Hey, the Supreme Court annulled the conviction. Any thoughts? I’m sure this has come as a (pleasant) surprise to you.
I guess we’ll know better when they publish their reasoning in 90 days.
AnlamK
Karma: 79
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.
Hello komponisto,
By ‘why’, I mean why do courts keep changing their opinion when the evidence is the same? I know you have written on this subject a lot before (which influenced my opinion) so here are some questions (perhaps some a little basic) I have about the case. (Some may be just rehashing old facts about the case.)
(1) You write that ‘the Supreme Court has gotten the verdict it wanted.’ Why does the Supreme Court want to convict Sollecito and Know? The appeals courts cited ‘a complete dearth of evidence’ when they acquitted Sollecito and Knox—which is what I think. How did the prosecution respond to this?
(2) In the room murder was committed, no DNA evidence pertaining to Knox and Sollecito was found. How does the prosecution explain that only one assailant (Guede) left traces of DNA but the two others left no such traces?
(3) It is said that the evidence shows that Kercher was killed by multiple people. What is your take on this? Do you think it was Guede and some other accomplice? If so, do you think Guede knows more than in fact he admits?
(4) Perhaps most basically, how did Knox and Sollecito get implicated in this crime? I mean there were a lot of witnesses being questioned but how did the police/investigators somehow get the idea that Knox and Sollecito were suspects?
Thanks.
Hello,
There have been informed discussions of this subject on LW before.
Particularly to parties informed on the subject: Can someone explain the court’s reasoning? I can’t quite follow why Knox and Sollecito were first convicted, then acquitted and yet are convicted once again.
Thanks for sharing your experience. It was inspiring indeed.
The Inuit may not have 47 words for snow
The Inuit does not have 47 words for snow! Please, don’t propagate this falsehood, especially on a ‘rationality’ blog.
Edit: Sorry I read incorrectly. My apologies! It says ‘may not’…
I wonder if most of the responses to JJT’s thought experiment consider the least convenient possible world. (Recall Yvain’s insightful discussion about Pascal’s wager?)
Most of the responses that I have read try to argue that if the act of killing a healthy person to steal his organs for organ-missing people were generalized, this would make things worse.
By the way, this worry about generalizing one’s individual act feels so close to thoughts of Kant—oh the irony! - whose “first formulation of the CI states that you are to ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.’”. (Does this sound like this “What happens in general if everyone at least as smart as me deduces that I would do X whenever I’m in situation Y”″)?
But suppose this act were not to be repeated in the following (candidate?) least convenient possible world. Suppose a group of ethics students killed a healthy human to distribute his organs to organ missing people. They did this very secretly and only once to increase the total utility/happiness/quantifiable measure of goodness and they have no intention to repeat the act—precisely to parry the sorts of objections people have been voicing. And they have succeeded in increasing utility as the killed person was an ex-convict homeless guy with no family or friends. The saved individuals were cherished entrepreneurs and aging prevention scientists.
Now the question is, was their act of killing an ethical one? In a world where Eliezer Yudkowsky is the president and Less Wrongers are law-makers, should these people be jailed?
That said, I don’t think objections such as these are knock-off arguments against consequentialism, the way they may look so. I will explain why later.
“If you object to consequentialist metaethical theories”
There is no such thing as a ‘consequentialist metaethical theory’.
Consequentialism is a first-order ethical theory.
While most people here despise philosophy (see here ), I do wonder how much people actually understand philosophy.
If you (or anyone else) are still interested, I recommend this article . I think I’m pretty close to the position the author articulates.
The only consideration I can think of even close to the insightfulness of komponisto’s analysis of how the coverup is the only hard question in the Knox case would be to ask how often mothers cover up a murder of their children they were not culpable in. And when you ask it like that, then Anthony looks highly likely to be guilty.
This morning I read the following. I still don’t have statistics on this but this should be relevant:
Nicholson, who worked as a social worker on the child abuse team at Dayton Children’s before becoming director of Care House in 1998, said there are facts about the case that she finds extremely troubling. “What I can tell you definitively is that the parents of children who die accidentally don’t lie about it; they don’t wait 31 days before reporting the deaths, and those are facts of this case that are seemingly indisputable,” Nicholson said.
komponisto, I would be very interested in reading if you decided to do a similar post (to the Knox case post you had) for this case as well—even if it’s just a discussion post.
Also, you say that p(Anthony=guilty) is ‘possibly over %50’. Let’s assume it’s %50.
This claim could be interpreted as the following. Suppose that there are X many possible scenarios for what happened, given the constraints of our evidence about the case. In X/2 Anthony is guilty and in X/2, she is not guilty.
This seems implausible to me. X/2 alternate scenarios (scenarios that don’t involve Anthony’s guilt) seem too many.
What other alternate scenarios are there?
Let me note that most (all?) of this evidence is contested by the defense. Juror #3 Jennifer Ford, in her post-verdict interview with ABC news, said that she didn’t believe the evidence based on chloroform.
The stench similarly was also contested.
I personally think that Case Anthony at least caused the death of Cayley that involved criminal elements. So, I am biased—I’ve made up my mind. I could change it if someone could explain all of the above in a more plausible way.
Judging by the public uproar, I guess that most people think she is guilty. Even the jurors themselves said that they ‘were sick to their stomachs’ in delivering the verdict, which is a strange display of human psychology.
What exactly do people mean by ‘proof’? With near certainty, almost nothing can be proven.
Since the body decomposed under the soil for 30 days, it’s really hard to determine the precise case of death—even though I think some prosecution witnesses made the argument that it was a homicide. It’s hard to link the murderer with the body, since the body was discovered so much later.
I think the prosecution had enough ‘circumstantial evidence’ to get a conviction. I think that beyond a reasonable doubt, Casey Anthony was responsible for the child’s death. It may not have been murder but something happened to that child which this woman tried to cover up.
I know that the law works under the presumption of innocence but I wonder why prosecution was assumed to be under such burden of proof. Doesn’t the defense also have a burden to explain the duct tape, the stench, etc.? Has the defense met that burden? I don’t think so.
Thanks for posting this.
I don’t know about Bayes but I think Occam’s razor (simplest explanation for the data) indicates that most likely she’s guilty of murder. Here are the relevant events (as evidence) that I’m thinking about:
Casey Anthony borrowed a shovel from her neighbor on June 18th 2008. Cayley Anthony was last seen alive on June 15th 2008.
There were search queries like chloroform, ‘how to break a neck’ (and others) found on Casey Anthony’s computer—through reconstructed Firefox cache browser. The computer files were deleted to hide the data, so special software was used to reconstruct the data.
There was a month between the last time Cayley Anthony was seen alive and the time she was reported as missing. When she was reported as missing, it was the grandmother, Casey Anthony’s mother Cindy Anthony, who reported it.
During that month, Casey Anthony was seen as partying and entering ‘hot-body’ contests.
In Cindy Anthony’s call to 911, she describes the stench in Casey Anthony’s car as a foul smell ‘as if someone died in there’.
The body was found only a quarter a mile away from the house where here parents and Casey Anthony live.
There was a duct tape with the skeletal remains of the body. Same type of duct tape was also found in Anthony household.
I could go on and on and on...
The jurors acquitted Casey Anthony on the basis that there was no connection between her and the dead body of the child and that prosecutors weren’t able to prove a link between her and the dead body of the child.
My reaction is that if you look at all the circumstantial evidence, the simplest explanation that fits all the data is that she probably killed her child. Yes, you can have someone just curious about chloroform searching google. Yes, it may also have been food rotting in the car. Yes, Casey Anthony may have borrowed the shovel for gardening—but if you string together all these explanations, the final conjunction of all of them just becomes a lot less probable.
There is a reason why the Gettier rabbit-hole is so dangerous. You can always cook up an improbable counterexample to any definition.
That’s a very interesting thought. I wonder what leads you to it.
With the caveat that I have not read all of this thread:
*Are you basing this on the fact that so far, all attempts at analysis have proven futile? (If so, maybe we need to come up with more robust conditions.)
*Do you think that the concept of ‘knowledge’ is inherently vague similar (but not identical) to the way terms like ‘tall’ and ‘bald’ are?
*Do you suspect that there may be no fact of the matter about what ‘knowledge’ is, just like there is no fact of the matter about the baldness of the present King of France? (If so, then how do the competent speakers apply the verb ‘to know’ so well?)
If we could say with confidence that conceptual analysis of knowledge is a futile effort, I think that would be progress. And of course the interesting question would be why.
It may just be simply that non-technical, common terms like ‘vehicle’ and ‘knowledge’ (and of course others like ‘table’) can’t be conceptually analyzed.
Also, experimental philosophy could be relevant to this discussion.
If our situation controls our behavior (let’s try to bracket “to what extent” and “how” it does so), then wouldn’t it also control what kind of situation we will go for?
Here’s an example from an Orwell essay: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”
And then I’ve always wondered about the following: If situationism is true, why do the folk have such a robust theory of character traits? Can we provide an error theory for why people have such a theory?
Note that the folk do seem to allow for some ‘situationism’ - for example, when someone gets drunk, we admit they’ll have a different persona and some more than others.
Thursdays 7pm is a little tough for me. I have a chess game at my chess club 8pm every Thursday. Weekends work better for me.
Nonetheless, thanks for organizing.
Sorry, you’ll have to excuse a bit of my ignorance here.
Classical philosophers like Hume came up with some great ideas, too, especially considering that they had no access to modern scientific knowledge. But you don’t have to spend thousands of hours reading through their bad ideas to find the few good ones, because their best ideas have become modern scientific knowledge.
What are some of Hume’s “bad” ideas? He’s a philosopher I cherish quite a bit. I’d be interested to know what his “bad” ideas are. (Have you read Hume at all? Or anything about Hume?)
You don’t have to read Kant to think abstractly about Time; thinking about “timelines” is practically built into our language nowadays.
I think reading Kant about “Time” (why capital T?) could be a bad idea, since so many ideas about space and time were influenced by modern physics. (For instance, Kant thought that physical space, a priori, was Euclidean—please correct me if I’m misinterpreting Kant here-, which is unfortunate but completely reasonable.)
I think the most exciting idea Kant had was his attempt to establish a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy—that our perception of the world and minds were somehow limited and subject to constraints like any other object in the world. I will direct all interested parties to this podcast .
I agree with caveats. I mean I just looked up what the hell is a ‘g6’ - it turns out it’s a twin-engine airplane manufactured by Gulf Stream. (They will finish production in 2012 - it’s said. Price tag is $58M.)
Now I surely for hell didn’t need to know that but I couldn’t help myself… like a g6… so fly like a g6…
My caveat is that it may be good to accumulate seemingly useless information. You can’t after all predict when it’ll be handy.
I’m just surprised to see that the Kercher family is sad that the accused were acquitted.
Why do the Kercher family think that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are guilty?
Update: Here’s a clue to the family’s thinking: