Did Amanda Knox kill Meredith Kercher?

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by GeoffP, Oct 4, 2011.

?

Is Amanda Knox guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher?

  1. Yes

    3 vote(s)
    21.4%
  2. No

    11 vote(s)
    78.6%
  1. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    No, I mean it's hypocritical in some ways to criticize Italian justice since American justice is also flawed in many ways.
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,049
    sorry Geoffp, didnt mean to quote you. I ment to quote quadraphonics
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,738
    It's a Circus Maximus.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    That's ok.

    Hardy har.

    Syzygs: I thought it was her Italian boyfriend that bought the stuff, and that it turned out to be from some time earlier. Someone must have a link, but I can't find it.
     
  8. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    If she was Meredith Kerchers roomate and knew who her friends were , why didn't Amanda know who might have killed her. Amanda sais she wasn't there when the murder happened but was there that same day talking with Meredith.:shrug:
     
  9. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    Yeah but that's not when the murder occurred.
     
  10. Gustav Banned Banned

    Messages:
    12,575
    oh?
    you seem to know an awful lot about the details

    /suspicious
     
  11. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    You'll never take me alive, copper.
     
  12. NCDane Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    155
    I voted no, although if stupidity was punishable by 20 years
    per offence AN would be serving 40 for (1) making out with
    her boyfriend within sight of a crime scene investigation, and
    (2) doing cartwheels at the police station while awaiting questioning.

    Then she earned another 20 years by fingering an innocent man,
    so she should be happy to get off with four. Maybe I should change
    my vote to "guilty".

    Oh, and crime stories are a form of entertainment for those of us
    who lack the purity of moral superiors such as Captain Kremmen.
    One of these days I will try to better myself in that regard, but for
    now I plan to continue being alert for the sound of crime story carnival barkers.
     
  13. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,383
    Would a innocent person transitioning from girlhood to womanhood when falsely accused of a crime out of fear turn around and falsely accuse somebody else of the crime? Maybe.

    Make note: If falsely accused don't falsely accuse somebody else as doing so will likely backfire.

    Then again maybe she really was involved in the crime. Make note: when guilty don't make accusations that perhaps can be proven to be lies.
     
    Last edited: Oct 7, 2011
  14. kira Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,579
    The guy who was falsely accused (Patrick Lumumba) was arrested because Knox initially said in the night of the murder she was in the house and saw Lumumba with Kercher entered Kercher's room. He was arrested for 2 weeks, but then released because he had witnesses who confirmed his alibi that he was somewhere else in the night of the murder.

    Now, what if he didn't have witnesses? What if at that time of the murder he was at his own home and sleeping and no one could confirm it?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    Quite sure he'd been in jail together with the other black guy (Rudy Guede) because of the defamation. Yes Guede was acting guilty by escaping himself to Germany and there were evidence (DNA? fingerprint?) of him in Kercher's room. But so is Knox, she was acting guilty by making lies, defamation, and there were evidence of her and her bf. The difference is that, no one seems to questioning if Rudy Guede DNA was contaminated or wasn't taken using international standard or whatever. Let's hope that he was indeed the murderer and that he was acting alone so that justice is served.
     
  15. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,383
    I don't doubt that African men would find it more difficult to get justice.

    I did not follow this case. The most interesting aspect of this case to me is Knox's accusation against Lumumba. False accusation is evil but that is not the interesting part. What interests me about this is that the false accusation was tactically stupid regardless of Knox's innocence or guilt. Is Knox stupid? If she is not stupid why did she do such a stupid thing?

    Did she do this stupid thing on her own? Did the police get her to be stupid? Did the police keep her awake for three days. Did the police convince her that she would not get a fair trial? Has Knox tried to explain why she accused Lumumba.
     
  16. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,383
    Perhaps answering my own question, Knox's father says the police intimidated Knox into implicating Lumumba. Knox's father said the police hit Knox. http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Amanda Knox police until pinned blame Lumumba/5514076/story.html

    Article goes on to say:

    Curt Knox said his daughter had been manipulated into making the accusation after police repeatedly questioned her about a text message she had sent to Mr Lumumba on the night of the murder in which she wrote "See you later."

    He said that in English it was a vague and casual expression, but Italian investigators had interpreted it as a concrete plan for the pair to meet up.

    They quizzed her about it, suggesting that she and Lumumba were part a plot to kill Kercher."
     
  17. kira Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,579
    Actually, Italian police sue Amanda Knox's parents for slander:

    http://www.examiner.com/criminal-pr...-trial-for-slander-will-they-get-a-not-guilty

    Amanda Knox's parents Curt Knox and Edda Mellas are headed for trial themselves, now that an Italian court has overturned a previous conviction of murder for their 24-year-old daughter. Knox's parents were indicted earlier this year for libel charges stemming from statements they made to newspapers that Italian police abused their daughter physically and verbally, according to KBOI Radio.

    -----

    Seven Italian police officers as well as an interpreter denied Knox's allegations and felt she was sullying their professional reputations unjustly. A judge agreed with them, saying enough evidence existed to pursue the case for slander against the Seattle Washington girl convicted at that time of the murder of Meredith Kercher.


    I think the same way. Imagine if this case would have been a US American student killed in Italy, with some African men accused for the murder. The pro kontra sides would probably have been different.
     
  18. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    Sort of lost on the relevance of the bolded part. But anyway: I suppose they well might. Fear might make you do a number of rash things. Are they distractions of last resort, or simply mistaken?

    Good point: who is checking Guede's case for evidence mishandling? I suspect his home country won't be. The wonders of uneven justice and investigation.
     
  19. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    How about as a first topic, we deal with the very basic forensic evidence:

    We can state the following: Ms. Kercher was certainly killed via blood loss from the neck wound/suffocation. This seems trivial, but isn't: in order to suffocate her, it is more likely that her assailant was stronger than she was. I note also that her jawbone was fractured, "as if her head had been forced back".

    (A moment aside while my utter disgust and burning hate, hate, hate, hate of murderers of women registers and hovers, screaming for vengeance...there, all better.)

    Now this might mean that Ms. Knox at least could not have done this solo, whether or not this argument is being advanced by anyone. If Ms. Kercher was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, Ms. Knox might have conceivably smothered her (their strength probably being proportionate), but fracturing her jawbone seems less likely. Does anyone have any information on Ms. Kercher's bloodwork post-mortem, or indeed on any of them? Some have described an apparent conflict between Ms. Knox and Ms. Kercher as a result of the latter's supposed prudery, which suggests that Ms. Kercher would not be under the influence of anything, but I don't think this is necessarily conclusive and, given her age, seems unlikely. In any event, I think fracturing her jaw less likely for Ms. Knox solo, unless she is staggeringly larger than Ms. Kercher, or had a blunt weapon to hand, which has not been suggested so far.

    Has anyone seen any additional information on the state of Ms. Kercher as found? Even that seemingly unrelated to one plea or another might be instructive, as it might be uncontaminated by the desire to press one or another conclusion home for reasons possibly independent of the facts.
     
  20. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    Ah. My apologies. No traces of either drugs or alcohol were found in Ms. Kercher's body:

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2816366.ece

    The detective in question describes Ms. Kercher as "morally upright", a statement that makes me question his presentation given some of the other facts of the accusation, but I think we must accept this statement nonetheless; there could be reason behind a misrepresentation, of course, but it is difficult to see what they could have got out of it.
     
  21. kira Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,579
    You wrote: "Ms. Kercher was certainly killed via blood loss from the neck wound/suffocation. This seems trivial, but isn't: in order to suffocate her, it is more likely that her assailant was stronger than she was".

    If the perpetrator had a knife to wound the neck, he/she/they don't have to be necessarily stronger than the victim to "suffocate" the victim. The body was found with 3 cuts on the neck. What for the need of "suffocating"? I don't even understand.


    A lot of details are not reported in the wiki entry. The murder took place on Nov 1, 2007. If you read some older articles, there are some interesting details (not showing that Knox is guilty, just interesting from the psychological point of view), for examples:

    • "Strange behaviour: Amanda and boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were seen kissing outside the crime scene. Read more."

      Not exactly what a normal person would do, a few hours after the murder was reported.

    • "Wearing a blue jumper and jeans, she addressed the presence of a vibrator in her wash bag, which Miss Kercher had complained about as one of the sources of problems between the two women in the house they shared in Perugia, Umbria. The court heard earlier that Miss Kercher thought it was “strange” that her American flatmate would leave the vibrator, along with condoms, in a clear-sided wash bag without apparent embarrassment."

      What kind of girl keeping a vibrator and leave it for her neighbour to see? Doesn't make her guilty, but quite wild, to say the least. Then, her defense team complained that the Italian media portrayed her as some sort of evil wild girl. Well, what did they expect??

    • "Knox, who goes by the nickname Foxy Knoxy, is a creative writing student whose colourful imagination has seen her pen a short story about rape. Doctor's son Sollecito, 23, by his own account likes to "try risky things"."

      Pen a short story about rape? Entertaining much?

    • Now, what about this: "Police think Knox was involved in holding her down because imprints on her face matched Knox's hands and fingers. Marks and lesions around her neck indicated that someone forcibly put their hands around it. Once immobilised she was subjected to a sickening attempted sex act, threatened further with the knife, then cut three times."

    • Also from the same link above: "Emerging from under a duvet was Miss Kercher's foot. Among the blood stains were a series of footprints, one of which was found under the duvet. When, days later, Sollecito was arrested police seized a pair of Nike trainers which they say were a clear match for the footprints, including that under the duvet."

    When I saw the picture of the crime scene, in which it shows that the dead body was covered by a duvet, I asked myself, why did the perpetrator(s) feel the need to cover the body with the duvet? Psyschologically speaking, it doesn't look like what would have been done by common (male) rapists and murderers to their victims. More like have been done by someone who felt guilty afterwards. Perhaps at the time of the event, the perpetrators were too "high"?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    Last edited: Oct 7, 2011
  22. nirakar ( i ^ i ) Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,383
    I think Children panic and tell poorly thought out lies more than adults do. (All age groups panic under pressure and act stupid while panicking to some degree.) Under pressure I think children find it more difficult to think about the future ramifications of their actions than adults do. Is age 20 a child or a adult in terms of panicking under pressure?

    I think age 20 is in between a child and an adult in terms of panicking under pressure.
     
  23. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    22,087
    Neither do I - and suffocation should not be in quotations, because it's not my supposition; it's a part of the news clipping I cited from 2009. Personally, I'd like confirmation of it.

    Edit: well, seems to be there is some confirmation of it.

    "During Friday's hearing pathologist Gianaristide Norelli, called by the Kerchers' lawyer Francesco Maresca, told the court that Miss Kercher had died from "manual suffocation".

    He said that three wounds to her throat could have ultimately contributed to her death marginally. But he said that they were probably caused as "threats.""


    The major cause of death was suffocation, seemingly. :shrug: Not what I'd thought either. All right, Kira, I task you thusly: I'm not convinced of suffocation either, though I'm not sure why. Find a reference that refutes this cause and we can refute the argument.

    However, it's also my belief that the neck wounds do also imply a position of superior strength: as a fighter when I was younger, landing a blow on the neck was a surprisingly difficult task. You could only manage it if they were caught completely off-guard or their guard opened up enough to manage it. It was rare. Three neck-wounds to me implies a stronger assailant, able to hold the victim down, in an uneven contest. My suspicion is that the first ones weren't full -force blows either, implying torture or prolonged assault. I could be wrong about that, but I doubt it. Does anyone have any access to, or perhaps have found, a more complete coroner's report?

    I know, and we must get to those, and we will. But first I think we need to be certain of the forensic details of the body itself. If not even wiki, nor a single media report, bothers to exact all the details of the corpse itself, how can one be certain of anything? I ask for your forbearance.

    Incidentally: I had the same reaction to the covering of her body by the duvet. It suggests a guilty conscience to me also; but whether this is common in rape/murders by unfamiliar assailants I cannot say. Does anyone else know?
     

Share This Page