Headsup: To those many lawyers amazed that Knox did not get on the witness stand to head off a certain re-conviction: the best guess among Italian lawyers is that Knox's own lawyers feared ANOTHER calunnia charge if she repeated the crackpot and highly disprovable claims that she was tortured. The tough calunnia law is primarily a pushback measure against mafia meddling which is widely suspected in this case.

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #2

Posted by James Raper

Sequential images all from courthouse; court was closed to press

Reflections

These are my reflections, as a lawyer, on the Motivation of the Florence Appeal Court re Amanda Knox’s conviction for criminal defamation of Patrick Lumumba

This appeal was heard in Florence before the presiding appeal judge Dr Anna Sacco and the reporting judge Angelo Grieco. The offence for which Knox was convicted was pursuant to Article 368 of the Italian Penal Code. It is worth stating the offence as follows –

Anyone who with a denunciation, complaint demand or request, even anonymously or under a false name, directs a judicial authority or other authority with an obligation to report, to blame someone for a crime who he knows is innocent, that is he fabricates evidence against someone, shall be punished with imprisonment from two to six years.

Knox had been convicted of the offence at trial in 2009 - where the evidence was that she had named Lumumba as Meredith’s murderer, effectively as a witness herself present in the cottage at the time - and then again on her first appeal before the Hellmann court in 2011, and then again on her final appeal to the 1st Chambers of the Supreme Court in 2013. Her conviction for the offence thus became definitive under Italian law.

Why then did the Italian Supreme Court (in Italy it was reported that it was the 5th Chambers) refer the conviction to the Florence Appeal Court for a review? I have my suspicions as to the 5th Chambers’ motive for taking this step but a more charitable and legalistic view would be that it was a tidying up exercise pursuant to an alteration that had been made to Italian law by a Legislative Decree in October 2022.

The Florence Appeal Court refers to this in its Motivation. Basically, the Decree states that henceforth there must exist a framework in the Italian judicial system for implementing, in it’s domestic law, decisions at the European Court of Human Rights that go in favour of the applicant.  As to what is meant by “implementing”, in the case in hand, it must be that such decisions by the ECHR have to be, and have to be shown to be, taken into account in achieving the final verdict. In the event the 5th Chambers excluded any discussion, let alone a critique, of these decisions, by declaring that they could not be challenged.

That ruling, however, does not apply to us.

I had not, until now, known anything about the terms of reference laid down by the 5th Chambers for the Florence Appeal Court, other than what could be gleaned from social (and the largely unreliable) media. Having now read the Motivation I now know, as the Appeal Court refers to them.

The ECHR had found three violations, or rather procedural infringements, in the case, and it was on this basis that the 5th Chambers had made the referral.

The first was to do with Knox’s treatment at the Questura on the night of the 5th/6th November. Although the ECHR dismissed the claim (under article 3 ) that she had been subjected to inhumane or degrading treatment, it did say that there should have been “an effective investigation” by law enforcement and the judicial system “to identify and punish possible perpetrators”. What was meant by this I am not entirely clear. It surely cannot mean the perpetrators of the murder. We are dealing with the defamation here so it must be a reference to the behaviour of the police oficers and whether this had a prejudicial impact on the offence that then occurred. But what would constitute an “effective investigation” other than a trial of the accused on the charge, with the hearing and cross-examination of witnesses etc, which is exactly what came to pass? What, exactly, would have been the point of an earlier, and presumably less rigorous, investigation conducted, presumably by the said perpetrators i.e the police, or at any rate by those institutionally biased in favour of them? This makes little to no sense at all to me.

The second infringement (or violation, whatever you prefer)  was to do with Knox’s lack of legal representation. The ECHR had determined that Italy “had failed to demonstrate that the restriction of access to a lawyer had not irrepairably affected the fairness of the process as a whole”. This is taken by Knox supporters as a statement that the outcome (the verdict) had been irrepairably unfair, and accordingly the verdict should be squashed.

The statement, in one brief sentence, puts together, sequentially, as if one entailed the other, the bones of a premise and then a conclusion, even if the conclusion was not expressly stated. To my mind, there is no logical structure here such as would enable anyone to draw a valid conclusion from it. There is clearly something missing. The missing part (well it is there but cleverly hidden) is an assumption, or an additional premise that holds that “restriction of access to a lawyer is irrepairably unfair”. On the face of it that might also appear a reasonable proposition. So, insert that and then at least we have a logical argument, as follows –

Restriction of access to a lawyer is irrepairably unfair

Italy failed to demonstrate otherwise

Therefore the “process” was irrepairably unfair

But the conclusion to even a seemingly valid logical argument can be unsound and the above, as it relates to the case in hand, is unsound.

For a logical argument to be sound the premises upon which it is built have to be established as true in the given circumstances. There is a reason for why the aforesaid premise is missing. It is both untrue, in the given circumstances, and highly loaded (the use of the word irrepairably!)

The assertion, as it stands, without the missing premise, is pure sophistry, and begging the question, the petitio principii fallacy. The concept of it being irrepairably unfair is as much a part of the premise as it is the conclusion , which the conclusion then expands to “the process as a whole”. Whether Italy did, or did not, fail to demonstrate otherwise is actually irrelevant as to whether what happened was fair or unfair.”

In fact it was the ECHR which had failed to demonstrate required truths. It had failed to demonstrate

(a) that Knox did have her access to a lawyer restricted. The only person who claims that this was so is, of course, Knox herself. Was the State under an obligation, in the circumstances, to ensure that she had a lawyer whether or not she wanted one? It seems to be only in retrospect that she says she did want one.

(b) that her untrue accusation against Lumumba was in fact connected to and part of, that is that it arose from an unfair “process as a whole”, whatever that means, but let us restrict it to the absence of a lawyer in this instance. Without this the logical argument is meaningless in so far as it relates to the matter in hand.

(d) that, and of course this is the crux of the matter, restriction of access to a lawyer was, in the circumstances, unfair and, indeed, irrepairably unfair.

Whether it, and the other two procedural infringements, were unfair, let alone in the case of the absence of a lawyer, irrepairably unfair, and had a material and substantive adverse impact upon the safety of the conviction for slander, the ECHR did not attempt to establish as it would under the terms of Italy’s treaty obligations as to the Convention have to be a matter for an Italian trial court to investigate and rule upon, in accordance with the law and on the evidence before it.

The ECHR would know that, and that it was a matter more appropriate for an Italian court but now with regard to the concerns the ECHR had expressed. Indeed I see the above statement as being little more than saying that. Had it been more than that, and had it been within it’s remit, then the ECHR could have, but did not, declare, in unmistakable language, that the lack of legal representation, and the other two infringements, in the precise circumstances at the time, was unfair, and impacted on what happened next – with a precise explanation as to why it so held. That it did not speaks to an understanding on it’s part that it was not competent to the task and that the task was beyond it’s remit and the generalities of Human Rights Law.

As far as Italian law itself is concerned we have (in so far as relevant) Article 63 of the Italian Procedure Code. This states that if a person who is not accused or a suspect makes self incriminatory statements to the criminal police, then the proceedings must be terminated and the accused/suspect warned that investigations may be carried out on him and that he should appoint a lawyer. If the person should have been heard as an accused or suspect from the beginning his statements shall not be used. Nothing unfair in any of that.

It is, of course, arguable that Knox had made herself a suspect when she declined to co-operate with the police over the exchange of texts with Lumumba, but even so surely only as a suspect in the murder case or, at the least, suspected of withholding information in relation to that investigation, not that she had made any self-incriminatory statements up to then, or prior to the slander of Lumumba. Actually, I would go further and say that she should already have been a suspect due to Sollecito’s prior dismissal of her alibi. However, at no stage could she have been a suspect for the offence which she then committed. One cannot be a suspect for an offence that has not yet occurred. However at the point when that did occur, Article 63 would apply. Although it is difficult for me to see how that would have assisted Knox, perhaps it played into the 5th Chambers terms of referral which excluded the Appeal Court from giving any consideration to the 1.45 and 5.45 statements that Knox signed, contrary to the ruling by Gemelli at the Supreme Court in 2008 which held them to be admissable in respect of the charge of slander only.

To be fair to the ECHR neither the trial court nor any subsequent court actually addressed the obligations imposed upon Italy by the Convention on Human Rights in their respective Motivations confirming the convictions for slander, and had they done so then perhaps that would have gone some way to mollifying the ECHR. But that is not to say that, as judges, they had not done so. A beneficial by-product of the Legislative Decree may well be that in future judges will deal have to do so to avoid being thus ensnared.

The third infringement was that the Interpreter had been too familiar with Knox and had led her on to believe that she had amnesia. This, to some extant, actually accords with the testimony of Anna Donnino.

In short, according to the 5th Chambers, these infringements may have been procedural but they had a “decisive impact (here the 5th Chambers, in the rather dogmatic and pre-emptive fashion with which we have become familiar, enters on the merit following on from a definitive verdict with which it had previously agreed) on the very moment of (Knox) making the slanderous accusations in the 1.45 and 5.45 statements.” The ECHR had not said as much. The statements therefore had to be removed, the 5th Chambers ruled, declaring that only it had an interface with the ECHR and thus be able to interpret it’s rulings! The Appeal Court, in it’s Motivation, refers to this as a “peremptory” ruling, hardly bothering to hide it’s disgust with it.

However the Appeal Court also pretty much has it’s hands tied by the effect of Article 628 which states –

“In any event a verdict (in this case the annulment of the conviction for slander) issued by a court following a Cassation [Supreme Court] order of remand may be appealed only on reasons that do not concern those that had already been decided by Cassation on the order of remand….” As it was the 5th Chambers which issued the verdict and order of remand this has the hallmark of a self entitled student being allowed to mark his own work! Nevertheless the Court of Appeal had to be careful and not fall into the trap laid for it.

What we are left with, thanks to the 5th Chamber’s (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) interface with the ECHR is the Memorial. The Memorial (the 5th Chambers said) remained to be assessed as it could not be said that it was impacted by the aforesaid infringements.

The 5th Chambers went on to say that there were 2 unanswered questions in this respect. I have to paraphrase what these were as the Motivation is a bit obtuse at this point, but they come straight out of the same playbook used by the 5th Chambers in acquitting Knox and Sollecito in 2015.

1.  Does the content of the Memorial imply the existence and content of the slanderous statements at 1.45 and 5.45? This looks to me pretty much like a trap for the Appeal Court.

2.  Is the Memorial to be taken as a retraction or confirmation of the slander?

Entry in to the merit was provided for by the Legislative Decree but that was not for the Supreme Court at this stage. Hence the referral. However we have to worry that the matter might come back to the 5th Chambers on appeal.

In the final analysis the terms of referral for the Appeal Court was that it “had to determine whether, in the light of the false evidence, the Memorial written by Knox contained statements accusatory against Lumumba made in the knowledge of his innocence, such as to uphold the guilty verdict at 1st instance”.

The Appeal Court took into account the submissions of interested parties.

According to Knox’s defence the Memorial was nothing more than a dreamlike account of fragments of a nightmare that Knox doubted had any connection to reality; flashes of blurred images etc. Furthermore, the police had already formed an investigative hypothesis of Lumumba’s involvement in the murder given that his detention was authorised (at the same time as Knox’s) at 8.30 am on the 6th, which was well before Knox (at around 13.00 hours) asked for paper on which to write her Memorial. Thus it was not the Memorial that instigated his arrest! No, it was plainly Knox’s earlier accusations. It is all really rather Fawlty Towers, isn’t it? Think Basil Fawlty and “Don’t mention the war!” when some germans come to stay at his Guest House. Here it is don’t mention the statements at 1.45 and 5.45! Also the language of the Memorial fell short of the necessary intent to commit the crime. I will come to how the Court of Appeal dealt with these submissions shortly.

Of course, in addition to the Memorial there is Knox’s letter of the 7th November which is likewise unimpacted by the aforesaid infringements.

The Appeal Court went through both documents with a fine tooth comb.

The Appeal Court also listed the submissions on the part of Lumumba. In my opinion it was rather clever in doing this as the effect was to destroy much of the subversive agenda that lay hidden in the 5th Chamber’s terms of referral all the while avoiding any charge that the Court of Appeal was itself challenging those terms. Indeed the Court of Appeal disposed of a number of these submissions in a manner making it clear that it had fully got the message from the 5th Chambers.

One of the Lumumba defence submissions was that, taking into account the first infringement mentioned by the ECHR, there needed to be a Review of Procedure hearing. That was not accepted by the Court of Appeal as it was not in the terms of referral it had received. In any event we can mention here, be it not menioned by the Court of Appeal itself, the following remark by the 5th Chambers in 2015 –

“And also, a possible decision of the European Court in favour of Ms Knox, in the sense of a desired recognition of non-orthodox treatment of her by investigators, could not in any way affect the final verdict, not even in the event of a possible review of the verdict, considering the slanderous accusations that the accused produced against Lumumba consequent to the asserted coercions, and confirmed by her before the Public Minister during the subsequent session, in a context which, institutionally, is immune from anomalous psychological pressures; and also confirmed in her Memorial, at a moment when the same accuser was alone with herself and her conscience in conditions of objective peacefulness, sheltered from environmental influence; and were even restated, after some time, during the validation of the arrest of Lumumba, before the investigating judge in charge.”

Another was that in the Memorial, which was, indeed the crux of the referral, Knox had specifically mentioned her earlier statements – “and I stand by my statements that I made last night” -  and thus it was clear from this that she had full recall of their content, and stood by it. The Court of Appeal did not fall into the trap, but re-iterating this submission in the Motivation speaks for itself.

Another, in aid of the foregoing, was Knox’s letter of the 7th November, in which Knox claimed that she had not lied and stated that “I really thought he was the murderer”. In addition, Amanda Marie Knox, at the hearing on 8 November 2007 validating the arrest before the Judge for preliminary investigations, had made use of the power not to reply and, therefore, neither at that meeting nor at any time thereafter had she or her lawyers represented to the investigators the innocence of Diya Lumumba, and yet that she was already perfectly aware of her guilt as to the slander is apparent from the content of her conversations with her mother, and then both parents together, in prison.

Turning to the Knox defence submission that a proper interpretation of the Memorial was that it contained a retraction of the accusatory statements, the Court of Appeal was of the firm view that this was not acceptable.

The Court of Appeal said – “the incidental reference in the grounds of the judgment of the ECHR to the content of the Memorial, in the sense of the alleged retraction of the statements previously made by Amanda Marie Knox, in that case evidently inferred from the interpretation given by the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Perugia in the judgment of 3 October 2011 (Hellmann, annulled by the ruling of the Court of Cassation), is therefore not relevant for the assessment of the substance to be carried out in this case. It follows that the defense, which seeks to give the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights of 24 January 2019 a broader scope than the actual one, which also extends to a binding interpretation of the substance of Knox’s Memorial of 6 November 2007, going beyond the provisions of the judgement of the Court of Cassation of 12 October 2023 (annulling the conviction and setting out the terms of referral), is therefore unfounded.”

On the Knox submission that the Memorial contained nothing but the fragments of a nightmare dimly remembered, the Court of Appeal considered whether there could be any reasonable doubt as to Knox’s ability to distinguish between reality and unreality and, indeed, whether this was relevant to the issue in hand. It was not just a case of having flashes of blurred images as Knox herself had referred to them as flashbacks –

“In the flashbacks I’m having I see Patrick as the killer, but the way the truth appears in my mind……. there’s no way for me to tell you, because I don’t remember for sure if I was at the house that night.”

The Court of Appeal, referring to Case Law, stated that doubt is only relevant to the material element of an accusation if that element does not have the character of seriousness, or is absurd, unlikely or grotesque. Even then, doubt is irrelevant if the accuser is aware of the innocence of the slandered person.

“The case law has long made it clear that the crime of slander is supplemented even if the criminal liability of a third party is maliciously put forward in doubt, provided that the complainant is aware of the innocence of those who are indicated as possible offenders.”

Logic comes into play here because if she was there, as she was definitively held to be by the 5th Chambers upon her acquital, then she must have been aware of Lumumba’s innocence and even if she was not then she must have been aware that she was fabricating evidence against him.

Furthermore the dream theme pushed by her defence is contradicted by the thread of the circumstances related by her flashbacks. Meeting Lumumba on the basketball court, then with him at the door to the house, then she curled up in the kitchen with her hands over her ears as Meredith screamed. That screaming was heard by witnesses but not suggested to her by Mignini or anybody else. Such a thread with evidential elements in support, is inconsistent with the disassociated fragments of a nightmare.

“The indication of Lumumba as the perpetrator of the murder is explicit and precise in the Memorial, written by the defendant autonomously and in solitude, in her own language and in her own hand”, the Court of Appeal held.

On the matter of intent, again this is irrelevant.

“According to the settled case-law of the Court of Cassation, slander is a crime of danger. The question to be assessed is whether, in the present case, Knox’s conduct was liable to create a risk of criminal proceedings being initiated, a requirement which can be regarded as inadequate only where the false accusation has a purpose which is manifestly and prima facie unlikely or incredible by reason of the circumstances in which it was carried out, the manner in which it was expressed or the absolute unreliability of its content, so that a finding that it is unfounded does not require any investigation. Only in such cases can the action be regarded as lacking the ability to harm the interests protected by the offending rule and constitute a criminal offense impossible under Article 49 cod. pen.

On the other hand, for the offence of slander to be capable of being characterized, it is only necessary that the false accusation contains in itself the necessary and sufficient information for the initiation of criminal proceedings against a person who is unequivocally and easily identifiable, as was certainly the case - even nominally and documentally - in the present case.”

By and large I think this is a well argued Motivation, it covers all the basic points and does nothing to put itself at odds with it’s terms of referral. It established, despite the bizarre exclusion of the signed statements, that the conviction was sound. I had not expected otherwise from a panel of reasonable and intelligent judges. It was always a slam dunk case.

I am not sure about this but I believe that Knox has been given 6o days in which to lodge an appeal, that is until the 8th October.

Friday, September 13, 2024

Florence Court Explains Second Knox Guilty Verdict For Criminal Slander #1

Posted by KrissyG

1. Overall Context

The image above shows Tuscany Chief Judge Nencini (left; 2014-15 lead judge on Knox’s main appeal) and Tuscany Appeals Court President Judge Anna Maria Sacco (second from right), the lead judge for this retrial, discussing another case.

This was Knox’s own repeat calunnia trial - a repeat of a segment of the 2009 trial. It was HER choice. It was not something Italy insisted upon. On this Knox had previously failed THREE appeals, in 2011, 2013, and (in part) 2015.

The option to request a new trial and potentially to wind back her felony conviction was offered to Knox (if she paid court costs if again found guilty) because of a bizarre and misinformed advisory to Italy from the European Court of Human Rights as we explain in earlier posts and again below.

Unlike the ECHR the Rome Supreme Court and Tuscany Appeal Court actually did their homework and now have seemingly left Knox without a leg to stand on.

Knox’s new guilty verdict was announced on 5 June by Judge Sacco. The long-form judges’ explanation (largely unique to Italy; the US and UK have no direct equivalent) signed by Judge Sacco followed several weeks ago. If there is an appeal route we don’t see it.

Our Wiki and two PMF forums and TJMK have a track record of great caution in translations, often requiring back-and-forths to Italy, and so a final English version is still several weeks away. Meanwhile this is a first of several overviews. 

2. Immediate Wider Context

Back in June Knox turned up at the Florence Court with her entourage in tow, having “defaulted” (the court’s word) by skipping the “merits” hearing back in October 2023.

The press saw Knox’s attendance as a sign that maybe she could be acquitted. But the written reasons indicate that her attendance was not optional; it was to do with showing up as ordered by the court, and so the default was revoked.

In the event, Knox declined to read out her ready prepared victory statement (though she later shared her delusional opening statement with the whole world) as the court ruled in Lumumba’s favour. It ordered that she pay an immediately enforceable €10,000 to him, plus the court costs. Her calunnia conviction was reinstated, with an amendment to one of the “aggravating” factors, as ruled on by the Fifth Chambers on 27 Mar 2015 (final verdict).

3. Immediate Narrow Background

The background of the retrial is that Knox’s defence had demanded the Calunnia conviction be quashed, owing to the ECHR finding of 24 Jan 2019, under Article 6, “right to a fair trial”, and in part Article 3, “freedom from psychological pressure”, that (a) a lawyer was not provided as of the times Knox made her verbal allegations against Patrick Lumumba, and that (b) the interpreter provided, Anna Donnino, had exceeded her remit in providing Knox emotional support (this is all the ECHR upheld; Knox had requested more, including a vast payment, but ECHR endorsed a mere token equivalent of $20,000).

To this the Florence Court now points out:

However, the Strasbourg Court did not find any infringement of Article 81 EC in substantive terms of the Convention, observing that there was “nothing to support the conclusion that the applicant had been subjected to the inhuman and degrading treatment complained of.”

The only remaining allowable evidence re the calunnia charge was the written document dated 6 Nov 2007, which Knox had hand-written around noon and gleefully handed to policewoman Ficarra as “a gift” after having provided two signed statements after midnight.

It was thus decided by the Central Court of Cassation (Supreme Court) on 10 Oct 2023 that the case could go back down to retrial, with the two typed and signed statements impermissible, and the remaining independently-written post-noon one assessed on its merits as to whether it could be said to be a case of Aggravated Criminal Calunnia against Lumumba.

“Aggravated” relates to a serious crime that attracts more than ten years imprisonment and accordingly:

... of teleological connection, ex art. 61 n. 2 cod. pen. for having acted in order to obtain impunity for all and, in particular, Guede Rudi Hermann for the crime of murder.

Knox was jailed for three years (2009-2011) for “multiple aggravated slander”, with some aggravating elements excluded by the Supreme Court Fifth Chambers final verdict of 27 March 2015.

The Supreme Court’s College of Legality had thus ruled that the convictions of 26 Mar 2013 and that of 27 March 2015 together with the Perugia Court of Appeal of 3 Oct 2011 – the controversial Hellmann court that saw Knox freed to fly back to America but still convicted of calunnia – could all be annulled conditional upon a retrial and possible re-conviction of calunnia albeit with time served.

Knox’s oral accusations against Lumumba had been made at around 01:00 and again at 05:45; these are the statements now barred as evidence because of the murky ECHR ruling. But Knox’s claimed ‘retraction’ was written in private and in English at circa 13:00, the same day.

The warrant executed for Lumumba’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment had been enacted at 08:30 that morning (6 Nov 2007) and thus precedes the timing of the memo in question.

4. The Defendant’s Case

Knox’s lawyers (Carlo Dalla Vedova of Rome and Luca Luparia Donati of Milan) argued thus:

... the memorial was a dream-like account of the fragments of a nightmare in which Amanda Marie Knox repeatedly admitted that she was unsure of having lived the confusingly reported experience, which re-emerged in the reality elaborated by her mind, badly prostrated after the last interrogation held the previous night. These were flashbacks which she herself doubted to the point of questioning who the real murderer was and of ruling out the possibility of being considered a witness against Diya Lumumba.

The Florence Appeal Court rejected this claim, reasoning that the language deployed was escamotage – a trick or sleazy ploy.  For something to be considered circumstantial evidence, there needs to be a logical chain of events that leads up to it and from it.

The Appeal Court now points out that Knox’s use of the clear chain of events (seeing Patrick in the basketball court – seeing him at the door - hearing Meredith’s screams) couldn’t be claimed to be a “messy dream” in particular because the event of Meredith’s screaming had been independently witnessed and verified by two separate neighbours, and because Knox was the only person with the key to access the apartment that night.

5. The Civil Party’s Case

Carlo Pacelli of Perugia representing Patrick Lumumba argued as follows.

In this regard he highlighted the part of the writing in which Amanda Marie Knox claimed that she had not lied when she had said that she thought the killer was Patrick and added immediately afterwards “I really thought he was the murderer”.

6. Court Consideration Of Arguments

The defence for Knox claimed the memo represented a retraction of the claims she had made during the early hours and a need to clarify that she was doubtful and confused.

The Florence Court rejected this, saying that far from being a retraction or a description of a dream state, it was a reiteration, with the language used not as expressing doubt but as “a ploy” or a literary device if you like.

It explained that under the criminal code, a defendant was allowed to lie about their own involvement in a crime (equivalent to the right not to incriminate oneself), but, when an innocent third party is blamed, it brings in the concept of risk brought upon against that person.

Thus, Knox had endangered Lumumba with imprisonment and the risk of a conviction of a serious crime, of which he did unfairly serve fourteen days.

In its reasoning, the court further points out the transcripts of police wire-tapping of Knox talking in prison with her mother, in which she says she felt “terrible” about what she had done to Lumumba. Putting him “in a horrible situation and in jail through her fault, reiterating that concept several times”.

And yet, the court points out, Knox failed to mention Lumumba’s innocence at her post-arrest remand hearing with Magistrate Matteini, indicating a deliberate false accusation against Lumumba. (That was the hearing where for the second time Sollecito seriously sold Knox down the river. And as per routine procedure, Matteini now took over overall management of the case from Dr Mignin.)

The court also notes:

The defendant told her mother - who spoke of possible lies spread artificially by the mass media - “But it is stupid. I can’t say any more, because I know that I was there and I can’t lie about it, I have no reason to do it.” (bold is mine).

The defence had also argued that Knox’s further memo written before 1:00 pm on 6 Nov 2007 (four days after the murder, at the Questura) was done after the time of the order of detention of Lumumba, at 08:30 am, and thus, they argue, cannot be said to have caused his arrest, her earlier statements which caused this now not being permitted as evidence.

The court dismisses this point, stating:

On the other hand, for the offense of criminal slander to be capable of being characterized, it is only necessary that the false accusation contains in itself the necessary and sufficient information for the initiation of criminal proceedings against a person who is unequivocally and easily identifiable, as was certainly the case - both nominally and documentally - in the present case.

It rejects the claim Knox was confused and bringing up false memories because of the logical nature of the sequence of events she describes, as pointed out above.

In any case, I note, personally - not the court - a false memory typically occurs when a person suffers a traumatic event and is unable to remember what happened.  Later, with the passing of time, one’s brain fills in the missing details to make sense of the forgotten parts, and these details may be false.

For a memory to be false, a traumatic event must have happened in the first place. For example, via early childhood abuse or a car crash.  If Knox had never been at the cottage whilst Meredith was murdered, how could she have a false memory of it?  It certainly wouldn’t qualify as a “false memory” in its conventional sense.

The court further writes:

To conclude this point, it must be added that - a fortiori - the essential and direct nature of the false accusation does not make it either absurd or unlikely and confirms its suitability to integrate the material element of the alleged crime.

In Knox’s read-out statement to the current hearing she said “I wanted the police to know that I was doing my best to cooperate.” But the Florence Court questions this:

It must be said that the crime of slander requires general intent, that is to say, the conscience and willingness to charge a person who is innocent of a crime, the reason for the false accusation being irrelevant (Cassation 2489 of 2000).

[snip]

Amanda Marie Knox was perfectly aware of Diya Lumumba’s innocence, as Patrick is known, from a number of elements.

The first is that the defendant was at the time of the murder of Meredith Kercher at the house and, therefore, she knew that there was no Diya Lumumba there.

The situation is clear from Knox’s own writing, which locates her inside the house, and reports a scream from Meredith (“I saw myself curled up in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I heard Meredith screaming”).

That harrowing scream, which in her account required her to press her hands to her ears and to curl up in the kitchen in an attempt not to hear it, was a fact that really happened and was clearly perceived by Capezzali Nara and Monacchia Antonella, two neighbors of the house, with dwellings located near the cottage of via della Pergola #7, who both heard her, deeming it anomalous and atrocious, so much so that they were shocked.

[snip]

Meredith Kercher’s harrowing scream, at the time of Knox writing the accusatory statement against Diya Lumumba in the noon 6 November memoriale, was an element unknown to investigators, and to anyone who could not hear it because they were not present in or near the house where the murder took place.

[snip]

That circumstance demonstrates - first - the presence of Amanda Marie Knox in the house where the homicide occurred, at the time when it occurred, a place where, moreover, she herself sits (“curled up in the kitchen with her hands over her ears”) and, secondly, that the defendant was perfectly aware of the innocence of Diya Lumumba, known as Patrick, who was certainly not in that house.

7. The Florence Court’s Conclusions

The persistence of this attitude marks a clear departure from any behavior aimed at cooperation with investigators, so often represented by the defense and by the defendant herself, most recently in her final statements.

In short, Amanda Marie Knox must be held liable for the crime of aggravated criminal slander within the meaning of Article 2(2) of Regulation No 40/94 subpart f of paragraph 368 of the penal code).

The judgment at first instance [2009] must, however, be reformulated in part, first, by considering the definitive exclusion of the aggravating teleological link by reason of the formation of the final judgment on Knox’s acquittal on the charge of participation in the murder of Meredith Kercher, handed down by the Court of Cassation on 27 March 2015, and, second, from the point of view of the penalty [actually adjusted slightly by Judge Hellman in 2011].

[There follows various court costs orders.]

Thus decided in Florence on 5/6/2024
Anna Maria Sacco, President
Angelo Grieco, Jury Manager
And six lay judges

Thursday, June 13, 2024

Knox Lie-A-Thon #4: How Myriad Past Lies About “Forced Confession” Are Sinking Her Now

Posted by FinnMacCool

Breaking news 20 December 2013. This post goes live just as the news breaks that it was Knox lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova who filed these patently false claims against the justice system of Italy with the European Court.

1. “There would be no need for these theatrics.”

Amanda Knox has not been present for any part of her latest appeal [at the Nencini court] against her own murder conviction. Nevertheless, she has made two meretricious contributions to the proceedings.

First, on the day that the prosecution opened its presentation of the case against her, she announced that her lawyers had filed an appeal against her slander conviction to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). ECHR hears only allegations of human rights abuses, which must be reported within six months of the alleged incident (or within six months after all local avenues have been exhausted; in this case none has even been explored).

This out-of-date application to an inappropriate body in pursuit of a groundless allegation is therefore bound to fail.

Knox’s second publicity stunt came on the day that her own defense lawyers began their own presentation. She sent a five-page email in English and Italian, with grammatical mistakes in each language, protesting her innocence and affirming that the reason she is not present in the court is because she is afraid of it.

There are many comments that could be made about the email, but perhaps its most grievous legal error comes in the aside where she claims that the “subsequent memoriali (sic), for which I was wrongfully found guilty of slander, did not further accuse but rather recanted that false ‘confession’.”

That singular document does not recant her previous statements (“I stand by what I said last night”), but does contain further accusations against Patrick Lumumba (“I see Patrik (sic) as the murderer”), as well as seeking to cast suspicion on Sollecito (“I noticed there was blood on Raffaele’s hand”), and on an unnamed “other person”.

However, by claiming that she has been “wrongfully found guilty” on that charge of calunnia, she is refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian Supreme Court, which has definitively found against her on that count, and also of the Hellmann appeal court (the only court to date that has not found her guilty of the main charge of murdering Meredith Kercher).

Dr Alessandro Crini presented the prosecution’s case on November 25th/26th 2013. It was not a particularly theatrical performance, but rather a very long summary of the many items of evidence against Sollecito and Knox.

The most theatrical element of the case so far has been when one of the defendants insisted that the judge should read out five vacuous pages of her email immediately before her own lawyers presented their case on her behalf.

This gives a certain dramatic irony to Knox’s claim “If the prosecution truly had a case against me, there would be no need for these theatrics”.

Such ironies appear to be lost on Knox, however, since she seems incapable of reading back over her own work for solecisms or contradictions. (In the email itself, for example, in consecutive sentences she writes: “I had no contact with Rudy Guede. Like many youth in Perugia I had once crossed paths with Rudy Guede.”)

One of the many errors she makes in the email is to put in writing some of the wild claims that she and/or her supporters have previously made regarding the witness interview she gave on the night of November 5th/6th 2007.

The purpose of the current post is to consider that interview in greater detail, using as source material primarily Knox’s memoir “Waiting to be heard” (2013) and Raffaele Sollecito’s memoir, “Honor Bound” (2013), abbreviated here to WTBH and HB respectively.

2. “When we got there they said I couldn’t come inside.”

Amanda Knox was not even supposed to be at the police station on the evening of November 5th, 2007. She should have been attending a candlelit vigil, in which Meredith Kercher’s friends, classmates and supportive well-wishers met at eight o’clock at Corso Vannucci to proceed through to the Duomo, carrying candles and photographs of the victim.

A friend of Meredith’s “a young Polish student” texted Amanda Knox to invite her to this vigil, but Knox had better things to do. (WTBH: 82) She accompanied Sollecito to his friend Riccardo’s house for a bite to eat (HB: 29) where she absent-mindedly strummed a ukulele. (WTBH:82)

Knox writes of the vigil: “I wanted to be there but the decision was made for me” because “Raffaele had somewhere else to be”. (WTBH: 82)

One consistent feature of her narrative is her refusal to accept responsibility for anything, including her failure to turn up for her murdered roommate’s vigil, but we should note also that the vigil (eight o’clock) and the dinner (nine o’clock) both take place within the timeframe of her supposed series of interrogations, which according to her email involved “over 50 hours in four days”.

By her own account, when she ignored the police’s request not to accompany Sollecito to the Questura and just came anyway, it was the first contact she had had with the police in well over 24 hours.

Let us consider what was happening in the early part of the evening of November 5th, 2007.

The police are at the station studying the evidence; Meredith’s friends are proceeding downtown with candles and photographs of the victim; and Knox is playing the ukulele at Riccardo’s house.

Far from taking part in a lengthy coercive interview, Amanda Knox had gone to her University classes as normal, had bumped into Patrick Lumumba, whom she would later accuse of Meredith’s murder, and had later skipped the vigil to have dinner with Sollecito. (WTBH:83)

Meanwhile, back at the Questura, the police could see that Raffaele Sollecito’s stories simply did not add up.

They therefore called Sollecito and asked him to come into the station for further questioning. They told him that the matter was urgent; that they wanted to talk to him alone; and that Amanda Knox should not accompany him. (HB: 29) 

Sollecito responded that he would prefer to finish eating first. (The same meal is used as an excuse for not attending the vigil at eight o’clock, and for delaying their response to the police request at around ten.) By his own account, Sollecito resented being ordered what to do by the police (HB: 29), and so he finished eating, they cleared the table together, and Amanda Knox then accompanied him to the station. (HB:30; WTBH: 83)

Naturally the police were both surprised and disappointed to see her. Their civilian interpreter, who had worked flat out through the weekend accompanying not only Amanda Knox but also the rest of Meredith’s English-speaking friends, had gone home. The only person they were planning to speak to that night was Sollecito, and even he was late. According to Knox, the police were not expecting their interview with Sollecito to take very long:

When we got there they said I couldn’t come inside, that I’d have to wait for Raffaele in the car. I begged them to change their minds. (WTBH: 83)

The police were not prepared for an interview with Amanda Knox. They had asked her not to come, and they tried to send her away when she got there. It was late on a Monday evening and there were no lawyers or interpreters hanging around on the off-chance that someone might walk into the police station and confess.

However, that’s what happened. And it is on that basis that Amanda Knox is now claiming that the interview which she herself instigated was improperly presented by the police:

I was interrogated as a suspect, but told I was a witness. (Knox email, December 15, 2013)

But she wasn’t a suspect. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to be there.

3. “Who’s Patrick?”

We will now examine Knox’s claim that “the police were the ones who first brought forth Patrick’s name” (Knox blog, November 25th, 2013).

She has already admitted in court that this is not true. In fact, it is clear from her own book that the police did not even know who Patrick Lumumba was, at that point.

If they had suspected him or anybody else, they would have brought them in for questioning, just as they had already questioned everyone else they thought might be able to throw some light on the case.

The police plan that evening was to question Sollecito in order to establish once and for all what his story was. They would perhaps have brought Knox back the following day (together with the interpreter) to see how far Knox’s story matched Sollecito’s. In the event, their plan was disrupted first because Sollecito delayed coming in, and second because when he finally arrived, he had brought Knox with him.

“Did the police know I’d show up,” Knox asks rhetorically, “or were they purposefully separating Raffaele and me?” (WTBH: 83) She does not offer a solution to this conundrum, but the answer is (b), as the patient reader will have noticed.

She thus turned up to the police station despite being expressly asked not to come. The police asked her to wait in the car and she refused, complaining that she was afraid of the dark. They allowed her inside.

Today, she might complain that she “was denied legal counsel” (Knox email, December 15th 2013) as she entered the Questura, but there was absolutely no reason for a lawyer to be present, since by her own account, all the police were asking her to do is go home.

Knox did not go home. According to WTBH, while Sollecito is in the interview room, she sits by the elevator, doing grammar exercises, phones her roommates about where to live next, talks to “a silver-haired police officer” about any men who may have visited the house (she claims to have first mentioned Rudy Guede at this point, identifying him by description rather than name) and does some yoga-style exercises including cartwheels, touching her toes and the splits.

It is at this point “somewhere between 1130 and midnight” that Officer Rita Ficarra invites Knox to come into the office so that they can put on record Knox’s list of all the men she could think of who might have visited the house.

Knox takes several pages (WTBH 83-90) to explain how she went from doing the splits to making her false accusation against Patrick Lumumba. Like much of her writing, these pages are confused and self-contradictory.

One reason for the confusion is that Knox is making two false accusations against the police, but these accusations cannot co-exist. First, she attempts to demonstrate that the police made her give the name of Patrick Lumumba. Second, she wants us to believe that Officer Ficarra struck her on the head twice.

This is denied by all the other witnesses in the room, and Knox did not mention it in her latest story about applying to ECHR. In her memoriale (WTBH: 97), she claims she was hit because she could not remember a fact correctly.

But in her account of the interview (WTBH: 88), Knox explains that Ficarra hit her because, the fourth time she was asked, “Who’s Patrick?”, she was slow in replying, “He’s my boss.” This is the exact opposite of not remembering a fact correctly. Knox is so keen to make both false charges against the police stick that she fails to notice that one contradicts the other.

Knox at least provides us with two fixed times that allow us to verify the start and finish times of the formal interview. It began at 1230, when Anna Donnino arrived to interpret, and ended at 0145 when Knox signed her witness statement.

Bearing in mind that this statement would have needed to be typed up and printed before she signed it, the interview thus took little over an hour, and was not the “prolonged period in the middle of the night” that her recent blog post pretends. (We might also remember that Knox’s regular shift at Le Chic was from 9 pm to 1 am, meaning that the interview began during her normal working hours.) (WTBH:31)

WTBH also flatly contradicts Knox’s own claim that her accusation of Lumumba was coerced by the police.

According to her own account, she first mentions her boss (although not by name) in the less formal conversation, before the interpreter’s arrival, telling the police : “I got a text message from my boss telling me I didn’t have to work that night.” (WTBH: 84)

The police appear to pay no attention to the remark (which undermines Knox’s argument that the police were pressing her to name Lumumba) but instead keep questioning her on the timings and details of what she did on the night of the murder. And Knox finds those details difficult either to recall or to invent.

Donnino arrives at half past midnight, and the formal interview begins.

Again, the focus is on the timings of Amanda Knox’s movements on the night of the murder, and again she is having difficulty remembering or inventing them. Ficarra picks up Knox’s cell phones and observes: “You texted Patrick. Who’s Patrick?” and Knox answers, “My boss at Le Chic.” (WTBH: 86)

There is a short discussion about this text message, and then a second police officer asks her: “Who’s Patrick? What’s he like?” This time Knox answers: “He’s about this tall… with braids.” They then continue to discuss the text message, and then the police ask her a third time, “Who’s this person? Who’s Patrick?” Knox again replies: “Patrick is my boss.” (WTBH: 87)

Donnino then makes the intervention about how traumatic events can sometimes affect memory. Such events certainly seem to have an effect on the memory of the police, because one of them asks Knox a fourth time: “Who’s Patrick?” At this point, Knox claims in her memoir that Ficarra struck her on the head. (WTBH: 87)

This is nothing to do with failing to remember a fact correctly, because the fact is correct: Patrick Lumumba is indeed her boss.

The police continue to believe that she is hiding something, and they ask her who she is protecting. After a few minutes of questioning along those lines, Knox has an epiphany in which she claims that the face of Patrick Lumumba appeared before her and she gasps: “Patrick… it’s Patrick.”

If we believe one of Knox’s other stories, that the police were cunningly trying to get her to name Patrick Lumumba, we might expect them to be quite pleased to have succeeded at this point. But according to Knox, their response is to ask her a fifth time, “Who’s Patrick?” The whole room must have wanted to chorus at this point, “He’s her boss!”, but according to Knox, it is she herself who simply repeats: “He’s my boss.”

4. “I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly”

Shortly after lunch on Tuesday November 6th, Knox wrote a piece of paper (known as her “memoriale”) in which she makes her first accusation that the police hit her. She hands this memoriale to Rita Ficarra, the very person she would later name as doing the hitting. We have noted above that in her account of the interview, the context Knox provides for this alleged blow is as follows:

This singularly repetitive catechism is supposed to have taken place at around one o’clock in the morning.

However, writing the following afternoon, Knox describes the event like this:

Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly. I understand that the police are under a lot of stress, so I understand the treatment I received. (WTBH: 97)

This makes no sense as a reflection on the interview as she has earlier described it. In her version of the interview, she claims that the police kept asking her the same simple question, to which she keeps replying with the same factual answer, and the blows to the head take place in the middle of all that. Yet in her “memoriale”, she claims that the blow was because she could not remember a fact correctly.

In case two mutually contradictory accounts of that false allegation are not enough, Knox also provides a couple more explanations for why she was hit. Her third bogus claim is that the police said they hit her to get her attention, which makes for a dramatic opening to Chapter 10 of WTBH:

Police officer Rita Ficarra slapped her palm against the back of my head, but the shock of the blow, even more than the force, left me dazed. I hadn’t expected to be slapped.

I was turning around to yell “Stop!” my mouth halfway open, but before I even realized what had happened, I felt another whack, this one above my ear. She was right next to me, leaning over me, her voice as hard as her hand had been. “Stop lying, stop lying” she insisted.

Stunned, I cried out, “Why are you hitting me?”  “To get your attention,” she said. (WTBH: 80)

This is a direct allegation against a named police officer, and not surprisingly it has resulted in another libel charge against Amanda Knox. It is a strong piece of writing, too: on its own, isolated from context, it reads like a trailer for the movie version. The trouble is, that when Knox later tries to set it in context, it makes no more sense than “because I didn’t remember a fact correctly” as an explanation as for why the blow came.

They pushed my cell phone, with the message to Patrick, in my face and screamed,

“You’re lying. You sent a message to Patrick. Who’s Patrick?”

That’s when Ficarra slapped me on my head.

“Why are you hitting me?” I cried.

“To get your attention,” she said.

“I’m trying to help,” I said. “I’m trying to help, I’m desperately trying to help.” (WTBH: 88)

This makes no sense. They already have Knox’s attention, and she is having no difficulty giving them a factual response to their repeated question, “Who’s Patrick?”

It is difficult to explain any logical motivation for that slap in terms of any of the three suggestions Knox has made so far: (1) because she couldn’t remember a fact correctly; (2) because she failed to answer the repeated question “Who’s Patrick?” quickly enough; or (3) to get her attention. She’d got the fact right, she’d answered the question, and they already had her attention.

Knox then provides us with a fourth version of possible reasons for the alleged slap. She describes the following encounter between herself and Rita Ficarra on their way to lunch at around two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon:

With my sneakers confiscated, I trailed [Ficarra] down the stairs wearing only my socks. She turned and said, “Sorry I hit you. I was just trying to help you remember the truth.” (WTBH: 94)

Once again, this makes no sense in the context of a blow to the head while waiting for a reply to the question, “Who’s Patrick?” It is perfectly true that Patrick Lumumba was Amanda Knox’s boss, and she had already correctly answered the same question twice, by her own account.

These are the four main WTBH versions of how Amanda Knox was struck on the head by Rita Ficarra. Perhaps she hopes that readers will choose the one they like best and will ignore its discrepancies with the others.

When testifying in court, however, Knox provided three further versions of the same alleged incident.

First, when asked to explain why she had stated in her witness account that Meredith Kercher had had sex before she died, Knox answered that the police had suggested this to her and that they hit her to make her says so in her statement (Knox testimony, June 12 2009).

Second, a few minutes later during the same testimony, she claimed that the police hit her twice before she gave the name of Patrick, to make her give a name she could not give. (WTBH: 227-8; Knox testimony, June 12 2009)

Third, later still, she tells her own lawyer that the police were screaming at her “You don’t remember”, she was struck from behind, and when she turned around she was struck again. (WTBH:227; Knox testimony, June 12 2009)

These are seven different stories Knox has told about how she was hit during her interview. Even her most generous supporters would have to admit that at least six of them must be false. Everyone else in the room at the time has testified that it did not happen.

When Knox published her fantasy claim about appealing to ECHR last month, she neglected to mention that she was hit. This essentially confirms what has been obvious for some time: Rita Ficarra did not hit Amanda Knox during the interview.

Nobody did. All seven stories are false. 

5. “She was screaming in Italian ‘Aiuto! Aiuto!’ “

However, Sollecito provides an ear-witness account of Knox’s traumatic interview, claiming that he could hear her shouting from where he was being interviewed in a nearby room. Here’s his version:

Then came a sound that chilled my bones: Amanda’s voice, yowling for help in the next room. She was screaming in Italian, “Aiuto! Aiuto!” I asked what was going on, and Moscatelli told me there was nothing to worry about. But that was absurd. I could hear police officers yelling, and Amanda sobbing and crying out another three or four times. (HB:33)

If Sollecito’s aim here is to invent a story even more ridiculous than Knox’s, he has succeeded.

For one thing, it does not match any of Knox’s seven stories about how her interview went. But even on its own terms, Sollecito’s story makes no sense. If we imagine for a moment an Italian witness or suspect being interrogated in Italian by Italian officers in an Italian police station, what possible motivation could such a woman have for shouting “Aiuto!”? Who could she be hoping might conceivably respond to her call?

How much more absurd, then, to suppose that an American woman accompanied by an interpreter would shout “Aiuto!” when by her own account she was trying to help the police with their inquiries at that point.

Perhaps Sollecito wants us to believe that Knox was offering to help the police with their inquiries, and Donnino was loudly translating it to “Aiuto!” at this point. Or perhaps, as is often the case with Sollecito, he has given so little thought to his lies that he has not made the slightest effort to make them believable.

There are other occasions when Sollecito is cavalier with the credibility of his explanations for the evidence against him. For example, when confronted with evidence that the victim’s DNA is on his kitchen knife, he suddenly remembers an occasion when he accidentally pricked her while cooking.

(Astonishingly, he repeats this absurd fiction on page 49 of Honor Bound, although he shifts the pricking to Via della Pergola and makes it a knife local to there, since it is obvious that the victim had never visited his own apartment.)

Or again, on being confronted with the (incorrect) evidence that his shoeprints have been found at the scene of the crime, he speculates to Judge Matteini that someone might have stolen his shoes and committed the murder in them. (HB:42)

Even today, Sollecito is currently making a public appeal for funds for his defense, pleading financial hardship, while taking lengthy vacations in the Caribbean, with photographs of his tropical lifestyle appearing in Oggi.

In his book, Sollecito also decides to make a claim of his own that the police struck him:

One of my interrogators opened the door noisily at one point, walked over, and slapped me. “Your father is a fine upstanding person,” he said. “He doesn’t even deserve a son like you, someone who would stand by a whore like Amanda.” (HB:36)

This is actually one of his more plausible stories. He has not named the officer, and he has created an incident to which there are no witnesses; he gives the impression that he was alone in the interview room when this officer came in.

Of course, he has made no formal complaint about this, nor has he mentioned it before publishing it in his book, nor has he named the officer or given any clue as to his identity. Nevertheless, these details simply stand in contrast to Knox’s libelous allegation, in which she named the officer, gives several contradictory accounts of how the blow occurred, and there are several witnesses all of whom deny that any such blow took place.

6. “Maybe a cappuccino would help.”

Finally, it seems only fair to speak up for Anna Donnino, the much-maligned interpreter who was given the task of accompanying Knox as she made her slanderous accusation of Patrick Lumumba.

Knox describes her arrival at the station like this:

The interpreter sat down behind me. She was irritated and impatient, as if I were the one who had rousted her from bed in the middle of the night. (WTBH:86)

While someone else must have done the rousting, by Knox’s own account it is indeed her fault that Donnino was called into the police station that night. Knox was the only English-speaker present, and she had ignored the police’s request that she stay home while they interviewed Sollecito.

Although Donnino must have had every right to feel irritable and impatient, Knox gives little evidence of it in her transcript of the interview. On the contrary, Donnino patiently volunteers an explanation that might attribute Knox’s self-contradictory stories to trauma and stress rather than deliberate lying.

Amanda Knox has often repeated her assertion that police called her a liar during that interview. For example, in the movie-trailer-type excerpt at the beginning of Chapter Ten, she writes:

They loomed over me, each yelling the same thing: “You need to remember. You’re lying. Stop lying!” (WTBH:80)

However, in the more detailed version that she gives on pages 83-90, she does not mention a single police officer calling her a liar. Only once do the police even ask her “Why are you lying?” (WTBH:88) The only person to call Knox a liar, in her account, is Anna Donnino, in the following passage:

“In English, “˜see you later’ means good-bye. It doesn’t mean we’re going to see each other now. It means see you eventually.”

In my beginner’s Italian, I had had no idea that I’d used the wrong phrase in my text to Patrick””the one that means you’re going to see someone. I’d merely translated it literally from the English.

The interpreter balked: “You’re a liar.” (WTBH:87)

The verb “balked” makes no sense here, and so let us charitably call it a printer’s error for “barked”. However, that is the only instance of Knox being called a liar her entire remembered account of the interview.

It seems that she is so reluctant to admit to having said anything that her readers might think sounds like a lie that she forgets this gives the police no context for calling her a liar. This in turn means that the only “lie” she can be accused of is her demotic interpretation of the English phrase “see you later”, in which she presents herself as correct and Anna Donnino getting it wrong.

Ironically, Anna Donnino’s next intervention, for which there are several witnesses including Amanda Knox herself, is clearly intended to suggest that failing to remember the details of a traumatic event properly may NOT be an indication of lying, but instead may be the result of the stress of the trauma:

The interpreter offered a solution, “Once, when I had an accident, I didn’t remember it. I had a broken leg and it was traumatizing and I woke up afterward and didn’t remember it. Maybe you just don’t remember. Maybe that’s why you can’t remember times really well.”

For a moment, she sounded almost kind. (WTBH:88)

“Kind” is a key word for Amanda Knox, and she continually judges people by whether they are kind to her. On this occasion, she is quite right: Anna Donnino does sound kind and helpful in volunteering this intervention. It is not a kindness that Knox would repay, however. On the contrary, in her later account of the trial, she is scathing of prosecutor Mignini’s description of Donnino as “very sweet”:

As for my interrogation at the questura, Mignini described the interpreter”” the woman who had called me “a stupid liar” and had told me to “stop lying”“”as “very sweet.” “I remember that evening how she behaved toward Amanda,” he said. (WTBH:244)

Knox has evidently forgotten that she has failed to mention anybody at all calling her a “stupid liar” during the interview, or that anybody told her to “stop lying”. Even her claim that Donnino called a liar over a translation error is illogical and is out of keeping with Donnino’s subsequent intervention.

Knox has also forgotten that the only other mention she makes of Donnino at the questura is in the following passage, from the day before the interview. While Knox is going over the events of the night of the murder in her mind, she reports: 

“”¦the interpreter walked by, looked at me, and said, “˜Oh my God, are you okay?... You’re pale”¦ Maybe a cappuccino would help. Come with me.” (WTBH: 76-77)

Once again, Knox unwittingly provides evidence that supports Mignini’s description of Anna Donnino, and undermines her own. Once again, she unwittingly provides evidence that her human rights were perfectly safe at Perugia police station.

7. “What does this say about my memory?”

The accounts of all three defendants in this case are so obviously fictitious that the subject should no longer be open for discussion. Any level of reasonable doubt that might have been acceptable to the Hellman appeal court has been removed not only by the Italian Supreme Court but even more so by the self-penned accounts published by Knox and Sollecito themselves.

Their bizarre and delusional writings will appear incredible to any objective reader who troubles to read them. The physical evidence against them - the DNA, the footprints, the knife, the faked burglary, and so on - only serves to confirm the most likely explanation for their wildly unbelievable stories - namely that they are lying to cover up their involvement in a brutal murder.

Given that his own account was patently fictitious, Guede has been fairly well advised to opt for a fast track trial which offers a reduced sentence and an abbreviated process. (Better advice might have been to plead guilty, but that is for him to choose.)

As a result, he will be eligible for parole relatively soon, even as the longwinded trials of Knox and Sollecito grind toward their conclusions. Whether or not it is right and fair for Guede to be given that parole is a separate question that will be considered in due course - even his expressions of remorse sound false and are undermined by his continuing refusal to give a plausible and honest account of what happened that night.

However justice systems all over the world are obliged to balance the rights of victims against the rights of defendants, with resultant compromises that are often uneasy and unsatisfying. Victims’ families may want the truth, but the perpetrators don’t always want to tell it.

The situation for Knox and Sollecito is different because their preposterous stories have been shored up by a coterie of supporters who in the long run have done the two defendants no favors whatsoever.

The pair have chosen the full trial process which may have postponed the final decision for several years, but which is also likely to result in much lengthier prison sentences.

It is too late now for Knox and Sollecito to opt for a fast track process, and everyone, no matter how ill-informed, can surely agree at least that the path they have chosen has been painfully slow and longwinded.

But there were many other options that, although previously open to them, have now been closed down by their supporters’ stubborn insistence that the case against them was first concocted by a vindictive prosecutor who took an early dislike to them and was subsequently supported by a vast conspiratorial network of police, judges, journalists, shopkeepers, students, friends and relatives of the victim, and so on.

This conspiracy theory is not only daft, but it provides no help at all for the two people at its core whose words and actions remain delusional and psychotic.

Amanda Knox wrote in her memoriale,  “Is the evidence proving my pressance [sic] at the time and place of the crime reliable? If so, what does this say about my memory? Is it reliable?” (WTBH 98-9). These words are a clear cry for help.

Whether or not this cry was genuine, or was simply a cunning attempt to diminish punishment, is a matter that could and should have been determined at the time by a qualified psychiatrist. Instead, Knox was provided with a set of lawyers and a PR firm both of whom were set the task of claiming and proving their client’s innocence.

Her false allegation against an innocent man was then explained as resulting from a coercive police process - another ludicrous claim, contradicted by all the available evidence, including the self contradictory accounts published by the defendants themselves.

Knox and Sollecito are damaged individuals whose grip on reality is loose and whose delusional ramblings suggest that they need urgent psychiatric help. Instead, their fantasies have been cocooned by highly vocal supporters who have enabled the fantasists to maintain a series of fictions that, in the final analysis, will almost certainly fail to stand up to legal scrutiny.

Friday, June 07, 2024

Knox Lie-A-Thon #3: Nailing New Lies In Florence Court On June 5th #1

Posted by James Raper

Patrick Lumumba at Knox & Sollecito trial in 2009

Pesky Comparisons

“She told the Court on Wednesday that police had coerced her into implicating Mr Lumumba”.

That is a hoax that needs to be thoroughly dismantled, particularly as it has such fervent acceptance amongst Knox supporters online and in incurious official media outlets.

For a start it is not, to my knowledge, a claim that she has publicly made before. We will strive in vain to find, either in her trial testimony or in her book, where and how the alleged coercion to implicate Lumumba occurred.

This from her trial testimony -

GCM - “Now what happened next? You, confronted with the [text] message, gave the name of Patrick. What did you say?” [Note: So, it was not the police who suggested Lumumba to her, as she would have it, this having to be a critical element of the alleged coercion.]

AK -  “Well, first I started to cry. And all the policemen, together, started saying to me, you have to tell us why, what happened? They wanted all these details that I couldn’t tell them, because in the end, what happened was this: when I said the name of Patrick I suddenly started imagining a kind of scene, but always using this idea; images that didn’t agree. That maybe could give some kind of explanation of the scene.”

She suddenly [note the “suddenly”] started imagining a kind of scene? And “always using this idea”? What idea was that? She does not explain. Is “idea” a synonym for “flashback”, or for a flash of inspiration?

In her “memoriale” later that day, she talks of flashes of blurred images which can only be a reference to flashbacks.

“In my mind I saw Patrick in flashes of blurred images. I saw him near the basketball court. I saw him at my front door. I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming.”

Where is the element of coercion in all of this? Even if one were to give any credence to the inappropriate pressure she says she was under from the police, there is still no coercion, let alone to falsely accuse Lumumba of murder, in what she is saying.

Incidentally, it is reported that she told the Court that she had been slapped three times round the head - roundly denied by three police officers and the Interpreter - whereas it was only twice in her trial testimony. Another example of Knox playing up the original lie.

Who is to be believed? Make your choice. Even if the choice is to believe her then, in context, it only relates to her strange inability to remember with whom the exchange of texts had been, not to the coercion she is alleging.

Even in her book she does not actually say that the police coerced her to implicate Lumumba though that, through her description of her treatment at the hands of the police was what she wanted the reader to believe, and which so many, in their ignorance, do.

But it does not add up. None of it.

As to the pressure she says she was under, that does not add up either. What was so difficult that she was unable to remember with whom the exchange of texts had been or in explaining the somewhat unremarkable content (which she tried to do later but not at the time)?

Her subsequent explanation (the day after she was detained in prison) does not make sense either.

“I’m sorry I didn’t remember before and I’m sorry I said that I could have been at the house when it happened. I was very stressed at the time and I really did think he was the murderer. I said these things because I was confused and scared. But now I remember that I can’t know who was the murderer because I didn’t return back to the house.”

The issue, for Knox, would therefore seem to have been that she had not been able to remember whether or not she had really met up with Lumumba at the cottage. So why say she had? Would being “confused” and “scared” really bring on a sudden bout of amnesia that was only to dissipate some time after, and as a credible eye witness, giving two statements, 4 hours apart, to the police, directly incriminating Lumumba?

Plenty of time there to reflect on what she had just done. That made no difference. She doubled down on it, both in her 5.45 am statement and in her Memorial.

One would think, would one not, that not being at the cottage at the time of the murder would, for her, and whatever the stressful circumstances, be a pivotal, and unshakable fact, ever present at the forefront of her mind? In her case so much so that she had already given statements to the police to that effect. This was never about her memory being affected by confusion, or by being scared, as she would have us believe, and there is simply no credible (but plenty of disprovable) evidence for the coercion she is alleging.

And finally, the 5th Chambers itself, the court which acquitted Knox and Sollecito of murder, and which referred the criminal defamation to Florence for this review in the light, apparently, of the ECHR ruling (though frankly I do not understand the reason for this, other than it was to enable Italian courts to demonstrate that in the final analysis they had indeed taken the Convention on Human Rights into account in any definitive verdict ), said the following -

“And also, a possible decision of the European Court in favour of Ms Knox, in the sense of a desired recognition of non-orthodox treatment of her by investigators, could not in any way affect the final verdict, not even in the event of a possible review of the verdict, considering the slanderous accusations that the accused produced against Lumumba consequent to the asserted coercions, and confirmed by her before the Public Minister during the subsequent session, in a context which, institutionally, is immune from anomalous psychological pressures; and also confirmed in her memorial, at a moment when the same accuser was alone with herself and her conscience in conditions of objective peacefulness, sheltered from environmental influence; and were even restated, after some time, during the validation of the arrest of Lumumba, before the investigating judge in charge.”

Wednesday, June 05, 2024

Amanda Knox Again Found Guilty of Criminal Slander; Our Further Explanation Of Why

Posted by KrissyG

Knox & husband arrive at court

1. Previous Analysis

Click for Post:  Nailing In Advance Amanda Knox’s Expected Lie-A-Thon At 10 April Retrial #1

Click for Post:  Nailing In Advance Amanda Knox’s Expected Lie-A-Thon At 10 April Retrial #2

Click for Post:  Knox Calunnia Retrial: Prosecution Makes Strong Case For Letting 3 Year Felony Sentence Stand

2. Further Analysis

Knox appeared in court in Florence today - and lo-and-behold, she did once again lie!!

Here is an excerpt of her probably dishonest statement posted today 5 June 2024 by the BBC News:

“She told the court on Wednesday that police had coerced her into implicating Mr Lumumba.

“The police threatened me with 30 years in prison, an officer slapped me three times saying ‘Remember, remember’,” Knox, 36, said.

“I’m very sorry that I wasn’t strong enough to withstand the pressure from the police,” she added, speaking in Italian.

“I never wanted to slander Patrick. He was my friend, he took care of me and consoled me for the loss of my friend (Meredith). I’m sorry I wasn’t able to resist the pressure and that he suffered.”

Lumumba was a civil plaintiff in the trial and his lawyer had asked for the calunnia conviction to be reinstated.

Let’s flashback to the original slander. 

Guiliano Mignini, Perugia state prosecutor in the initial stages, writes in his recent book, soon to be in English and for-now translated from the Italian:

“…[…]…the most important event of that week [6th – 7th Nov 2007]was precisely the false accusation made by Amanda Knox against her employer, Patrick Diya Lumumba, owner of the Pub “Le Chic”, in the historic center of the city. This slander, repeated on several occasions in the hours and days after and which would be completely unexplained if Amanda had not at least been present at the crime, played a fundamental role in the judgment of responsibility against Knox and constitutes, so to speak, the painful point against which Amanda defended herself, shifting the accusation against the policemen in front of whom she accused Patrick and against me who, however, arrived at the police station later. I would stress that, for the offense of slander against Patrick, Knox has been definitively convicted, so that she can no longer invoke pressure from the investigators to make her falsely accuse Lumumba. This crime was committed with full conscience and self-determination by Amanda, who is the only author of it and who, for this reason, was sentenced to an exemplary sentence.” p.52.

So we see Knox still tries to pin the blame on the police even today.

It is clear the Florence court was not having it, even without the disallowed documents, as highlighted by the ECHR.

“…her final conviction for slander now precludes any possibility of repeating her version that she had named Patrick because suggested to her by the Police and to escape the intolerable pressure to which she would have been subjected.” p 63

Knox even tried to blame Dr Mignini! Even though he was not present at the time.

So, if all of the courts reject Knox’ claim the police pressurised her – including the court today - then what made her name Lumumba?

Firstly, on the murder evening of 2nd Nov 2007, Knox had received Lumumba’s text message to not come in to work that evening, in the vicinity of Plaza Grimana, despite her claiming never to have left Sollecito’s apartment after arriving home from the students’ cottage at via del Pergola, at about 5:00pm (claims Knox in several sources).

Secondly, Guede remains definitively convicted of the murder and he himself admits he was at the scene but with others.

So why would Knox lie about not leaving Sollecito’s apartment and why name Lumumba to the police?

Clearly both men, Guede and Lumumba, are black African in appearance, and indeed, this was the motivation put forward by the final Fifth Chamber Supreme Court that annulled the murder charges, under the grounds of ‘insufficient evidence’, but affirmed the Calunnia conviction.

It said definitively that Knox had named Lumumba to cover up for Guede.  Its reasoning was that by deflecting the investigation towards Lumumba it covered the possibility that Guede had been seen by a neighbour but that he could be mistaken for Lumumba, whilst at the same time, deflecting suspicion away from the real perpetrators.

In his book Dr Mignini writes:

“ The connecting factor, therefore, was there, and it was made up of the very Knox that had made Lumumba known to the victim. Thus, the aggravating circumstance at issue could not be ruled out, and the slander was clearly a device that Amanda found herself “compelled” to mislead the investigators. It is clear that if Amanda was convicted of slander, it means that she accused Lumumba while aware of his innocence and that this in turn presupposes, as has been said, that the girl knew who was with her in the house of Via della Pergola and had participated in the murder. After the judgment of the Fifth Chamber, Knox was with “complete certainty” at the time and place of the crime, while Rudi killed Meredith in concurrence with two accomplices. Sollecito was (present) almost certainly. We shall see this little gem further, which, by now, is no longer open to question. P 242

This refers to Knox’ statement to the police that she had met Lumumba in the basketball court of Plaza Grimana and had taken him to the cottage to meet Meredith, whereupon he raped and killed Meredith, whilst she, Knox, covered her ears from the screams and thuds.

We might ask why Knox bothered to appeal the Calunnia charge, given the conviction has now been reaffirmed on six occasions and has never been annulled nor once declared ‘not guilty’ at any stage. 

Given the aggravated murder conviction was overturned twice (Hellmann and Marasca/Bruno) you might think Knox would just shrug it off, having served the three-year sentence, plus one year on remand, and was now free, back in Seattle, and having largely lost on most points of her ECHR claim, to just get on with her life with her young family.

Most people, apart from those who have followed the case closely probably are not even aware she was still convicted of a serious crime, and from newspaper reports assumed she had been ‘exonerated’ of everything. 

By bringing this back to appeal and re-trial, the whole world is now more aware than ever, that Amanda Knox accused an innocent man of the worse crime known to man, a man who himself had a young child, and a man whom she referred to as ‘a friend’ in court today.

And what does it say about her lack of empathy that getting her conviction quashed was more important to her than allowing Lumumba justice for the terrible wrong, which was purposefully and callously done to him by Knox herself?  What kind of a person does that?

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Knox Calunnia Retrial: Prosecution Makes Strong Case For Letting 3 Year Felony Sentence Stand

Posted by Our Main Posters

The Prosecutor General of Tuscany

1. Today’s Happenings

The Florence court met for its first tense and briefly heated session today.

The verdict for Knox in the calunnia retrial, in which she is accused of criminal slander against Patrick Lumumba, her boss, is postponed to 5 June.

The Florence Prosecutor-General Dr Ettore Squillace Greco (tellingly a very big gun) asked for confirmation of the three-year sentence for Knox, who was provisionally acquitted of murder by the Supreme Court’s Fifth Chambers (bizarrely, that is the family court) in 2015.

During the session’s opening, the fiery lawyer Carlo Pacelli, Patrick Lumumba’s lawyer, shouted “Amanda is a liar” to Ms Knox’s lawyers.

He was interrupted by the judge, and Ms Knox’s lawyer replied: “We cannot restart the murder trial again, we are here for a defamation case.” (An odd response, as that is why Patrick’s team is there too.)

According to the Prosecutor General, when Knox wrote her “memoriale” on 6 November 2007 she would have been “aware of Lumumba’s innocence” and “aware of suggesting to investigators the name of a person who had nothing to do with the murder”.

It was explained to the court that the ECHR was simply mistaken in its summary of Knox’s treatment on the night of her arrest.

The court has before it all the documents we summarized in the two posts just below.

2. Some Context

Knox of course repeatedly undermined her own case by testifying under oath in December 2007 and at trial in 2009 that she was treated well.

We now know that a major reason for the ECHR’s confusion was a pretty fictional account by Knox lawyer Dalla Vedova, who did not seem to have anything compelling to say in her support today.

The case Dalla Vedova made to ECHR was kept confidential by Knox’s defence for years. When Italian prosecutors finally got to see it, they were amazed and amused. All it asked for was the equivalent of about $1 million in damages. No verdict rollbacks. The ECHR only recommended a payment to Knox of about $20,000.

Amanda Knox wrote her “memoriale” in English before being transferred to Capanne Prison, and she handed it to Officer Ficarra (who has no English) with a gleeful laugh. In it she seems to be trying to walk back damage done in her sessions with Ficarra and Dr Mignini before daylight on that same day.

Knox’s memoriale makes no mention of having been pressured or abused except a claimed tap on the head that all witnesses and her own lawyers denied. (In her other calunnia trial Judge Boninsegna in effect accused the cops of being too kind!)

Nor did she claim this to the supervising magistrate, Dr Matteini, several days later, or to Dr Mignini on 19 December when she was interrogated (actually her first interrogation) at her own request.

Even Knox’s own lawyers made a public announcement denying any abuse in early 2008. They never filed a complaint - something they could be disbarred for if they really believed Knox.

Knox did not actually go looking for this appeal, which could have major impact on her “I’m the victim” flow of cash. The Italian Parliament dropped it in her lap with a change of the rules. Did Sollecito lawyer and Member of Parliament Bongiorno not think this thing through?

Or maybe she did. Like the Sollecitos, she has always seemed to want to see Knox brought down.

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

Knox Lie-A-Thon #2: Nailing In Advance Expected Lies At 10 April Retrial #2

Posted by KrissyG

Florence courts, venue of callunia retrial

Recap of Knox’s and Sollecito’s earliest written records

The Recorded Statement taken from Amanda Knox re the afternoon and evening of 2 Nov 2007 is timed at 3:30pm. Dr Mignini had arrived about 3:00pm. What jumps out is the following statement:

Amanda Knox [statement 2 November 2007]

“Around 5 pm I left my house together with Raffaele to go to his house where we stayed the whole evening and the night.”

So, from having been at Via della Pergola for lunch, during which time, Sollecito joined her, and Meredith had got out of bed after arriving home in the early hours, who according to Knox and Sollecito, still had the remains of vampire makeup on her chin, was wearing her ex-boyfriend’s jeans, and had gone out at four, “Without saying where she was going”, the pair claim to have gone straight to Sollecito’s apartment in Via Garibaldi, ‘At about five’.

The next written record we have comes from Knox’ email home to 25 people in her address book:

Amanda Knox [email Sunday 4 Nov 2007, in the early hours circa 36 hours or so after Meredith’s body was found]

“meredith came out of the shower and grabbed some laundry or put some laundry in, one or the other and returned into her room after saying hi to raffael. after lunch i began to play guitar with raffael and meredith came out of her room and went to the door. she said bye and left for the day. it was the last time i saw her alive.

after a little while of playing guitar me and raffael went to his house to watch movies and after to eat dinner and generally spend the evening and night indoors. [sic]”

The next written record is Sollecito’s first written statement to the police:

Raffale Sollecito [November 5th 2007 at 22:40 in the offices of the Flying Squad of the Perugia Police Headquarters]

“QA Around 16:00 Meredith left in a hurry without saying where she was going. Amanda and I stayed home until about 17:30-18:00.
QA We left the house, we went into town, but I don’t remember what we did.
QA We stayed there from 18:00 until 20:30/21:00. At 21:00 I went home alone because Amanda told me that she was going to go to the pub Le Chic because she wanted to meet some friends.”

For the first time we are made aware that the pair went somewhere after leaving Via della Pergola at between ‘5:30 and 6:00’ according to Raffaele’s statement, this glides neatly into Popovic’s visit at 6:00pm at Raff’s abode.  No visible gaps in the timeline here.

Next comes Knox’ handwritten statement to the police:

Amanda Knox [Handwritten Statement to the police 6 Nov 2007]

‘Thursday, November 1st I saw Meredith the last time at my house when she left around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Raffaele was with me at the time. We, Raffaele and I, stayed at my house for a little while longer and around 5 in the evening we left to watch the movie Amelie at his house.’

So Knox says they left at 5:00 – as she set out in the email home, above, whilst Sollecito makes it an hour later.  So, we are led to believe, they didn’t stay in town long at all, and in any case, ‘I don’t remember what we did’.

This is a big red flag.  When people say, ‘I don’t remember’, they are telling you they recall an event, but are unable to retrieve it from their memory.  In fact, Knox and Sollecito do not even try to ‘remember’, not even when elite detectives are carrying out a crucial murder investigation of your girlfriend’s own roommate.  A person who was not involved would surely say, ‘I don’t know’ when asked a straight question, not ‘I don’t recall’.

Sollecito sticks to his script: ‘We left via della Pergola at six’:

Raffaele Sollecito [7 Nov 2007 Prison diary]

“An amusing thing I remember is that Meredith was wearing a pair of men’s jeans which belonged to her ex‐boyfriend in England. She left quickly around 4 pm, not saying where she was going. Meanwhile, Amanda and I stayed there until around 6 pm and we began to smoke cannabis.

My problems start from this moment because I have confused memories. Firstly, Amanda and I went to the centre going from Piazza Grimana to Corso Vannucci passing behind the University for Foreigners and ending up in Piazza Morlacchi (we always take that road). Then I do not remember but presumably we went shopping for groceries. We returned to my house at around 8 ‐ 8:30 pm and there I made another joint and, since it was a holiday, I took everything with extreme tranquillity, without the slightest intention of going out since it was cold outside.”

Note the signifier, informing the reader, ‘it was cold outside’ implying, ‘therefore we would not have gone out that night’.

So, whilst Sollecito on 7 Nov 2007 jotted in his Prison Diary they were out between ‘six and eight’, Amanda writes to her lawyers a couple of days later adhering firmly to her script of not going anywhere at all.

Amanda Knox [Letter to her Lawyers 9 Nov 2007]

“Around 3 or 4 Meredith left the house wearing light-colored clothing, and all she said was “Ciao”. She didn’t say where she was going. I continued playing guitar and after a while Raffaele and I left my house, probably around 5pm.

We went to his house and the first thing we did was get comfortable.”

Then comes Knox’ next written affirmation of what she did the day of the murder:

Amanda Knox [Page 1223 Prison diary27 Nov 2007]

“Here is what I did that night:
5pm: Left my house with Raffaele and walked to his apartment.
5:05pm - ???:  (1) Used the computer to look up songs to play on the guitar.
  (2) Read Harry Potter in German w/Raffaele.
  (3) Watched Amelie.
  (4) Prepared and ate dinner – Fish.
  (5) While cleaning the dishes a bunch of water spilled on the floor.
  (6) We tried to soak up a little with small towels but there was too much.
  (7) Raffaele rolled a joint.
  (8) We smoked the joint together and talked.
  (9) We had sex.
  (10) We fell asleep.
It’s that simple.”

Still no mention of going into the old town.  None. Note the qualifier, “It’s that simple”.  Note the triple question mark as if she is unsure it took half an hour to an hour to arrive at Sollecito’s, when it would only have been five or ten minutes away, at most.

Raffaele helpfully offers us an insight in his book several years later as to why he revealed – even if Amanda NEVER does, not once – they went into town in his police statement of 5 Nov 2007.

Andrew Gumbel and Raffaele Sollecito [From Honor Bound 2012]

P 17
“It was the last time I ever saw [Meredith Kercher].
Amanda and I smoked a joint before leaving the house on Via della Pergola, wandered into town for shopping before remembering we had enough for dinner already, and headed back to my place.”

P53 (in the Questura 5 Nov 2007)

“I mentioned [to police] Amanda and I had gone out shopping, something I had apparently omitted in my previous statements.” [note the plural].

So, we see, Sollecito has not voluntarily offered the information ‘We went into town’ either, on the afternoon of 1 Nov 2007.  He concedes he only proffered it, because the police brought it up.  When asked the purpose of the trip, he claims they went ‘shopping’, but on not being able to prove they bought anything via receipts nor state which shops the pair frequented, Sollecito had to retract this claim, by now adding to his 6 Nov 2007 official police statement, later, that once there, they suddenly realised ‘We had enough for dinner already’.

So, we are led by this to conclude the purpose of the expedition into the old town was ‘shopping for dinner’.

So Sollecito says they set out to do something – shopping - but then didn’t do it.  Sollecito omits to even mention to police going into the old town, and Knox persistently does not mention it at all, even though Sollecito told police she was with him, in a signed statement.  He only mentions it when detectives ask him why he omitted to in the earlier police statements. 

Sollecito then suddenly remembers this implied unimportant detail and tells the police they were there, shopping.  But wait.  The pair then suddenly do not do any shopping at all because once there, they realise they ‘already had’ provisions for the evening meal.  Amanda Knox makes clear that the evening meal was FISH.  Yet she claims she couldn’t remember exactly what she did at Sollecito’s, for at least three weeks. (Fishy indeed.)

Astonishingly, years later, Knox still refuses to mention the pair’s mysterious excursion. Here in her book Amanda Knox resolutely omits the detail of ‘going into the old town’.

Amanda Knox [Waiting to be Heard 2013]

P61

“Sometime between 4:00pm and 5pm we left to go to his place.”

There then follows filler sentences about how “we wanted a quiet cozy night in.

As we walked along, I was telling Raffaele that Amélie was my all time favourite movie.

‘Really?’ he asked.  ‘I’ve never seen it.”

[Forgetting completely, forensic police discovered he’d downloaded the movie way back on 28 Oct 2007].

“Oh my God,’ I said, unbelieving.  ‘You have to see it right this second.  You’ll love it.”

The narrative then completely jumps to:

“Not long after we got back to Raffaele’s place, his doorbell rang.”  [Enter first alibi Jovanna Popovic, whom Raff states appeared at 6:00pm].

A whole hour is omitted.  One whole hour to get back to Raff’s, just around the corner, four to ten minutes away at the outside.  And once again Sollecito sets out to help Popovic with her suitcase but that doesn’t actually happen after all, either.

From all the evasions and omissions we see that what happened between 4:00pm and 9:00pm on the afternoon of the murder and where the pair went, is deeply significant.  The trip into the old town which took up to two to five hours of their time seems rather more sinister than some kind of coyness or embarrassment about perhaps buying some drugs. They talk quite openly about smoking dope in their police statements and books.

In his statement to police on 5 Nov 2007, Sollecito claims he came home alone from town at “20:30/21:00”.  As we now know, the pair both switched off their phones together, between 20:45 and 21:00, so we can be sure this time is supremely salient.  Meredith was on her way back around then.  From Knox not ever mentioning the trip into town, it could be she indeed never did go into town, and that Raff went alone; after all it was Amanda, Popovic claimed to have seen at six.

When Knox wrote in her follow-up memorandum to the police – which was not allowed to be used as evidence in court – after having named Patrick Lumumba as the perpetrator, she portrays herself as having been dreadfully confused.  But the importance of concealing ‘going into town’ between 4:00pm and 6:00pm seems to be closely connected to what happened vis-à-vis Patrik Lumumba-cum-Rudi Guede.

Amanda Knox [memo to police 6 November 2007]

“In my mind I saw Patrik in flashes of blurred images. I saw him near the basketball court. I saw him at my front door. I saw myself cowering in the kitchen with my hands over my ears because in my head I could hear Meredith screaming. But I’ve said this many times so as to make myself clear: these things seem unreal to me, like a dream, and I am unsure if they are real things that happened or are just dreams my mind has made to try to answer the questions in my head and the questions I am being asked.”

And indeed, the annulling final Fifth Chamber confirms that Knox, as a finding of fact, covered up for Guede by naming Lumumba.

Can we really believe Knox was simply stressed out by the police when she named Lumumba?  If so, why the great desperation to conceal what she did between 16:00 and 21:00?

And what were her exact whereabouts when her room mate was killed?

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Knox Lie-A-Thon #1: Nailing In Advance Expected Lies At 10 April Retrial #1

Posted by Peter Quennell

Perugia Central Police Station at night (left-center)

Overview

Right now, Amanda Knox is a convicted felon who served three years.

Knox still owes damages of about $100,000 as well. This award over a decade ago was to Patrick because Knox had framed him for murder when under no pressure (as all courts agreed).

Because of an absurd mistake by the bungling European Court of Human Rights - falsely concluding from “evidence” that one of Knox’s lawyers made up that Knox was (1) a formal suspect (2) under extreme police pressure, and (3) should have had a lawyer present (4) when she was “interrogated” - Knox is being given a chance to annul her felony.

She will present her evidence if any before an appeal court starting in Florence on April 10. 

Knox’s endemic false claims and smears that make up this interrogation hoax took a team of more than 30 of us three years, with extensive document gathering and translation, and over 20 posts (see all links below) to definitively put to bed. This text below was our final overview, first posted here in 2014.

1. Masterlist Of Posts In The Pre-Trial Series

The Interrogation Hoax pre-trial series consists of a total of 20 posts. Numbering of posts is not chronological. It represents the original order of postings.

These posts quote from a large number of transcripts only recently acquired and translated. There are no serious conflicts, no gray areas. One can assume with total certainty that this is the real thing (see Part 3 below), and that any other versions (see Part 4 below) are fabricated.

1. What Happened At AK & RS Q&A Prior To 6 Nov

Click for Post: #19: ALL Knox Q&A Sessions 2-6 November 2007 WERE Recorded #1

Click for Post: #20: ALL Knox Q&A Sessions 2-6 November 2007 WERE Recorded #2

2. What Happened At Knox Q&A 6 Nov Ending 1:45 AM

Click for Post: #2: Trial Testimony From Rita Ficcara On Realities 5-6 Nov

Click for Post: #3: More Defense Pussyfooting Toward Rita Ficcara, Key Witness

Click for Post: #4: More Hard Realities From Rita Ficcara, More Nervousness From Defense

Click for Post: #12: Ficarra & Knox Notes PROVE Knox Merely Worked On Visitors Names List

Click for Post: #5: Key Witness Monica Napoleoni Confirms Knox Self-Imploded 5-6 Nov

Click for Post: #7: Testimony Of Witness Lorena Zugarini On The Knox Conniption 5-6 Nov

Click for Post: #8: Testimony Of Interpreter Donnino On Events Night Of 5 November

3. What Happened At Sollecito Q&A 6 Nov Ending 3:30 AM

Click for Post: #6: Sollecito Transcript & Actions Further Damage Knox Version

Click for Post: #9: Officer Moscatelli’s Recap/Summary Session With Sollecito 5-6 Nov

4. What Happened At Knox-Rights Session Ending 5:45am

Click for Post: #15: Knox Is Told Her Rights And Repeats Fake Murder Charge

5. What Of Relevance Happened In Ensuing Months

Click for Post: #13: The First Two Pre-Trial Opportunities Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #14: The Third Pre-Trial Opportunity Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #16: The Fourth Pre-Trial Opportunity Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #17: Sollecito April 2008 Before Supreme Court Again Coldshoulders Knox

Click for Post:#18: The Final Pre-Trial Opportunities Which Knox Flunked

Click for Post: #21: Illustrating How Batshit Crazy The Interrogation Hoax Has Become

6. Why Investigators’ Version Won Hands-Down At Trial

Click for Post: #10: Why Prosecution And Defenses Never Believed Knox’s Version #1

Click for Post: #11: Why Prosecution And Defenses Never Believed Knox’s Version #2

2. Explaining Overall Arc Of Events

Much of the testimony listed above was about events at the central police station pre-arrest in early November 2007 and subsequent court attempts to achieve some believability and relief.

Early in 2009 at trial Knox and Sollecito sat glumly through all of the investigators’ pre-arrest testimony and cross-examination at trial. They were downhearted and apprehensive, and there were no smiles and few interruptions.

Subsequently Sollecito chose not to get on the stand, so from his team there really was never a rebuttal.

But Knox HAD to get on the stand, in July, for two days. She had no other way to defend herself against the serious felony crime of falsely framing Patrick for murder.

It was her word against theirs. It contradicted in many places what she had heard months earlier in sworn testimony from many investigators.

Knox’s version inevitably weakened a lot under cross-examination, and was ultimately a fail at trial and several appeals, even the annulled one.

Knox ended up serving three years. While on the stand she confirmed that she had been treated well, stiffing thousands of supporters duped into believing she had not been.

3. Explaining Court-Accepted Narrative For 6 Nov

This is an overview of Knox’s so-called “interrogation” at Perugia’s central police station, the subject of the first ten posts.

It led to her arrest and three years served. To make this picture really firm we will quote a lot of the testimony at trial. The Case Wiki carries all of these transcripts, many in English translation, and more. 

Senior Inspector Rita Ficarra testified that she arrived back at the police station late on 5 November, and finds her way blocked by a cartwheeling Knox.

She rebukes Knox, who testily responds that she is tired of the investigation. Rita Ficarra tells Knox to go home and get some sleep. Knox testily refuses, and remains there.

Shortly after, Ficarra suggests to Knox that if she really wants to help, she could add to the list of possible perps - men who Meredith knew and who might have visited the house.

This was a recap/summary, a simple checking of facts with someone who might or might not be of help. This could have been done on a street corner or in a house by a single officer. It was not a witness or suspect interrogation. From the transcript:

Ghirga: “While this interrogation - let’s call it thus - was in progress, some colleagues arrive…”  Ficarra: “It was not an interrogation, Attorney.” Ghirga: “They are called recaps/summaries.

Knox eagerly agrees. So they begin on the list.

This goes slowly because of language problems, until an interpreter, Anna Donnino, arrives. In total only Knox and four others (three of them women) are present.

Knox builds a list of seven people and adds maps and phone numbers (placed in evidence) in a calm proceeding. These were the names: Peter Svizzero, Patrick, Ardak, Juve, Spiros, Shaki and “a South African [Guede]” who played basketball near the house.

At several points in the evening Knox is provided with refreshments. No voices are ever raised, no bathroom breaks are refused.

In a separate wing Inspector Napoleoni and a couple of colleagues are seeking facts from Sollecito. Shown conflicts between what he has said and what his phone records show, Sollecito backtracks, and declares that Knox went out alone on the night, and made him lie.

Napoleoni moves through the questura to suggest to Ficarra to discuss the night of the attack with Knox in more detail and clarify who might have been present. Knox is not informed of Sollecito’s backtrack. She is asked for more names and spontaneously shares her phone. There is an outgoing to Patrick but no prior incoming. Knox is asked who Patrick is.

Suddenly, to the considerable surprise of others present, Knox has a yelling, head-clutching conniption (the first of several that night) and says “It’s him, it’s him, it was him, he killed her”. The session is halted.

Despite warnings she should not do so without a lawyer, Knox insists on a recorded statement which says she headed out to meet Patrick that night after he texted her. She accuses Patrick of killing Meredith. 

Efforts are made throughout the next several hours to try to help Knox to calm down. Knox is put on hold, given more refreshments, and made comfortable on some chairs so she might try to get some sleep.

A second session ending at 5:45 is intended as merely a formal reading of Knox’s legal status and her right to a lawyer, with Dr Mignini presiding. She is to be held as a material witness and for her own protection.

Again warned that she should not speak without a lawyer, and no questions can be asked, Knox still insists on a second spontaneous accusation culminating in a second recorded statement.

This also says she went out to meet Patrick that night, also accuses Patrick of killing Meredith, and now also hints that Sollecito may have been there. 

Just before noon, now under arrest and about to be taken to Capanne Prison, Knox insists on writing out at length a third statement this time in English.

She gleefully hands it to Rita Ficcara who cannot read it as she as no English. In the statement, Knox included this damning remark, without any mention of having been coerced: “The questions that need answering, at least for how I’m thinking are… 2. Why did I think of Patrik?”

Knox’s lawyers never ever substantially challenge this version. At trial they accept that there was no interrogation, leave standing that Knox insisted on all three statements, and dont ever pursue Knox’s claims that she was coerced.

Courts all noted that there is no mention in that third note of Knox having been coerced, although this note was her idea and she could put in it anything she liked. From this there never was any going back.

In July 2009 at trial, in face of days and days of prior investigator testimony, Knox brashly tried to substitute this scenario above with the one below. Of course she was disbelieved.

For the calunnia framing of Patrick Lumumba Judge Massei in 2009 sentenced her to a year more than Sollecito, amended by Judge Hellmann in 2011 to three years served.

The Supreme Court definitively overruled her calunnia appeal so for her false framing of Patrick she is a felon for life.

4. Explaining Knox Family & PR Alternative

Knox’s Italian lawyers were not a part of this; in contrast the American PR lawyer Ted Simon sought to introduce major confusion.

In Italy, lawyers are REQUIRED to report tales of abuse of their clients or face possible criminal charges. Contrariwise, if they knowingly report false charges they can face similar charges. So what they do is a strong indicator of truth. 

Amanda Knox’s lawyers not only did not ever report any abuse. They even announced publicly, in face of incessant claims of abuse by Knox, family, and PR forces, that they had seen no evidence of abuse and so would not be reporting. 

Though her precise claims vary and often contradict one another, Knox herself has on and off ever since November 2007 tried to put the investigators on trial - tried to blame the police for causing her conniption and her false accusation of Patrick for the death of Meredith.

Her fail rate has been spectacular.

Knox failed to convince (1) Supervising Magistrate Matteini and (2) the Ricciarelli review panel in November 2007, (3) failed to convince Prosecutor Mignini in December 2007, (4) failed to convince the Supreme Court in April 2008, (5) failed to convince the Micheli court in late 2008, (6) failed to convince the judges and jury at trial 2009, (7) failed at annulled appeal 2011, (8) failed at repeat appeal 2013, (9) failed to convince the Supreme Court in 2012 and (10) failed again in 2015.

As Knox’s team simply did not ever believe her, they may not have given this their hardest shot. It was not part of their largely spurious complaint to the EC HR.

And yet despite all of these failures, the huge and very nasty Knox PR effort went full-bore ahead with the abuse allegations anyway.

Read this post of 11 February 2009 which was about two weeks before the Knox “interrogators” were cross-examined at trial, and several months before Knox herself took the stand. Dozens of media reports repeated the Knox claims as if true.

Knox repeated them in her April 2013 book, and her December 2013 email to Judge Nencini, and her appeal to EHCR Strasbourg, and in some TV and newspaper interviews, including one with the Italian weekly Oggi which caused that paper legal harm.

This version has been blown up by Knox PR shills in internet posts, articles, TV interviews, and books. Among others propagating it have been mafioso wannabes Raffaele Sollecito (in his book), Doug Preston, Saul Kassin, Steve Moore (especially), John Douglas, Jim Clemente, Paul Ciolino, Michael Heavey, Greg Hampikian, Chris Halkidis, Mark Waterbury, Doug Bremner, Candace Dempsey, Nina Burleigh, Bruce Fischer, and many posters on the Knox sites and Fischer sites and on Ground Report.

Main claims included 50-plus hours of “interrogation”, numerous officers in teams, no food or drink, no sleep, no bathroom breaks, no lawyer, no recording, and much abuse and yelling and suggestions and threats. Way beyond anything even Knox herself and notably her own lawyers ever claimed. 

• Here is Steve Moore claiming that around a dozen cops in rotating tag teams of two assaulted a starving and sleepless Knox over 20/30/40 hours, threatened her, and refused her a lawyer throughout.


• Here is Saul Kassin claiming that Knox was interrogated over the entire night of 5-6 November, until she was finally broken and a coerced “confession” emerged - even though the “false confession” actually framed Patrick and was in reality a false accusation. That Kassin ignores.


• Here are several former FBI profilers blatantly embellishing the same claims in a book, with (today) 60 five-star reviews.

And yet Knox’s own Italian lawyers specifically denied her accusations! No complaint against the police was ever lodged. All courts disbelieved her. Knox served her three years. But still the PR-driven hoax keeps resounding.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/14/24 at 02:05 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Hoaxes Sollecito etc • Comments here (9)

Saturday, October 14, 2023

Explaining The New Attempt To Annul Knox’s Calunnia Conviction & ECHR’s Role

Posted by KrissyG

Florence court where decision will be made

1. The History

Knox has provisionally won a Supreme Court appeal against her 2009 calunnia conviction for framing Patrick. A Florence court will now check the facts and rule whether she did win.

It is worth looking back to see on what grounds Knox had a limited victory at the ECHR in Strasbourg which gave its findings in January 2019, and in which Italy unsuccessfully appealed against.

Back in 2008, the European Court of Human Rights issued a groundbreaking decision in the case of Salduz v. Turkey. The court held that people detained at police stations have the right to access a lawyer. If people are interrogated by the police without getting the benefit of legal assistance, this could be a violation of their fundamental right to a fair trial.  It is on this point that Knox succeeded.

But we can readily see that (a) Knox was not being detained at a police station when she made her false allegations against Lumumba, she arrived of her own volition, and (b) as of that point she was not a suspect, ergo nor was she scheduled for an interrogation.  As soon as Knox accused Patrick Lumumba of being the rapist/killer of Meredith, the interview was terminated.

So where did the ECHR get the idea Knox had been ‘interrogated’?  From the fact of Knox’s defence lawyer, Carlo Dalla Vedova’s submissions to the ECHR, relying heavily on the Motivational Reports of Boninsegna, 2016, and Hellmann-Zanetti, 2011. 

Problem is, Boninsegna was not the judge in Knox’s callunia conviction case; that was Massei, 2009.  Massei was largely ‘overturned’ by 2011 Appeal Judges Hellmann-Zanetti, who in turn was largely annulled by the 2013 Chieffi Supreme Court, and the Knox-Sollecito first apeal was reverted back to the 2014 Appeal Court Nencini, 2014, in a different legal region (Tuscany).

Judge Hellmann nonetheless upheld Knox’s Calunnia conviction, as did final Supreme Court Bruno-Marasca. Thus, the Calunnia conviction was never at any stage rescinded or referred back on appeal. 

But it was Judge Hellmann who introduced the concept of ‘interrogation’ and Judge Boninsegna, who oversaw the second Calunnia trial, this time relating to a different charge of slander, against the police, and which was thrown out, relied heavily on Hellmann’s descriptive narrative of an ‘interrogation’.

Yet Knox was not in custody and was there only as a person of interest.  She volunteered to hang around, having arrived at the Questura with her then boyfriend, Sollecito, who had been summonsed by the police to attend.  Thus, volunteering information is not technically an ‘interrogation’ in the legal sense.

The ECHR upholding Knox’s claim under Article 6, right to a fair hearing:

•relied on comments by Hellmann Appeal Court, which was largely superseded and replaced by the Chieffi Supreme Court.

•relied heavily on police minutes and the fact, it says via Boninsegna, that an interpreter, Doninno, and a police officer, RI, failed to record details of their expressions of familiarity with Knox, or make a note that (i) Knox was asked if she wanted a lawyer and declined, (ii) that start and end times are not recorded, and that (iii) hours are condensed into minutes. These police minutes represented a failure of procedure, the ECHR reasoned. 

But if Knox was not technically under police interrogation nor detained, that would explain the lack of ‘start’ and ‘finish’ times and obviate the need to read the informant their rights.

2. The Evidence

So what is the evidence of Knox falsely, of her own free will, accusing Patrick Lumumba of raping and killing Meredith?

According to Prosecutor Mignini in his recent book, the facts are these:

When Amanda receives that message in her mobile phone 3484673590, precisely at 20.18.12 […]  the users were “hooked” to the cell “Via dell’Aquila n. 5 - Torre dell’Acquedotto sector 3” […].

Amanda replies to Patrick at 8.32.34 p.m., with the SMS message whose screen Lumumba recognized […]. Amanda writes: “Of course. See you later. Good evening!”, in Italian but which was thought by Amanda in English as equivalent to “see you later”, an equivalent of “See you later” or “to resent”, indicating an indeterminate future, next meeting, just of people who see themselves regularly. That evening, in fact, there was no work.

Amanda and Patrick had no appointments whatsoever […]. When Amanda sends the SMS message in reply to Patrick, the reference cell, to which Knox’s users are “hooked”, is that of “Via Berar- di sector 7”, which gives coverage to Corso Garibaldi, where the Sollecito’s home is located.  This means that the girl from Seattle, as it was said, had gone out […] from where she was returning to the Sollecito’s house when she received Patrick’s SMS. It is quite likely that Amanda returned from Sollecito at about 20.30, after getting off via Ulisse Rocchi or passing through Piazza Cavallotti, where she received Patrick’s SMS.

[…]on the night between Monday and Tuesday, that is between 5 and 6, is the centre piece of the trial, […] because the most important event of that week was precisely the false accusation made by Amanda Knox against her employer, Patrick Diya Lumumba, owner of the Pub “Le Chic”, in the historic centre of the city. This slander, repeated on several occasions in the hours and days after, and which would be completely unexplained if Amanda had not at least been present at the crime, played a fundamental role in the judgment of responsibility against Knox and constitutes, so to speak, the painful point against which Amanda defended herself, […]  in front of the policemen to whom she accused Patrick and to me who, however, arrived at the police station later. I would stress that, for the offense of slander against Patrick, Knox has been definitively convicted, so that she can no longer claim invoked pressure from the investigators, which made her falsely accuse Lumumba. This crime was committed with full conscience and self-determination by Amanda, who is the only author of it and who, for this reason, was sentenced to an exemplary sentence.”

There is also the issue of the police wiretap which caught Knox confessing to her mother in the following week of knowing that Patrick was in prison wrongfully, but neither informed the police to rectify the situation.

Mignini further explains in his book that Knox said in her statement to the police that she lied to Sollecito that she had to go to work that evening:

...that, therefore, she had gone out and met Patrick in the nearby basketball field, and that she had then returned with him to the apartment of Via della Pergola. There, again according to Knox’s account, Lumumba would have secluded himself in Meredith’s chamber with her, had sexual intercourse with her, then degenerately killed her. Amanda would have heard everything from the position where she had stayed. It’s evident that she must have heard screams, fuss and then cries of Meredith before she was killed.’

[…]… and, therefore, the need to hide from Raffaele the encounter with Patrick (or, perhaps, with the other black, hidden under the guise of Lumumba, that is Rudi Hermann Guede), the next story may have a more or less innocent side, in the sense that Amanda would have only wanted to make Lumumba meet with her British roommate, but also, on the contrary, a disturbing side, alluding to a real participation of the girl from Seattle in the violence suffered by Mez and in her killing at the hands of Lumumba, having knowingly allowed him to meet Meredith in the apartment. However, Amanda accused Lumumba, not herself. They were statements that were “straight incrimination of another party”, not “self
incrimination”.

This is an important distinction.  One has the right in law not to incriminate oneself but no-one has the right to falsely accuse another of a crime that leads directly to their detriment.  Lumumba was arrested in the early hours, in front of his wife and children, wearing nothing but underpants, and thrown into jail accused of a particularly heinous rape and murder, as a terrified African man from the Congo.  The photograph of his arrest appeared in the worldwide press.

2. The Court Judgments

Then of course, there is the finding of the Supreme Court, Marasca & Bruno, Sept. 2015, who made it clear that Knox’s confirmed Calunnia conviction was borne out of a need to cover up for Rudi Guede, by virtue of his being also Black, as was Lumumba, and by reasoning that had a neighbour seen someone of that description near the cottage, that could be interchangeable with the person Knox had pointed a finger at, insofar that Marasca and Bruno upheld as a fact that Knox was present at the cottage when Meredith was murdered.

“All this took place in Perugia, during the night between the 1st and 2nd of November 2007. Knox […], knowing that he was innocent, with statements filed during declaration to the Flying Squad and the Police of Perugia on the 6th of November 2007, she falsely blamed Diya Lumumba called “Patrick” for the murder of the young Meredith Kercher, all of this to obtain impunity for everyone and particularly for Guede Rudi Hermann, coloured as is Lumumba; in Perugia, during the night between the 5th and the 6th of November 2007.
[…]

4. Meanwhile, it can’t be ignored, on a first summary overview, that the history of these proceedings is characterized by a troubled and intrinsically contradictory path, with the only fact of irrefutable certainty being the guilt of Amanda Knox regarding the slanderous accusations against Patrick Lumumba.

[…] On the other hand, in the slanderous declarations against Lumumba, which earned her a conviction, the status of which is now protected as final judgement [giudicato], [they] had themselves exactly that premise in the narrative, that is: the presence of the young American woman inside the house in via della Pergola, a circumstance which nobody at that time – except obviously the other people present inside the house – could have known (quote p. 96). According to the slanderous statements of Ms. Knox, she had returned home in the company of Lumumba, who she had met by chance in Piazza Grimana, and when Ms. Kercher arrived in the house, Knox’s companion directed sexual attentions toward the young English woman, then he went together with her in her room, from which the harrowing scream came. So, it was Lumumba who killed Meredith and she could affirm this since she was on the scene of crime herself, albeit in another room.’

[…]

‘Another element against her is certainly constituted by the false accusations [calunnia] against Mr. Lumumba, afore-mentioned above. It is not understandable, in fact, what reason could have driven the young woman to produce such serious accusations. The theory that she did so in order to escape psychological pressure from detectives seems extremely fragile, given that the woman [47] could not fail to realize that such accusations directed against her boss would turn out to be false very soon, given that, as she knew very well, Mr. Lumumba had no relationship with Ms. Kercher nor with the Via della Pergola house. Furthermore, the ability to present an ironclad alibi would have allowed Lumumba to obtain release and subsequently the dropping of charges. However, the said calunnia is another circumstantial element against the current appellant, insofar as it can be considered a strategy in order to cover up for Mr. Guede, whom she had an interest to protect because of fear of retaliatory accusations against her. This is confirmed by the fact that Mr. Lumumba, like Mr. Guede, is a man of colour, hence the indication of the first one would be safe in the event that the latter could have been seen by someone while entering or exiting the apartment.’

FIFTH CHAMBERS MOTIVATION REPORT (PRE-FINAL DATED 1 NOVEMBER 2015

For completeness of facts, here is what Massei, the trial court judge, had to say about Knox’ framing of Lumumba:

“It must therefore be asserted that Amanda Knox freely accused Diya Lumumba of having killed Meredith, and so accused him with full knowledge of the innocence of the [419] same Lumumba. The incriminating evidence against Amanda Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito which has been presented also highlights the goal that was thus pursued: to lead the investigators down the wrong track, far away from that which might have led to an investigation of her own and her boyfriend’s responsibility. A behaviour and a choice, therefore, [that were] purely defensive: Amanda had good relations with Lumumba, by whom she had always been treated well, as she herself stated, and thus there could have been no reason for rancour, animosity, revenge which could have justified such a serious accusation; the sole reason for unjustly accusing Lumumba was that of distancing herself and her boyfriend from every possibility of suspicion and the necessity of further investigations. To obtain this it was necessary to indicate a different perpetrator and so Amanda pointed to Diya Lumumba. A behaviour, therefore, which follows the same defence strategy as that already put into effect with the staging implemented by breaking the window of Romanelli’s room, and constitutes a further confirmation of Amanda Knox’s capacity for fictitious representations and contrived manipulation of the events.
SENTENCE OF THE COURT OF ASSIZES OF PERUGIA 2009

(PRESIDED OVER BY DR. GIANCARLO MASSEI)

3. Conclusions

So we can glean the following conclusions from this.  During the very earliest days of the course of investigation of Meredith’s murder, on the very next Tuesday evening after the Friday of 2 November, 2007, Knox pointed a finger at Lumumba knowing he was innocent and of her own free will, as found by all of the criminal courts.  The Italian criminal charge of Calunnia equates to the US charge of Obstruction of Justice or the UK equivalent of Perverting the Course of Justice, and is quite separate and distinct from any associated charge, such as the Aggravated Murder charge.  In the recent submission to the Court of Cassation, Knox relied heavily on the fact that the Aggravated Murder charge was annulled, and thus, ipso facto, was the argument that the Calunnia charge was also void.  However, the Court was not buying this and instead of the immediate annulment of the Calunnia conviction, a retrial has been set.

Did Amanda Knox seek to derail the police investigation by pointing the detectives in the wrong direction of an innocent man, Patrick Lumumba? This is what will need to be determined once again.

Why would Knox use the heavily criticised judgement of Hellmann - who found her guilty anyway - or that of third-party Judge Boninsegna who didn’t even deal with the Calunnia case against Lumumba, but who, to Dalla Vedova’s delight -ever the defence lawyer looking for a ‘get-out clause’ -  quoted Hellmann’s imprecise description of her voluntary police statements as an ‘interrogation’, when there were other, more completely, legitimate and more authoritative judgments that said otherwise, including the final Supreme Court Judge Marasca & Bruno of 2015.  Not forgetting that after she had signed her statement, she went away to her own private space and wrote a letter to the police underlining her belief she saw Patrick at the cottage, entirely unasked for and off her own free will.  Imagine the astonishment of the police officer when Amanda Knox crammed this letter into her hand, calling it ‘a present’.

Far from being cowed or confused, it seems as though Amanda Knox was determined to direct the police to the wrong person.  As many people are unaware - especially in the USA - of Knox’s Calunnia conviction, this whole new retrial might be a shot in the foot for Knox as well as a waking up surprise for those who had no idea of this aspect of her involvement in the Meredith Kercher case nor of her true character.

Posted by KrissyG on 10/14/23 at 03:01 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Hoaxes Sollecito etc • Comments here (2)

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Knox’s Misleading Petition To The Supreme Court

Posted by James Raper

Dalla Vedova also wrote untruthful Knox ECHR petition

1. Setting The Record Straight

With reference to this MailOnline article and numerous Italian reports (see one translation below) on Knox’s attempt to have Italy quash her calunnia conviction.

It should be borne in mind that the conviction was:

1. Rendered definitive by the 1st Chambers of the Supreme Court following an appeal by Knox on the issue

2. Effectively confirmed as definitive by the 5th Chambers of the Supreme Court

3. The 5th Chambers also poo-poo’d any attempt by the ECHR to interefere with the conviction whatever decision the ECHR came to.

4. The ECHR, in it’s ruling, did not in any event request the Italian justice system to review the safety of the conviction

5. The 5th Chambers also held, as a fact, that Knox was present in the cottage when Meredith was murdered. Accordingly she was perfectly well aware that Lumumba was not there and thus innocent.

There is an argument for saying that with a lawyer present she probably would not have made the accusation incriminating Lumumba.

That rather depends on what we cannot know, but it is hardly an excuse since she did (though there was no justifiable reason as to why she should, and she knew she was lying when she did.

The argument being used is like saying “Well I would not have shot him if there had been someone there to stop me”. Hardly an adequate defence.

I suspect that the hearing to which the MailOnline refers is really for leave to appeal - the route Guede took when challenging his definitive conviction, only to be denied leave.

Again Knox is drumming up interest so that she can continue with another round of grift and money making appearances.

But again - as always with the Italian Justice system - it is a question of watch this space.

2. Italian media report

Translation from Italian News Service TGCOM:

Meredith Kercher Case: Amanda Knox asks to cancel her sentence for slander against Lumumba

Appeal to Cassation of the American for the three years of imprisonment on the basis of one of the articles introduced by the Cartobia reform. Congolese opposes “out of respect for truth and justice”

Amanda Knox is asking that the definitive sentence of three years of imprisonment arrived for slander against Patrick Lumumba and linked to the trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher (for which she and Raffaele Sollecito were aquitted) be canceled.

She is doing this with an appeal to the Court of Cassation on the basis of one of the articles introduced by the Cartobia reform and after the European Court of Human Rights recognized the violation of her defense rights during the investigation.

However, Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese owner of the former pub Le Chic of Perugia, who was accused by the girl from Seattle and unjustly arrested for the murder, is opposed to the application. His motivation: “No to the cancellation of the sentence out of respect for truth and justice”.

Acquitted for the crime of Meredith Kercher but condemned for slander towards Patrick Lumumba, Amanda Knox presented the application in the Court of Cassation through the lawyers Carlo Dalla Vedova, her historical lawyer, and Luca Luparia Donati.

The appeal will be examined, in the council chamber and in non-participatory form [only lawyers present] at the beginning of October by the Fifth Chambers of Cassation. The appeal is accordingly opposed by Lumumba, represented by the lawyer Carlo Pacelli, “out of respect for truth and justice”.

This court may reject the American appeal, revoke the sentence of conviction for slander, or order a renewal of the trial, which in that case would be held in Perugia.

However, the possibility of a new trial is deemed very remote by Knox’s lawyers on the basis of the sentence of Cassation which acquitted her of the murder charge.

A possible cancellation of the conviction for slander would not however open the way to a request for compensation for unjust detention by Knox, since the terms have expired, though she could still make a request for damages.

Patrick Lumumba opposes the request of Amanda Knox to cancel the sentence against her slander towards him “out of respect for truth and justice”.

“Especially in the memory of Meredith Kercher” Patrick underlined with his lawyer, the lawyer Carlo Pacelli who will also represent him in the Court of Cassation. “Lumumba immediately became a civil party against Knox and that remains party to every procedural act” added the lawyer.

Lumumba was arrested for the murder of Meredith Kercher accomplished in Perugia in November 2007 based on Knox’s initial statements, but after 14 days in the cell he was released, because he was totally recognized as foreign to that crime and immediately acquitted.

Amanda Knox will not be in Italy for the hearing of the Cassation which will examine her request to cancel the sentence suffered for slander to Patrick Lumumba. “The procedure will be in the council chamber and without the parties. And also Amanda is awaiting a second child ...” explained the lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova, her defender from the initial stages of the investigation for murder. A charge from which she was definitively acquitted [actually, untrue].

It was Knox herself who asked to present the application to cancel the sentence of conviction. “She has always considered the accusation of slander unjust because she believes she had not committed that crime”.

Posted by James Raper on 09/24/23 at 09:18 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Hoaxes Sollecito etc • Comments here (5)

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