“If Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were to be in investigators’ thoughts at all, they had to get there via Guédé -- because otherwise the hypothesis (a priori unlikely) of their having had homicidal intent toward Kercher would be entirely superfluous in explaining the chain of events that led to her death.”
They have fake alibi’s, a crime scene they believed had been tampered with to conceal evidence, the whole Lumumba story from Knox and evidence from the body suggesting multiple people were involved in the murder. I’m not sure that these are things it’s trivial to assign probabilities to in order to work out the odds of anybody’s guilt or innocence.
“The hypotheses of Knox’s and Sollecito’s guilt are thus seen to be completely unnecessary, doing no explanatory work with respect to Kercher’s death. They are nothing but extremely burdensome details.”
Again, the body appeared to show the work of multiple attackers. Knox and Sollecito had lied about their alibi; Guede appeared to have an alibi for the time the police believed the body was moved. Whoever cleaned up after the murder (which the police believed occurred) clearly made little attempt to hide evidence pointing to Guede.
What are the odds of these events given Amanda being innocent and Amanda being guilty? Can anybody tell within a couple of order of magnitude?
Given a murder in a shared house, what is the a priori probability that somebody from that house was involved? 0.1? 0.01?
Surely you are comparing the combined probability of various events whose individual probability you can only guess at and not all of which you may know, that have complex interdependencies and comparing that number against another number that you don’t know with any certainty. The likelihood of being out by a very great margin in such a calculation is large.
“If Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were to be in investigators’ thoughts at all, they had to get there via Guédé -- because otherwise the hypothesis (a priori unlikely) of their having had homicidal intent toward Kercher would be entirely superfluous in explaining the chain of events that led to her death.” They have fake alibi’s, a crime scene they believed had been tampered with to conceal evidence, the whole Lumumba story from Knox and evidence from the body suggesting multiple people were involved in the murder. I’m not sure that these are things it’s trivial to assign probabilities to in order to work out the odds of anybody’s guilt or innocence.
“The hypotheses of Knox’s and Sollecito’s guilt are thus seen to be completely unnecessary, doing no explanatory work with respect to Kercher’s death. They are nothing but extremely burdensome details.” Again, the body appeared to show the work of multiple attackers. Knox and Sollecito had lied about their alibi; Guede appeared to have an alibi for the time the police believed the body was moved. Whoever cleaned up after the murder (which the police believed occurred) clearly made little attempt to hide evidence pointing to Guede.
What are the odds of these events given Amanda being innocent and Amanda being guilty? Can anybody tell within a couple of order of magnitude?
Given a murder in a shared house, what is the a priori probability that somebody from that house was involved? 0.1? 0.01?
Surely you are comparing the combined probability of various events whose individual probability you can only guess at and not all of which you may know, that have complex interdependencies and comparing that number against another number that you don’t know with any certainty. The likelihood of being out by a very great margin in such a calculation is large.