Category: Knox-Marriott PR
How America’s Premier Justice College Misrepresents Italian Justice - To Global Audience
Posted by brmull
Conflicts between Kassin’s academic and court personas
Saul Kassin is a psychologist with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He tries to advance the notion academically and in court that many confessions are coerced by the police and thus false.
In writing about American cases of confessions, Kassin would normally be very sure to interview all the parties to the confession. Police would not simply be sidelined, and the confessor’s tale would not be the only narrative he pays attention to. His academic pieces would normally be peer-reviewed and any claims which were questionable would be examined by the academic peers or the readership. False claims by Kassin could result in criminal complaints and civil lawsuits.
It is quite clear from online postings that Saul Kassin was taken on as a hired gun for the Knox defense in the Knox/Sollecito trial in Perugia. He was being paid NOT to simply be academic and objective, he was being paid to give the police witnesses and prosecution as hard a time as possible.
Although he seems to have flown to Perugia at one point he definitely did not encounter let alone interview even one police officer, even one prosecutor or even one judge. He made no visit to the questura where the Knox questioning took place. He doesnt speak or read Italian so he would not be able to get to grip with original evidence.
He does not reveal if and when he interviewed Amanda Knox herself. She makes no mention of any meeting with Kassin in her book. Kassin was definitely not in court in mid-2009 when Amanda Knox was cross-examined for two days on the witness stand about her false allegations against Patrick Lumumba. Her stint on the stand was regarded as a disaster for her by most of those present.
Conflicts consequentially plaguing Kassin’s academic judgments
During the Hellmann appeal in 2011 [subsequently annulled by the Supreme Court in 2013] Kassin started to use his academic standing and ostensible objectivity to propagate to American and later global audiences his hired-gun take for the defense. He had still not interviewed anyone in the Perugia police or prosecution.
He never made clear that his description of Knox’s interrogation was already UNIVERSALLY discredited in Italy - and that even Knox had admitted that the police treated her fairly. He never explained what peer review process his many pieces went through. Not one police officer or prosecutor in Perugia was contacted by any peer reviewer seeking confirmations. This suggests either that there was no peer review or it was unethically cooked in some way.
Our own peer reviews of Kassins proliferating claims
One month ago my fellow poster the Machine took apart ten claims which Saul Kassin made last year in a Seattle radio interview. As the Machine showed, every one of those claims fall apart once one refers to official documents and the more objective case books and websites.
Another post one month ago by my fellow poster Fuji showed that Amanda Knox is NOT likely to issue false confessions in the heat of an interrogation moment.
That is Kassin’s key claim here, and in effect Fuji used Kassin’s own “science” against him.
Then we were warned by a John Jay colleague critical of Kassin that he had repeated these same spurious claims live on television - and that Kassin had made even more wrong claims in a keynote speech to a conference of the elite John Jay College in June in New York, in front of an influential international audience.
And he did so again in a paper, possibly peer-reviewed, which the respected journal American Psychologist has placed online. This post provides the truth on the Knox-related claims at the front and back ends of that American Psychologist paper.
Saul Kassin still appears to want to argue that Amanda Knox was convicted ONLY based on a false confession (as the Machine and numerous posts on TJMK show, she wasn’t - and in fact, Knox didn’t even confess) and he now makes almost 50 erroneous assertions about the case.
You can see highlighted in the first box-quote below those misleading and erroneous passages of PR shill Kassin which I correct in the second box-quote below.
(1) SAUL KASSIN’S ORIGINAL VERSION WITH WRONG STATEMENTS HIGHLIGHTED
As illustrated by the story of Amanda Knox and many others wrongfully convicted, false confessions often trump factual innocence. Focusing on consequences, recent research suggests that confessions are powerfully persuasive as a matter of logic and common sense; that many false confessions contain richly detailed narratives and accurate crime facts that appear to betray guilty knowledge; and that confessions in general can corrupt other evidence from lay witnesses and forensic experts””producing an illusion of false support. This latter phenomenon, termed “corroboration inflation,” suggests that pretrial corroboration requirements as well as the concept of “harmless error” on appeal are based on an erroneous presumption of independence among items of evidence. In addition to previously suggested reforms to police practices that are designed to curb the risk of false confessions, measures should be taken as well to minimize the rippling consequences of those confessions….Meredith Kercher was found raped and murdered in Perugia, Italy. Almost immediately, police suspected 20-year-old Amanda Knox, an American student and one of Kercher’s roommates””the only one who stayed in Perugia after the murder. Knox had no history of crime or violence and no motive. But something about her demeanor””such as an apparent lack of affect, an outburst of sobbing, or her girlish and immature behavior”” led police to believe she was involved and lying when she claimed she was with Raffaele Sollecito, her new Italian boyfriend, that night.
Armed with a prejudgment of Knox’s guilt, several police officials interrogated the girl on and off for four days. Her final interrogation started on November 5 at 10 p.m. and lasted until November 6 at 6 a.m., during which time she was alone, without an attorney, tag-teamed by a dozen police, and did not break for food or sleep. In many ways, Knox was a vulnerable suspect””young, far from home, without family, and forced to speak in a language in which she was not fluent. Knox says she was repeatedly threatened and called a liar. She was told, falsely, that Sollecito, her boyfriend, disavowed her alibi and that physical evidence placed her at the scene. She was encouraged to shut her eyes and imagine how the gruesome crime had occurred, a trauma, she was told, that she had obviously repressed. Eventually she broke down crying, screaming, and hitting herself in the head. Despite a law that mandates the recording of interrogations, police and prosecutors maintain that these sessions were not recorded.
Two “confessions” were produced in this last session, detailing what Knox called a dreamlike “vision.” Both were typed by police””one at 1:45 a.m., the second at 5:45 a.m. She retracted the statements in a handwritten letter as soon as she was left alone (“In regards to this “˜confession’ that I made last night, I want to make it clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion.”). Notably, nothing in the confessions indicated that she had guilty knowledge. In fact, the statements attributed to Knox were factually incorrect on significant core details (e.g., she named as an accomplice a man whom police had suspected but who later proved to have an ironclad alibi; she failed to name another man, unknown to police at the time, whose DNA was later identified on the victim). Nevertheless, Knox, Sollecito, and the innocent man she implicated were all immediately arrested. In a media-filled room, the chief of police announced: Caso chiuso (case closed).
Police had failed to provide Knox with an attorney or record the interrogations, so the confessions attributed to her were ruled inadmissible in court. Still, the damage was done. The confession set into motion a hypothesis-confirming investigation, prosecution, and conviction. The man whose DNA was found on the victim, after specifically stating that Knox was not present, changed his story and implicated her while being prosecuted. Police forensic experts concluded that Knox’s DNA on the handle of a knife found in her boyfriend’s apartment also contained Kercher’s blood on the blade and that the boyfriend’s DNA was on the victim’s bra clasp. Several eyewitnesses came forward. An elderly woman said she was awakened by a scream followed by the sound of two people running; a homeless drug addict said he saw Knox and Sollecito in the vicinity that night; a convicted drug dealer said he saw all three suspects together; a grocery store owner said he saw Knox the next morning looking for cleaning products; one witness said he saw Knox wielding a knife.
On December 5, 2009, an eight-person jury convicted Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito of murder. The two were sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively. Finally, on October 3, 2011, after having been granted a new trial, they were acquitted. [Actually they still stand accused - and facing a tough fact-based prosecution appeal] Ten weeks later, the Italian appeals court released a strongly worded 143-page opinion in which it criticized the prosecution and concluded that there was no credible evidence, motive, or plausible theory of guilt. For the four years of their imprisonment, this story drew international attention (for comprehensive overviews of the case, see Dempsey, 2010, and Burleigh, 2011).1
It is now clear that the proverbial mountain of discredited evidence used to convict Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito was nothing but a house of cards built upon a false confession. The question posed by this case, and so many others like it, is this: Why do confessions so often trump innocence? ...
Third, it is important to realize that not all evidence is equally malleable or subject to corroboration inflation. Paralleling classic research indicating that expectations can color judgments of people, objects, and other stimuli that are ambiguous as opposed to those that compel a particular perception, forensic research indicates that ambiguity is a moderating condition. Asked to report on an event or make an identification decision on the basis of a memory trace that cannot be recovered, eyewitnesses are particularly malleable when confronted with evidence of a confession (Hasel & Kassin, 2009). This phenomenon was illustrated in the case against Amanda Knox. When police first interviewed Knox’s British roommates, not one reported that there was bad blood between Knox and the victim. After Knox’s highly publicized confession, however, the girls brought forth new “memories,” telling police that Kercher was uncomfortable with Knox and the boys she would bring home (Burleigh, 2011). ...
In recent years, psychologists have been critical of the problems with accuracy, error, subjectivity, and bias in various types of criminal evidence””prominently including eyewitness identification procedures, police interrogation practices, and the so-called forensic identification sciences, all leading Saks and Koehler (2005) to predict a “coming paradigm shift.” With regard to confessions, it now appears that this shift should encompass not only reforms that serve to minimize the risk of false confessions but measures designed to minimize the rippling consequences of those confessions””as in the case of Amanda Knox and others who are wrongfully convicted.
(2) MY REPLACEMENT VERSION WITH CORRECT FACTS AND CONTEXT NOW INCLUDED
On November 2, 2007, British exchange student Meredith Kercher was found sexually attacked and murdered in Perugia, Italy. The next day, 20-year-old Amanda Knox, an American student and one of Kercher’s roommates, became a person of interest, along with Meredith’s downstairs neighbors and several of her other acquaintances. Interviewing close contacts is a cornerstone of police work. Two of Meredith’s close English friends, who were so scared they couldn’t sleep alone, left Perugia in the immediate aftermath of the murder. Everyone else stayed on.Months before arriving in Perugia, Knox received a citation for a noise violation when a going-away party she’d thrown for herself in Seattle got out of hand. One of the officers described it as a “scene from Baghdad.” Within about three weeks of moving into the cottage in Perugia, Knox was ejected from a nightclub for pouring her glass on the head of a disc jockey.
It’s often said that Knox had no motive to kill Meredith, but it was Knox’s claim of drug use which indicated a possible motive: a drug-fuelled assault. There are various others, though a motive is not actually required for conviction. In crime scene videos from the day Meredith’s body was discovered, Knox can be seen outside the cottage glancing furtively around. Still, it was not this and other odd behavior, but rather the many conflicting witness statements by Knox and her new Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, that led police to believe Knox was involved and lying when she claimed she was with Sollecito at his home continuously on the night of November 1.
Police interviewed dozens of witnesses in the days after the murder, some more than once. All witness statements were written down and signed for, not recorded. The police interviewed Sollecito for the third time beginning at 10:40pm on November 5. Knox later testified that she voluntarily accompanied her boyfriend to the station, because she didn’t want to be alone. The police did not summon her. To the interviewers’ surprise, Sollecito repudiated his earlier alibi when shown phone records, and now said Knox had left his apartment for much of the evening. Some time after 11:00pm the police asked if they might interview Knox. An interpreter was called and by 1:45am Knox had given a signed statement that she had witnessed the sounds of her employer, bar owner Patrick Lumumba, murdering Meredith at the cottage.
In that statement she acknowledged that she had been given an interpreter, and that she herself was now officially a suspect. Knox later testified that she was treated well. She was offered snacks and drinks during the interview and afterward. Made aware that she could not be interrogated without a lawyer, but still anxious to put out as much information as possible, she then requested a chance to make a spontaneous statement without any questioning. Dr Mignini, the magistrate on duty, was called from his home, and she gave a statement in front of him very similar to her witness statement from hours earlier. He asked no questions.
Knox and the police gave different accounts of how the 11:00 to 1:45 am interview was conducted. Police said Knox was told Sollecito now no longer confirmed her alibi and he had called her a liar. She now had no alibi. Sympathetic to her because Knox was freaking out, the interpreter urged her to try to remember at least something. Shown a text she had sent to Lumumba at 8:35pm saying “See you later. Have a good evening!” she was asked to explain this. The police describe how Knox started to cry and burst out, “It’s him! It’s him!”
Both Knox’s witness statement at 1:45 a.m and her voluntary suspect statement at 5:45am were written out in Italian and translated back to her before she signed. After Knox was formally taken into custody at midday on November 6, she asked for paper and wrote a slight modification of her earlier statements, adding: “In regards to this “˜confession’ that I made last night, I want to make it clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock, and extreme exhaustion.”
Lumumba was arrested along with Knox and Sollecito. Knox and her mother held out on his non-involvement for weeks, but he was eventually determined to have a solid alibi. Another man, Rudy Guede, was identified through a hand print in Meredith’s bedroom. Knox appeared to have substituted Lumumba for Guede in her statements, and several details of the crime in her so-called confession were later corroborated by witnesses.
Because police had not needed to provide Knox with an attorney at the impromptu witness interview after 11:00, the Supreme Court ruled that statement inadmissible in the murder case against her. However both statements were ruled admissible in court for the purpose of establishing the crime of defamation against Patrick Lumumba. Knox’s November 6 letter was also ruled admissible.
Guede, the man whose DNA was found on the victim, told a friend while he was still on the run that he had found Meredith stabbed and that Knox had nothing to do with the murder. However, in the same conversation, which was recorded by police, he speculated that Knox and Sollecito might have been at the cottage. In a letter dated March 7, 2010, while his sentence was awaiting final confirmation by the Supreme Court, Guede wrote that Knox and Sollecito murdered Meredith. He reiterated this claim as a witness during Knox and Sollecito’s appeal.
Forensic police from Rome concluded that a kitchen knife found in Sollecito’s apartment had Knox’s DNA on the handle and Meredith’s DNA on the blade. Sollecito’s DNA was on the victim’s bra clasp in Meredith’s locked bedroom.
Several eyewitnesses came forward. Three neighbors testified that they heard a disturbance around 11:30pm in the vicinity of the cottage. A homeless man who at appeal admitted heroin use was reading a newsmagazine at the basketball court near the cottage. He testified that he saw Knox and Sollecito four or five times that night. An Albanian, a possible drug dealer. who the Massei court deemed unreliable after the Micheli court accepted him, said he had seen all three suspects together, and that Knox had accosted him with a knife. A grocery store owner testified he saw Knox at his shop early on the morning after the murder.
The conflicting alibis of the two were never resolved during trial. On December 4, 2009, an eight-person panel consisting of two professional judges and six lay judges found Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito guilty of murder aggravated by sexual assault, simulation of a burglary, unlawful carrying of a knife and, in Knox’s case, criminal defamation of Patrick Lumumba. The two were sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison, respectively….
Knox’s mother later described her daughter as “oblivious to the dark side of the world.” Knox herself wrote that, on the night of the murder, she and Sollecito were talking about his mother’s suicide. She told him her philosophy was “life is full of choices and that these choices are not necessarily between good and evil, but between what’s better and what’s worse.”...
Results of our own peer-group analysis
Kassin asserted that the witnesses in this case imagined “new memories” unfavorable to Knox because of her highly-publicized confession. He referenced an experiment in which an unknown actor walked into a classroom and stole a laptop. The students were asked to try to identify the thief from a line-up. Two days later, the students were told which person in the line-up had confessed. Many changed their minds when told of the confession, although in truth the thief was never in the line-up at all.
Obviously this contrived scenario has nothing at all to do with Amanda Knox or people who had met her.
In his book, Meredith, the victim’s father John Kercher recalls his daughter complaining about Knox’s poor hygiene and how she brought home strange men several weeks before the murder. Numerous witnesses recounted specific anecdotes of Knox’s sharp-elbowed and offputting behavior. Her circle of friends quickly diminished only to Sollecito.
Really, could all these be “new memories”?
Psychologists studying eyewitness testimony, interrogation techniques and false confessions need to be circumspect. Even DNA testing, considered the best of the forensic sciences, requires a thorough understanding of circumstances in order to be interpreted correctly.
Kassin’s continued stonewalling and legal risks
I really wonder who agreed to publish him. I work in a science-based field. When I first learned Kassin had been recruited by Curt Knox’s hatchet men as a PR shill, had been put directly in touch with Knox herself, and had been provided with pre-selected reading materials, I wrote to ask him why he hadn’t disclosed all this to his readers.
Still no reply.
It’s true that numerous talking heads have exaggerated their qualifications and concealed their conflicts of interest and financial stakes when speaking in support of the defense. Judge Mike Heavey abused his oath of office to try to sway the process.
What’s different about Kassin is that, using his John Jay College aura, he has corrupted the scientific record with misinformation.
And he has done this, at least in part, with the goal of misleading an Italian court. These dirty tricks are especially dangerous because most people, including judges, expect that what’s stated as fact in prominent academic journals is objective and true.
Kassin looks to us nothing like an academic here. He looks instead like a defense hired gun who (only in English and only in America) has repeatedly falsely accused police officers of serious felonies in how they questioned Knox as a witness.
If even a single complaint is lodged in Italy and Kassin cannot prove his 50 or so seemingly-spurious and very damaging claims, he could find himself facing years in an Italian prison for attempted obstruction of justice.
Kassin’s peers need to press him for the truth once and for all, and to stop him using his academic mantle illegally and academically unethically as a cloak for a sleazy defense campaign.
[Everything in this post applies equally to the ludicrously inaccurate claims of ex FBI “mindhunter” John Douglas in his books and lobbying at the State Department.]
Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #5
Posted by Our Main Posters
Joint press conference of American and Italian prosecutors
1. Perverse Denigration Of Italian Justice
The stance of Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project on Amanda Knox is not only opportunistic and dishonest. It is perverse in terms of their main mission.
We don’t approve of their broad-brush undermining of forensic science. Statistics show that forensic science has made quantum advances since most of their cases were sent to prison, and these days very few new cases of bent science are showing up. The CSI Effect is a defense device not based on current reality.
But we do approve of any highlighting of how the American system rains massive unfairness, such as the huge tilt toward plea-bargaining by hard-line and mostly elected prosecutors (in Italy only highly-trained career judges can enter into their restrained form of plea-bargaining) and to push for much-needed reforms. And of any learning from other, better, justice systems.
They are not too far down the road on the latter, but seem sincere about it - and there is a great deal that they could learn from Italy.
So the Innocence Project’s incessant use of Amanda Knox, a FAKE exoneree who for big bucks is demonizing perhaps the world’s FAIREST system, is not helpful to either the Italian or American situations.
Here below from our numerous comparison posts are some that highlight the many pluses and several minuses of the Italian justice system.
In essence: it is an extremely effective system. it is widely respected by competent counterparts (as contrasted with the wildly incompetent Steve Moore, Michael Heavey, and so on), it works very closely with the FBI and exchanges officers, it keeps Italian crime at a very low level, it very bravely takes on the mafias despite over 100 assasinations, and it gives an exceptional list of breaks to perpetrators. Recidivisms - repeat crimes - are among the world’s lowest.
2. Main Pluses And Minuses Of The Italian Justice System
1. Plus: Italy Has Little Crime, Few Murders, Small Prison Population
Click for Post: Compared To Italy, Say, Precisely How Wicked Is The United States?
2. Plus: The Well-Trained Well-Equipped Italian Police Are Also Well-Liked
Click for Post: Italian Police Long Known As Among Europe’s Coolest, Now Also Being Remarked Upon As”¦
3. Plus: Italian Cops, Judges, Labs Work Exceptionally Closely With US’s FBI
Click for Post: FBI Reporting Close Co-operation With Italy In Arresting And Soon Extraditing A Fugitive Swindler
4. Plus: Italy And United States Cooperate Daily On Effecting Extraditions
Click for Post: Italian Justice & The Telling Status Of Extraditions To And From Italy
5. Plus: Italy Has Implemented Perhaps World’s Best Anti-Terrorism System
Click for Post: Counterterrorism: Another Way Italian Law Enforcement Is An Effective Model For Everywhere Else
6. Plus: The Career Prosecutors Are Well-Trained, Straight, Very Hard to Bend
Click for Post: Why The Italian Judiciary’s Probably Less Prone to Pressure Than Any Other In The World
7. Plus: Those Charged Get Repeated Chances To Walk Free Before Trial
Click for Post: “They Were Held For A Year Without Even Being Charged!!” How Italian Justice REALLY Works
8. Plus: The Courts Take Reasonable Doubt At Trials Very, Very Seriously
Click for Post: Reasonable Doubt In Italian Law: How Sollecito, Hellmann, And Zanetti Seriously Garbled It.
9. Plus: The Appeal System Is Ponderous But Its Fairness Exceptional
Click for Post: How The Italian Appeals Process Works And Why It Consumes So Much Time
10. Plus: The Italian System Learns Fast And Seeks Incessantly To Improve
Click for Post: Meredith May Not See Justice (Yet) But She Will Leave At Least Three Legacies
11. Minus: Mafias And Corrupt Politicians Have Somewhat Bent a Good System
Click for Post: Trashing Of Italian Justice To Bend Trial Outcomes And How The Republic Pushes Back
12. Minus: The System Is So Fair To Perps, Victim’s Families Can Suffer Terribly
Click for Post: The Terrible Weight On The Victim’s Family Because The Italian System Is So Very, Very Pro Defendant
13. Plus: Still, A Fine System Continuously Improving, Already Good As A Global Model
Click for Post: Italian Justice: Describing A Fine System And How To Improve It
14. Plus: And The System Really Has Gone The Extra Mile In Meredith’s Case
Click for Post: From Shortly Before Last December’s Verdict: Our Poster Hopeful’s Moving Tribute To Italian Justice
3. Final post in this series.
Click for Post: Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #6
Innocence Project: Seven Years Clutching Knox And Trashing Italian Justice To Joy Of Mafias #6
Posted by Our Main Posters
Right: Ryan Ferguson, a REAL exoneree, to present at IP Kansas City fundraiser
1. Innocence Project Dishonesties Posts #1 To #6
1. Click for Post: #1 Jason From’s Absurdly Ill-Informed Interview With Knox.
2. Click for Post: #2 Hampikian Illegally & Incompetently Interfered On DNA
3. Click for Post: #3 Overwhelming Forensic Evidence Against Knox #1
4. Click for Post: #4 Overwhelming Forensic Evidence Against Knox #2
5. Click for Post: #5 Stop Knocking Italian Justice, And Learn From It
6. Click for Post: #6 REAL Exonerees: Knox Falsely Claims To Be One Too
2. To REAL Exonerees: Knox Falsely Claims She Is One Of You
At this week’s gala the Midwest Innocence Project is seriously misleading its sponsors and real exonerees about Amanda Knox.
Amazing that Tricia Bushnell and her Midwest staff are having Knox present yet more dangerous anti-Italy trashing in the keynote speech. For starters, Knox is not even an exoneree! That was NOT her final status.
And there’s more. We previously explained how Knox is walking free when she should not be, and how the Innocence Project and the mafias illegally interfered in the judicial process.
And how the Innocence Project has been ferociously touting Knox with zero serious questioning for seven years now.
3. What Knox Will Seek To Convince You
If Knox is true to form, she will attempt to convince you that she is one of you, for two reasons, both of them untrue: (1) that her four years in prison should not have been; and (2) that her conditions in prison were at least as nasty as yours were.
Out of a possible 200-plus reports here that go toward disproving these claims, we are linking below to 25 of the most telling.
4. Knox’s Four Year In Prison? Fully Justified
Knox’s four years in Capanne Prison outside Perugia (for which tellingly she is not suing for compensation) consisted of:
(1) a year in 2007-08 during which she was repeatedly given chances to convince courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, in the face of ever-mounting evidence described in previous posts, that she should make bail or house arrest or be released entirely. She failed at all of them (oh, she didn’t tell you?)
(2) a three-year sentence for spontaneously and without provocation framing an innocent man for murder; the Supreme Court has ruled that her appeals are all exhausted, the European Court of Human Rights will therefore not touch it, and so Knox is a convicted felon for life (oh, she didnt tell you?).
5. Knox’s Nasty Experiences In Prison? All Mythical
1. First, note conditions in American prisons.
We have posted most recently on the extraordinary fact that an estimated 200,000-plus are there only because they were frightened into a plea-bargain. (Despite the hullaballoo, those released with Innocence Project help are only a small fraction of one percent of that.)
1. Click for Post: Why Italy Doesnt Look For Foreign Guidance On Its Justice System.
2. Click for Post: The Vital Context Of A Genuine, Huge US Justice Problem.
3. Click for Post: More On A Genuine, Huge Justice Problem In The US
4. Click for Post: Yet More On A Genuine US Justice Problem.
2. Now note the contrast of Italian prisons.
The prisons Knox and IP maliciously trash include some of the most modern and humane in the world - Knox even had a bathroom, kitchen and TV in her cell, she was able to wander around the prison pretty freely, and she was given a job and attended concerts.
5. Click for Post: A Famous Black Widow Confirms Italian Prisons Are Pretty Nice
6. Click for Post: NY Times Describes How Italy Leads The World In Rehabilitation
7. Click for Post: With Not Many Prisons Italy Decides To Build More
8. Click for Post: “Human Rights Watch” Gives An Approving Nod To Italy
9. Click for Post: Italy’s Advanced, Effective System Adopted By City Of New York
3. Knox had numerous ways to complain
Knox had direct access to the media, and Sollecito actually ran a blog from prison. She could write letters and make phone calls. Her family visited her at least weekly when they were in Perugia. Her lawyers visited her at least weekly.
Also an Italian MP, Rocco Girlanda, made several dozen visits to “monitor her conditions”. And an American Embassy staffer checked upon her conditions every month and reported them to the State Department.
What actually happened? Knox reported NO complaints. Nor did her parents. Nor her lawyers. Nor the Italian MP. Nor the US Rome Embassy staffers. Italian lawyers under law MUST pass on complaints of ill-treatment from clients, so the fact that they didn’t is very telling.
10. Click for Post: State Department Monitored Knox 2007-11; Reported Fine
4. The HIV complaint? A defense trick
Knox was checked out medically on arrival in prison. An HIV test returned a false positive. She was told not to worry as this is not uncommon, and a second test was negative. There was nothing malicious about this and neither prosecution nor prison staff leaked to media.
11. Click for Post: Felony Charge Of HIV Leak Was From Knox Defense-Team.
5. Knox herself did raise eyebrows in prison
Media were essentially benign while Knox was inside and she used them often to seek support. They actually showed her having good times. But staff and cellmates saw a darker aspect suggesting all was not well. Her hygiene issues came up again. She was under incessant pressure from Sollecito, who never confirmed any of her alibis in court.
12. Click for Post: Much-Admired Feminist On Knox As Ice-Cold In Capanne.
13. Click for Post: The Hands Of Time Video With Screenplay By Amanda Knox.
14. Click for Post: The Milestone Book By Dr Hodges On Knox’s Driving Psychology.
6. Knox’s 2013 book explodes with surprise charges
Knox’s book was published after the Nencini appeal court confirmed her guilt. Desperation was setting in. It was her first blast against Italy for her prison term and it sure conned a lot of Americans. As Knox finds it harder and harder to maintain the interrogation hoax and the false-confession hoax, she falls back on the nasty-prison hoax more and more despite strong proof she was treated well.
15. Click for Post: Knox’s Smear-All Revenge Book #3
16. Click for Post: Knox’s Smear-All Revenge Book #4
17. Click for Post: Knox’s Smear-All Revenge Book #6
18. Click for Post: Knox’s Smear-All Revenge Book #9
19. Click for Post: Knox’s Smear-All Revenge Book #11
Plus many shown to be stabbed in the back by Knox in the demonization series were in Capanne.
7. Italy reacts to Knox’s malicious claims negatively
The book was withdrawn at the last moment from publication in Italian in Italy in 2013. Why? Because the publishers’ lawyers considered it highly defamatory. Italian reactions are to the English language version and to long excerpts in the weekly Oggi (see part 8 below).
20. Click for Post: In Italy Knox’s Malicious Demonizations Spark Anger
21. Click for Post: Book Claims About Prison Contradicted By Many Sources
22. Click for Post: Good Reporters Surface Amanda Knox’s False Claims In Droves
23. Click for Post: Callous Attacker Who Smirked At Trial Turns Into A Whiny Victim
8. Oggi lost in court for republishing Knox claims
The Italian weekly tabloid has a kind of a pro-mafia anti-justice slant and delights in showing justice officials up. It was the only publication in Italy to translate lurid passages from Knox’s book and it lost in court for this. The passages are rebutted in the second post.
24. Click for Post: (1) The Knox Article Oggi Is Now Charged For 1
25. Click for Post: (2) The Oggi Article: Our Claim By Claim Rebuttal
26. Click for Post: Diffamazione Complaint Against False Claims In Oggi Article
6. And Knox’s Biggest Hoax Of Real Exonerees?
Fake exoneree Knox is not out of the woods on this matter. Recently Sollecito faced charges in a Florence court for defamations in his book - and he lost. The Statute of Limitations on the myriad defamations in Knox’s book has several years to run still.
27. Click for Post: Sollecito Loses Supreme Court Appeal On $0.55M Damages Claim
7. Afterthought
Knox may have gained backing from a foolish IP but at a high price and a great risk for both. Many despise her, especially those dozens she has defamed. She would be given no peace if she visited Italy. She has lost all prospect of any reversal via the ECHR “appeal” and all prospect of any compensation for “false” imprisonment. And the black mafia cloud over her grows larger. Thanks not least to Sollecito’s dead uncle.
For those still in the process of clicking through, this is the Breaking News box that sat at the top for the past several days.
8 Breaking News Box Of Past Few Days
Breaking news. There seems deliberate intent to make Thursday night IP fundraiser in Kansas City with Amanda Knox all but invisible to the press. This might explain that. Quick reads: (1) On why Knox was rightly in prison and was not exonerated. (2) On Knox’s real experiences in prison, by witnesses and Knox herself. (3) And much more.