Amanda Knox, and refused to name her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.”

This could be read as either he didn’t know or recognise Sollecito well enough to name him; or that as a captive prisoner he was afraid of retribution by Sollecito’s unsavory clan.

In his description of the ‘man in the doorway’ of Meredith’s room as of the time of his arrest he claims the hall light had been switched off and the intruder’s face was backlit (in other words in the dark), but that he had light brown hair, was shorter than him and spoke native fluent Italian.

In addition, he wore a Napapirri type jacket, a white beanie, with a red band, and held a stiletto blade in his left hand.

This would certainly count out an Albanian as suggested by Sollecito’s star witness Alessi whom nobody took seriously, anyway.

However, Knox does give Alessi great credence, at p 418, Waiting to be Heard speculating that she wondered who Guede’s friend was in Alessi’s version of events, which involved a graphic threesome.

In WTBH p 220 Knox claims when she saw Guede’s photo on tv for the first time after he was arrested she thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s him.’  She goes on to claim this was the guy she was referring to when she told police of a South African ’who played basketball with the guys downstairs’.

She claims she had only seen him one time after that, at Le Chic when she had ‘taken his drink order’.  She omits to mention joining him for a joint with the guys in the downstairs house.

Guede himself claims he referred to himself as South African when chatting to Meredith during the England vs South Africa rugby cup final.

So, how did Knox ‘know’ he was ‘South African’ if she had never spoken to him, bearing in mind South Africans in Europe aren’t generally assumed to be black?

Guede, in his Prison Diary, claimed there had been a spark between him and Knox when they were smoking a joint (there are solid witnesses to the fact this gathering did take place).

Given Knox’s multiple falsely claims in her book WTBH, which she would have had a chance to review and edit, that she only met Guede ‘vaguely’ twice and we know that to be factually untrue. We have to suspect that actually she did know him as an acquaintance at least.

With Sollecito and Knox both ganging up on Guede, not to mention the widespread PR naming him as the ‘local burglar’ who left his DNA ‘all over the murder scene’, we can expect Guede to be keen to set the story straight from his POV once he is released.

2. Police Forensic Scientists Knox PR Abused

They know objective scientific tests do not lie: they know what the luminol, shoeprints and DNA means.

According to Nick Richardson of the London Review Of Books (LROB) in an excellent review of WTBH which I shall quote a lot (there are also numerous posts on TJMK which correspond):

“The Esperti Ricerca Tracce – the state police’s crime scene investigation unit – found bloody shoe prints and a handprint on a pillow that had been placed under Kercher’s hips.

On the sheet on her bed they found the outline of a knife.

One of the ERT’s scientists, Patrizia Stefanoni, examined Kercher’s vagina and found a long blonde hair.

They swabbed the bathroom, sprayed the apartment with luminol, a chemical used to reveal traces of blood that has been wiped away, and found footprints the size of Knox’s and Sollecito’s feet in the corridor outside Kercher’s room.

Also a drop of blood in Romanelli’s room that was later shown, as was the blood on the tap, to contain both Knox’s and Kercher’s DNA.”

The invisible bloody footprint directly facing Meredith’s door has been identified by forensic experts as Sollecito’s.

Add to the mixes of Knox’s and Meredith’s blood and/or DNA in the bathroom sink, bidet, cotton bud box and light switch, it is hardly accurate to say ‘there is no sign of Knox (or Sollecito) at the crime scene’, especially if one considers that the footprint/shoeprint expert further positively identified a ladies size 37 trainer shoe print underneath the body.

There was also shards of glass trailed in from Filomena’s room, where there is no sign of Guede at all, bearing in mind he is supposed to be the burglar who entered that way.

A quote from LROB:

The investigators never believed that Guede was Kercher’s sole killer. The state autopsy results suggested that there had been more than one assailant.

She had dozens of cuts and bruises: finger bruises round her neck, a bruise on her chin and over her mouth, identical bruises on her inner elbows compatible with her being held back.

It would have been extremely difficult to pin her down and inflict so much damage without being wounded too, especially as Kercher practised karate – but Guede only had the cuts on his hand.

Plus there were the bloody footprints shown up by the luminol and the mixed-DNA bloodstains in Romanelli’s room and the bathroom.

At Guede’s trial Judge Micheli declared that he believed Guede had acted with Knox and Sollecito.

His confidence was shored up by two pieces of DNA evidence that the prosecution would rely on heavily in court.

In November 2007 investigators found a knife at Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and Kercher’s on the blade.’

3. Police Telecomms Experts The PR Abused

technical forensic experts: they know the truth about Sollecito’s claim he didn’t turn off his phone, he just didn’t have a signal.

Sollecito’s phone providers gave the forensic communications technicians clear evidence there had not been anything wrong with the phone signals hat night, nor were the walls ‘too thick’ and nor was Raff’s apartment in a blind area for signals.

Residents in the neighbouring apartments and buildings experienced no problems with their phone signals.

Yet Sollecito denies he switched off his phone just before 21:00.

So the communications guys know for definite Knox and Sollecito both switched off their phones within minutes of each other, between 20:45 and 21:00.

After 21:20 there is no further recorded electronic activity in the flat for the rest of the night.

4. Police Telecomms Experts The PR Abused (2)

They know the truth about the trashed laptops.

Sollecito and Knox’ lawyers claim his was fried by the police via the wrong current plugged in.

Notwithstanding power portals are designed to only allow fit of the right size cable, this argument doesn’t work because it was only the cottage laptops that ‘fried’, and not Patrick Lumumba’s, which was tested at the same time.

CDV: Are you aware of the possibility of an electric shock?

MG: We are aware of the possibility of an electric shock [power surge], I can not exclude it with certainty, but at the same time the fact that it has worked in other hard disks always with the same instrument, always in that same place connected to the same electric network, is however an indicator that it cannot be that in one moment it worked and in another, not.’

‘CDV: However, are you aware that there is a different voltage between a portable PC and a desktop?
MG: Yes.’

In other words, the laptops were fried before the police sequestered them.

Filomena Romanelli rescued her laptop at the scene.  When she attended the Questura the next day to hand it in, it would not start.

Sure proof together with the dead laptops of Knox, Kercher and Sollecito that it was not the police who ‘fried’ them.

Sollecito claims in Honor Bound that his laptop was damaged by the police pulling the socket out of the wall before logging out.

Non-IT folk might be dumb, but not so dumb to believe it is a coincidence that all four laptops were kaput, whereas Patrick’s was not, and which was never anywhere near IT-boffin Sollecito, and all tested by the police at the same time.

5. Investigators Can Prove Knox Was Not Abused

The police know the truth about Knox’ claims of having been unethically treated. Knox claims in WTBH according to the LROB:

“ They gave her a confession to sign.  It said that she’d met up with Lumumba after leaving Sollecito’s flat at 8.30 p.m. and that they’d gone to the villa together; that Patrick had had sex with Meredith; and that she remembered ‘confusedly’ – confusedly because she’d earlier smoked a joint with Sollecito – that he killed her.

Once she’d signed it, Knox says, the police officers ‘whooped and high-fived each other’.

The public prosecutor later bullied her into making a second ‘spontaneous declaration’ in which she added that she had been in the kitchen when the murder took place, and that ‘at one point I heard Meredith screaming and I was scared and covered my ears.’

A classic case of ‘shoot the messenger’. It was Mignini what done it, according to Knox (see Point 10 below) as he made her blurt this out by some kind of special psychic power.

We proved this was not so.

6. Prison Officers Abused By PR Know Prison Truths

They know the truth about Knox’ claims of being suicidal in prison: by all accounts she fit in well and was as happy as a lark, performing, writing stories and scripting videos.

In her application to the ECHR, Knox claims she was tricked into revealing her list of sexual partners, which she listed in her Prison Diary and which was then leaked to the press.

We proved this was not so. Also the ECHR recently did not find Knox had been mistreated by the prison doctors or staff, nor was she abused by the police as she claims.

Fact is, Knox won a prize for essay writing (about a man at a party who finds his half-naked girlfriend lying on the floor at a party with stab wounds [‘piercings’]) and scripting a video featuring a young girl strapped to a chair being tortured by three people including Knox as the star character and the three seen running down a stairwell fleeing.

The Knox character is pictured in prison writing at a table and in the next she is seen raving at a prison party waving her arms in the air.

The message does not escape anybody. There are photos of her just like that.

7. What The Judges The PR Abused Saw

Some thirty-five to forty judges - both presiding or as in a jurors’ panel - all could not help but conclude the pair were guilty as charged (Marasca-Bruno never had the pair before them)

Whilst the criminal courts were dealing in criminal law:

“Meanwhile, Knox’s mother was appearing regularly on American TV shows, proclaiming her daughter’s innocence over home video footage of Knox as a child.

A Seattle-based group called Friends of Amanda was formed by Anne Bremner, a criminal lawyer who set herself up as a spokesperson for the Knox family.

The Knoxes also hired a PR guru called David Marriott to prepare press releases for the American media.

An American author called Douglas Preston, who had written a book about the serial killer known as the Monster of Florence – a case that had also been investigated by Justice Mignini, the chief prosecutor in Knox and Sollecito’s trial – discovered that Mignini had once wire-tapped a journalist.

This served to back up the Knox camp’s claim that improper interrogation techniques had been used (even though Mignini had hardly been present at the interrogation).

It also came out that when Mignini was investigating the Monster of Florence case he had called in a ‘witch’ to advise him on satanism.”

LROB

In other words, there was a concerted US campaign to outwit the courts, battling a ‘persuasion techniques’ advertising campaign, their motto being,  ‘attack is the best form of defence’, trying to dig up the dirt on the Italian Roman Catholic prosecutor with his ‘medieval religious beliefs’ whilst exaggerating Knox as Miss American Pie.

On their side was journalist and failing crime novelist Douglas Preston, with a score to settle against Italy and Mignini, having been forced to get out of the country or face prosecution for trying to pervert the course of justice in the MOF case.

‘The American novelist Nathaniel Rich wrote a long piece for Rolling Stone in June 2011 entitled: ‘The Never-Ending Nightmare of Amanda Knox’. [See our post here.]

It opened with a gory re-enactment of Kercher’s murder: ‘On the third try, the killer found a soft spot …’ The killer; one killer.’

LROB

We know that Nathaniel Rich was fed this story by Knox’s best friend of the time, Madison Paxton, on whom he had a crush.

Paxton was busy sending out PR and writing her own copy starting off the popular story ‘Knox was railroaded by the police’.

It was Nina Burleigh who started the ‘Guede was a drifter’ meme.

Whilst the PR has been very successful in the USA, the UK and Italian press focused more on the facts of the trial, with libel laws being much stricter and reporting standards high, although they nearly all describe Guede as the ‘drifter’

‘Rich followed his piece with a review of Waiting to Be Heard in the New York Review in which not only are the Italian police bungling idiots, the Italian journalists immoral dogs, the Italian legal professionals superstitious fools, but Perugia itself is portrayed as a vortex of evil and chicanery’

LROB

‘The managers of Knox’s downfall came in for savage caricature, though they were respected professionals with long careers behind them: Mignini was a senile fuddy-duddy, Napoleoni a vindictive bully; Stefanoni incompetent, though she was an internationally reputed forensics expert who had been entrusted with the identification of bodies after the 2004 tsunami.

[Senator] Cantwell stated that she had ‘serious questions about the Italian justice system’; the state for which she is senator, Washington, currently has eight people on death row.

In The Fatal Gift of Beauty, Burleigh, one of the most vocal Italy-haters, wrote that at the trial Knox’s family radiated ‘that quality that so differentiates the American from the European – enthusiasm’. ‘

LROB

The PR which Knox touts to this day makes out Knox to be the victim of a sexist salacious press determined to paint her as the drug-taking ‘slut’ and this is the story-telling Knox took to Modena.

No questions are allowed of her ever about the evidence at the trial itself.

8.  What DNA Expert Dr Francesco Vinci Saw In The DNA

Dr Vinci saw data that made him back off the case. Vinci was one of the defence forensic DNA experts.

He discovered DNA fragments of both Knox and Guede on Meredith’s bra fabric. These, however, were below the legal standard of needing at least ten alleles.

He walked off the case or was pushed, nonetheless.

What does Vinci know that made him no longer able to continue defending the pair on the DNA?

9. What Goods Sollecito Has On Knox (A Lot)

‘A short story by Knox surfaced, in which one of the male characters tells his friend: ‘A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don’t know what they want … You have to show it to them.’ This was taken by the colpevolisti as evidence that she had fantasised about rape.

In another story fragment that Knox posted on her Myspace page a couple of weeks before the murder the narrator has an obsessive crush on her female housemate.

Sollecito, the son of a wealthy Pugliese doctor, also had his character picked over.

He’d been into drugs when he was younger, and still smoked copious amounts of hash: in one post on a social networking site he bragged about spending ‘80 per cent of my waking hours high’.

He was a porn addict, and owned a collection of swords and knives. He liked vampire comics. He had written on his blog that he craved ‘new sensations’.

Perhaps the most damaging thing to turn up was a picture he once posted of himself wearing surgical bandages and posing with a meat cleaver and a jug of cleaning fluid.’

LROB

So, the American PR campaign that ensured Guede was constantly referred to as a ‘drifter’, ‘petty thief’, burglar’ and ‘drug dealer’ didn’t translate into Knox or Sollecito being similarly branded.

This was despite Knox getting a police caution and fine for riotous behavior at a party and Sollecito likewise in possession of drugs, both before the Kercher murder.

Guede was just as middle-class as either of them and had no police record at all.

The PR relies on racist stereotyping based on the US version of the ‘poor unemployable Black on welfare and in and out of prison’.

‘Sollecito told the police that she had left him in town, saying she was going to meet friends at Le Chic at 9 p.m., and he had gone home alone and surfed the internet until she came back at one.

(In Honour Bound, Sollecito’s new book, he says he was so stoned that he can’t be sure Knox didn’t leave him alone for some time that night.1) Computer experts who testified at the trial said that Sollecito’s laptop had not been used between 9.30 p.m. and 5.30 a.m. on the morning after the murder.

Knox and Sollecito said that they had slept in on the morning of 2 November, but phone records showed that they had both switched their mobiles on at six, having turned them off for the night.’

LROB

Forensic IT experts very clearly testified that there had been no computer activity on Sollecito’s laptop after 21:20, when the film Amelie finished until next day.

This was backed up by unequivocal data from Raff’s IT provider.

Sollecito in effect like Baby Jane knows ‘secrets about you’.

10. What Mignini knows but hasn’t revealed.

Dr Mignini has an enormous choice of means to clear his name and punish Knox and the mafia poodles when he takes retirement early next year.

He will really be liberated then and he does excellent speeches and TV. He will be in enormous demand for sure. He will come to the United States.

Our Italian lawyers tell us this malicious invention below in Knox’s 2013 book WTBH is diffamazione (criminal slander) for sure.

Knox was clearly trying to end Dr Mignini’s career, and see him sent to prison as well. The statute of limitations on this has years to go before it tuns out.

In other words he CAN sue in Italy and the UK and maybe even the US.

Amazingly, it is very much along the lines of the calunnia against Patrick Lumumba for which Knox served three years and it was without any provocation or pressure at all, as she was sitting in Seattle when she wrote her book.

The big problem for Knox? When this lurid claim of an illegal interrogation took place Dr Mignini was not even there.

He was asleep in bed.

[From pages 90-92 of the weirdly titled “Waiting To Be Heard”. The date is 7 November 2007. This is the 1.45 am session with Rita Ficarra which in fact was devoted merely to building a list of visitors to the house.]

Eventually they told me the pubblico ministero [prosecutor] would be coming in.

I didn’t know this translated as prosecutor, or that this was the magistrate that Rita Ficarra had been referring to a few days earlier when she said they’d have to wait to see what he said, to see if I could go to Germany.

I thought the “public minister” was the mayor or someone in a similarly high “public” position in the town and that somehow he would help me.

[One of numerous lies in the book. Knox had been with Dr Mignini three times already: on the morning after Meredith was killed and when he twice took her back to her house.]

They said, “You need to talk to the pubblico ministero about what you remember.”

I told them, “I don’t feel like this is remembering. I’m really confused right now.” I even told them, “I don’t remember this. I can imagine this happening, and I’m not sure if it’s a memory or if I’m making this up, but this is what’s coming to mind and I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

They said, “Your memories will come back. It’s the truth. Just wait and your memories will come back.”

The pubblico ministero [Dr Mignini] came in.

Before he started questioning me, I said, “Look, I’m really confused, and I don’t know what I’m remembering, and it doesn’t seem right.”

One of the other police officers said, “We’ll work through it.”

Despite the emotional sieve I’d just been squeezed through, it occurred to me that I was a witness and this was official testimony, that maybe I should have a lawyer. “Do I need a lawyer?” I asked.

He said, “No, no, that will only make it worse. It will make it seem like you don’t want to help us.”

It was a much more solemn, official affair than my earlier questioning had been, though the pubblico ministero was asking me the same questions as before: “What happened? What did you see?”

I said, “I didn’t see anything.”

“What do you mean you didn’t see anything? When did you meet him?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Where did you meet him?”

“I think by the basketball court.” I had imagined the basketball court in Piazza Grimana, just across the street from the University for Foreigners.

“I have an image of the basketball court in Piazza Grimana near my house.”

“What was he wearing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was he wearing a jacket?”

“I think so.”

“What color was it?”

“I think it was brown.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I’m confused!”

“Are you scared of him?”

“I guess.”

I felt as if I were almost in a trance. The pubblico ministero led me through the scenario, and I meekly agreed to his suggestions.

“This is what happened, right? You met him?”

“I guess so.”

“Where did you meet?”

“I don’t know. I guess at the basketball court.”

“You went to the house?”

“I guess so.”

“Was Meredith in the house?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did Patrick go in there?”

“I don’t know, I guess so.”

“Where were you?”

“I don’t know. I guess in the kitchen.”

“Did you hear Meredith screaming?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could you not hear Meredith screaming?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I covered my ears. I don’t know, I don’t know if I’m just imagining this. I’m trying to remember, and you’re telling me I need to remember, but I don’t know. This doesn’t feel right.”

He said, “No, remember. Remember what happened.”

“I don’t know.”

At that moment, with the pubblico ministero raining questions down on me, I covered my ears so I could drown him out.

He said, “Did you hear her scream?”

I said, “I think so.”

My account was written up in Italian and he said, “This is what we wrote down. Sign it.”

Saturday, June 15, 2019

The World Isnt Short Of Suckers - Lupária, Sola & Cagossi Present “The Traveling Innocence Gang Show”

Posted by KrissyG

“Pssst! Turn it all on, we are being paid to put on a good show”

1. The Moneygrubbing Gang Arrives

See that headline above? The Modena Organizers were so short of imprisoned Italian innocents, they had to import a few

They all make big bucks out of this kind of event, each misconstruing their case. Read here how the moneygrubbing works, and how many get to gain.

At the Milan airport Thursday, press photos revealed Knox making a great show of bowing her head and looking fragile. “I feel frayed” she wrote, on social media, with boyfriend Christopher Robinson looking on from behind. Mom Edda was also there but wasnt featured in news reports.

Once again, the world got a glimpse of Amanda Knox the consummate actress who can never resist hamming it up, a manipulator of gestures and body language to convey drama.

Remember her clutching her chest, cross-armed, in a gesture of faux gratitude when news came her conviction had been annulled, for the benefit of the photographers on her doorstep? 

Or the time she pressed her hands together in front of her as a gesture of humble thanks at the conference in Seattle when she was released in 2011 by Judge Hellman (an appeal verdict which was shortly to be overturned)? 

Was there really anything humble about it, when just hours earlier as she changed at Heathrow, she was seen laughing happily and defiantly? 

Or the most famous occasion of all, when she gesticulated wildly and dramatically from the dock, as she made her final submissions to the court after her 2009 trial enunciating each word in Italian?  She was convicted, anyway.

Even earlier than that she was pictured outside the cottage on the day after the murder waving her hands about as a gaggle of reporters eagerly leant forward to discover what had happened.  She wore a pristine white skirt.

So we get it, image is all to Amanda Knox and this visit to Modena is no exception.

Newspapers reports Friday said she appeared to be visibly emotional, wiping away a tear, as old friend Peter Pringle gave his “testimony” of his time on “Death Row for 14 years” and an Italian innocence claimer.

Also Angelo Massaro, little known in the English-speaking world, described by the Italian news agency ANSA as “a Tarantino acquitted - and released from prison - after a conviction for murder”. So presumably he is not “exonerated”, either? Just released. 

(ANSA has to be restrained how it chooses its words in its home country, as a reputable good quality news agency on a par with Reuters or AP.)

So, once again, attention was on Knox, who knows how to play the press.  Good show by Amanda wiping away a dry tear.

2. The Pringle Connection Explained

As part of her “Innocence” campaign, you may recall Knox travelled early last year, February 2018, to the Republic of Ireland to appear in the Raymond D’Arcy Show.

Her connection to Ireland stemmed from her earlier connection to “innocence” campaigners Peter Pringle and Sunny Jacobs.

Surprise, surprise, the link continues now.

Peter Pringle pops up in Modena for the very same “Justice Festival”.  (Festival?  What IS it they are celebrating exactly?)

A brief history of their past:
 
(1) Knox appeared on US TV with Irish ex-murder defendant and ex-death row wife

Knox appeared on US TV with controversial ex-death row defendants, Peter Pringle, who was once jailed in Ireland for the alleged murder of two Irish police officers, after a bungled robbery by a political gang, and Sunny Jacobs, once on death row in the USA for supplying a gun to a man who then shot dead a two young policemen.

Pringle is Dublin born and spent 17 years in prison, the death penalty having been stayed by an Act of Irish parliament since 1954, for the murder of two young policemen after a botched robbery in Roscommon. He has always claimed innocence of the crime.

They were both acquitted - in Sunny’s case, without any certificate of exoneration - and now, like Knox tour the country and fundraise for “Innocence Projects” claiming ‘wrongful conviction’.

(2) Amanda Knox appeared with Sunny Jacobs and William Pringle on K5News channel in May 2017.

Knox shared a sofa with the pair expressing solidarity.  Knox said that she and Sunny were “women together” fighting injustice.

However, there is still much controversy in the Irish Republic as to Pringle’s innocence and emotions run high, as five young children lost their fathers in the murder of the police officers in 1980.

In addition, some say Jacobs was freed from death row for compassionate reasons, not because she was innocent, as she now claims.

(3) Knox’s appearance on Irish TV was controversial

William Pringle lived in the USA for many years after his release, and has in 2016 settled in Connemara in Ireland,

Because of Knox’s connection, the interview was bound to cause a lot of media interest, as it did when she sang a round of an IRA rebel song to a stunned D’Arcy, who was not impressed.

Many in the UK and the mainland of Ireland are not convinced by Knox’s claim to have been “exonerated”.

It could well be that Knox was invited to Ireland via contacts William Pringle and Sunny Jacobs.

Sunny Jacobs is now 70. Her husband, Jesse Tafero was executed at age 43. Sunny Jacobs is alleged to have supplied the gun by which he shot dead two police officers from their car, in Florida.

Both were condemned to the electric chair.

The robbery for which Pringle was jailed, which led to the killing of the police officers in Roscommon, was allegedly connected to the INLA, an Irish “liberation” terrorist group of the day.

So there has been hostility towards Pringle resettling in Ireland.

Pringle made a new bid for compensation from Ireland in January 2018.  The judge “reserved” the judgment and we have heard nothing more since. So presumably his application has failed.

Peter, Sunny and Amanda certainly seem to have the “Innocence Gang Tour” sewn up, as they make their way from country after country.  Dabbing an eye and giving their moving “testimonies” and moneygrubbing away.

Thursday, June 06, 2019

Un preavviso per i partecipanti al progetto di Innocenza Italia

Posted by Our Main Posters

Siate consapevoli che la Knox

(1) fa danni immensi infiammando il bigottismo contro l’Italia,

(2) è condannata per reato di calunnia criminale, giustamente incarcerato 3 anni,

(3) non è stata esonerata dalla Cassazione per omicidio,

(4) ha mentita su larga scala ai media , che si è rigirata per lei,

(5) può essere arrestata per oltraggio alla Cassazione poiché non sono ancora stati pagati 10000 danni a Lumumba.

Tuesday, June 04, 2019

The Italian Venue (Really) Where Knox Will Feature On A Media Panel Next Week

Posted by Peter Quennell

Really? Here? Behind those garbage skips?!

We had to laugh. This really is the main entrance to the Open Laboratory space in Modena which that northern city now makes available for happening events.

The image below shows the main interior. It looks rather prison-like, to us appropriately so.

Here is the program in Italian for the first-ever conference of the Innocence Project’s Italian arm.

Knox’s media panel is shown as being next saturday there. 

As there are no known innocents in Italian prisons, given how careful the justice process is, importing Knox was apparently the best they could do to get anyone to come.

We’ve held back posting on this up to now, as we really do want to see how Knox is received there.

But expect some posts intended to open Italian eyes to Knox in the next several days.

No word yet on whether Sollecito will be there.

Friday, May 10, 2019

Pyrrhic Victory For Knox #3: Italy Now Challenges Knox’s “No Lawyer” ECHR Award (Continued)

Posted by KrissyG

Linos-Alexandre Sicilianos, from 1 April the ECHR’s chief judge

Added June 2019: Another panel of ECHR judges has just reviewed Italy’s appeal but balked at send the minor matter to the Grande Council of all ECHR judges (which is actually reserved for cases with greater import: less than 10% of requests make it up there). So Italy gave in amicably. The Ministry’s lawyers could see how confused and misinformed the judges had become, still thinking Knox had incriminated herself and not Patrick. In sharp contrast, Dalla Vedova was a sore winner. He showed anger in front of the press having lost face in being denied the now-public E2.5 million demand. He again claimed Knox was interrogated for 54 hours, with no interpreter, blah blah. Ghirga, a real criminal lawyer, must be laughing.

Legal Context Of Italy’s Appeal

This report picks up where yesterday’s analysis concluded.

The Italian government has lodged an appeal against the ECHR ruling in January 2019 upholding that Amanda Knox’ right to a fair trial (Article 6 of the Human Rights Convention) had been breached, in that the translator had not been impartial, and that as a suspect (was she?) Knox should have been given a lawyer earlier than she had.

This update is translated from the Perugia newspaper UMBRIA 24

The ruling by which the European Court of Human Rights has argued that Italy has violated Amanda Knox’s right of defense during the investigation of the murder of Meredith Kercher is being contested before the Grande Chambre in Strasbourg.

The decision by which last January Italy had been advised to pay 10,400 euros for moral damages to the American student, definitively acquitted by the accusation of murdering her English roommate on November 1, 2017 in Via della Pergola in Perugia, is was challenged by the Italian government.

La Grande Chambre, which represents a sort of Cassation of the European Court, is composed of 17 judges. In the recent past, Silvio Berlusconi has also passed through the Grande Chambre, bringing to the judges’ attention a question concerning its reliability.

Last January, the Court recognized Italy’s violation of Knox’s right to defense during the November 6, 2007 interrogation, and also evidence confirming complaints about police during the same interrogation . Amanda had asked for two and a half million euros.

In yesterday’s post I summarized from my point of view the findings of the ECHR in the original deliberations and how they may be challenged.

Summary:  The main issues revolve around the question of admissibility.  I have identified two or three possible grounds of appeal on points of law.  They are:

• Italy submitted that date-wise, the application by Knox had been submitted too early as the hearings had not yet been finalized.  ECHR rejects this saying that the hearings finalized very shortly after.  As far as I can see, this is not so.

• The ECHR relies on comments by Hellmann Appeal Court, which was largely superseded and outranked by Chieffi Supreme Court, to argue factors of free will.

• The ECHR relies heavily on police minutes and the fact interpreter Donnino and a police office, RI, fail to record details of their expressions of familiarity with Knox, or make a note that (i) Knox was asked if she wanted a lawyer and declined, (ii) that start and end times are not recorded, and that (iii) hours are condensed into minutes. Is it an error of law to assume these police minutes represented a failure of procedure?

That’s not to say that these are the grounds Italy have set out. We don’t know those yet.

The rules for such an appeal are set out under Article 43 which states the following:

ARTICLE 43

Referral to the Grand Chamber

1. Within a period of three months from the date of the judgment of the Chamber, any party to the case may, in exceptional cases, request that the case be referred to the Grand Chamber.

2. A panel of five judges of the Grand Chamber shall accept the request if the case raises a serious question affecting the interpretation or application of the Convention or the Protocols thereto, or a serious issue of general importance.

3. If the panel accepts the request, the Grand Chamber shall decide the case by means of a judgment.

From another newspaper citing the ECHR in Strasburg:

STRASBOURG (France) - The Government has challenged in front of the Grand Chamber the decision with which the European Court in Strasbourg claimed that Italy violated Amanda Knox’s right to defense in the investigation into the murder of Meredith Kercher, carried out at Perugia the evening of 1 November 2007, for which she has already been definitively acquitted by the Italian justice. The action - as learned by ANSA - was notified to the American’s lawyers, Carlo Dalla Vedova and Luciano Ghirga.

The Grand Chamber is a sort of Cassation of the European Court. “This - the lawyer Dalla Vedova explained - is a judge only of legitimacy. The Grand Chamber {Panel} will now have to rule on the admissibility of the Government’s request to transmit the case to be decided {by the Grand Chamber} of the European Court. Decision on the request has reserved. The request will move to discussion {by the Grand Chamber Panel}.”

It has to said that it is relatively rare for a case to be referred back to the Grand Chamber after the appeal is assessed for permissibility.  ECHR is predicated on case law, so I would expect Italy will be demonstrating an error of interpretation based on a previous case or cases. 

Case law generally refers to cases that have set a legal precedence.  For example, Salduz, which was to do with the rights of a person suspected of terrorist acts.

Yesterday I argued (1) that the original ECHR claim by Knox was ‘out of time’ – in this case presented too early - as internal procedure had not been exhausted - and (2) there was a too-heavy reliance on Hellmann (First Appeal Court) and Boninsegna (Knox’s second calunnia case) instead of the First Chambers of the Supreme Court (Chieffi) which overrode the Hellmann appeal.

In Judge Chieffi’s rationale Hellmann’s reasoning was largely struck down, and came in for stern criticism by Chieffi.

In effect, Dalla Vedova for his client, Knox, had resuscitated the appeal lodged with Hellmann although Judge Chieffi’s was the Res Judicata verdict. 

A principle in law is that you cannot have your case heard twice unless a higher court directs it back to the lower court.

It should be kept in mind that a referral to the ECHR Grand Chamber is statistically remote as the issue of admissibility has to be surmounted first.

Thursday, May 09, 2019

Pyrrhic Victory For Knox #2: Italy Challenges Knox’s “No Lawyer” ECHR Award

Posted by Peter Quennell

Dr Alfonso Bonafede the Italian Minister of Justice

The Breaking News

There should be more to come. This is what we know so far. Knox’s suggested award last February was simply for questions having been asked of Knox when her lawyer was not there.

But the ECHR was in fact parroting two corrupted courts (Hellman and Boninsegna) and so very clearly did not understand what other courts including the Supreme Court had already definitively found: (1) Knox specifically refused a lawyer several times; and (2) Once Knox falsely fingered Patrick no questions were asked.

The Italian Justice Ministry has just announced it is refusing for now to make the ECHR’s suggested award, and will soon be making (1) and (2) clear to the Strasbourg Court.

ECHR Strasbourg had already handed Knox numerous setbacks, in not accepting various grounds of her “appeal” although her team tried to paint the tiny suggested lawyer-related award as a win.

Knox’s biggest setback was that ECHR went along, not with her, but with the Supreme Court in refusing to find that Knox had been tortured and abused. That forever-repeated and defamatory false claim is STILL at the very heart of Knox’s book, paid presentations, and TV appearances and magazine interviews. Knox is again threatening to return to Italy to yet again repeat her defamatory claims. She might find some legal action awaiting her.

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

If You Are Going To Offshore A Fraud, Maybe It’d Be Smart To Not Pick Italy

Posted by Peter Quennell

Scarlet curve BT stock, purple curve Dow stockmarket index

When BREXIT Arrives…

The UK is going to need a few world-beating companies. Relentless prods by Italy suggest British Telecom is not one of them.

Back in the day, BT was perhaps the world’s most revered national telephone provider. It fielded teams to numerous developing countries to help with the planning and training needed to develop their national infrastructures.

BT was privatized by the British government in the mid 1980s, and if you had sold its stock around 2000 you would have done very nicely.

But since then BT has steadily headed down the tubes, and its stock now is actually worth less than on its very first day on the market.

Giving BT a hard time for several years have been the formidable fraud investigators of the Italian police.

Now a damning report has been issued by them.

Prosecutors in Milan allege that three former senior BT executives, Luis Alvarez, Richard Cameron and Corrado Sciolla, set unrealistically high business targets and were complicit in false accounting at BT Italy.

Alvarez and Cameron were respectively the former chief executive and former chief financial officer of BT Global Services, and Sciolla was the former head of continental Europe for BT. The three men, two of whom were based in London, left the company in 2017.

Allegations of fraudulent bookkeeping are part of a range of suspected wrongdoing at BT Italy. Italian prosecutors allege that a network of people at the unit exaggerated revenues, faked contract renewals and invoices and invented bogus supplier transactions to meet bonus targets and disguise the unit’s true financial performance.

The company has publicly disclosed that it uncovered a complex set of improper sales, leasing transactions and factoring at the division. Factoring is a way in which firms sell future income to financiers for cash…

Italy’s financial police found an email dated 5 August 2016, from O’Ferrall in which he says that Cameron wanted operating profit to increase by 700,000 euros and suggests to Luca Sebastiani, then CFO at BT Italy, along with other colleagues across Europe, that they capitalise labour costs as a solution.

“All, I have an urgent request from Richard to find another €700K,” O’Ferrall wrote to Sebastiani and his counterparts in Germany, Benelux, France, Spain, Hungary as well as Simon Whittle, then finance manager, reporting and consolidation, at Global Services Europe.

“Please, can you look at all opportunities and come back to Simon and me asap. Labour capitalization? Regards Brian,” says the email, whose subject line reads “Another €700K EBITDA needed in [July].”

Sad business. Italy and the UK have been special friends.

Friday, April 12, 2019

The Numerous Little Italys Throughout North America - Check These Out

Posted by Peter Quennell

Monday, April 01, 2019

Former (And Future?) Very Fine City Seattle: Good Luck In Reversing This Tough Trend

Posted by Our Main Posters

This great old-style reporting was uploaded by Seattle’s KOMO News two weeks ago.

It was mentioned to us by a loyal reader there who wants to see addressed less Knox and more this.

This video is already nearing two million views. It is one hour long.

Best of luck, all.