Page 5 of 15 FirstFirst ... 34567 ... LastLast
Results 41 to 50 of 143

Thread: Amanda Knox

  1. #41
    Admiral CnCP Legend JT's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 1976
    Location
    In ma hoose
    Posts
    1,215
    Italy to reopen Kercher murder case

    Amanda Knox and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito have had their acquittals for killing Briton Meredith Kercher in 2007 overturned and face a re-run of their appeal, Italy's top court has ruled.

    The pair spent four years in jail but were freed on appeal in 2011 largely on the grounds DNA evidence was flawed.

    Miss Knox said the news was "painful" but Miss Kercher's sister said she was happy with the decision.

    Italian law cannot compel Miss Knox to return from the US for the review.

    The American student lives in Seattle but, if convicted, Italy could seek her extradition.

    In a statement, Miss Knox said: "It was painful to receive the news that the Italian Supreme Court decided to send my case back for revision when the prosecution's theory of my involvement in Meredith's murder has been repeatedly revealed to be completely unfounded and unfair."

    She added: "No matter what happens, my family and I will face this continuing legal battle as we always have, confident in the truth and with our heads held high in the face of wrongful accusations and unreasonable adversity."

    A lawyer for Mr Sollecito, Giulia Buongiorno, said: "We are hopeful. We know Raffaele Sollecito is absolutely innocent."

    Freelance journalist Andrea Vogt told the BBC she had spoken to a lawyer for the Kercher family, who said the decision was a victory for the family and a victory for the Italian judicial system.

    Miss Kercher's older sister, Stephanie, welcomed the decision as a step forward.

    "Whilst we are not happy about going back to court, and it will not bring her back, we have to make sure we have done all we can for her," she said.

    Miss Knox, now 25, and Mr Sollecito, 29, were originally sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison for killing and sexually assaulting Meredith Kercher.

    Rudy Guede was convicted in a separate trial and sentenced to 16 years. The Ivory Coast national was found guilty of sexually assaulting and stabbing Ms Kercher. He admitted to being at the house on the night of the killing, but denies murder.

    Meredith Kercher, 21 and from Coulsdon in south London, had been on a year abroad from Leeds University when she was found semi-naked in her bedroom and with her throat cut in the cottage she shared with Miss Knox in Perugia in November 2007.

    Prosecutors believed she was killed in a brutal sex game that went wrong.

    Miss Knox and Mr Sollecito were acquitted in October 2011 by an appeals court that criticised the prosecution case and noted that the murder weapon had never been found, that DNA tests were faulty and that no murder motive was provided.

    Prosecutors appealed against that ruling and argued at the Court of Cassation on Monday that the acquittals were "contradictory and illogical".

    Addressing the court, prosecutors urged the judges to "make sure the final curtain does not drop on this shocking and dire crime".

    The court examined whether there had been procedural irregularities, rather than looking at the details of the case, and it will announce the reasons for its ruling within 90 days.

    Lawyers for Miss Knox and Mr Sollecito looked grim-faced on Tuesday as they tried to get the details of the ruling from the court.

    Knox lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said the decision was "shocking" and wanted to know the "motivations" for the ruling.

    "She thought the nightmare was over," he said, adding that it was unlikely the new hearing would be held before early 2014.

    The new hearing will take place in Florence.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21936308



    Make your mind up, Italy!
    "I have adopted the Italian way of life... I may stab you!"
    — Heidi

    "You make the British Lion seem like a declawed, toothless, neutered fat tabby with the mange."
    — Weidmann1939

    "Maybe you think your being clever."
    — Weidmann1939

  2. #42
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    JT, what's your opinion of the case?

  3. #43
    Admiral CnCP Legend JT's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 1976
    Location
    In ma hoose
    Posts
    1,215
    My overriding impression is of the incompetence of the police investigation. There should have been a surfeit of forensic evidence at the crime scene but the Italian detectives' failure to harness that has resigned us to speculate on matters where clear forensic evidence should illuminate. Kercher and Knox's housemates and their friends were allowed by detectives into the house and were permitted to remain even after Kercher's body had been discovered. The door to Meredith Kercher's bedroom was put in not by the police but by one of Filomena's male friends. Some of the residents entered the property even after the scene had been "sealed" off and rifled through their possessions to determine if anything had been stolen. Quite frankly, it is extraordinary that Italian police exhibited such careless behaviour at a scene of a major crime. If this saga had occurred in England, any detective who participated in it would not have had a police career left at the end.

    It seems obvious that there are not disparate murder sites and deposition sites: that is to say, Meredith was killed where her body was found. The positioning of Kercher's body, the manner in which it was partially disrobed, and the manner in which the fatal wounds were inflicted, all point to a sadistic killing, and that would tend to suggest that the offender would have been present in the household for more than a fleeting moment. The seemingly deliberate use of several towels to absorb the copious quantities of Meredith's blood, the presence of the two bloody handprints on the wall and the floor under Kercher's body, and the single bloody footprint on the bathroom mat, indicate an inexperienced and forensically unaware killer. The prosecution should have so much forensic evidence that it doesn't know what to do with it all.

    I have no doubt that the house was not broken into that night by a mystery third-party, and that the bedroom window was instead broken (surely by the killer) to give this impression to investigators and thus mislead them. Meredith's handbag had items stolen from it, but I am convinced that this was either an opportunistic theft or, more probably, done deliberately as a distraction mechanism. In other words, the baseline motive was sexual and sadistic rather than financial; the financial aspect is either negligible or (if the theft was a distraction technique) entirely nonexistent.

    A central weakness for Knox and Sollecito is their lack of a solid alibi. They can almost muster an alibi for each other but that is of questionable value when they are accused of a joint offence. Sollecito was not decisive in his initial police interviews when answering the question whether Knox spent the night at his apartment. Sollecito sought to attribute his forgetfulness to heavy use of cannabis, but I am not convinced that even heavy usage by a man of that age without any known neurological or psychological impediments would lead to such a fickle memory. They might well have been under intense stress but, as the media would doubtless tell us, they were not very good at showing it. Furthermore, their passive electronic footprint, on Sollecito's computer and on Knox's mobile phone, suddenly vanishes at roughly the same time that night - which corresponds approximately with the time Kercher was murdered (though we do not have an accurate time of death because the pathologist was unnecessarily delayed by police in his initial, in-situ examination of Meredith's body). Still, while all of this may serve to heighten one's suspicions, it is all ultimately circumstantial. There is no forensic evidence, no CCTV evidence, no serious and credible witness testimony. The prosecution case is on any view predicated on speculation and supposition and hearsay, rather than on reasonable inferences from a compendious body of forensic and testimonial evidence. Their guilt cannot be established beyond a reasonable doubt.

    My gut instinct - and I wish to emphasise that it is an "instinct" rather than an "inference" - is that they are probably not guilty, just a little bit odd, and they failed to grasp the magnitude of events in the initial hours and days after Meredith's body was discovered. Innocent, but very stupid. They had known each other for only a brief period, and met in circumstances which I cannot characterise as anything other than innocent. It is all but unheard-of for offenders who hail from rather different backgrounds to meet in innocent circumstances and proceed to commit jointly a sadistic murder within the timeframe of just a few weeks.

    I am convinced that Meredith's murder had a sadistic motive and was committed probably by a single offender who was known to her or at least to someone within her and her housemates' circle of friends. I bear in mind that Rudy Guede opted for a fast-track trial, which seems to me to be little short of a guilty plea, and I have no particularly good reason to question his decision: the physical evidence against him is rather more compelling. There should be sufficient forensic evidence to tell us precisely who was and who was not involved in Meredith's death, but that opportunity has long since passed. In the absence of such evidence, only Guede is in a real position to provide a decisive resolution, and that is a matter for him and his conscience.
    "I have adopted the Italian way of life... I may stab you!"
    — Heidi

    "You make the British Lion seem like a declawed, toothless, neutered fat tabby with the mange."
    — Weidmann1939

    "Maybe you think your being clever."
    — Weidmann1939

  4. #44
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    Your analysis is spot on, JT. As I stated earlier on this thread, I, too, have never ever heard of a case where three such different people who barely knew each other got together on the spur of the moment and decided to murder someone else for no plausible motive (the prosecution's "sex-game-gone-awry" theory doesn't make much sense to me and there appears to be no evidence to support it). Plus, as you said, Guede essentially pleaded guilty. Not only that, he fled to Germany within 24 hours of the murder. He also came up with some cock-and-bull story about having had consensual sex with Meredith, then taking a dump and, upon exiting the bathroom, happening upon a stranger in the process of murdering Meredith (which Guede failed to report at the time). Among the many shameful aspects of this case is that, since Guede opted for a fast-track trial, his sentence is only 16 years in prison. In Italy, that means he may well be out on the streets in less than half that time--after having committed a brutal murder of an innocent girl with absolutely no justification whatsoever.

  5. #45
    Admiral CnCP Legend JT's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 1976
    Location
    In ma hoose
    Posts
    1,215
    Yes, his version of events does seem to be totally farcical. It's no surprise it got him nowhere.

    With regard to his sentence, how on earth does this "guilty plea-lite" provide such extensive mitigation? It appears to be the only factor which earned him a reduction of 14 years from the original 30-year sentence. As a general rule in English murder trials, the judge may not reduce the minimum term by more than 5 years on the basis of a guilty plea. The sixteen years to which he has been sentenced would be quite lenient even if he was to serve all sixteen of them: that he might be out even sooner is ridiculous. Again, to use England as an example, the mandatory life sentence would have applied in this jurisdiction and I would have expected a minimum term of about 30 to 34 years (making allowance for an early and unconditional plea of guilty: a contested trial would result in a longer sentence). The word "minimum" really does mean what it says: he would have had to serve all thirty of those years behind bars, and even then release would be conditional and would have to be approved by the Parole Board. Not perfect, but significantly more than the decade or so we might anticipate him to serve in Italy.
    "I have adopted the Italian way of life... I may stab you!"
    — Heidi

    "You make the British Lion seem like a declawed, toothless, neutered fat tabby with the mange."
    — Weidmann1939

    "Maybe you think your being clever."
    — Weidmann1939

  6. #46
    Senior Member Member Jeffects's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    Southern California
    Posts
    238
    DON'T KNOX THIS 'SERIOUS NETWORK'

    Just days after the Turner Broadcasting System CEO claimed that CNN "is a serious news network," it aired a childish report on "Anderson Cooper 360" about convicted murderer Amanda Knox, which appears to have been written by Amanda's parents. Next up: "The Charles Manson story, reported by Squeaky Fromme."

    Amanda, you may recall, was charged, along with her Italian boyfriend and another of her acquaintances, of sexually assaulting and murdering her English roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. Amanda and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were convicted, the convictions reversed and then the reversal reversed.

    Among the evidence for her guilt is that the murder weapon was found -- freshly bleached -- in the apartment of Amanda's boyfriend with Meredith's DNA on the blade and Amanda's DNA on the handle.

    CNN's case for Knox's innocence consists primarily of making snarky remarks about the prosecutor. This is going to be a long series if CNN plans on vindicating Knox by smearing all those who say she is guilty -- the judges, forensic scientists, police, the other man also convicted of the murder -- as well as the man falsely accused of the murder by Amanda.

    According to CNN, the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, was a total jerk for diligently investigating Meredith's murder, proving he had caved to media pressure. Then -- his jerkiest move – he briefly fell for Amanda's lies.

    Thus, according to CNN's Drew Griffin: "As the media circus grew, so did the pressure on police to solve the case. On the night of Nov. 5, the police interrogated Amanda all night and into the next morning."

    Actually, Amanda didn't show up that night at the police station until nearly 11 p.m. for a voluntary interview with Raffaele. When she told the cops she was present during Meredith's murder and she knew who the murderer was, yes, they did want to chat a bit longer, the beasts.


    CNN's Griffin: "It was during this session Amanda confessed she was at the house that night. Her boss, Patrick Lumumba, was there as well. At that point Amanda Knox officially ceased to be a witness. She became the suspect."

    Manifestly, Amanda did not become "THE suspect": Patrick Lumumba did -- for the sole reason that Amanda had accused him of the murder. Griffin skipped over that detail with the strange statement: "Her boss, Patrick Lumumba, was there as well."

    Except he wasn't. Only Amanda said he was.

    Until that night, Amanda had been lying to the police, claiming she was at her boyfriend's apartment all night the evening Meredith was murdered. It was only when Amanda found out Raffaele was no longer backing her alibi that she turned around and accused an innocent man of murdering Meredith.

    For anyone other than Amanda's parents and CNN producers, that would raise suspicions.

    Griffin tries to soften the blow, claiming: "Almost immediately after police say she confessed to her crime, Amanda Knox recants."

    Except she didn't. The next morning, she wrote out her confession from the night before. (Her story that night couldn't be used by the police because Amanda was not yet a suspect, only a witness, no different from the other friends and roommates voluntarily providing information to the police.)

    Far from "almost immediately" recanting, Amanda again falsely accused Lumumba, in writing this time, and did not retract her story for the next two weeks as Lumumba sat in jail, waiting for DNA tests to prove him innocent.

    Griffin: "She tells her parents she broke under stress. In court, she would tell jurors how a police officer struck her from behind, how she was denied water, food, a translator, and how she says under pressure by police she was asked repeatedly to dream up, imagine scenarios for how it could have happened."

    No. 1: The police had absolutely no reason to pressure Amanda into fingering Lumumba, who had no connection to Meredith and would have been about the 160,000th person on any list of possible suspects.

    No. 2: Is CNN aware that there have already been lengthy proceedings in this case? Had they checked the record, they would have discovered that Amanda dropped her claim in court about the police hitting her, her lawyers never filed a complaint about it, and Amanda is currently being sued for slander by the police for ever having made the allegation. (Maybe it was Lumumba who hit her!)

    Next, Griffin goes into full sneer-mode at the idiocy of police for believing Amanda.

    Griffin: "That's not all that wouldn't make sense because it turns out virtually everything Amanda Knox told her interrogators the night of her so-called confession was a lie. Amanda Knox in this statement told police she was in the house the night of the murder and saw her boss, nightclub owner Patrick Lumumba, and Meredith Kercher go into Meredith's room, and she heard screams. ... Police apparently didn't bother to check the facts about Lumumba."

    The dolts! But wait -- what on earth is CNN talking about? The police promptly investigated Lumumba's alibi -- which, unlike Amanda's, held up -- and tested the DNA. They released him the day after the DNA evidence came in, clearing him -- but implicating another of Amanda's acquaintances, Rudy Guede.

    On balance, isn't CNN's heroine Amanda a little more to blame for putting Lumumba in jail by falsely accusing him of murder? He certainly thinks so. In court, Lumumba's lawyer called her "Lucifer-like, demonic, satanic, diabolic," pursuing "borderline extreme behavior" and "devoted to lust, drugs and alcohol."

    Guede, by the way, was later convicted, whereupon he said both Amanda and her boyfriend were involved in Meredith's murder.

    But as Alan Dershowitz has said, the American media just adore Amanda -- at best, a liar and terrible person, at worst, a murderer -- because she's pretty.

    That's how a "serious news network" operates.

    COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER
    DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK

  7. #47
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JimKay's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2013
    Posts
    1,122
    Italy top court faults Amanda Knox acquittal

    ROME (AP) — Italy's high court on Tuesday [18 June 2013] harshly faulted the appeals court that acquitted American student Amanda Knox of murdering her roommate, saying its ruling was full of "deficiencies, contradictions and illogical" conclusions. It ordered a new appeals court to consider all the evidence to determine whether Knox helped kill the young woman.

    In March, the Court of Cassation overturned Knox's acquittal in the 2007 murder of British flatmate Meredith Kercher, 21, and ordered a new trial. On Tuesday, the high court issued its written reasoning for doing so.

    The 74-page document picked apart the 2011 appeals court decision that freed Knox, faulting the judges for ignoring some evidence, considering other evidence insufficiently and undervaluing the fact that Knox had initially accused a man of committing the crime who had nothing to do with it.

    At one point, the high court said the appeals sentence "openly collides with objective facts of the case."

    Among the undervalued pieces of evidence was Knox's own statement to police, written in English after her police interrogation, in which she wrote that while she couldn't remember clearly, she had an image of herself in her apartment kitchen with her hands covering her ears to drown out Kercher's screams.

    Kercher's body was found in November 2007 in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, a central Italian town popular with foreign exchange students. Her throat had been slashed.

    Knox, now 25, and her Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 29, were initially convicted of the crime and sentenced to long prison terms. A Perugia appeals court acquitted them in 2011, criticizing virtually the entire case mounted by prosecutors. The appellate court noted that the murder weapon was never found, said that DNA tests were faulty and that prosecutors provided no murder motive.

    Both Knox and Sollecito denied any involvement, saying they weren't in the apartment at the time.

    A young man from Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the slaying in a separate proceeding and is serving a 16-year sentence.

    In the Cassation ruling, the high court judges sharply criticized the appeals court ruling for not taking into account the sentence against Guede, which said he hadn't acted alone.

    They said the new appeal process would serve to "not only demonstrate the presence of the two suspects in the place of the crime, but to possibly outline the subjective position of Guede's accomplices." It said hypotheses ran from a simple case of forced sex involving Kercher "to a group erotic game that blew up and went out of control."

    The high court faulted the Perugia appeals court for "multiple instances of deficiencies, contradictions and illogical" conclusions, saying at one point it used an "absolutely inadequate" evaluation of facts to arrive at an erroneous judgment. The new court must conduct a full examination of evidence to resolve the ambiguities, it said.

    Specifically, it faulted the appeals court for undervaluing the fact that Knox had initially identified local bar owner Diya "Patrick" Lumumba as the killer. Lumumba was jailed for two weeks but eventually freed after police determined he had nothing to do with Kercher's murder.

    "Even though she was young, Knox was a mature girl with an adequate level of culture, born and raised in a country whose laws don't permit one to gratuitously accuse someone else just to get out of an embarrassing situation," the court said.

    It said the failure of the appeals court to consider Knox's false accusation together with the murder charge was "manifestly illogical" and must be reconsidered by the new appeals court.

    Knox was convicted of slandering Lumumba; she denies the charge and says she was pressured into making the false accusation by overzealous police interrogators.

    The high court judges also sharply criticized the appeals court for glossing over what prosecutors say was a robbery staged by the suspects in the apartment to throw police off their trail.

    The judges noted that the glass from a broken window shattered inside the apartment, not outside, indicating that it was broken from the inside. In addition, there was no evidence that the outside wall had been scaled by the purported robber — again indicating it was an inside, staged job, the court reasoned.

    Knox left Italy a free woman after her 2011 acquittal, after serving nearly four years of a 26-year prison sentence. Now a University of Washington student in Seattle, she has called the reversal by the Cassation court "painful" but said she was confident she would be exonerated in the new appeals.

    Italian law cannot compel Knox to return for the new trial and her lawyers have said she has no plans to do so. It is unclear what would happen to Knox if a possible conviction from the new trial is upheld on final appeal.

    In Italy, prosecutors as well as the defense can appeal court decisions.

    No date for the new trial has been set. Florence's appeals court was chosen since Perugia only has one appellate court.

    Although Knox and Sollecito said they weren't in the apartment that night, they acknowledged they had smoked marijuana and their memories were clouded.

    Francesco Maresca, the lawyer for the Kercher family, said Tuesday he was "very satisfied" with the high court decision, saying it had taken into account all the prosecutors' and family's objections to the acquittal.

    Knox's attorney, Luciano Ghirga, said the defense would confront the upcoming appeals "serenely … knowing as always that Amanda and Raffaele weren't in the room of the crime when Meredith was killed," the ANSA news agency reported.

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/w...ittal/2436523/

  8. #48
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2011
    Location
    Missouri
    Posts
    1,277
    That Amanda Knox book deal has to be the worst in history! She got paid $4 million! $4 MILLION for a possible murderer! Not only that but there have been so many other stories in the news I doubt the book has sold well.

    Who cares about Amanda Knox anymore? The story is old news yet she gets $4 million?? INSANE!

  9. #49
    Banned TheKindExecutioner's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2011
    Location
    Missouri
    Posts
    1,277
    Amanda Knox retrial ordered

    Italy's high court has ordered Amanda Knox back for retrial over the murder of British student Meredith Kercher after determining that her acquittal was flawed and the death WAS a 'sex game gone wrong'.

    The acquittal full of "deficiencies, contradictions and illogical" conclusions, the high court ruled, ordering a fresh look at all the evidence to determine whether she did kill her flatmate Ms Kercher, 21.

    In March, the Court of Cassation overturned Knox's acquittal in the 2007 murder and ordered a new trial. The court has now issued its written reasoning.

    Ms Kercher's body was found in November 2007 in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia.

    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-n...-court-1964677

  10. #50
    Member Member Cryptic's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Posts
    61
    Quote Originally Posted by Moh View Post
    As I stated earlier on this thread, I, too, have never ever heard of a case where three such different people who barely knew each other got together on the spur of the moment and decided to murder someone else for no plausible motive (the prosecution's "sex-game-gone-awry" theory doesn't make much sense to me and there appears to be no evidence to support it).
    Though Amanda Knox was clearly convicted on noteriety rather than evidence, I dont think the proscecution's theory
    was that far fetched.

    A two people (Knox and boyfriend) who dislike an individual can develop a "mob mentality" that leads to violence that as individuals, they never would have done. Then factor in that the attack may have started as a "lets coerce the victim into playing a sex game, then we'll sexually humiliate her to teach her a lesson" and "Guede is sexually aggressive, he'll make an ideal participant, perhaps he can be goaded into taking the lead"

    Followed by.... "Yikes, Guede, either in our presence, or shortly there after, went way too far...."
    Followed b

Page 5 of 15 FirstFirst ... 34567 ... LastLast

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •