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Mia
 Posted:
Tue Oct 28, 2008 10:09 pm |
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Knox to stand trial with former lover for Kercher murder
| Quote: | Rudy Guede is given 30-year prison sentence for killing British student
By Peter Popham in Perugia
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old student, was stabbed in the throat
Amanda Knox, the American student accused of murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in the home they shared in the Umbrian city of Perugia, must face a full trial for her alleged crimes, along with her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. The trial will begin at Perugia's court of assizes on 4 December.
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Edited to add additional link
Judgement Day
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Whatever the outcome, it's clear that the overzealous freelance defense team in the United States, which has taken up Knox's cause with fervor, have not helped the defendant—and might even have hurt her standing in the Italian courts. The Friends of Amanda campaign, led by Seattle lawyer Anne Bremner, has infuriated prosecuting and defense attorneys alike by helping focus extensive coverage by major American news networks on the alleged ineptitude of the Italian investigators and antiquated Italian legal system.
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Mia
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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| RatPatrol
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 3:26 am |
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| Kay_The_Kitten wrote: | Ratty asked:
| Quote: |
As an aside. WTF is up with a legal system that allows suspects to be held, without any charges being filed, for almost a year - apparently without opportunity to post bail? |
It's called the Napoleonic system, where you are presumed guilty and have to prove your innocence..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code
Also known as the Gitmo system....
Kay
PS if you need a sleeping pill, instead of drugs you can read the description of their legal system here --> http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/Italy.htm |
Thanks for the links, Kay. I'll go study in a while, when I'm ready to unwind for the night. Presumed guilty, huh? From an American's POV that's a strange concept...
Speaking to the thread in general - not you in particular - I'm amused that my "aside" has provoked such reaction & comment. Perhaps I should adopt trolling (in the original usenet sense of the term) as my new occupation! 
But seriously, Gitmo comments really are apples/oranges (civilian vs. military justice) and/or red herring arguments. So says RART!
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On the Prowl
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1709
Location: Poofter's Froth, Wyoming
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| RatPatrol
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 3:30 am |
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| victims cry wrote: |
 hey hey hey Ratty!!! good to see you  |
Hey, VC!! Good to be seen. I'm just passing thru - I think - to stir the pot a little bit Promised myself I'm not getting in deep this time...
I know how much you like cats, so take a look at my post in Animals (Post a Picture thread) when you get a chance...
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On the Prowl
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1709
Location: Poofter's Froth, Wyoming
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| Kay_The_Kitten
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 7:08 am |
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| Quote: | | But seriously, Gitmo comments really are apples/oranges (civilian vs. military justice) and/or red herring arguments. So says RART! |
but it did what I expected it to, IE got a rise out of ya
Huggs welcome back
Kay
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Geek
Joined: 14 Apr 2006
Posts: 713
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| Kay_The_Kitten
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 7:51 am |
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| Quote: | | Thanks for the links, Kay. I'll go study in a while, when I'm ready to unwind for the night. Presumed guilty, huh? From an American's POV that's a strange concept... |
Actually it's not that strange, look at the Duke Lacrosse players, as well as dozens of other cases. Yes in Theory the prosecutor has to prove their guilt, but by the time the Prosecutor has finished his trial by publicity and the Jury pool is completely tainted, the only way an innocent person escapes prison time is to have the money to hire a good lawyer and to have some really good forensic evidence on their side (as the Duke boys did).
One has only to look at the work of the innocence project to see that innocent until proven guilty may be an ideal, but it is an ideal that is often not met....
"Napoleonic code" is no worse than "English common law" it all depends on the people administering the legal system. <grin> at least it is not the Stalin legal system of the USSR in the 1950's where the commissar decided guilt based largely on party membership.
Just my 2 cents, living in a part of Canada where Criminal law is based on "English common law" as the US is and the civil code is based on Napoleonic code, which leads to some interesting conundrums.
Kay
PS just to be clear, Canada is no better than the US when it comes to falsely convicted persons(Thinking of the Steven Truscott case [url] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Truscott [/url]), so I am not throwing rocks as I live in a glass house too.
Edited to fix all my spelling errors, (Have to learn not to post before one coffee.
Last edited by Kay_The_Kitten on Wed Oct 29, 2008 9:07 am; edited 2 times in total
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Geek
Joined: 14 Apr 2006
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| Isanah
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:31 am |
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Meredith has been indicted!
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| RatPatrol
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:35 am |
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| Isanah wrote: | | Meredith has been indicted! |
They've indicted a dead woman??? 
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On the Prowl
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
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Location: Poofter's Froth, Wyoming
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| Hannie
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 8:38 am |
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li'l Shango's Mommy
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
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Location: The Hague, The Netherlands
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| Isanah
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 1:08 pm |
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| RatPatrol wrote: |
They've indicted a dead woman??? |
LOL! I really need to stay abreast better!
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| olympic
Posted:
Wed Oct 29, 2008 11:02 pm |
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| yankee-in-france wrote: | | -- but I didn't think that Knox and Sollecito had been yet been charged with a crime. I thought that they were just being held and Italian law allowed them to be held for a year or so without charges. |
yankee i was ........ here we were pax, you, and i with questions, and no one to help us....looks like they are trickling in slowly, sprinkle some gold dust by the door will you...
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| pax
Posted:
Thu Oct 30, 2008 1:57 am |
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It's very interesting. I'd like to read a book about the trial after this is over. I don't understand what defense Guede raised. I think Knox and Sollecito are in a heap of trouble. It'll be interesting to see whether their defense strategies go against each other. And whether either testifies.
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| yankee-in-france
Posted:
Sat Nov 01, 2008 7:02 am |
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I think that his defense was that he and Meredith were in bed together in the prelude to a romantic interlude when he became ill (he ate a bad kebab or something) and was in the bathroom listening to his ipod. When he came out, he saw a tallish man leaving and she was dead or some such thing.
Sollecito claims that he did not know Geude. Knox finally admitted that she did but not well. There are so many inconsistencies in their stories that it would almost be impossible for them NOT to be involved in some way.
I think that Knox is underestimating the Italian justice system's ability to evaluate evidence and to mete out justice. Remember also that Knox also claimed that her boss was at the scene. He was initially arrested, but quickly released.
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YIF
Joined: 30 Mar 2006
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Location: France
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| pax
Posted:
Sat Nov 01, 2008 6:52 pm |
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Thanks yif. It will be interesting whether Knox and / or Sollecito testify. They won't be acquitted without presenting credible explanations for their changing stories. The 'I smoked pot' defense doesn't cut it. Most people remember what happened when they get high.
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| pax
Posted:
Sat Nov 22, 2008 7:47 pm |
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Everybody giving updates, thank you!
This next trial will be fascinating.
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| olympic
Posted:
Wed Dec 03, 2008 4:00 am |
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| pax wrote: | Everybody giving updates, thank you!
This next trial will be fascinating. |
here you are pax; last post on the link page elaborates on a few of the questions you may have had.
http://www.refugeesunleashed.net/viewtopic.php?t=16928&start=75
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| yankee-in-france
Posted:
Thu Dec 04, 2008 11:39 am |
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A friend told me that Dateline is doing a show this week on this case. I'm back in France so if you watch it, let me know the gist.
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YIF
Joined: 30 Mar 2006
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Location: France
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| pax
Posted:
Thu Dec 04, 2008 10:24 pm |
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Thanks!
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| olympic
Posted:
Fri Dec 05, 2008 1:09 am |
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| yankee-in-france wrote: | | A friend told me that Dateline is doing a show this week on this case. I'm back in France so if you watch it, let me know the gist. |
yankee you are correct....i'm not sure if i'll watch...we can most probably get it online.
Dateline returns on Friday!
Watch "The Mystery of Meredith's Murder" Friday at 10 p.m. ET, 9 p.m. CT on Dateline NBC.
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Joined: 18 Dec 2006
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| olympic
Posted:
Fri Dec 05, 2008 1:10 am |
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y/w pax
just in case you want to watch it.
Dateline returns on Friday!
Watch "The Mystery of Meredith's Murder" Friday at 10 p.m. ET, 9 p.m. CT on Dateline NBC.
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Joined: 18 Dec 2006
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| olympic
Posted:
Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:51 am |
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| yankee-in-france wrote: | | A friend told me that Dateline is doing a show this week on this case. I'm back in France so if you watch it, let me know the gist. |
hi yankee.....i left a link to dateline transcript under the articles and news thread.
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Joined: 18 Dec 2006
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| pax
Posted:
Sat Dec 06, 2008 4:27 am |
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I wish the trial were televised. But I respect whatever the Italians choose. Did anyone watch Dateline?
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Location: Wish You Were Here
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| pax
Posted:
Sat Dec 06, 2008 4:33 am |
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Hey, thanks olympic. Here's the transcript.
The mystery of Meredith's murder
A British student is killed in Italy — and her American housemate is charged
By Dennis Murphy
Correspondent
updated 6:39 p.m. MT, Fri., Dec. 5, 2008
This was a gruesome, gruesome murder. Who would commit such a crime? She's been criminalized. She was literally in shock. The girl from Seattle with the face of an angel... and ice-cold eyes.
She is flanked by Italian police guards whenever she leaves her 15 by 15-foot jail cell. Even a year later, photographers still jostle for a picture of the fresh American face at the center of Italy's most sensational murder case.
Twenty-one year-old Amanda Knox has declared again and again that she did not murder her university roommate but if her lawyers can't convince an Italian court of that, she can expect to be sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Here you'll see chilling, rarely-seen crime scene video ...the evidence against her she must explain. You'll meet her parents and feel the steely rage they have for a prosecutor they believe has conducted an outrageous trial by media. You'll hear Amanda in her own words: raw and emotional on leaked audio tape.
And a torrent of words from a prison diary: her dreams of someday walking free and the party she'll throw when she gets back home to Seattle- if she gets back.
The story begins here in the old fortress town of Perugia, Italy. In November 2007, two days after Halloween, the police forced open a bedroom door in a small student rental and found the naked body of a young English woman covered by a bed quilt. Her throat had been slashed, her blood thoroughly soaking the cotton shirt bunched up around her neck.
All the forensic evidence pointed to attempted rape and murder. Three-hundred and fifty dollars in rent money the victim had withdrawn that day was missing. A broken window suggested an intruder.
The awful crime here on the via Sante Antonio would quickly have been forgotten as yet another head-shaking statistic. Sad but not all that uncommon, except for the authorities’ chilling theory of the murder.
According to an investigating judge who issued a very preliminary kind of finding, it appears that the young English woman died at the hands of her friends. That she - the victim - refused to play along in their high-voltage games of drugs and group sex and as a consequence was tortured, sexually assaulted, stabbed and then left to die.
In the days after, the violent sex crime electrified Italy as pictures of three suspects appeared in the news. But the storyline quickly fixed on the person who seemed to be the connective tissue to all the players. The American studying Italian here at the University for Foreigners.
The riddle near the center of this lurid murder story is Amanda Knox and to begin to find out who she is we have to travel almost 6000 miles west, to Perugia's sister city, Seattle, Wash.
In this coffee-mad city, Amanda was the bubbly barista - the latte and cappuccino artiste - at this busy espresso bar near the University of Washington.
She was in her junior year at the U doing Dean's list level work in German and Italian studies. A delight to her former dormmates.
Dennis Murphy: What are the kind of personality traits you're thinking about?
Alexandra: Generous, kind, genuine, optimistic, bubbly. Pretty much all the good words that you can find in a dictionary she was.
By most accounts here, Amanda was no different than thousands of other young Seattle-ites growing into young adulthood. Outdoorsy. Tasting the first freedom of college, first jobs, first serious boyfriends. If there is a downside to her high-spiritedness, friends reflect that maybe she was naive in her judgement about the new people she was so eager to seek out. Boys. She tended to take in strays.
Male friend: She is a bit trusting and overly optimistic. It's sort of like, why shouldn't I trust this person?
To the point, her friends have said, that they had to warn her to be more careful when it came to strangers.
Amanda was known as a light drinker in her circle, tipsy after only a shot, as a now notorious cell phone video that made its way onto YouTube shows. She wasn't one to smoke a joint or take party drugs, according to her friends. The club scene was alien to her.
On Aug. 14, 2007, she was off to Europe. The first great adventure of her life. The first time she was truly on her own. She'd keep the posse back home up to speed on her journey through her webpage blog on MySpace. A final shout-out: "peace out suckers, love, Amanda."
And she was off.
In England, meanwhile, another young student- also a language major- was preparing to leave for university studies in Italy. She was 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, a recent college graduate. Meredith, like Amanda, was going to be living in Perugia, Italy, for the next school term.
Both young women had to find a place to live. Their paths would meet in a little house with a splendid view over the Umbrian valley. Two young women in Italy expecting the most exciting year of their lives.
Perugia straddles the hills in the middle of the Italian boot about a hundred miles north of Rome. This ancient stone city can boost tourist-worthy. Palazzos, piazzas, and tucked-away churches with gems of Renaissance art.
But for the 40,000 university students who go to school here, every bit as much of a lure is the vibrant late-night scene: plenty of cool places to hang and be young together.
In September 2007 Amanda Knox joined the student throng in Perugia, Italy. The Seattle student abroad quickly found a place to live: the little house on a hillside with three other roommates, one a young Englishwoman named Meredith Kercher. Amanda quickly dove into the student scene.
She'd always worked odd jobs to make ends meet and the former barista from Seattle quickly got herself hired at a popular hangout bar, le Chic. Student by day. Waitress every Tuesday and Thursday night, 65 bucks a week plus tips. Amanda wrote that she loved meeting new people, off-beat characters; and le Chic had no shortage of them.
Amanda's boss was a 38-year-old Congolese man named Patrick Lumumba, the bar's owner. He'd been in Perugia almost 20 years, an African student who never went home. He sang reggae music and was known to one and all on the bar circuit.
The bar owner was increasingly displeased with his new American waitress for flirting and dancing with the customers and he told her so.
Patrick Lumumba: Things didn't go very well. Often I would have to remind her to take care of the customers. She would apologize, but would eventually get distracted by her friends.
Lumumba said he was thinking of firing Amanda and giving her waitress job to Meredith, the attractive English roommate who was having her own issues with Amanda's slouchy habits around the house.
Richard Owen, the London Times: Never picked up, wouldn't do the chores. Never put out the garbage. Wouldn't pick up a mop or a broom.
And more worrying, sources of Richard Owen, correspondent for the London Times in Italy, told him that Meredith had complained to her British girlfriends about Amanda coming home regularly with strange men and some of them frightened her.
Owen: People who Meredith Kercher distrusted. Didn't like the look of. It appears that it got to the point where she confronted Amanda about this.
But then about three weeks into her Italian adventure, Amanda found a steady boyfriend in a 23-year old Italian computer engineering student named Raffaele Sollecito. He was a prominent doctor's son with his own apartment. He collected exotic knives and drove an expensive German car.
Owen: Clearly not short of cash and I think is much taken with this bright and breezy energetic American girl, blonde American girl who immediately takes up with him.
Perugia was turning out to be student heaven: classes, followed by party nights waiting around every bend. Halloween was the next rave up.
Raffaele- the doctor's son- costumed as a ghoulish surgeon with a cleaver- showed up at Lumumba's bar that night with Amanda, who didn't work Wednesdays.
Meredith, who had her own circle of pals, was bar-hopping, too. She dressed as a vampire with fake blood trickling down her mouth on Oct. 31. Next to her: a party-er wearing the mask made famous in "Scream," the student slasher horror series.
The prosecutor would argue later that it was significant that Meredith went that night dressed as a vampire.
The following day was a solemn Catholic holy day- All Saint's Day. The partied-out students slept-off the night before. The other roommates at the rental house had gone home for what would be, in effect, a long weekend.
Meredith and Amanda had lunch together at the house, then Meredith went to visit her English girlfriends for a quiet evening of pizza and a video. One of the friends walked her partway home a little after 9 p.m.
The next day, Nov. 2, is observed on some Christian calendars as the Day of the Dead.
It was all that and more, it would turn out, at the student rental on Via Sante Antonio, the villa the Italians would soon be calling the "House of Horrors."
Meredith Kercher- last photographed with fake blood on her lips- had been found and was being photographed by a crime scene technician in a pool of very real blood. Her own.
Owen: It was described by the investigating judge as a chilling scene.
There were finger marks on the jaw. A small knife puncture on the underside of the chin. And a gaping wound to the throat. Her torn and scattered jeans and underwear, and DNA found on her tampon, described the sexual torture of a woman being forced to her knees.
Owen: The police, of course, immediately sealed the scene, and Amanda, Raffaele and all friends of the dead girl were called in for questioning.
Amanda Knox told the Italian authorities she had no idea what had happened, but her story seemed to change, and change yet again, as physical evidence - bloody prints, DNA and scattered clothing -suggested to authorities a group sex and drugs party that ended in unimaginable horror.
With her roommate so brutally murdered, Amanda Knox's butterfly days of youth and innocence had ended on an Umbrian hillside.
Investigators found that 21-year-old Meredith Kercher had slowly choked to death from a stab wound to her throat, alive for half an hour or more, lying on her back, drowning in her own blood. Reporter Richard Owen is covering the story for the London Times.
Owen: The judge's report on this says that she died a slow and agonizing death.
The revelation of the murder began a quarter mile away from the crime scene when a woman found two cell phones had been tossed in her garden.
Police traced the phones to Meredith Kercher - and the student rental - where outside they found Amanda Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. There was no sign of Meredith. The house looked as though it had been broken into.
Owen: The police then find that Meredith Kercher's bedroom door is locked and they break it down and they found her body with her throat cut.
Police questioned Amanda. She told them she'd spent Thursday night, Nov. 1, at Raffaele's house and returned home about 10:30 the following morning only to discover a window glass shattered by a rock. She alerted Raffaele, and he said he phoned the police.
But police were skeptical of the couple's story. They say Raffaele didn't place his 911 call until after they'd already shown up. And that smashed bedroom window - so high above the deeply sloped home site? It telegraphed a staged break-in.
Were Amanda and the boyfriend spinning, covering up something big, something awful? That was the story that leaked out of the investigator's notes and onto the evening newscasts.
The electrifying story went international as Italian investigators- based on early forensic evidence- theorized that Meredith had most likely been killed because she refused to play along in a group sex game... the victim of people she knew.
And after Amanda's name got out, it wasn't long before the media pounced upon her My Space webpage. Her online nickname was "Foxy Knoxy." She'd posted a leggy glam shot of herself as well as a disturbing short story about a rapist. Was this American beauty capable of murder, as the authorities were hinting? Who was this Foxy?
Owen: The Italian press called her, "The girl from Seattle with the face of an angel and ice cold eyes."
Her boyfriend Raffaele had a webpage too. It featured that photo of him holding a meat cleaver. Who was this perhaps murderous doctor's son? He described himself as "Christian....sweet...but sometimes totally creazy (sic)."
The Italian press couldn't get enough of the two memorably photographed kissing outside the murder scene. There were fevered reports at the time that Amanda and Raffaele had the next day been seen nuzzling in a clothing store, buying underwear and talking about "wild sex."
Owen: Their conversation was clearly overheard by the store keeper who took the money at the till and heard, heard them saying this to each other the day after her flatmate's body has been discovered. This is very odd behavior.
Odd, and to authorities, circumstantial evidence for a growing case file. Less than a week after the murder of Meredith Kercher, police arrested Amanda Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Amanda was grilled about her alibi for the night in question.
Owen: Her first story is that she was at Raffaele's flat. And came back the next morning with him to find, to find the body.
Within hours, Amanda reportedly cracked: changed her story. And her new version of events was damning: Yes, she had been at the house the night Meredith was murdered. And so had someone else: her boss from the bar, Patrick Lumumba.
Owen: Well, then she said Patrick Lumumba attacked her flatmate and she put her fingers in her ears and doesn't remember what happened afterwards.
Police arrested Patrick Lumumba. But crime scene technicians were finding no evidentiary trace of him at the murder house and a customer at his bar gave him a credible alibi. That's when she seemed to change her story again, insisting police had bullied a confession out of her.
She admitted to falsely accusing Lumumba of being the killer and then reverted to her original account, claiming she'd been at Raffaele's apartment all night- and hadn't returned to her student rental till the following morning.
But police believed she was lying; that she and Rafaelle Sollecito had planned the bloody crime together.
And DNA evidence was telling the authorities a third person was also there that night. A bloody palmprint at the scene yielded the name and picture of Rudy Hermann Guede, a 21-year old immigrant from Ivory Coast.
Guede - who'd posted a video clip of himself on the Web, moaning he was Dracula - was known as a small time drug dealer.
American Zach Nowak, a student tour guide in Perugia, recognized Rudy's face in the news right away.
Zach Nowak: He did have a reputation for being sorta the guy who bugged the girls. To the point where the girl would go to the bartender and say, “Look, this guy is bugging me. Can you tell him to leave?”
Authorities were certain Rudy was their third person in the murder house. Forensic tests put his DNA all over the crime scene and on the victim's body. Authorities released the bar owner Patrick Lumumba and picked-up Rudy Guede who'd been on the run in Germany. Rudy's story was that he had, in fact, been with Meredith the night she died having consensual sex, he said, but he claimed he'd been in the bathroom when he heard her screams.
Owen: He emerged from the bathroom to see her lying in a pool of blood and 'An-Italian-I-did-not-know' grasping a knife in his left hand.
As the knife-weilding assailant and another person fled, Rudy says, he cradled a dying Meredith in his arms. She gasped a sound "Aff," perhaps short for Raffaele, the media speculated.
Final scene, dying in the arms, gasping out the name of the killer.
Owen: That's right, and it may indeed be a scenario taken from a thriller or a crime film.
In a series of hearings this year to determine who would stand trial for the murder, lawyers for Amanda and Raffaele seized on Rudy's hard to swallow story, saying it and a mountain of bloody evidence proved Rudy, and Rudy alone, had murdered Meredith Kercher.
Rudy didn't want to share a defense table with Amanda and Raffaele if their lawyers were going to nail him for the crime, so he opted for what's called in Italy a "fast track" trial. In that closed-door proceeding, Rudy allegedly named Amanda and her boyfriend as the true killers in the house that night. But the judge wasn't buying Rudy's story of being an innocent bystander on a date. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
With Rudy dispensed with, the court announced a follow-up decision: There was enough compelling evidence to put both Amanda and Raffaele on trial for murder, too.
Crime analyst Clint Van Zandt: Damning physical evidence, because that says someone stepped in blood and then left that footprint.
Inside this Perugia courthouse the Italian prosecutor has outlined a detailed theory as to how English student Meredith Kercher was murdered. The murderous tableau: Rudy Guede, the street drug dealer, strangling Meredith from behind, sexually assaulting the victim now on her knees; her clothing torn away. Raffaele Sollecito to the side pinning the struggling woman. And facing her, taunting her with a kitchen carving knife, Amanda Knox, holding the sharp point beneath Meredith's chin, jabbing, finally slashing through her roomate's throat as she resisted the sex play of three young people stoned out of their minds.
The mechanics of the theorized murder- outlined to Dateline a year ago when we visited Rome's national CSI lab- has changed not a bit.
Clint Van Zandt, a onetime supervisor in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, known informally as the Profilers--is an analyst for NBC News and he'd traveled with Dateline to Italy back then to look at the considerable evidence already collected and analyzed.
Van Zandt, with 25 years of experience at this sort of analysis, was eager to take an updated look at what the Italian investigators had gathered.
With Rudy Guede already tried and convicted, we concentrated on the evidence against Amanda and Sollecito, starting with the knife found in the boyfriend's apartment with Amanda's DNA on the handle and Meredith Kercher's DNA on the tip.
Clint van Zandt: On that tip, on that very tip, is evidence that demands- demands an explanation, and we just don't have that.
Dennis Murphy: If you're the prosecutor in court, Clint, how much do you talk to the jury about this knife?
Clint Van Zandt: Oh, you have to show a jury a murder weapon. And here, we have the prosecution able to not only say we think this is the weapon, but here's the dna of the victim on it. Here's the dna of somebody who had that knife in their hand. And it's in sollecito's apartment. That's a nice packaged case for the prosecution.
Some of the more difficult evidence Amanda and the boyfriend will have to refute are these bloody footprints, left, the authorities claim, as the two of them scurried about the house trying to clean up a bloody mess.
Clint Van Zandt: Yeah. I don't think there's any doubt that someone has stepped in blood.
Dennis Murphy: So as evidence, Clint, this is leaving a calling card?
Clint Van Zandt: All we have to do is identify that bloody footprint. That should take us to the identity of at least one of the offenders.
Other footprint shapes came eerily alive when the bathroom and hallway outside the murder room were sprayed with Luminol - a chemical used by CSI detectives to reveal the presence of blood.
Dennis Murphy: You hit it with a light and wow, there you go.
Clint Van Zandt: One of a number of footprints that the police believed is Sollecito's or Amanda's. Again, damning physical evidence, because that says someone stepped in blood and then left that footprint. But it remains to be seen if we can say whose footprint that is.
And there's what investigators found on the clasp of the victim's bra.
Dennis Murphy: Sollecito's DNA is said to be on this bra clasp.
Clint Van Zandt: And now they're saying also Amanda. So that, in theory, places our two suspects at the crime scene, with hands on the bra that was taken off the victim- at the time she was assaulted.
But for Van Zandt, perhaps the strongest evidence against Amanda is a blood stain on a bathroom drain. The prosecutor says it contains a mix of Meredith's and Amanda's blood.
Clint Van Zandt: This is a hard thing for Amanda to explain, Dennis. She never suggests she had any type of a wound that would allow that blood to be transferred. And especially mixed with-- with the victim's blood. It's up to Amanda, in theory, to explain how that blood got there.
And it's not just bloody footprints and DNA that Amanda has to explain. Investigators say her behavior was odd from the outset, cold and lacking compassion for her murdered roommate. What was that underwear buying story all about? The day after the body was found and then overheard talking about wild sex?
And then there's the problem of her alibi. First she wasn't at her house the night of the murder, she was at her boyfriend Raffaele's; then--take two- she was at her house, hearing her friend's death screams; Lumumba did it, no he didn't, then--forget all that--she was back at Raffaele's place ... nowhere near the bloody murder.
Clint Van Zandt: There's been so many versions, how do we know this is going to be the last version?
Dennis Murphy: That's a general presiding problem for Amanda Knox. She told a lotta stories.
Clint Van Zandt: Why isn't there one story? There is only one truth. Why does she have one, two, three? You know, it's either she was there, or she wasn't.
But as much as the forensic evidence suggests she was at the murder scene, Amanda's parents insist she has been trying to tell the truth all along.
In the year-long trial by media, Europeans have been sold a sexy heartless icon at the center of this brutal murder: "Foxy" to the world, “my daughter, Amanda,” to this woman.
Edda Mellas: Leaving your innocent child locked up is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.
Edda Mellas and Curt Knox of Seattle are Amanda's mother and father. They told Amanda's side of a year-long ordeal to British television. They say they first heard the trouble in their daughter's voice in a phone call from her very early on Nov. 2, 2007. From nine time zones away, Amanda telling them a fragmentary story about police being at the house, something about the roommate, it was all still happening. Confused:
Edda Mellas: The police had come and they had broken down the door to Meredith's room, and, erm, she heard them screaming they were shouting and she wasn't quite getting the Italian, but all she heard was a foot. A foot either in or near the closet.
The same story Amanda herself told Italian authorities on tape. Now we can hear the American in her own words recounting what happened when the police entered the house.
Amanda on tape: After the police arrived, i brought them into the house. I showed them the window was broken. I was in shock , I couldn't understand what was going on. All I heard was "a foot, a foot".
Edda Mellas: And then she called me back and said it wasn't a foot, they have found a body.
Given how upset they said Amanda was, they wondered why anyone would look at the images of her kissing her boyfriend and see strange, suspicious behavior.
Curt: Just looking at her face, you can just tell she was literally in shock. And, and, you know, just traumatized by the whole situation. They were trying to comfort each other. I mean, her roommate had just been killed.
Amanda's mother and father- divorced for years- have become their daughter's unofficial defense team in her trial by media. Counseled by lawyers, a former judge, and PR specialists, they have argued their daughter's innocence on national television.
On TODAY, a former Seattle prosecutor and trial lawyer working with the Knox family ridiculed the police work at the crime scene. Her parents' complaints about the evidence are essentially what her criminal defense lawyer will argue in the Italian courtroom.
Take, for instance, the young couple's lingerie buying trip--the we'll-have-wild-sex comment allegedly overheard by a shopkeeper. Not frillies, counter the parents. Just cheap cotton underwear.
Curt: You are dealing with a crime scene. She has the clothes on her back. And she has no access to any of her clothes. It is not a lingerie store, it happened to have a bin of underwear.
To her parents, the prosecutor and investigators have been heartless, feeding one juicy morsel after another to a voracious tabloid press.
Curt: Everything I read or see on TV I no longer believe because I know, I know what they did to Amanda and what they have said in print. Media- all kinds of media- have said about her is totally false. So you wonder how much out there is really true.
Case in point: Amanda's alleged confession about being at the house and hearing Meredtih's screams. It's an account, say the parents, all but waterboarded out of a terrified young woman, not fluent in Italian and not represented by a lawyer. This is Amanda's version of that encounter with police:
Amanda: The police were telling me that we know you were at the house. We know you left the house. I couldn't understand why they were telling me that I was lying.
Edda: She was interrogated, you know, depending on the reports, anywhere from nine to 14 hours . Terrified being told by the police to come up with. With possibilities or possible scenarios.
Amanda: I was stressed; I was scared. It was after long hours, it was in the middle of the night. I was innocent. They were telling me that I was guilty.
And as for the carving knife found at Sollecito's apartment, the one said to have Amanda's DNA on the handle and Meredith's DNA on the tip
Curt: There is absolutely no issue as far as the DNA on the handle of the knife. It is Amanda's, it was found at Raffaele's house, in the drawer where the knives are that you use to cut things in the kitchen. There is a speck so slight that it could be Meredith’s, and it’s also been stated it could be half the people in Italy.
As for the rest...The mixed blood in the drain? Amanda's DNA on the bra clasp? Luminoled bloody footprints? All of a piece, say the parents and their team. A crime scene contaminated by careless police work.
It is a standard argument in so many criminal trials: the evidence gathering was flawed. Clint Van Zandt examined the remarkable crime scene video taken just hours after the body of Meredith Kercher was discovered. He, for one, thinks the video may play an important role in Amanda's defense.
Clint Van Zandt: You see places in the video where people processing the crime scene- they don't have hair nets on. You see places where there's evidence that appears, that should have been seized, and it wasn't.
Dennis Murphy: So it may have been good evidence, but it's compromised?
Clint Van Zandt: It could be. And that would be my position, as the defense, saying, "Yeah, that's evidence." But of what? Sloppy police work maybe?
The anger Amanda's family feels toward the press is mild for the contempt it has for her prosecutor. His name is Giuliano Mignini and the Knox camp in Seattle accuses him of seeing satanic conspiracies behind the most explainable of crimes. They condemn him for the selective leaks that made their way into the media.
The prosecutor Mignini has surprised even people who think he has a reasonable case by asserting, as he has in court, that the blueprint for Meredith's murder can be found in a grisly Japanese comic book discovered among Sollecito's posessions. In it, female vampires are killed in gory fashion, the corpses left not unlike Meredith's.
Clint Van Zandt: Jury, every judge, wants to know motive. But the prosecution to me is this is almost a bridge too far, the theory. But he has to explain it, Dennis. He has to tell a jury, how could these otherwise normal young people participate in this terrible crime?
As for Amanda, she can't remember it all but vampire killing had nothing to do with that night.
On a hillside in Perugia, a world away from the classrooms and the student clubs sits the Capanne prison.
It's there Amanda, just days after being arrested, began writing what she called My Prison Diary. In a school-girl's careful hand on lined paper she set down her thoughts and emotions, a stream of consciousness on her first weeks in jail.
I'm writing this because I want to remember. I want to remember because this is an experience that not many people will ever have...
As read by Dateline, the words tumble out: Why she's innocent of Meredith's murder, why she named Lumumba as the killer, and why Raffaele- that "silly boy"- seemed confused with his lies to authorities.
Authorities, she tells her diary, who roughed her up mentally and physically during their interrogation of her.
They actually confused me, told me lies, yelled at me, kept me up all night, called me a stupid liar, hit me. And what's strange is i'm not even mad.
And when the police weren't harrassing her, Amanda writes, someone else was. A deputy warden making, she claims, sexual advances.
He said that he would most definitely have sex with me right now... He was so sure that I had nothing to worry about. Then he joked about having me promise to have sex with him. Once again ol' Vince Capo is hitting on me...
She's drolly amused at the fan boys on the outside sending love notes to her, the "girl with the angel face" she writes disdainfully. "The majority comment on how beautiful I am...( p1178)...And, jeez, I'm not even that good looking"(p. 1179) --smiley face.
Mostly, life in lock-up was boring, sterile:
Here is no place for love. I need to be with the people I love. So I wait. And the waiting is such a pain that I almost can't stand it but I do.
When she wasn't filling the void by singing songs, obsessively, the Beatle's hymnlike "Let It Be" ...
Amanda was piecing together the case against her by analyzing the police's questions. She was hearing bits of the investigation leaked to the papers.
I haven't done anything so I know there is no proof. The knife, I don't know what to make of it. I never carried a knife back and forth between my house and Raffaele's. It's that simple.
As for fingering her boss, Patrick Lumumba, as the killer, she wrote Dear Diary she'd given up the name under duress.
...They were nice to me in the end, but only because I had named someone for them, when I was very scared and confused.
And in her cell she was learning that it sounded as though Raffaele had turned on her, now telling the authorities he couldn't vouch for Amanda's whereabouts on the night of the murder.
He's the one who lied about me. He's the one who is still lying about me...Well, it's not important. I'll forgive him when the time comes, silly boy.
She had been with Raffaele all night, she wrote. She was innocent.
I may not be perfect like everyone else, but i'm not a murderer.
She's asserted her innocence to a diary. And blurted it out to the court, in one of her pre-trial appearances. But how will an Italian court, under Italian law treat the American's claim? A major difference in trials there is that Amanda will not be judged solely by a jury of her peers.
Her lawyers will argue the case to two judges and six citizen jurors who will decide her guilt or innocence. She won a big decision in pre-trial rulings: that jury will not be allowed to hear evidence that she changed her initial story and had falsely accused her boss Lumumba. The reason? No lawyer present and she wasn't fluent in Italian.
Criminal defense lawyer Theodore Simon of Philadelphia has represented Americans accused in overseas courts, including Italy. He is not a participant in the ongoing trial, but he thinks the prosecutor's evidence made public so far is daunting.
Theodore Simon: There's a number of pieces that are problematic. The prosecution- is gonna present evidence that there was- a faked robbery. That there was a faked break-in. That the body was moved. And bleach was implemented to get rid of either fingerprints, footprints, and/or blood. The more circumstantial pieces of evidence that are gathered, the hurdle starts getting higher.
And higher still when you factor in a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, the bias that as one goes, so goes the other.
Dennis Murphy: if I'm persuaded by the evidence that the boyfriend, Sollecito, is in that house, then I've gotta think that she's there too.
Theodore Simon: There is so much evidence, that seems to allegedly involve each of them. This becomes a bigger hurdle to overcome.
And this criminal defense lawyer thinks they can't just play whack-a-mole with the forensic evidence.
Theodore Simon: She will have to present a cogent story that explains why they are not guilty.
On the other hand, what Amanda has going in her favor- thinks Ted Simon- is the lack of a motive and the unlikeliness of the charge: that a seemingly quiet, normal student abroad would participate in a murderous orgy.
Theodore Simon: The defense is gonna say there's no clear motive. There's no precise time of-- of death. And they clearly do not have a definitive murder weapon.
Dennis Murphy: The prosecutor in this case, Mignini, is a controversial character in Italy. He has an expanded theory, beyond the sex play gone wrong, and may have been lifted from a Japanese comic book about killing vampires.
Theodore Simon: I would say, what is the basis- other than an imagination run wild?
Dennis Murphy: Here's the comic-- here's the comic book, we found it in Sollecito's house?
Theodore Simon: Not all dots connect. And if you start trying to connect certain dots that just are not meant to be connected, you lose credibility. And you may lose credibility on the more persuasive parts of your case.
The defense will be expected to argue that the blood and genetic evidence proves Rudy did it, a solo break-in that escalated out of control. End of story. Let Amanda and Sollecito go. But remember: The prosecutor Mignini has already convicted Rudy Guede with his sex-game argument. Will his same theory - embellished with demonic touches - adhere to the Harry Potter-ish boyfriend and the young American?
When Amanda Knox petitioned an earlier judge for bond under house arrest, he declined, reasoning in part that Knox was capable of committing the same crime again. Court House observers, including Ted Simon, predict an uphill fight for Amanda Knox.
Theodore Simon: The third defendant has already been found guilty. And the fact that he's been found guilty, and that judge has already said the other two are implicated, certainly does not bode well for the future trial.
In her diary Amanda once wrote: "I don't want to be sad or traumatized. I want to be happy. I want to be me, free, singing, jumping, dancing, laughing."
Liberties and emotions all on hold pending a jury verdict in an ancient fortress town, far, far from Seattle.
© 2008 msnbc.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28057560/
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| olympic
Posted:
Sat Dec 06, 2008 4:55 am |
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thanks pax  ....i posted it to the news articles no discussion thread
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Joined: 18 Dec 2006
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| pax
Posted:
Sat Dec 06, 2008 4:56 am |
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Is anyone else sick of US television portraying police and prosecutors overseas as bumbling idiots? And Knox family efforts to do the same? Italians desire justice for murder victims.
American tabloid television is out of date. Most aren't as stupid or xenophobic as networks apparently believe. That whole 'angel or demon' characterization -- what a tired cliche.
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Joined: 23 Mar 2006
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Location: Wish You Were Here
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| olympic
Posted:
Sat Dec 06, 2008 5:34 am |
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| pax wrote: | Is anyone else sick of US television portraying police and prosecutors overseas as bumbling idiots? And Knox family efforts to do the same? Italians desire justice for murder victims.
American tabloid television is out of date. Most aren't as stupid or xenophobic as networks apparently believe. That whole 'angel or demon' characterization -- what a tired cliche. |
ditto pax on your statement..
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