“Personally, I don’t know the degree of likelihood of Knox’s leaving no single piece of physical evidence when someone else left all kinds of traces. I do know the odds that I personally would change my story if police were investigating me for a murder in which I had no part: zero.”
Maybe its true that you would never change your story to the police if you were being investigated for murder (can you be sure? Has this actually happened to you?) But even then, some people are innocent and yet change their story. (Also, lots of ‘confessions’ that are coerced out of people through interrogations are false).
Anyway, you can probably take the story-changing as weak evidence of guilt. However, compared to actual physical DNA evidence at the crime scene, which is STRONG evidence, this is nothing. Lets say you started out with a prior probability that Knox is guilty as being X (based on association with the victim), and then updated to be somewhat higher due to ‘story changing’. But then when you consider the physical DNA evidence you have to MASSIVELY reduce the probability. The phyisical DNA evidence is orders of magnitude more important than various speculative psychological evidence about phone call lengths and story changing and things like that.
After correctly updating for all the evidence, you come to the conclusion that Guede has a very high probability of guilt, due to his actual DNA being at the crime scene, and Knox having a very low probability.
Given that we have a strong, scientific reason to believe that Guede was there, and Knox was not, you should convict Guede and acquit Knox. (Unless there is strong evidence that Knox had conspired to have Guede do the killing for her, which there is not).
Given that the murder can be fully explained by Guede’s guilt, and that there is no strong evidence that Knox was also involved, there is no good reason to suspect Knox any more.
You’ve merely restated, at length, the paragraph to which I’ve objected. Have police ever questioned me about a murder in which I knew I did not take part? Not that I recall. Can I be sure I wouldn’t change my story if I were questioned about such a thing? Yes, if the word “sure” is used in an ordinary sense. If you’re inclined to get into, let’s say, a metaphysical debate about that, I’ll have nothing to contribute.
You state that “some people” are innocent and yet change their story. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it does not change the fact that story-changing is, in my view, at least, strong evidence of guilt. You state that it “can probably [be taken] as weak evidence of guilt,” and the author of the present post seems to grant even less than that. Story-changing by someone caught in a trap is a significant element of the human condition, an element you seek to dismiss with the phrase “speculative psychological evidence.”
I also don’t know whether it’s true that “lots of confessions” are coerced and false; but unless you have something specific to point out with respect to such supposed coercion and the changed stories of Knox, you’re just throwing up dust.
As for the DNA: again, you have merely restated the author’s remark. I personally don’t know how much significance may be attributed to the alleged absence of Knox’s DNA at the crime scene, and you’re not clarifying that by putting the word “strong” in ALL CAPS.
You say it’s a given that the murder can be “fully explained” by Guede’s guilt. From the little I’ve heard about the case, my impression is that that’s not true. It’s not a given; there’s some evidence, apparently, that more than one person was involved. If that’s incorrect, please let me know.
You state that “some people” are innocent and yet change their story. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it does not change the fact that story-changing is, in my view, at least, strong evidence of guilt. You state that it “can probably [be taken] as weak evidence of guilt,” and the author of the present post seems to grant even less than that. Story-changing by someone caught in a trap is a significant element of the human condition, an element you seek to dismiss with the phrase “speculative psychological evidence.”
I also don’t know whether it’s true that “lots of confessions” are coerced and false; but unless you have something specific to point out with respect to such supposed coercion and the changed stories of Knox, you’re just throwing up dust.
It’s extremely common for people to give false confessions under duress, and some judicial systems take this into account. In Japan, for instance, no person can be convicted on the basis of a confession alone; they must be able to reveal verifiable information about the crime which the police could not have already provided to them.
I participated in a psychological study a few months ago regarding interrogation. I was interrogated for a minor offense which I did not commit by a person who was led to believe that I had committed it. I pretty much had the deck stacked in my favor here; I knew that the stakes riding on the interrogation were trivial, I had, if not an actual alibi, then at least extremely strong circumstantial evidence in favor of my innocence, plus strong material evidence. I was accused of stealing money, which I would not have had time or opportunity to spend or hide, but I did not have any bills on me in the denomination I was accused of stealing, and was free to demonstrate this. I am also pretty good at retaining my reasoning and rhetorical faculties under pressure, making me better at arguing in my own defense than most people.
Nevertheless, it was a really surprisingly stressful experience. If you’ve never been interrogated for a crime you haven’t committed, then I would say that this is absolutely an area where you shouldn’t try to state with any kind of confidence what you would or would not do.
As for the evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime, to make a not-that-long story short, that’s not really the case. The prosecution had already flagged Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito by connection, as suspects, on very tenuous bases, prior to processing any forensic evidence for the case, and they continued to interpret the available evidence in light of that hypothesis, but on the whole there was really an absence of evidence favoring the involvement of multiple people over a single murderer.
The evidence for the involvement of other people besides Guede pretty much boils down to
The number of stab wounds and general brutality of the murder
Evidence of the break-in being staged
*DNA of other individuals aside from Guede at the scene.
However, had the prosecution not already had a vested interest in flagging multiple suspects, they would almost certainly have noted that the number of stab wounds on Kercher’s body was not actually unusual for a knife murder. Knife murders routinely involve very large number of stab wounds, because it’s much harder to kill a person with a knife than people generally expect, and when a person who’s not trained or experienced in killing people with knives attempts to do so, the result is usually a frantic extended struggle. The “evidence” that the break-in was staged did not stand up even cursory analysis by the defense, and could reasonably be described as “completely made up,” and the DNA analysis only suggested involvement of multiple people after egregious mishandling.
Had the police not walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito into the case, it’s unlikely that they would have concluded from the available evidence that any perpetrators other than Guede were involved.
Edit: With regards to Knox having specfic reason to alter her testimony in absence of her guilt, it’s important to realize that the person she flagged after her extended interrogation was the same person the police had already decided to treat as a suspect based on their interpretation of her phone messages to him0, messages which were in fact quite innocuous when viewed in light of English language colloquialism. They had a suspect they wanted her to finger, and after an interrogation in which she alleges extreme duress, she eventually does so. Then, after having a short period in which to recuperate, she repudiates her own testimony. The suspect then proves to have an airtight alibi.
Under these circumstances, if her changing testimony should be taken as indication of anything, it’s that the police probably did push her extremely hard to give a response they had already settled on. It’s very unlikely that she and the police would independently narrow down the same suspect who was unambiguously uninvolved, and the content of the proceedings clearly shows that the police, rather than Knox, were the first to point to that suspect.
Allow me to say first that I appreciate your extended comment even if I can’t say I embrace all you’ve said in it. I can believe the personal experience you’ve described was, as you say, surprisingly stressful; but let’s note that you came through it without, as I gather, either falsely confessing or changing your story. Every one of us lives with crime; every one of us lives with the possibility that, at any moment, he or she will be arrested for, or questioned about, a crime with which he or she has had nothing to do. Every one of us lives, as well, with the knowledge that some humans are liars; every one of us knows that that knowledge complicates interrogation. If any one of us is subjected to interrogation, he or she is obliged to perform seriously through it. That fact is no more subject to change than is, say, the law of conservation of energy. Either you accept it, meet your duties, and hold others to theirs—or you are antisocial.
As you know by now, I mentioned, below, that I’d got the impression that the multiple-attacker theory was insubstantial, but I do appreciate the time you’ve taken to detail problems with it. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say the police walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito to it; but I can believe the police early on developed a theory of a many-party-attack and a false break-in to cover it, a theory they never managed to abandon.
As for false confessions, I’ll point out that I didn’t bring up false confessions and really haven’t said anything about them with respect to this case, in particular. In fact, I clarified, in a comment at 02 February 2014 10:51:01PM, somewhere in these exchanges, that “Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis …. They are story-changing ….” Even in my statement that you quote, above, I mention false confessions only as something that has been brought up by our fellow-poster Ander; I ask him to comment on Knox’s “changed stories,” not any confession. Yes, false confession is something I’ve discussed in these exchanges; and what I just said, two paragraphs above, about the duty of a person being interrogated applies to false confessing and to story-changing—both. Even so, they are distinct things.
Either you accept it, meet your duties, and hold others to theirs—or you are antisocial.
If you still don’t think this is easier said than done, you haven’t learned anything from this discussion. Confabulation under stress is a fact of human psychology. You can’t make it go away by just saying “try really hard to keep your story straight”.
You are missing an important fact about police: They are not your friends, especially not if they are investigating a case and (rightly or wrongfully) suspect you of being involved. Police’s incentives, and for the most part goals, are to get a conviction by hook or by crook, and they will lie and cheat to get it.
Allow me to say first that I appreciate your extended comment even if I can’t say I embrace all you’ve said in it. I can believe the personal experience you’ve described was, as you say, surprisingly stressful; but let’s note that you came through it without, as I gather, either falsely confessing or changing your story. Every one of us lives with crime; every one of us lives with the possibility that, at any moment, he or she will be arrested for, or questioned about, a crime with which he or she has had nothing to do. Every one of us lives, as well, with the knowledge that some humans are liars; every one of us knows that that knowledge complicates interrogation. If any one of us is subjected to interrogation, he or she is obliged to perform seriously through it. That fact is no more subject to change than is, say, the law of conservation of energy. Either you accept it, meet your duties, and hold others to theirs—or you are antisocial.
This seems like an unfairly high standard to hold people to in order to determine whether they are “antisocial.” After all, in an interrogation where the police do not believe the subject’s protestations of innocence, they generally take extensive measures to induce the subject to change their testimony. Interrogation subjects can be subject to considerable duress, and condemning people for changing their stories under circumstances is, hopefully, different in degree, but is not different in kind from condemning people for caving to torture. It would certainly take an unusual definition of “antisocial” to capture people who will falsely self incriminate under sufficient pressure from the police.
As you know by now, I mentioned, below, that I’d got the impression that the multiple-attacker theory was insubstantial, but I do appreciate the time you’ve taken to detail problems with it. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say the police walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito to it; but I can believe the police early on developed a theory of a many-party-attack and a false break-in to cover it, a theory they never managed to abandon.
In fact, the police flagged Amanda Knox as a suspect on the basis of her mannerisms at the crime scene, which the lead investigator (who has come under fire for his use of implausible profiling techniques in other cases) judged to be unusual, before developing a multiple-attacker hypothesis behind the murder. Raffaele Sollecito was flagged by association with Knox, as was Patrick Lumumba on the basis of her phone contact with him. All of this is a matter of public record. Since the presumption of Knox’s involvement was central to their investigation from the beginning, they had a major reputational stake in not admitting that it had been based on weak premises, and all the information they received was thus evaluated in light of their original hypothesis.
As for your distinction between false confession and story-changing, the relevance of false confession here is simply that it is generally the most extreme form of story changing under duress from the police- false self incrimination. If people can regularly be induced to falsely self-incriminate, it should be no surprise if they can be induced to falsely incriminate others. The fact that Amanda Knox changed her testimony should be evaluated in light of the fact that she changed it to something that the police had known motive to pressure her for, and when she was removed from her conditions of duress, she immediately recanted. If we are to take this as evidence of anyone’s wrongdoing, it should be that of the police, since we can take it as a measure of their misconduct that they convinced an interrogation subject to point them to a suspect that they had already decided they wanted, who we know in light of present evidence could not have been involved.
Thank you for the additional information, about the way the investigation proceeded. As for the rest of your comment, well, you and I don’t see things quite the same way. I’ll add only that, in the minutes of video footage I’ve seen of her, Knox has never exhibited even a moment’s dignity.
You state that “some people” are innocent and yet change their story. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it does not change the fact that story-changing is, in my view, at least, strong evidence of guilt.
I’m not an expert, but AFAIK it’s common knowledge in criminology that eyewitness testimony, confessions, alibies, and other statements in a criminal investigation are often unreliable: people misremember facts, or can be induced to make false claims by suggestive or coercive interrogation techniques.
If I understand correctly, in typical legal systems (at least those which provide reasonable guarantees of due process), making an incoherent claim or repudiating a previous claim is generally not considered evidence of guilt, unless deliberate intent to mislead the investigation can be proved.
Although I’m among those persons who find it very difficult to believe that a person would make a false confession, I have read that such a confession is not unheard of and, in fact, might be made fairly frequently. Such a thing is extremely anti-social and is, I hope, criminalized itself.
I would point out that, in this particular case, we’re not really quite talking about any of the things you mention. Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis; they’re not even really incoherent claims or repudiations of previous claims—not, at least, from what I can tell from the internet pages where I’ve seen them discussed. They are story-changing, an inconsistent story, one version of which includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person). I’ll mention, too, that it’s not out of the question that Knox has falsely stated that she was slapped, by a police officer (or maybe officers, plural), when she was being questioned about the crime.
Let me add that I agree with Komponisto’s suggestion, in this essay, that .99 is probably a weak lower bound for the probability of the guilt of Guede. In fact, I would say anything below 1.00 is an insult to the spacetime continuum. Even if we add to that the fact, discussed below, in this thread, that the absence of physical evidence of Knox or Sollecito in the murder room is just about equally certain, I will say that, had I been on any of these juries, I would probably have voted Knox guilty. Komponisto’s essay and the reading that I’ve now done, because of it, have made me realize I have a simple rule in these things:
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
...and if your accusers are people who say things like the above, your probability of innocence is 10.00.
In all seriousness, you appear to be completely ignorant of the subject of coerced statements, as well as wildly overconfident about your ability to predict your own (not to mention other people’s) behavior in highly abnormal situations. This, indeed, will make it difficult for you to understand the case for Knox and Sollecito’s innocence.
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00.
This is equivalent to stating “no innocent person ever changes their story.” Empirically, this is false.
Let me provide a personal example. Several years ago, I was nearby when a co-worker was injured on the job. Two years later, I received a summons—she had ended up suing the company, and as an eyewitness, my testimony was relevant. Lawyers for the two parties asked me questions for a while; I answered to the best of my ability, as honestly as I could. My memory of the event was somewhat fuzzy by then, so I tried to only state things which I was sure I remembered accurately, and expressed my uncertainty when I was uncertain.
Once they finished their questions, they handed me a photocopy of a document in my own handwriting, written on the day of the event. The company had gotten such statements from everyone present on the day of the incident, you see. Not only had I forgotten that I had written such a thing until they showed it to me, my own handwriting directly contradicted the things I’d stated from memory minutes before!
This was before I participated in Less Wrong or was otherwise aware of the breadth of human cognitive failings. I was quite taken aback! My brain had betrayed me—not in old age, in my early twenties! I do not generally consider myself forgetful—if anything, I have an unusually good memory—yet in a fairly short span of time, my brain had managed to confabulate almost every detail of the event.
Since I became aware of it, I’ve noticed myself mid-confabulation on a regular basis. Despite how much my conscious mind values truth, my underlying hardware doesn’t seem to much care.
You may indeed be one of the lucky people with flawless recall. This is not, by a long shot, a universal human trait. Memory is fragile. It is quite easy for many humans to misremember things without knowing anything has gone wrong, especially when under significant amounts of stress.
I know very little of the Amanda Knox case specifically, so this should not be taken as an argument for either side particularly. I am only arguing that your simple rule is not a good rule—it doesn’t actually work.
Your example is a good one—of memory change across a period of two years. From work I’ve done on a family history based on my own recollections, recollections from other persons, and the occasional bit of documentary evidence, I know I don’t have “flawless recall,” but that strikes me as a bit of a straw man. In fact, I will mention, in passing, that I have been favorably impressed, in the course of the project, by the number of decades-old recollections that comport—or very-nearly comport—with surviving documentation. On one or two occasions, an erroneous memory has been interestingly explained. A family member recalls, for instance, that a photograph was taken on a date that a relative moved out of a residence, but the photograph itself is seen to be dated three years before the relative’s departure from that place. At some point, somebody else’s recollection reveals that the photograph was taken on the day a visitor to the residence left it, to go home. The false memory, in other words, included an association with the word “departure.”
It’s a matter of the details of the story-changing. I haven’t read all of Knox’s statements to the investigators and don’t know the dates on which each of them was made. They appear to have been made within a few days of the murder; and at least one of them seems to have included the following false statement, about the man named Lumumba: “I confusedly remember that he killed her [Kercher].”
The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved.
The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved.
That may be so!
This is quite different from being a literally perfect indicator of guilt. I’d feel overconfident saying there was a 95% chance I could keep my story straight if accused of murder, never mind in another country and another language.
Part of this may be calibration. 2.00 obviously isn’t even a probability, but even if I assume your 1.00 figure is simply rounded to two decimal places, it would require that less than one person in one hundred who changes their story is actually innocent. I doubt that is the case.
Such a thing is extremely anti-social and is, I hope, criminalized itself.
I doubt that criminalisation would change much. Without having researched this, I would assume that people make false confessions when they believe they would be convicted even if they didn’t confess.
I’m also not sure what’s supposed to be so extremely antisocial about it. It’s not like the police will surely catch the responsible party if only you don’t make that false confession to get a more lenient sentence.
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
Well, one shouldn’t be using such heuristics without prior research into the matter, precisely because of the typical mind fallacy. You couldn’t imagine innocent people changing their stories—but it happens. So what does that say about the validity of your inference from your own imagination to the expected behaviour of other people?
You couldn’t imagine innocent people changing their stories—but it happens. So what does that say about the validity of your inference from your own imagination to the expected behaviour of other people?
I didn’t see the above when I first read your comment; maybe I was busy forming, mentally, my reply, below, to the rest of what you said. I direct you to the comment I just posted, at 02 February 2014 11:49:15PM, in response to Wes_W.
I also doubt that criminalisation would change much.
It wouldn’t hurt.
I’m also not sure what’s supposed to be so extremely antisocial about it. It’s not like the police will surely catch the responsible party if only you don’t make that false confession to get a more lenient sentence.
Presumably, a false confession increases the likelihood that a case will be erroneously closed. That, in my estimation, makes it extremely antisocial, not least because it increases the likelihood that a criminal is not only at large but is unrecognized as such. Every person is obliged to avoid giving his or her fellow human beings false information about crime.
Are you a neurological outlier in some respect so that you could not grasp the implications of my question, or are you just being an annoyingly uncooperative communicator? By the way, I don’t believe for your claim about thousands for a split-second. I wouldn’t even believe it if you had said “hundreds”. I’ll be impressed if you manage in reasonable time for “tens”.
I had failed to generate this as a hypothesis, but now that you bring it up, it makes the second possibility appear much more likely since it provides a possible motivation for the non-cooperativity. (This looks a bit like the conjunction fallacy, but it’s not really because possibilities that I had simply failed to think of play a role here...)
I responded to what I regarded as a ridiculous question. I’ve said enough to indicate my view of the seriousness of false confession. Do you really find it difficult to believe I could come up with countless examples of behavior that, say, you and I would agree is mildly antisocial—my neighbor’s failure to trim weeds that were partly obstructing our block’s common driveway, for one? You’re being pointless.
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
At most you could convict them of something like obstruction of justice or criminal defamation, if you could actually prove mens rea beyond reasonable doubt. But convicting somebody of murder just because they made an incorrect or even deliberately false claim, would not serve the interests of justice.
In this case, Knox was actually convicted of “calunnia” against Lumumba. It could be argued whether this conviction was fair, since Knox made the claim in a statement signed at the end of a lengthy interrogation without an attorney, in a language she was not familiar with, and the statement mentions that she “remembered confusedly”. Anyway, fair or not, she already served her term for that false accusation.
Knox’s behavior was worse than mere calumny, whether Italian law recognizes that. The exchanges here and at websites devoted to discussion of the case are just a small consequence of her actions; she completely and permanently disrupted investigation of the brutal destruction of a young woman.
But convicting somebody of murder just because they made an incorrect or even deliberately false claim, would not serve the interests of justice.
I guess that depends on your definition of justice. I use the Sicilian model:
“—but I’m a superstitious man, and if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if he should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he’s struck by a bolt of lightning, then I’m going to blame some of the people in this room.”
There is a whole range of humanly possible mental states whose existence you seem to be unaware of. It includes all sorts of confusion and anxiety/panic where one’s agency is severely reduced. You can pretend that they aren’t there on the basis that you can’t simulate them, but that won’t make them any less of a fact.
Have police ever questioned me about a murder in which I knew I did not take part? Not that I recall. Can I be sure I wouldn’t change my story if I were questioned about such a thing? Yes, if the word “sure” is used in an ordinary sense.
Anyway, some part of me says that if you lie to the police when they question you about a murder in which you know I did not take part, then you are a dick and/or an idiot and if you end up in jail that serves you right and I hope you spend your time there reading this post over and over again until you intimately understand it. (But another part of me suggests that police interrogations could temporarily turn me into a dick and/or an idiot even if I previously wasn’t and therefore I shouldn’t gloat this much.)
Maybe the typical-mind-fallacy is typical, but I don’t think I’ve demonstrated it here. Rhetorically, yes, I spoke of what “I personally” would do, and I emphasized the point with a sort of quasi-mathematical use of the word “zero.” After that, I remarked as follows: “Story-changing by someone caught in a trap is a significant element of the human condition ….”
That statement seems valid. Although no examples come to my mind, the storylines of many pieces of fiction, I think, turn on such story-changing, whose significance the author feels no need to explain. Its significance lies in empathy, precisely the sort of empathy that the author of the present essay presumes to lecture about, so to speak, when he asks whether we’ve thought what a ride like the one Knox took to jail after her initial conviction is like. Because the typical person imagines such a ride well enough to want to avoid it, he or she reacts to story-changing. He or she knows that story-changing on his or her own part would be born only of incompetence in avoiding admitting guilt. He or she knows that he or she would carefully avoid story-changing, to avoid inviting such a ride.
Although no examples come to my mind, the storylines of many pieces of fiction, I think, turn on such story-changing, whose significance the author feels no need to explain.
Detective fiction isn’t exactly known for its realism.
Detective fiction isn’t exactly known for its realism.
Whether that’s true, I didn’t use the phrase detective fiction. If you’re suggesting that the significance of story-changing in a fictional narrative would be lost on you, I would say you’re probably mistaken.
Have you been questioned by police about a crime you did not commit? Have you been similarly interrogated by someone with substantial power over you in a situation where you had no other recourse? If neither, kindly cease talking out of your ass on a subject where you both have no direct experience and are in direct conflict with all research on the topic. And even if you have, where do you get sufficient evidence to have so much certainty in defiance of all known research?
For the record, I have been. And not changing your story is damn difficult. In fact, studies have shown that the guilty are substantially less likely to change their stories than the innocent. Guilty people may have a predetermined story to get straight beforehand and rehearse; innocent people do not.
That is at least dubious. The initial coroner’s report concluded that probably there was one attacker. That coroner was fired, and the new coroner reported that there was probably more than one attacker. Of course, one could assume that the first coroner was fired for incompetence and that the second report is more likely, but given the levels of incompetence and malfeasance that the Italian authorities seem to have displayed throughout the trial, I’m inclined to give more credibility to the initial report. Certainly the fact that the crime scene had a lot of physical evidence implicating Guede and basically none from anyone else, it seems that if someone else was involved they’d have to have been very indirectly involved, or there’d have to have been an amazingly selective cleanup that successfully removed all the evidence except that from Guede. This was all extensively discussed in the various threads.
From what I’ve read on the internet since I posted the statement to which you’ve replied, I tend to share your view that there’s no physical evidence, for lack of a better term, of more than one attacker. Similarly, I’ve encountered nothing that suggests the shattered window is evidence of anything other than a genuine break-in. Maybe that’s been discussed extensively in the threads, too.
I’ll qualify that, in two ways. First, the things I’ve read have been second-hand reports, at websites where the case has been discussed. I would prefer to have read primary sources, i.e., trial testimony, official evidentiary reports, and the like; but to be honest, I’m not caught up in the case enough to track such things down.
Second, my sense—identical to yours—that a cleanup that removed all the evidence except that from Guede would have to be amazingly selective is pretty much the sort of hunter-gatherer thinking that the author of the present post disparages; I don’t think I could say I’m being scientific.
Komponisto translated what documentation was available to the public in Italy for people on this site to peruse. They’re probably still linked on this or some related page, but if you’re not invested enough to check them out yourself, I’ll at least say that having spent a fair amount of time examining them during a protracted debate on the subject, I’d regard them as pretty damning to the prosecution.
Given some of your statements in this thread though, I think it might be a good idea (at least if you want to get an understanding of why people have been downvoting your comments,) to check out Privileging the Hypothesis and 0 and 1 Are Not Probabilities. Reading the entire How To Change Your Mind sequence would definitely give a better understanding of where people in this thread are coming from, but to be fair, it’s pretty long.
I appreciate your alerting me to Komponisto’s translations. If the information I’ve encountered at pro-guilty and anti-guilty websites had not given me identical impressions of the murder-room evidence, I might well be inclined to read those translations. As things are, my caveat that my sources are second hand is a minor one. From what I know, your assessment of the prosecution doesn’t sound off-base.
After seeing your links to them, I took quick looks at “Privileging the Hypothesis” and “0 and 1 are Not Probabilities.” I’m not sure I understand why you’ve suggested I read them, but I’ll address what I’ll guess you have in mind:
Suppose we say that the investigators of the Kercher murder privileged the hypothesis that Knox and Sollecito participated in it. Once convinced of it, those investigators went looking for every little thing that seemed to support it, even while the murder premises were all but shrieking: “Guede did it; case closed.” That has nothing to do with Knox’s story-changing. Whether the interrogation of Knox would have proceeded differently if the investigators had not been privileging the hypothesis, Knox gave different stories, one of which included a false accusation. Once she did that, the story-changing itself became a legitimate focus of concern. To put that another way: One can say, “If the investigators hadn’t privileged the hypothesis that Knox participated in the murders, the story-changing wouldn’t have occurred.” Maybe so—but they did privilege it, and the story-changing did occur. That is as much a part of reality as the DNA in that room.
As for probability 1.00--well, I’ve already linked to that clip from The Godfather. When William the Conqueror was having trouble getting his Saxon subjects to accept the presence in their country of their new overlords, his Norman kin, he passed a law that said, I think, that, if a Norman were to be found dead in a Saxon town, the town was guilty of killing him. The thinking, I imagine, was rather like that of Don Corleone: “[even] if he’s struck by a bolt of lightning.” That’s what I mean when I say the probability of the guilt of a person who has engaged in story-changing like Knox’s is 1.00. Whether that’s quite in the spirit of this website, I’m not equipped to say.
Suppose we say that the investigators of the Kercher murder privileged the hypothesis that Knox and Sollecito participated in it. Once convinced of it, those investigators went looking for every little thing that seemed to support it, even while the murder premises were all but shrieking: “Guede did it; case closed.” That has nothing to do with Knox’s story-changing. Whether the interrogation of Knox would have proceeded differently if the investigators had not been privileging the hypothesis, Knox gave different stories, one of which included a false accusation. Once she did that, the story-changing itself became a legitimate focus of concern. To put that another way: One can say, “If the investigators hadn’t privileged the hypothesis that Knox participated in the murders, the story-changing wouldn’t have occurred.” Maybe so—but they did privilege it, and the story-changing did occur. That is as much a part of reality as the DNA in that room.
Since the false accusation, or rather, the statement that she had an impression that Lumumba had some association with the crime, which is what Knox provided, was itself almost certainly due to pressure from the police to give exactly that testimony, then it seems more than a little unreasonable to hold her accountable for “story changing.” The only reason that Knox pointed to Lumumba was that the police pointed her to him.
Suppose that you were living in a rather more paranoid country, where the government suspected you of subversive activities. So, they took a current captive suspect, tortured them, and told them they’d stop if the suspect accused you. If the suspect caved, would you blame them for accusing you, or the government for making them do it?
Having pursued, over the past twenty-four hours or so, some information about the case, I would say that, whether she was involved in the murder, Knox is a catastrophic failure of personality formation, one who, at the least, increased the agony of Kercher’s family by making an understanding of the murder forever impossible. Sympathy for her is as much of a menace as she is.
“Personally, I don’t know the degree of likelihood of Knox’s leaving no single piece of physical evidence when someone else left all kinds of traces. I do know the odds that I personally would change my story if police were investigating me for a murder in which I had no part: zero.”
Maybe its true that you would never change your story to the police if you were being investigated for murder (can you be sure? Has this actually happened to you?) But even then, some people are innocent and yet change their story. (Also, lots of ‘confessions’ that are coerced out of people through interrogations are false).
Anyway, you can probably take the story-changing as weak evidence of guilt. However, compared to actual physical DNA evidence at the crime scene, which is STRONG evidence, this is nothing. Lets say you started out with a prior probability that Knox is guilty as being X (based on association with the victim), and then updated to be somewhat higher due to ‘story changing’. But then when you consider the physical DNA evidence you have to MASSIVELY reduce the probability. The phyisical DNA evidence is orders of magnitude more important than various speculative psychological evidence about phone call lengths and story changing and things like that.
After correctly updating for all the evidence, you come to the conclusion that Guede has a very high probability of guilt, due to his actual DNA being at the crime scene, and Knox having a very low probability.
Given that we have a strong, scientific reason to believe that Guede was there, and Knox was not, you should convict Guede and acquit Knox. (Unless there is strong evidence that Knox had conspired to have Guede do the killing for her, which there is not).
Given that the murder can be fully explained by Guede’s guilt, and that there is no strong evidence that Knox was also involved, there is no good reason to suspect Knox any more.
You’ve merely restated, at length, the paragraph to which I’ve objected. Have police ever questioned me about a murder in which I knew I did not take part? Not that I recall. Can I be sure I wouldn’t change my story if I were questioned about such a thing? Yes, if the word “sure” is used in an ordinary sense. If you’re inclined to get into, let’s say, a metaphysical debate about that, I’ll have nothing to contribute.
You state that “some people” are innocent and yet change their story. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it does not change the fact that story-changing is, in my view, at least, strong evidence of guilt. You state that it “can probably [be taken] as weak evidence of guilt,” and the author of the present post seems to grant even less than that. Story-changing by someone caught in a trap is a significant element of the human condition, an element you seek to dismiss with the phrase “speculative psychological evidence.”
I also don’t know whether it’s true that “lots of confessions” are coerced and false; but unless you have something specific to point out with respect to such supposed coercion and the changed stories of Knox, you’re just throwing up dust.
As for the DNA: again, you have merely restated the author’s remark. I personally don’t know how much significance may be attributed to the alleged absence of Knox’s DNA at the crime scene, and you’re not clarifying that by putting the word “strong” in ALL CAPS.
You say it’s a given that the murder can be “fully explained” by Guede’s guilt. From the little I’ve heard about the case, my impression is that that’s not true. It’s not a given; there’s some evidence, apparently, that more than one person was involved. If that’s incorrect, please let me know.
It’s extremely common for people to give false confessions under duress, and some judicial systems take this into account. In Japan, for instance, no person can be convicted on the basis of a confession alone; they must be able to reveal verifiable information about the crime which the police could not have already provided to them.
I participated in a psychological study a few months ago regarding interrogation. I was interrogated for a minor offense which I did not commit by a person who was led to believe that I had committed it. I pretty much had the deck stacked in my favor here; I knew that the stakes riding on the interrogation were trivial, I had, if not an actual alibi, then at least extremely strong circumstantial evidence in favor of my innocence, plus strong material evidence. I was accused of stealing money, which I would not have had time or opportunity to spend or hide, but I did not have any bills on me in the denomination I was accused of stealing, and was free to demonstrate this. I am also pretty good at retaining my reasoning and rhetorical faculties under pressure, making me better at arguing in my own defense than most people.
Nevertheless, it was a really surprisingly stressful experience. If you’ve never been interrogated for a crime you haven’t committed, then I would say that this is absolutely an area where you shouldn’t try to state with any kind of confidence what you would or would not do.
As for the evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime, to make a not-that-long story short, that’s not really the case. The prosecution had already flagged Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito by connection, as suspects, on very tenuous bases, prior to processing any forensic evidence for the case, and they continued to interpret the available evidence in light of that hypothesis, but on the whole there was really an absence of evidence favoring the involvement of multiple people over a single murderer.
The evidence for the involvement of other people besides Guede pretty much boils down to
The number of stab wounds and general brutality of the murder Evidence of the break-in being staged *DNA of other individuals aside from Guede at the scene.
However, had the prosecution not already had a vested interest in flagging multiple suspects, they would almost certainly have noted that the number of stab wounds on Kercher’s body was not actually unusual for a knife murder. Knife murders routinely involve very large number of stab wounds, because it’s much harder to kill a person with a knife than people generally expect, and when a person who’s not trained or experienced in killing people with knives attempts to do so, the result is usually a frantic extended struggle. The “evidence” that the break-in was staged did not stand up even cursory analysis by the defense, and could reasonably be described as “completely made up,” and the DNA analysis only suggested involvement of multiple people after egregious mishandling.
Had the police not walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito into the case, it’s unlikely that they would have concluded from the available evidence that any perpetrators other than Guede were involved.
Edit: With regards to Knox having specfic reason to alter her testimony in absence of her guilt, it’s important to realize that the person she flagged after her extended interrogation was the same person the police had already decided to treat as a suspect based on their interpretation of her phone messages to him0, messages which were in fact quite innocuous when viewed in light of English language colloquialism. They had a suspect they wanted her to finger, and after an interrogation in which she alleges extreme duress, she eventually does so. Then, after having a short period in which to recuperate, she repudiates her own testimony. The suspect then proves to have an airtight alibi.
Under these circumstances, if her changing testimony should be taken as indication of anything, it’s that the police probably did push her extremely hard to give a response they had already settled on. It’s very unlikely that she and the police would independently narrow down the same suspect who was unambiguously uninvolved, and the content of the proceedings clearly shows that the police, rather than Knox, were the first to point to that suspect.
Allow me to say first that I appreciate your extended comment even if I can’t say I embrace all you’ve said in it. I can believe the personal experience you’ve described was, as you say, surprisingly stressful; but let’s note that you came through it without, as I gather, either falsely confessing or changing your story. Every one of us lives with crime; every one of us lives with the possibility that, at any moment, he or she will be arrested for, or questioned about, a crime with which he or she has had nothing to do. Every one of us lives, as well, with the knowledge that some humans are liars; every one of us knows that that knowledge complicates interrogation. If any one of us is subjected to interrogation, he or she is obliged to perform seriously through it. That fact is no more subject to change than is, say, the law of conservation of energy. Either you accept it, meet your duties, and hold others to theirs—or you are antisocial.
As you know by now, I mentioned, below, that I’d got the impression that the multiple-attacker theory was insubstantial, but I do appreciate the time you’ve taken to detail problems with it. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say the police walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito to it; but I can believe the police early on developed a theory of a many-party-attack and a false break-in to cover it, a theory they never managed to abandon.
As for false confessions, I’ll point out that I didn’t bring up false confessions and really haven’t said anything about them with respect to this case, in particular. In fact, I clarified, in a comment at 02 February 2014 10:51:01PM, somewhere in these exchanges, that “Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis …. They are story-changing ….” Even in my statement that you quote, above, I mention false confessions only as something that has been brought up by our fellow-poster Ander; I ask him to comment on Knox’s “changed stories,” not any confession. Yes, false confession is something I’ve discussed in these exchanges; and what I just said, two paragraphs above, about the duty of a person being interrogated applies to false confessing and to story-changing—both. Even so, they are distinct things.
If you still don’t think this is easier said than done, you haven’t learned anything from this discussion. Confabulation under stress is a fact of human psychology. You can’t make it go away by just saying “try really hard to keep your story straight”.
You are missing an important fact about police: They are not your friends, especially not if they are investigating a case and (rightly or wrongfully) suspect you of being involved. Police’s incentives, and for the most part goals, are to get a conviction by hook or by crook, and they will lie and cheat to get it.
This seems like an unfairly high standard to hold people to in order to determine whether they are “antisocial.” After all, in an interrogation where the police do not believe the subject’s protestations of innocence, they generally take extensive measures to induce the subject to change their testimony. Interrogation subjects can be subject to considerable duress, and condemning people for changing their stories under circumstances is, hopefully, different in degree, but is not different in kind from condemning people for caving to torture. It would certainly take an unusual definition of “antisocial” to capture people who will falsely self incriminate under sufficient pressure from the police.
In fact, the police flagged Amanda Knox as a suspect on the basis of her mannerisms at the crime scene, which the lead investigator (who has come under fire for his use of implausible profiling techniques in other cases) judged to be unusual, before developing a multiple-attacker hypothesis behind the murder. Raffaele Sollecito was flagged by association with Knox, as was Patrick Lumumba on the basis of her phone contact with him. All of this is a matter of public record. Since the presumption of Knox’s involvement was central to their investigation from the beginning, they had a major reputational stake in not admitting that it had been based on weak premises, and all the information they received was thus evaluated in light of their original hypothesis.
As for your distinction between false confession and story-changing, the relevance of false confession here is simply that it is generally the most extreme form of story changing under duress from the police- false self incrimination. If people can regularly be induced to falsely self-incriminate, it should be no surprise if they can be induced to falsely incriminate others. The fact that Amanda Knox changed her testimony should be evaluated in light of the fact that she changed it to something that the police had known motive to pressure her for, and when she was removed from her conditions of duress, she immediately recanted. If we are to take this as evidence of anyone’s wrongdoing, it should be that of the police, since we can take it as a measure of their misconduct that they convinced an interrogation subject to point them to a suspect that they had already decided they wanted, who we know in light of present evidence could not have been involved.
Thank you for the additional information, about the way the investigation proceeded. As for the rest of your comment, well, you and I don’t see things quite the same way. I’ll add only that, in the minutes of video footage I’ve seen of her, Knox has never exhibited even a moment’s dignity.
I’m not an expert, but AFAIK it’s common knowledge in criminology that eyewitness testimony, confessions, alibies, and other statements in a criminal investigation are often unreliable: people misremember facts, or can be induced to make false claims by suggestive or coercive interrogation techniques.
If I understand correctly, in typical legal systems (at least those which provide reasonable guarantees of due process), making an incoherent claim or repudiating a previous claim is generally not considered evidence of guilt, unless deliberate intent to mislead the investigation can be proved.
Although I’m among those persons who find it very difficult to believe that a person would make a false confession, I have read that such a confession is not unheard of and, in fact, might be made fairly frequently. Such a thing is extremely anti-social and is, I hope, criminalized itself.
I would point out that, in this particular case, we’re not really quite talking about any of the things you mention. Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis; they’re not even really incoherent claims or repudiations of previous claims—not, at least, from what I can tell from the internet pages where I’ve seen them discussed. They are story-changing, an inconsistent story, one version of which includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person). I’ll mention, too, that it’s not out of the question that Knox has falsely stated that she was slapped, by a police officer (or maybe officers, plural), when she was being questioned about the crime.
Let me add that I agree with Komponisto’s suggestion, in this essay, that .99 is probably a weak lower bound for the probability of the guilt of Guede. In fact, I would say anything below 1.00 is an insult to the spacetime continuum. Even if we add to that the fact, discussed below, in this thread, that the absence of physical evidence of Knox or Sollecito in the murder room is just about equally certain, I will say that, had I been on any of these juries, I would probably have voted Knox guilty. Komponisto’s essay and the reading that I’ve now done, because of it, have made me realize I have a simple rule in these things:
If you change your story, the probability of your guilt is 1.00. If one version of your story includes a false accusation (i.e., of another person), that goes up to 2.00
...and if your accusers are people who say things like the above, your probability of innocence is 10.00.
In all seriousness, you appear to be completely ignorant of the subject of coerced statements, as well as wildly overconfident about your ability to predict your own (not to mention other people’s) behavior in highly abnormal situations. This, indeed, will make it difficult for you to understand the case for Knox and Sollecito’s innocence.
This is equivalent to stating “no innocent person ever changes their story.” Empirically, this is false.
Let me provide a personal example. Several years ago, I was nearby when a co-worker was injured on the job. Two years later, I received a summons—she had ended up suing the company, and as an eyewitness, my testimony was relevant. Lawyers for the two parties asked me questions for a while; I answered to the best of my ability, as honestly as I could. My memory of the event was somewhat fuzzy by then, so I tried to only state things which I was sure I remembered accurately, and expressed my uncertainty when I was uncertain.
Once they finished their questions, they handed me a photocopy of a document in my own handwriting, written on the day of the event. The company had gotten such statements from everyone present on the day of the incident, you see. Not only had I forgotten that I had written such a thing until they showed it to me, my own handwriting directly contradicted the things I’d stated from memory minutes before!
This was before I participated in Less Wrong or was otherwise aware of the breadth of human cognitive failings. I was quite taken aback! My brain had betrayed me—not in old age, in my early twenties! I do not generally consider myself forgetful—if anything, I have an unusually good memory—yet in a fairly short span of time, my brain had managed to confabulate almost every detail of the event.
Since I became aware of it, I’ve noticed myself mid-confabulation on a regular basis. Despite how much my conscious mind values truth, my underlying hardware doesn’t seem to much care.
You may indeed be one of the lucky people with flawless recall. This is not, by a long shot, a universal human trait. Memory is fragile. It is quite easy for many humans to misremember things without knowing anything has gone wrong, especially when under significant amounts of stress.
I know very little of the Amanda Knox case specifically, so this should not be taken as an argument for either side particularly. I am only arguing that your simple rule is not a good rule—it doesn’t actually work.
Your example is a good one—of memory change across a period of two years. From work I’ve done on a family history based on my own recollections, recollections from other persons, and the occasional bit of documentary evidence, I know I don’t have “flawless recall,” but that strikes me as a bit of a straw man. In fact, I will mention, in passing, that I have been favorably impressed, in the course of the project, by the number of decades-old recollections that comport—or very-nearly comport—with surviving documentation. On one or two occasions, an erroneous memory has been interestingly explained. A family member recalls, for instance, that a photograph was taken on a date that a relative moved out of a residence, but the photograph itself is seen to be dated three years before the relative’s departure from that place. At some point, somebody else’s recollection reveals that the photograph was taken on the day a visitor to the residence left it, to go home. The false memory, in other words, included an association with the word “departure.”
It’s a matter of the details of the story-changing. I haven’t read all of Knox’s statements to the investigators and don’t know the dates on which each of them was made. They appear to have been made within a few days of the murder; and at least one of them seems to have included the following false statement, about the man named Lumumba: “I confusedly remember that he killed her [Kercher].”
The utterance of such a false thing, outside, maybe, a literal torture chamber, is depraved.
That may be so!
This is quite different from being a literally perfect indicator of guilt. I’d feel overconfident saying there was a 95% chance I could keep my story straight if accused of murder, never mind in another country and another language.
Part of this may be calibration. 2.00 obviously isn’t even a probability, but even if I assume your 1.00 figure is simply rounded to two decimal places, it would require that less than one person in one hundred who changes their story is actually innocent. I doubt that is the case.
I doubt that criminalisation would change much. Without having researched this, I would assume that people make false confessions when they believe they would be convicted even if they didn’t confess.
I’m also not sure what’s supposed to be so extremely antisocial about it. It’s not like the police will surely catch the responsible party if only you don’t make that false confession to get a more lenient sentence.
Well, one shouldn’t be using such heuristics without prior research into the matter, precisely because of the typical mind fallacy. You couldn’t imagine innocent people changing their stories—but it happens. So what does that say about the validity of your inference from your own imagination to the expected behaviour of other people?
I didn’t see the above when I first read your comment; maybe I was busy forming, mentally, my reply, below, to the rest of what you said. I direct you to the comment I just posted, at 02 February 2014 11:49:15PM, in response to Wes_W.
It wouldn’t hurt.
Presumably, a false confession increases the likelihood that a case will be erroneously closed. That, in my estimation, makes it extremely antisocial, not least because it increases the likelihood that a criminal is not only at large but is unrecognized as such. Every person is obliged to avoid giving his or her fellow human beings false information about crime.
Right, because the people making false confessions aren’t under enough psychological pressure already...
Can you give me an example of what you consider to be a mildly antisocial act?
At arbitrary costs to themselves… ?
Of course. I can probably give you thousands of them.
Are you a neurological outlier in some respect so that you could not grasp the implications of my question, or are you just being an annoyingly uncooperative communicator? By the way, I don’t believe for your claim about thousands for a split-second. I wouldn’t even believe it if you had said “hundreds”. I’ll be impressed if you manage in reasonable time for “tens”.
I think he answered your question by providing an example on the spot.
I had failed to generate this as a hypothesis, but now that you bring it up, it makes the second possibility appear much more likely since it provides a possible motivation for the non-cooperativity. (This looks a bit like the conjunction fallacy, but it’s not really because possibilities that I had simply failed to think of play a role here...)
I responded to what I regarded as a ridiculous question. I’ve said enough to indicate my view of the seriousness of false confession. Do you really find it difficult to believe I could come up with countless examples of behavior that, say, you and I would agree is mildly antisocial—my neighbor’s failure to trim weeds that were partly obstructing our block’s common driveway, for one? You’re being pointless.
At most you could convict them of something like obstruction of justice or criminal defamation, if you could actually prove mens rea beyond reasonable doubt.
But convicting somebody of murder just because they made an incorrect or even deliberately false claim, would not serve the interests of justice.
In this case, Knox was actually convicted of “calunnia” against Lumumba.
It could be argued whether this conviction was fair, since Knox made the claim in a statement signed at the end of a lengthy interrogation without an attorney, in a language she was not familiar with, and the statement mentions that she “remembered confusedly”.
Anyway, fair or not, she already served her term for that false accusation.
Knox’s behavior was worse than mere calumny, whether Italian law recognizes that. The exchanges here and at websites devoted to discussion of the case are just a small consequence of her actions; she completely and permanently disrupted investigation of the brutal destruction of a young woman.
I guess that depends on your definition of justice. I use the Sicilian model:
“—but I’m a superstitious man, and if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if he should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he’s struck by a bolt of lightning, then I’m going to blame some of the people in this room.”
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v75CFbaajKg )
There is a whole range of humanly possible mental states whose existence you seem to be unaware of. It includes all sorts of confusion and anxiety/panic where one’s agency is severely reduced. You can pretend that they aren’t there on the basis that you can’t simulate them, but that won’t make them any less of a fact.
Even assuming you’re right about yourself, beware of generalizing from one example to other people.
Anyway, some part of me says that if you lie to the police when they question you about a murder in which you know I did not take part, then you are a dick and/or an idiot and if you end up in jail that serves you right and I hope you spend your time there reading this post over and over again until you intimately understand it. (But another part of me suggests that police interrogations could temporarily turn me into a dick and/or an idiot even if I previously wasn’t and therefore I shouldn’t gloat this much.)
Maybe the typical-mind-fallacy is typical, but I don’t think I’ve demonstrated it here. Rhetorically, yes, I spoke of what “I personally” would do, and I emphasized the point with a sort of quasi-mathematical use of the word “zero.” After that, I remarked as follows: “Story-changing by someone caught in a trap is a significant element of the human condition ….”
That statement seems valid. Although no examples come to my mind, the storylines of many pieces of fiction, I think, turn on such story-changing, whose significance the author feels no need to explain. Its significance lies in empathy, precisely the sort of empathy that the author of the present essay presumes to lecture about, so to speak, when he asks whether we’ve thought what a ride like the one Knox took to jail after her initial conviction is like. Because the typical person imagines such a ride well enough to want to avoid it, he or she reacts to story-changing. He or she knows that story-changing on his or her own part would be born only of incompetence in avoiding admitting guilt. He or she knows that he or she would carefully avoid story-changing, to avoid inviting such a ride.
Detective fiction isn’t exactly known for its realism.
Whether that’s true, I didn’t use the phrase detective fiction. If you’re suggesting that the significance of story-changing in a fictional narrative would be lost on you, I would say you’re probably mistaken.
Have you been questioned by police about a crime you did not commit? Have you been similarly interrogated by someone with substantial power over you in a situation where you had no other recourse? If neither, kindly cease talking out of your ass on a subject where you both have no direct experience and are in direct conflict with all research on the topic. And even if you have, where do you get sufficient evidence to have so much certainty in defiance of all known research?
For the record, I have been. And not changing your story is damn difficult. In fact, studies have shown that the guilty are substantially less likely to change their stories than the innocent. Guilty people may have a predetermined story to get straight beforehand and rehearse; innocent people do not.
That is at least dubious. The initial coroner’s report concluded that probably there was one attacker. That coroner was fired, and the new coroner reported that there was probably more than one attacker. Of course, one could assume that the first coroner was fired for incompetence and that the second report is more likely, but given the levels of incompetence and malfeasance that the Italian authorities seem to have displayed throughout the trial, I’m inclined to give more credibility to the initial report. Certainly the fact that the crime scene had a lot of physical evidence implicating Guede and basically none from anyone else, it seems that if someone else was involved they’d have to have been very indirectly involved, or there’d have to have been an amazingly selective cleanup that successfully removed all the evidence except that from Guede. This was all extensively discussed in the various threads.
From what I’ve read on the internet since I posted the statement to which you’ve replied, I tend to share your view that there’s no physical evidence, for lack of a better term, of more than one attacker. Similarly, I’ve encountered nothing that suggests the shattered window is evidence of anything other than a genuine break-in. Maybe that’s been discussed extensively in the threads, too.
I’ll qualify that, in two ways. First, the things I’ve read have been second-hand reports, at websites where the case has been discussed. I would prefer to have read primary sources, i.e., trial testimony, official evidentiary reports, and the like; but to be honest, I’m not caught up in the case enough to track such things down.
Second, my sense—identical to yours—that a cleanup that removed all the evidence except that from Guede would have to be amazingly selective is pretty much the sort of hunter-gatherer thinking that the author of the present post disparages; I don’t think I could say I’m being scientific.
Komponisto translated what documentation was available to the public in Italy for people on this site to peruse. They’re probably still linked on this or some related page, but if you’re not invested enough to check them out yourself, I’ll at least say that having spent a fair amount of time examining them during a protracted debate on the subject, I’d regard them as pretty damning to the prosecution.
Given some of your statements in this thread though, I think it might be a good idea (at least if you want to get an understanding of why people have been downvoting your comments,) to check out Privileging the Hypothesis and 0 and 1 Are Not Probabilities. Reading the entire How To Change Your Mind sequence would definitely give a better understanding of where people in this thread are coming from, but to be fair, it’s pretty long.
I appreciate your alerting me to Komponisto’s translations. If the information I’ve encountered at pro-guilty and anti-guilty websites had not given me identical impressions of the murder-room evidence, I might well be inclined to read those translations. As things are, my caveat that my sources are second hand is a minor one. From what I know, your assessment of the prosecution doesn’t sound off-base.
After seeing your links to them, I took quick looks at “Privileging the Hypothesis” and “0 and 1 are Not Probabilities.” I’m not sure I understand why you’ve suggested I read them, but I’ll address what I’ll guess you have in mind:
Suppose we say that the investigators of the Kercher murder privileged the hypothesis that Knox and Sollecito participated in it. Once convinced of it, those investigators went looking for every little thing that seemed to support it, even while the murder premises were all but shrieking: “Guede did it; case closed.” That has nothing to do with Knox’s story-changing. Whether the interrogation of Knox would have proceeded differently if the investigators had not been privileging the hypothesis, Knox gave different stories, one of which included a false accusation. Once she did that, the story-changing itself became a legitimate focus of concern. To put that another way: One can say, “If the investigators hadn’t privileged the hypothesis that Knox participated in the murders, the story-changing wouldn’t have occurred.” Maybe so—but they did privilege it, and the story-changing did occur. That is as much a part of reality as the DNA in that room.
As for probability 1.00--well, I’ve already linked to that clip from The Godfather. When William the Conqueror was having trouble getting his Saxon subjects to accept the presence in their country of their new overlords, his Norman kin, he passed a law that said, I think, that, if a Norman were to be found dead in a Saxon town, the town was guilty of killing him. The thinking, I imagine, was rather like that of Don Corleone: “[even] if he’s struck by a bolt of lightning.” That’s what I mean when I say the probability of the guilt of a person who has engaged in story-changing like Knox’s is 1.00. Whether that’s quite in the spirit of this website, I’m not equipped to say.
Since the false accusation, or rather, the statement that she had an impression that Lumumba had some association with the crime, which is what Knox provided, was itself almost certainly due to pressure from the police to give exactly that testimony, then it seems more than a little unreasonable to hold her accountable for “story changing.” The only reason that Knox pointed to Lumumba was that the police pointed her to him.
Suppose that you were living in a rather more paranoid country, where the government suspected you of subversive activities. So, they took a current captive suspect, tortured them, and told them they’d stop if the suspect accused you. If the suspect caved, would you blame them for accusing you, or the government for making them do it?
Having pursued, over the past twenty-four hours or so, some information about the case, I would say that, whether she was involved in the murder, Knox is a catastrophic failure of personality formation, one who, at the least, increased the agony of Kercher’s family by making an understanding of the murder forever impossible. Sympathy for her is as much of a menace as she is.
???