Reply to: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6k7/experiment_knox_case_debate_with_rolf_nelson/4jmb

Didn't realize you updated, looks like we can't go more than 8 or 9 deep before the RSS feed stops notifying about thread changes.

In terms of narrowing down what Umani Ronchi was actually saying, saying that the prosecution claims something in its appeals document isn't useful evidence. If there's a specific quote of Umani Ronchi that the prosecution makes, that might be useful, as long as the quote is clear enough that we can deduce it isn't being quoted out-of-context.

It sounds like you might disagree with... another of Raffaele's consultants, Introna, who placed the start of attack between 21:30 and 22:30.

Not according to p. 180 of Massei-Cristiani, where Introna is described as placing it between 21:00 and 21:30.

That's a good find, and you may be right. I was going by this, but maybe it's a mistranslation or a misunderstanding:

"[Introna] also observed that the beginning of the attack must have been a moment of tremendous stress for Kercher and may have arrested the digestive process. One could and should obtain a precise indication from this, in the sense that the stress to which the victim was subjected must have started between 21:30 pm and 22:30 pm." (p. 130)

Raffaele's appeal document argues for 21:30 - 22:00... I think 21:00-21:30 is most likely, but 21:30-22:00 is not ruled out nearly as strongly in my model as anything after 22:00 is.. the computer evidence provides an alibi up to nearly 21:30.

Again, post-trial prosecution claims that haven't even gone under cross-examination aren't useful evidence. If you want an alibi to 21:30, you'll have to provide better support, which will unfortunately be difficult even if Raffaele is innocent, since computers open files in the background all the time, and so not just the timing but the nature of the file opened will have to be examined.

(although their is no evidence of significant alcohol or drug consumption)

There's evidence of about one glass (p. 152), so around 10 ml. A dose of 60 ml appears to almost double emptying time in one study (http://alcalc.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/3/187.full.pdf+html), so I'd expect a change of about 10-20% in Meredith's case. So probably not terribly significant on its own. I know there was no trace of drugs found in her body, and marijuana appears to have a long half-life, so I agree there's no drug consumption even though Meredith had easy access to marijuana.

Although the paper I cited explicitly stated that the results did not fit to a normal distribution, the percentiles given are fairly well approximated by assuming a mean of 81.5 and a standard deviation of 30. Under these assumptions, the lag time required for the Massei guilt scenario would be at least a five- or six-sigma event.

So to get to even 21:00 from 18:00, you need to go out by more than 90 minutes. Three standard deviations is >.99 probability, so this model doesn't seem to be accurate, at least not with a normal distribution. So do you want to propose a new model with a greater standard deviation, or propose that it's not a normal distribution? If the latter, I would expect the deviation from normality to be equally likely to work against Raffaele, as it is to work in his favor.

In the other direction, a 30-minute variance is already too large to provide much evidence in favor of Raffaele's innocence, especially without further evidence of a 21:30 alibi.

Now I know you doubt that the conditions of the study hold here, but don't you find this at least a little bit confusing?

I agree that the stomach findings are a mild surprise if we're talking about 23:00+ like in the Massei narrative, but the first problem is that my surprise is only mild since there are so many factors that affect it, and the second problem is that once I'm slightly surprised by going out to 21:00, I don't get much more surprised by going out to 21:30 or even 22:00, and so don't see Raffaele as having an alibi.

As an example, does it surprise you that the abstract of one (unfortunately gated) study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7956593) of fried food gives 317 minutes for total gastric emptying, even though it probably, like other experiments, is unlike Meredith's case in that it probably involves pre-experiment fasting and no post-meal snack.

But even in the worst-case scenario here, the amount of slippage can't have been very large, because the stomach contents could easily have constituted the entire meal on their own.

I don't follow the logic here; isn't the more important question whether the stomach contents could have equally well constituted just half or 2/3 the meal? Or do you just mean that it's unlikely more than half of the meal passed through?

To illustrate further, if as much as half of Meredith's meal had passed into the duodenum, and we assume a normally-distributed half-time with median 127 minutes and standard deviation 40 (the median taken from the study), the finding would still have put her well within the slowest 1% under the prosecution theory (while only in the slowest 10% to 50% under the defense theory).

Yes, your model (if correct) of a non-ligature situation harms the court's theory about the attack taking place somewhere in the 23:00-23:30 interval, though it fails again to save Raffaele's computer alibi. Plus, I think you're underestimating the quantitative level of uncertainty if we don't know how much she ate, exactly what all she ate, exactly when she started eating, what effect having a post-meal snack has, what effect not fasting has, amount of alcohol consumed, and what effect walking home after eating had, all of which should contribute to a large standard deviation.