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brazil84 comments on The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom - Less Wrong
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"That a known burglar, involved in three separate break-in incidents in the weeks prior to the murder broke in and robbed, assaulted and murdered Kercher.
Or
That new lovers Knox and Sollecito with no criminal history whatsoever, conspired with relative unknown Guede to involve Kercher in some sex game and inadvertently killed her?"
Are those the only two possibilities? As an attorney, I can tell you I have seen many many cases where neither side's theory about events is very credible.
It seems pretty clear to me that the answer to my question is "no," but I would like to hear your take.
As an attorney you are asking a tangential question with the implication that it has more relevance than it does.
I remember when I started practicing law on my own I would be outraged when I caught the other side in numerous lies and yet the judge would still go against my client. At the time, it seemed to me that the judge was heavily biased against my client.
It took me a while to learn what I have tried to share in my last couple posts. In hindsight, I realize that most of those clients really did do pretty much what they had been accused of doing. And that in any event, the judge was (generally speaking) making a reasonable assesment as to my client's guilt or innocense.
The fact that the prosecution's case has holes in it doesn't necessarily mean that the Defendants were innocent or uninvolved in the murder.
But feel free to explain why you think my question is tangential or irrelevant and I will be happy to consider it.
Also, you might ask yourself if you are angry at me over our previous exchange and whether this anger is coloring your judgment.
I will wait and see if anyone else finds my objection to your rhetoric hard to understand.
Suit yourself. In essence, I am pointing out that there are other possibilities besides the 2 scenarios described by captcorajus.
If you feel that my observation is so obviously tangential or irrelevant that no explanation is required beyond simply stating that it is tangential or irrelevant, then so be it. People can draw whatever inference they wish. My inference is that you have no good explanation for your claim, but of course I am starting from the belief that my observation was relevant. (Otherwise I would not have made it.) If someone else sees things differently, perhaps they can shed some light on the issue.
"Please see the response from RNO (for a start)."
I don't see anything in RNO's response which would offer an explanation for your claim. On the contrary, it appears that RNO simply misunderstood my point and I explained myself a bit further.
Ah, i think i see the problem here.
You say that a weak prosecution does not equal an innocent defendant. I think we can all agree on that.
You say that there are other explanations for the evidence. Sounds reasonable enough; after all, even if we're sure of something, we're not absolutely sure, not 100% sure.
Back in the first "you be the jury" thread, there was a general agreement that Guede was guilty and Knox was innocent. For Knox, as i recall, there were various estimates from 10% to 30% chance of guilt, thus a judgment of "probably innocent / not likely enough to convict". So, i think it's not that nobody is considering any other explanation, rather, they're convinced that this one explanation is correct.
Saying, "there might be another explanation" is a good idea as a general point, but that doesn't mean that another explanation is particularly likely. You keep saying "there are other possibilities" but the problem is: what other scenario are you suggesting, and why should we believe it?
I'm not suggesting any particular scenario. There simply isn't enough evidence to make a good guess at what happened in the hour or two leading up to Kircher's death.
It's a bit like the Annie Le case in New Haven. It's reasonably clear who the killer was, but it's not clear why he did it.
In any murder case, there is a lot of pressure on the prosecutor to put together a scenario as to how and why the killing happened. And usually it's not too hard to do. i.e. to paint the defendant as a jealous ex-husband; a robber; a competing drug dealer; etc.
But I'm not the prosecutor so there's no need for me to put together any scenario. I'm reasonably confident that Knox and Sollecito were involved in the murder, but I do not know what their role was or why they did it.