Amanda Knox

Amanda Knox's Appeal: A Case of Too Little DNA?
(Stephan Faris, Time.com, March 26, 2011)

The eight Italians who will decide the fate of Amanda Knox, the American college student who is appealing a 2009 conviction of the murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, won't officially consider a review of the DNA evidence for more than another month. But they're unlikely to have missed the news, leaked to an Italian news agency earlier this week, and picked up by newspapers and television, that the investigators had been unable to find enough genetic material on the knife that Knox and her Italian co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito are alleged to have used to stab Kercher in a sex game gone wrong. Nor are the judges and jurors likely to have missed the jousting by lawyers for and against the accused, as both sides rushed to explain what the insufficient DNA evidence might mean for the case.

"If it's true, it would be positive for the kids," says Luciano Ghirga, one of Knox's lawyers, who said he learned of the leak from news accounts. "Then you'd have to look at the analysis that was done during the first trial, which we've always sustained was not done properly." Kercher's bra clasp, another crucial piece of evidence, was also judged to be too rusty to be re-examined.

In the Italian justice system, it pays to play the press. Most trials are presided over by professional magistrates, but some — like Knox's — also include a panel of jurors known as "citizen judges." Unlike in the United States, where those deciding the case are carefully screened for bias and sequestered during the proceedings, Italian jurors are not only free to hold preconceived opinions, they're at liberty to follow the news of the trial as it unfolds, leaving them vulnerable to swings in popular sentiment. Leaks like the one that broke this week open the possibility that by the time the evidence is officially presented on May 21 the minds of the jurors will already have been made up. "This is a way to play with public opinion," says Francesco Maresca, a lawyer representing the murdered woman's family. "Obviously, somebody put it in circulation to cause confusion."

During the original trial, the DNA analysis was the most contested aspect of the case against Knox and her co-defendant, and much of her appeal was expected to turn on a re-examination of that same evidence. Lawyers for the defendants criticized the investigator for relying on too small of an amount of genetic material on the knife's handle, which linked Knox to the alleged murder weapon. The bra-clasp, they added, may have borne Sollecito's DNA, but it had been kicked around the apartment for weeks before being discovered by the police and was thus subject to contamination.

In an interview with TIME, Maresca stresses that the fact that the court-appointed independent analysts were unable to find large amounts of DNA did not mean the original investigation was flawed. "You may not be able to repeat the analysis," he says. "But this doesn't imply that it was carried out badly in the first place. These are two questions that are completely separate. This news doesn't change anything." He adds that his sources had told him that the little bit of DNA that researchers were able to glean had been found in the same location as in the original analysis. "This is a confirmation of what had been done before," he says.

For much the same reasons, Knox's lawyers have tried to contain the potential damage from a made-for television movie, which aired in the United States last month, in which Kercher's murder is re-enacted according to the verdict from the original trial. On Thursday, Knox, who is serving a 26-year sentence, appeared in court to ask that the judge ban the movie — entitled Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy — from distribution in Italy and on the Internet. "I am distressed by this invasion into my life and the way my life is being exploited," Knox, 23, told the judge, according to her lawyers. "We want to stop the movie from being diffused in Italy," says Ghirga. "There have been books published, the news talks about it constantly. But this movie spells out so many details."

On the matter of the movie, those backing the accused are in agreement with supporters of the victim's family, who have described the depiction of the murder as "horrific and distressing." Asked what he thought of the movie, Maresca, the Kercher family's lawyer answered: "It's obviously ill-timed and out of place when there's an appeals trial going on." But, given the importance of public opinion, does it help the case against Knox? "Sure," says Maresca. "It completely reconstructs the events as we've always sustained they happened."

I will pound an iron spike through my own skull

For what it's worth, the police in Perugia are not only falsely accusing Frank of Perugia-Shock of beating up five police officers (at once), now they are trying to suggest he was involved in killing Meredith Kercher:

Note his latest entry:

Quote:

THE LAST LAUGHTER

This is going to make you laugh. Guess who the prosecution, now, thinks to be involved with the crime? Me. It’s no surprise. It’s perfectly consistent with everything else.
The great psychologists who thought that a girl first watches Amelie and then goes and kills her housemate must of course think that the one who writes about a crime is the criminal...
Indeed they got something in their hands; they found out that criminals know me. Will they manage to understand why I talk to criminals? No, there’s no hope.
Five cops, then, reported to have been beaten by me and they proved it with a medical certificate... Will the great judges be fooled again by a couple of cops and a piece of paper? Of course. It’s their specialty!

This is the local mind. Have you all now figured out why this judicial disaster happened?

http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2011/03/cabaret-mignini-at-knox-sollecito-trial.html

to take notice of the fact that Italy is a rogue nation:

I don't suppose there is a transcript -
I'm a fuzzy hearer re a lot of videos.
Well, never mind, I'll try to look that up.

Looking at page one of this thread, I haven't changed re my takes.

I'm sort of hostile re Amanda, while getting it that I may be wrong.

All my instincts and some data - see Robert on the same page or two, who verbalizes reasons - say no re her, but my instincts aren't always right.

I don't really follow this thread - that I started - since I don't read Oralloy. But I remain interested.

Italy hasn't detained for 10 long years a bunch of people who were falsely sold to them as "terrorists". How many real convictions, not huge government pressured "guilty pleas" have there been since 2001?

I have a hearing problem, you piece of ****.

I am still interested in what is understood on all this.

Like, you're kidding.

oralloy wrote:

For what it's worth, the police in Perugia are not only falsely accusing Frank of Perugia-Shock of beating up five police officers (at once), now they are trying to suggest he was involved in killing Meredith Kercher:

Note his latest entry:

Quote:

THE LAST LAUGHTER

This is going to make you laugh. Guess who the prosecution, now, thinks to be involved with the crime? Me. It’s no surprise. It’s perfectly consistent with everything else.
The great psychologists who thought that a girl first watches Amelie and then goes and kills her housemate must of course think that the one who writes about a crime is the criminal...
Indeed they got something in their hands; they found out that criminals know me. Will they manage to understand why I talk to criminals? No, there’s no hope.
Five cops, then, reported to have been beaten by me and they proved it with a medical certificate... Will the great judges be fooled again by a couple of cops and a piece of paper? Of course. It’s their specialty!

This is the local mind. Have you all now figured out why this judicial disaster happened?

http://perugia-shock.blogspot.com/2011/03/cabaret-mignini-at-knox-sollecito-trial.html

It looks like international organizations are beginning to take notice of the fact that Italy is a rogue nation:

http://www.cpj.org/2011/04/journalists-threatened-for-reporting-on-murder-cas.php

oralloy wrote:

It looks like international organizations are beginning to take notice of the fact that Italy is a rogue nation:

http://www.cpj.org/2011/04/journalists-threatened-for-reporting-on-murder-cas.php

The Italian courts have ordered Google to shut down Frank's Perugia-Shock blog.

Google responds that they've been looking to abandon their Don't Be Evil motto for some time, and "helping a third-world hellhole like Italy cover up their atrocities" is the perfect way to start being an evil scumbag:

http://www.westseattleherald.com/2011/05/10/news/google-shuts-down-site-run-italian-blogger-critic

oralloy wrote:

oralloy wrote:

It looks like international organizations are beginning to take notice of the fact that Italy is a rogue nation:

http://www.cpj.org/2011/04/journalists-threatened-for-reporting-on-murder-cas.php

The Italian courts have ordered Google to shut down Frank's Perugia-Shock blog.

Google responds that they've been looking to abandon their Don't Be Evil motto for some time, and "helping a third-world hellhole like Italy cover up their atrocities" is the perfect way to start being an evil scumbag:

http://www.westseattleherald.com/2011/05/10/news/google-shuts-down-site-run-italian-blogger-critic

The shutting down of Perugia-Shock has caused human rights organizations to offer a fresh round of condemnation of these third-world Italians.

http://www.cpj.org/2011/05/italian-prosecutor-files-defamation-lawsuit-shutte.php