Amanda Knox

[LadyBeagleEyes]

Her appeal is being heard at the moment, and there is a good chance she'll be freed.
So who did kill Meredith?
If she and her ex boyfriend are deemed innocent, I hope the Italian police will continue to look into the case and get some justice for her.
I don't understand why they say the DNA is flawed, or have Knox's parents just managed to hire some very smart lawyers?
It's such a sad case.

fastweb, but as there is no record of the interrogation how can we know how it all went down? I am quite good in French, but under a stressful situation I wouldn't know in a conversation what was hypothetical and what was real. It's like I watch films with dd in French, then later watch a DVD in English and realise there is a whole other (slightly smutty) subtext thing going on - like Tangled, Shrek, the Smurfs etc. After 5 years my french is good enough to understand the words, but I still miss the subtlety of langiage.

Exactly - nobody knows what they mean. It suits them for it to be like that.

Apparently she can speak fluent Italian now, thanks to spending five years at the 'Residential Language School'. May she use it well tomorrow.

porto,
"italian male honour"- a little bit of sterotypical racism and sexism there do you not think? Claiming that a whole criminal case is based on protecting italian male honour is a conspiracy theory too far. Especially as the main witness to be ripped apart by the defense is female, one of the prosecutors is female and most of the lay judges are female, so i do not think you can say the only reason that a woman was convicted is because she is a victim of sexism. Or if they give a guilty verdict tomorrow will you claim these are just little women doing what they are told by men.
Oh by the way why is it that you think your profile of Meredith's killer is better than the Italian judges profile. And why do you think profiling is relevant seeing as it is rarely used in court cases, is not a particulary respected field and is more common in fiction than reality.
And Knox claims this is what happened when she was questioned.

abend,
Computer records show that their film finished at nine. After this their 'phones were turned off, and there was no computer activity until the morning.

Ah, so they must have switched their phones off (as you do) and gone round to Meredith's (as you do) and slit her throat then.

Of course. Now it makes sense.

abend,
It makes more sense than your nasty little theory that only Guede could have done it because he is from the ivory coast and everyone knows, acording to you, that is a breeding ground for murderers.

What do you mean fastweb? Do you think that it didnt happen at all, or that they asked her to imagine and she told them what happened or that they asked her what happened and she thought she was being asked to imagine?

Having been shouted at by irate policemen when still in my early aquisition phase (please don't ask, and please don't tell my son) I can't see them attempting a hypothetical when the girl would have struggled (with the vocab load alone) of earlier questions to the frustration of all involved.

Either it was asked in English, or she heard something else entirely, and made a mammoth leap. (god only knows what)

Or it wasn't asked at all, and she did not hear that question but retropsectively she wanted something to cover her back from having fingered PL. (and no, I am not saying that makes her a murderer)(would her a bit of a fibber and perhaps a damn sight sympathtic to the public though)

Best guess, one of those three possibilities above

No, it is because I see the whole scenario as described by the prosecution as ridicilous. It is more likely that AK/RS were at home, completely stoned and that the crime was carried out by RG alone as the evidence dictates. I am still waiting for some one to give me the evidence that they were there, and they did it.

I am back! woopeee

The police suggested PL's name to Amanda, she didn't just throw it in there.

Amanda consistantly told the same story - that she had been at RS's flat. However the police told her that RS had implicated her in the murder.

The confession was written out by the police, not by AK.

he court actually said the interrogation of AK was not admissible in the trial, that the interrogation was illegal as she had no lawyer.

That female lead investigator wasn't a real woman. She was in drag.

The lead prosecutor Mignini was jailed for 16 months for misconduct on another case. Interestingly, he also accused Knox of being in a Satanic sect, and did the exact same thing in the 'Monsters of Florence' case that he was suspended from after the misconduct. It was also Mignini that spent 53 hours questioning a 20 year old girl who had only been learning Italian for 2 months. Without a lawyer present.

The anti-police blog Perugia Shock was closed down earlier this year. When Knox's parents complained about her treatment in prison, a week later their daughter was given the guilty verdict.

I can't believe anyone thinks this woman can go to jail for 30 years under these circumstances.

They had tried to fit up Knox's boss, Lumumba, who ran the coffee shop - that's what Knox's confession was about. Then when they found they couldn't do that and Guede was caught, they knew they were in deep sh*t. This was a man who had spent years failing to prosecute the likely 'Monster of Florence'.

I feel that male Italian honour is playing a HUGE part in all this - as opposed to justice.

For a start male Italian honor is tied to family (and football team). Not duty, and certainly not the defence of the nation's image abroad.

Secondly

The court system as it is today was set up after WW II to protect the nation from Mussolini's kangeroo courts ever happening again.

A dodgy verdict (and it does have to be publically justified, in writing) has no chance of slipping under the radar of the supreme court in a case as high profile as this. There would be an immediate response from the supreme court and the verdict over ruled.

Because protecting the carefully constructed checks and balances that favour the odds of the defendant in the face of a potential malevolant and powerful political hand behind a puppet prosecution, is a far greater priority than the "bumbling wops" sub text of much of the international media.

Simply put, the italian judicery are far more worried about a future Mr B trying to morph into another Mr M, than they are about the Today show host's opinion of them.

With good reason.

So I really wouldn't worry too much about a "vendetta" or "waggle my willy" guilty verdict as payback, the supreme court would be all over it like a rash and heads would roll.

It's not like the verdict is going to be created and delivered by a group exclusively picked from a public

a) who don't have any practice at appreciating that media reports and the actual evidence in court are often quite distinct from each other, and only one of the two has any place in court when coming to conclusions.

b) have a long, niosey history of being a tad nationlistic and are smarting so badly at the way their nation has been painted abroad that they'll make a vindictive verdict based on that, rather than evidence and points of law.

cos

a) It is almost impossible for the lay judges to over rule BOTH the actual judges in the jury, given that they absolutly require the actual judges to complete the paperwork that supports their verdict and the judges in the jury can't write motivations that chose to ignore the law or the evidence presented. (please see Mussolini's kangeroo courts to understand why the system is so)

b) A constant domestic lament is the wholly disinterested attitude Italians have towards any form of national pride. "Viva Italia" is exclusively reserved for cheering on the national footie team.

There isn't going to be an accepted verdict that hurls the Italian constitution under a bus.

To misquote L'Oreal

"Cos you aren't worth it"

Ok: Time of death:

The phone activity at 10 sounds like someone attempting to turn the phone off. The activity also connects to a tower other than one of the two it connected to earlier in the day when Meredith was known to be in the flat suggesting that the phone had left the flat.

The stomach contents would have completely emptied by 11 at the latest - this would be an outside time and emptying hadn't even started. Go and look at all the forensic testimonials again. Common sense and any research you can find tells us that an 11.30 time of death would have been virtually impossible.

Meredith was up until 5 that morning and had classes at 10 the next day. She had just borrowed a book and was a big reader. She had borrowed amanda's lamp so she could read in bed. I reckon she would have been in bed by 9.30 if she hadn't been murdered by guede.

Nobody has a couple of slices of pizza at 6pm and still has the whole lot churning in their stomach five and a half hours later. Ten pm would be unlikely, 11.30 impossible and the broken down car was outside the darkened cottage from 10.30 to 11.15.

That is why the prosecution report is so odd. All the evidence collected is like neon arrows pointing to rg and then the summation is a complete work of fiction ignoring it all.

Have just read that gastroparesis is diagnosed if 10% of food is still in the stomach 4 hours after eating. Even if you account for witness unreliability and Meredith ate as late as 7 she would have an extreme form of this illness if she died at 11.30.

digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/gastroparesis/

There is live coverage on the BBC website this morning.

Nobody has a couple of slices of pizza at 6pm and still has the whole lot churning in their stomach five and a half hours later. Ten pm would be unlikely, 11.30 impossible and the broken down car was outside the darkened cottage from 10.30 to 11.15.

The use of stomach contents for assessing time of death in persons deceased.

--

Time since death can be approximated by the state of digestion of the stomach contents. It normally takes at least a couple of hours for food to pass from the stomach to the small intestine; a meal still largely in the stomach implies death shortly after eating, while an empty or nearly-empty stomach suggests a longer time period between eating and death (Batten, 1995). However, there are numerous mitigating factors to take into account: the extent to which the food had been chewed, the amount of fat and protein present, physical activity undertaken by the victim prior to death, mood of the victim, physiological variation from person to person. All these factors affect the rate at which food passes through the digestive tract. Pathologists are generally hesitant to base a precise time of death on the evidence of stomach contents alone.

myweb.dal.ca/jvandomm/forensicbotany/plantanatomy.html

Stomach Contents: Estimating the time of death by examining the stomach contents is not, because of the variability in the digestion process, regarded as a very reliable method for estimating the time of death.

www.relentlessdefense.com/forensics/autopsy/

The inspection of the contents of the stomach must be part of every postmortem examination because it may provide qualitative information concerning the nature of the last meal and the presence of abnormal constituents. Using it as a guide to the time of death, however, is theoretically unsound and presents many practical difficulties, although it may have limited applicability in some exceptional instances. Generally, using stomach contents as a guide to time of death involves an unacceptable degree of imprecision and is thus liable to mislead the investigator and the court.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/2929541/

There is considerable variation in the emptying of stomach. The stomach empties gradually which can be described in terms of half-life, e.g., during half to one hour, the stomach half-empties, and then in a similar period, half-empties itself again and again. The bulk of the meal leaves the stomach within tow hours after being eaten, a mediums-zed meal requires 3 to 4 hours and a heavy meal 4 to 6 hours. A head injury, physical or mental shock or stress, may completely inhibit the secretion of gastric juice' the motility of the stomach and the opening of the pylorus, and undigested food may be seen after more than 24 hours

forensicpathologyonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58:estimation-of-post-mortem-interval&catid=49:chapter2-cat&Itemid=75

The bulk of the meal leaves the stomach within tow hours after being eaten

forensicpathologyonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58:estimation-of-post-mortem-interval&catid=49:chapter2-cat&Itemid=75

I m taking that as a two. Nothing had left her stomach. The possible outside time of complete emptying is utterly irrelevant.

9pm is already an outside emptying time - 11.30 is ridiculous.

ys, if the trauma which killed her did inhibit the gastric juices it isn't really relevant if you think the time of death is 11pm or later. Infact, that theory would suggest a much earlier killing time, no?

The prosecution is in knots. They need the piazza tramp to put ak and rs outside of his apartment. But he gives them an alibi until 10pm. So they have to push the time of death beyond the car being fixed at 11.15. Which is outside the realms of documented science.

Actually, her friends said they ate at about eight, and she ate sometime after nine when she got home. It would be perfectly possible for some of the the food to be in her stomach at 10:30 -11:00 which is when the pathologist said she most likely died. And she had eaten after she got home at nine, and this had began to digest which means she was certainly alive after nine.

It seems the whole defense seems to be based on saying all evidence that does not exonerate AK and RS must have been gathered by incompetant or corrupt people - according to porto, people basing their judgements on "Italian male pride"! Now the pathologist is being told he is wrong, no doubt by people who know nothing about pathology or GI processes and had to google their information, this on top of people saying the original judge's conclusion that one person could not have physically carried out the attacker is irrelveant and incorrect because porto has carried out her own criminal profile of the killer (despite criminal profiling not being a very respected art, and is used in Europe mainly in fiction) which proves the italian judges were wrong. Oh and lets not forget aben, who says that of course Guede must have done it on his own as he is from the ivory coast and according to aben they breed murderers.

The same pathologist who gave the time of death, also said she had been sexually assaulted and not taken part consensually. Are we going to be saying he was incompetant here too, or as that does not effect AK and RS defense will people claim that his incompetance only occurs when his evidence does not exonerate AK and RS?

'Actually, her friends said they ate at about eight, and she ate sometime after nine when she got home. It would be perfectly possible for some of the the food to be in her stomach at 10:30 -11:00 which is when the pathologist said she most likely died. And she had eaten after she got home at nine, and this had began to digest which means she was certainly alive after nine.'

Where in the prosecution report does it say this?

redandgreen,
a lot of the food she had eaten was gone. The only things left were her pudding, and the food she ate after nine.

redandgreen
it says it in the translation of the original court report. there are links to it a couple of pages back.
As far as I am aware there was more than one autopsy (I think the defense requested one of their own too), and I do not think the time fo death was contested in court. Although I am not certain of that.