Amanda Knox (Netflix)

[FuriousStyles]

On 10/11/2016 at 9:07 AM, Ohwell said:

Unlike some people, I am not going to sit at my computer and try to analyze Amanda Knox as to whether she is on the autism spectrum, or has some kind of mental illness.  

All I can say is that she comes off as spoiled, entitled, clueless, and heartless.  Now whether she's like that in real life is another story.  I can only go by what I've seen of her.  

Yep!  This is what it boils down to, to me. Amanda just oozes privilege it almost made the doc unwatchable because I couldn't watch objectively.  It's probably the one thing I nodded in agreement with the prosecutor.  He said something about her being entitled and wondered if that was a typical Seattle attitude....and given the conversation Amanda had with her friend 3 days after the murder I had to wonder myself.

I mean...yes Amanda didn't know Meredith very long and I wouldn't expect her to be boo-hooing.   But a girl was just brutally murdered in the house you shared with her.  I dont think it's too much to ask to display some level of sorrow or even fear.  Instead they're talking about Rafaelle and I think the girl actually said "ohh don't worry, you'll look back on this in a year and consider it the best time of your life".  I was like what????

The door being left open would freak me out....but then also seeing blood in the bathroom? I'd be going nuts.  How she ignored BOTH those things is baffling to me. 

I see some OJ references that I'd like to jump in on.  OJ wouldn't have needed to attack Nicole and Ron at the same time.  What likely happened is that OJ was just finishing up killing Nicole and Ron walked up on the whole thing (he was returning a pair of glasses) trying to stop OJ at which time OJ started his attack on Ron (while Nicole was mostly likely already dead).

[Bastet]

That conversation with her equally vapid friend was jaw dropping to me.  A woman is freshly murdered!  Like you said, they were just short-term roommates, so I don't expect her to feel any connection beyond that, but someone she knew was killed in their shared home.  Someone broke in, raped and murdered her.  What if Amanda had been home at the time?  Even if she can't muster up some basic human sympathy for Meredith, the "Wow, freaky!" nature of events isn't a little sobering that nattering on with her friend about her little European fling doesn't feel inappropriate?  The investigation into what had happened to that poor woman was, at this point, just some big inconvenience to Amanda, going by that phone call --she just wanted to get back to getting stoned and having sex.  Which, hey, nice way to pass a day.  But it's like the murder was just something that was harshing her buzz.

None of this makes it right that she went through hell for a crime she didn't commit, of course.  Just, holy cow, she was an unlikable person back then.

Depending on the circumstances, the door being left open may not have given me pause, either.  I live alone, so if I came home to my door open, I'd freak out.  But when I was young and had a roommate, if we hadn't had indoor-only cats, if I'd come home and found the door open, I'd have thought she left it open to get some air or had brought in groceries and forgot to come back and shut it long before I'd think someone had broken in.  But when I didn't see her, I'd have probably called out, "Are you home?" (if for no other reason than to see if I needed to be annoyed that she'd gone off and left with the door open).

The blood in the sink, if it was just a few tiny drops, probably wouldn't alarm me on its own; I'd figure she cut herself, went into the bathroom to clean up.  But maybe now I'd start having second thoughts about the open door.  And at any rate, I'd probably be knocking on my roommate's door to check that she was okay. 

So, while I can certainly think of ways I might have reacted differently, it's not outside the realm of possibility I wouldn't have really grown suspicious until the blood on the rug, either.  Especially if I was stoned.

(I once cut my hand horribly, and had to call my mom to come take me to get stitched up.  I thought I'd cleaned the kitchen fairly well while I waited, but when my roommate got home she discovered me gone, my car in its spot, a little bit of blood I'd missed, the knife, my interrupted meal preparation, and the bloody handprint I'd left on the phone that hung on the wall just outside the kitchen.  She didn't assume I was dead or abducted, she assumed I'd cut myself making dinner and had called my parents to take me for stitches.  She waited a bit, and when I hadn't yet returned, she called my parents' house, where my dad confirmed what had happened.)

Edited October 26, 2016 by Bastet

[HunterHunted]

On Saturday, October 22, 2016 at 5:53 PM, Bastet said:

Seriously.  I came away from this documentary thinking poorly of just about everyone involved -- investigators, the prosecutor, Amanda (I don't think she killed Meredith, but I think she was a disturbingly uncaring person back then), Amanda's hideously immature friend who called her three days after the murder, and that awful Daily Mail reporter.  He disgusted me pretty much every time he opened his mouth, and especially with that declaration.  He should be struck by lightning whenever he calls himself a journalist.

I finally had an opportunity to watch this. Ugh, I agree with you. They all suck.

The journalist whose justification of his negligence and complete and total abdication of his journalistic ethics and professional responsibility was "if I had to do research and investigate things, I wouldn't have gotten that headline first. And isn't that the most important thing."

The prosecutor and investigators who were crowing about what their non evidence proved. The collection of evidence was shockingly bad. The fact that the bra clasp was not found for 45 days is really problematic. No booties. No jumpsuits. Random people in and out of the crime scene. And the prosecutor seeming to discount the possibility of cross contamination or transfer. Even if you aren't a forensic scientist, you have to know how easily this happens. When I lived in my apartment and shared a laundry room, my clothes were always coming out of the laundry with long blonde hair. I am not a blonde. I imagine if something happened to one of my blonde neighbors, the dimwits investigating Meredith's case would have come up with a theory that I was psychosexually obsessed with my neighbor and I stalked and killed her. Also the prosecutor and investigators talked like they had OJ levels of evidence in the case. And they did for Rudy, but somehow it made it more obvious to them that Amanda was involved?!? This would be like looking at all of the evidence in the OJ trial and concluding that Kato did it. The prosecutor did the case and the Italian criminal justice system no favors with his wild unsupported theories and feelings. It all combined to make Italy seem like a backwards superstitious and ignorant backwater.

The fact that the Italian government seemingly gets a ton of opportunities to prosecute a defendant feels like a nightmare to me.

I found Amanda's phone call with her equally immature friend to be appalling. That was until I remebered a girl that I went to college and med school with. We had a test in some class and were all waiting outside of a classroom chatting about studying for the test. The girl I'm thinking of said that she had a hard time studying last night. Someone asked why. She said that one of the girls who lived in her suite was up all night crying because her father had passed away suddenly. I responded "that's terrible." And the girl in my class said to her suite mate "I don't know why you're up all night crying. Yeah, your father died, but get over it bitch. I have to study." A bunch of other people in our class said that the girl grieving over her father was a rude asshole for crying so long. Except for myself, every last one of the people who participated in that conversation is a medical doctor. We were all 19 o 20 when this happened. People at that age are often assholes and self-absorbed people at that age are monsters, but that doesn't mean that they are murderers.

I was also surprised that Amanda would go into the house when the door was ajar, but Perugia is kind of small. I can see it as the kind of place where people don't lock their doors. I moved from the northeast to a southern city with a population of one million. A few years ago, the police came to my office and my neighborhood meeting to remind us to lock our car doors and homes during the holiday season. We'd had some break ins. I'm still shocked that as a person who always locks my car and home that I was the weird outlier. I tried to explain to my mother about people not locking their cars or homes. My mom was totally befuddled and kept coming up with scenarios where you had forgotten something somewhere and had to run back to get it. I was like no. They mean like all day at work or Christmas shopping at the mall. Perugia has a population of 200,000 and was very provincial when it came to morality issues. An unlocked and open door probably doesn't have the same impact in Perugia as it might have in Rome.

What Amanda did with Patrick Lumumba was disgusting. I don't know that she's racist, but I think that the fact she went to a pretty bigoted place speaks to perhaps some innate biases, especially since Lumumba seems to have been decent to her. I'm going to give her the side eye for a long time.

I was really irritated by Rudy's lawyer who sneered about Americans critiquing the Italian Criminal Justice system. He sat there crowing about how they have courthouses and schools of law dating back to the 1300s, while Americans were painting on cave walls. So fucking racist. So while Italians were busy studying and trying animals who had "committed crimes" (it's a thing--look up medieval animal trials), the native people of the Americas had their own tribal councils and tribunals. It was a comment born out of ignorance and arrogance. No collection of people from a family to a massive civilization gets by day in and day out without a way to resolve disputes and transgeessions. If you don't, these groups basically collapse in on themselves. Additionally, most Americans and most of the current American legal/criminal is derived from European traditions. There was no reason to impugn native people.

I've also learned that in the Italian system, the prosecutor prosecutes the case and can direct most of the police investigation. Prior to around 2000, the prosecutor could do all of the above, present the case to the judge, and work with the judge to investigate the crime. All of this was done without ever really sharing any evidence with the defense. Around 2000, Italy changed the law so that the system could be more adversarial and independent because the prior system meant that judges were biased in favor the prosecutor as they had worked collaboratively in developing the case. 

On Monday, October 10, 2016 at 10:27 PM, Court said:

False confessions are more common than one thinks. The chances of one happening is even higher when dealing with someone young or affected by mental illness. Knox is likely both.

Police use leading questions, manipulate, or outright lie to get the answers they want.

In the cases that the Innocence Project has used DNA to overturn convictions, one third of the cases had defendants who had given false confessions to the police. It is very common. Age, mental illness, intellectual disability, substance impairment, length of detention, isolation, and stress can play a factor in getting people to falsely confess. It's not surprising that Amanda, a young woman who might be mentally ill, who definitely had been drinking and smoking pot while in Italy, didn't really know the culture, and was not fluent in Italian could have been manipulated into giving a false confession. I'll argue that as an American she was also particularly disadvantaged because the Miranda warning and other defendant protections that are frequently depicted in American entertainment never occurred when she was being interrogated. When everyone else in their circle was obtaining lawyers and beating feet out of the country, she's sitting around not doing any of that. I think she was sitting there waiting for Lenny Briscoe to mirandize her so she would know when this shit got serious.

I expected something more balanced. I don't know if there is a way to make the investigation and procesecution more understandable because that was a shit show. I wish we had more from Meredith's family and anything from Patrick Lumumba.

Edited October 28, 2016 by HunterHunted

[Marsupial]

She was given an interpreter and when Mignini began his formal interrogation of her, he twice offered her a lawyer. She refused both times, and signed a document waiving her right. Amanda thought she was smart enough to outwit the system and didn't need a lawyer. Besides, she already had a fall guy lined up.

Yes, false confessions happen. Unfortunately Amanda's false "confession" was not about herself, it implicated somebody else, a completely innocent man.

As to the DNA not picked up for 45 days, again, that was in a sealed room that nobody went into and it was conclusively proven to be Sollecito's. What is an explanation for his DNA being in the bloody bra clasp of a murdered woman?