Allow me to say first that I appreciate your extended comment even if I can't say I embrace all you've said in it. I can believe the personal experience you've described was, as you say, surprisingly stressful; but let's note that you came through it without, as I gather, either falsely confessing or changing your story. Every one of us lives with crime; every one of us lives with the possibility that, at any moment, he or she will be arrested for, or questioned about, a crime with which he or she has had nothing to do. Every one of us lives, as well, with the knowledge that some humans are liars; every one of us knows that that knowledge complicates interrogation. If any one of us is subjected to interrogation, he or she is obliged to perform seriously through it. That fact is no more subject to change than is, say, the law of conservation of energy. Either you accept it, meet your duties, and hold others to theirs--or you are antisocial.

This seems like an unfairly high standard to hold people to in order to determine whether they are "antisocial." After all, in an interrogation where the police do not believe the subject's protestations of innocence, they generally take extensive measures to induce the subject to change their testimony. Interrogation subjects can be subject to considerable duress, and condemning people for changing their stories under circumstances is, hopefully, different in degree, but is not different in kind from condemning people for caving to torture. It would certainly take an unusual definition of "antisocial" to capture people who will falsely self incriminate under sufficient pressure from the police.

As you know by now, I mentioned, below, that I'd got the impression that the multiple-attacker theory was insubstantial, but I do appreciate the time you've taken to detail problems with it. I'm not sure it's accurate to say the police walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito to it; but I can believe the police early on developed a theory of a many-party-attack and a false break-in to cover it, a theory they never managed to abandon.

In fact, the police flagged Amanda Knox as a suspect on the basis of her mannerisms at the crime scene, which the lead investigator (who has come under fire for his use of implausible profiling techniques in other cases) judged to be unusual, before developing a multiple-attacker hypothesis behind the murder. Raffaele Sollecito was flagged by association with Knox, as was Patrick Lumumba on the basis of her phone contact with him. All of this is a matter of public record. Since the presumption of Knox's involvement was central to their investigation from the beginning, they had a major reputational stake in not admitting that it had been based on weak premises, and all the information they received was thus evaluated in light of their original hypothesis.

As for your distinction between false confession and story-changing, the relevance of false confession here is simply that it is generally the most extreme form of story changing under duress from the police- false self incrimination. If people can regularly be induced to falsely self-incriminate, it should be no surprise if they can be induced to falsely incriminate others. The fact that Amanda Knox changed her testimony should be evaluated in light of the fact that she changed it to something that the police had known motive to pressure her for, and when she was removed from her conditions of duress, she immediately recanted. If we are to take this as evidence of anyone's wrongdoing, it should be that of the police, since we can take it as a measure of their misconduct that they convinced an interrogation subject to point them to a suspect that they had already decided they wanted, who we know in light of present evidence could not have been involved.