Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Is The “Mignini Has Framed Them” Meme Now Fading?
Posted by Peter Quennell
[click for larger image]
Looks to us like it might be a strong case.
Perhaps easy to challenge the bits and pieces of the evidence. Perhaps harder now to challenge the sum of the whole.
And if Rudy Guede mounts the stand to tell all (he is to be an early witness, and wants time off his 30 years) and if Rudy’s tale cannot be seriously shaken by the defenses ...
Well, as the lead judge observed, this trial might be over by summer.
In Italy, the notion that Prosecutor Mignini somehow invented or twisted the facts of the crime to frame two of the defendants never really seemed to catch fire.
The problems with this notion are that there were too many professionals involved, the case has had to pass through too many judicial hoops, and there now seems an awful lot of evidence needing serious addressing.
Maverick Rome-based Peter Popham of The Independent (new image above - he looks better!) has seemed to be the lone media holdout for the Mignini-invented-it point of view.
But even Mr Popham is now sounding as if he’s in the dispiriting early phases of a U-turn.
This is from a skeptical piece of his just recently posted:
... how did Mr Mignini discover these salacious details? Through confessions, witness accounts, tapped telephones? Was there a video camera or tape recorder running throughout? None of the above.
None of the three accused has dropped even a hint that they were involved in an orgy, no party trash was discovered, nobody was peeking through the windows. The account seems to have emerged fully formed from the prosecutor’s imagination.
But this is from a more jaded piece also just posted.
Where did they actually pass the night, and doing what? Why did they make a start on cleaning up the murder scene next morning, and why didn’t they call the police? Amanda Knox will have to do a lot more than smile if she wants to go home.
As we mentioned yesterday, Mr Popham’s first piece above was strongly challenged by a commenter - a lawyer in the UK, who actually knew Meredith in person.
Comment by Liam O’Huigin
Title: Peter Popham: Legal Genius
“Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are on trial because Meredith Kercher died horribly, and they gave conflicting accounts of what they were doing at the time and behaved suspiciously the next day.”
Yeah, right. And I suppose everything else the Independent has reported about the pair since November 2007 has come fully formed from the brains of its journalists without the benefit of corroboration from the pair.
Before we take up Mr Popham’s invitation to consider Knox and Sollecito to be whiter than the driven snow, let’s remember, inter alia, that Knox implicated a man who could prove that he was not at the crime scene at the relevant time, that they have given a number of inconsistent accounts of their own whereabouts and activities, that the pair have fallen out between themselves, and that DNA evidence was recovered strongly suggesting their presence. If a prosecutor failed to bring a case against them, people would rightly think that some sort of cover-up was in place.
If it was Mr Popham’s daughter who was the victim of this crime, I doubt he’d be writing about the case in such a lofty and detached tone. I happen to have known Meredith, and I also happen to be a lawyer. I would be outraged if the Italians had not taken matters this far in the light of what we have so far read about the case. And unless the defence manages to produce something very special during the course of the trial I know what verdict I expect to be brought in….
Mr Popham commits an interesting Freudian slip in this article, which shows where his sympathies lie. He talks of the “three” accused, by which I assume he is including Rudy Guede: the latter is no longer an accused, having been convicted of the murder and sentenced to thirty years.
He is therefore correctly described as a murderer, or a criminal or a convict. Why does Mr Popham find that hard to do?
None of Mr Popham’s commenters, in fact, are still buying the fading “invented and framed” line. And we would REALLY like to see more of Meredith’s friends now speaking up.
Write to us, or for us, if you want to win one for her.
Posted by Peter Quennell on 01/21/09 at 03:18 PM in Various hypotheses, The officially involved, The prosecutors, The defenses
Comments
I have never really understood why Mignini would go to the trouble to frame innocent people in a case where he already has one perpetrator for whom the case against is a slam-dunk. All of my sources close to the case tell me that Mignini has his faults, like everyone, but that his only concern is bringing whoever who murdered Meredith Kercher or took part in this brutal act to justice.
No connection has ever been established between the routine charges Mignini faces for the Monster of Florence case and this one either. In my opinion, if Doug Preston and Mario Spezi did not have a book to promote about the Monster of Florence case and about their run-in with Mignini, then the case against the prosecutor would never have been made.
When Doug Preston was interviewed about the Kercher case last February (on a PI reader blog), he pushed the now discredited theory of the lone wolf and offered qualified reviewers advance copies of his book at the end of the interview. I was not the only person who found this distasteful.
My sense of distaste turned to disgust when I discovered the other day that he actually talks about the Kercher case briefly in his Monster of Florence book.
Talk about killing two birds with one stone: Preston used the murder of Meredith Kercher to malign the prosecutor he loathes, and who he has said is preventing him from returning to Italy, and to promote his own work.
Posted by Skeptical Bystander on 01/22/09 at 10:50 PM | #
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