You state that “some people” are innocent and yet change their story. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it does not change the fact that story-changing is, in my view, at least, strong evidence of guilt. You state that it “can probably [be taken] as weak evidence of guilt,” and the author of the present post seems to grant even less than that. Story-changing by someone caught in a trap is a significant element of the human condition, an element you seek to dismiss with the phrase “speculative psychological evidence.”
I also don’t know whether it’s true that “lots of confessions” are coerced and false; but unless you have something specific to point out with respect to such supposed coercion and the changed stories of Knox, you’re just throwing up dust.
It’s extremely common for people to give false confessions under duress, and some judicial systems take this into account. In Japan, for instance, no person can be convicted on the basis of a confession alone; they must be able to reveal verifiable information about the crime which the police could not have already provided to them.
I participated in a psychological study a few months ago regarding interrogation. I was interrogated for a minor offense which I did not commit by a person who was led to believe that I had committed it. I pretty much had the deck stacked in my favor here; I knew that the stakes riding on the interrogation were trivial, I had, if not an actual alibi, then at least extremely strong circumstantial evidence in favor of my innocence, plus strong material evidence. I was accused of stealing money, which I would not have had time or opportunity to spend or hide, but I did not have any bills on me in the denomination I was accused of stealing, and was free to demonstrate this. I am also pretty good at retaining my reasoning and rhetorical faculties under pressure, making me better at arguing in my own defense than most people.
Nevertheless, it was a really surprisingly stressful experience. If you’ve never been interrogated for a crime you haven’t committed, then I would say that this is absolutely an area where you shouldn’t try to state with any kind of confidence what you would or would not do.
As for the evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime, to make a not-that-long story short, that’s not really the case. The prosecution had already flagged Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito by connection, as suspects, on very tenuous bases, prior to processing any forensic evidence for the case, and they continued to interpret the available evidence in light of that hypothesis, but on the whole there was really an absence of evidence favoring the involvement of multiple people over a single murderer.
The evidence for the involvement of other people besides Guede pretty much boils down to
The number of stab wounds and general brutality of the murder
Evidence of the break-in being staged
*DNA of other individuals aside from Guede at the scene.
However, had the prosecution not already had a vested interest in flagging multiple suspects, they would almost certainly have noted that the number of stab wounds on Kercher’s body was not actually unusual for a knife murder. Knife murders routinely involve very large number of stab wounds, because it’s much harder to kill a person with a knife than people generally expect, and when a person who’s not trained or experienced in killing people with knives attempts to do so, the result is usually a frantic extended struggle. The “evidence” that the break-in was staged did not stand up even cursory analysis by the defense, and could reasonably be described as “completely made up,” and the DNA analysis only suggested involvement of multiple people after egregious mishandling.
Had the police not walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito into the case, it’s unlikely that they would have concluded from the available evidence that any perpetrators other than Guede were involved.
Edit: With regards to Knox having specfic reason to alter her testimony in absence of her guilt, it’s important to realize that the person she flagged after her extended interrogation was the same person the police had already decided to treat as a suspect based on their interpretation of her phone messages to him0, messages which were in fact quite innocuous when viewed in light of English language colloquialism. They had a suspect they wanted her to finger, and after an interrogation in which she alleges extreme duress, she eventually does so. Then, after having a short period in which to recuperate, she repudiates her own testimony. The suspect then proves to have an airtight alibi.
Under these circumstances, if her changing testimony should be taken as indication of anything, it’s that the police probably did push her extremely hard to give a response they had already settled on. It’s very unlikely that she and the police would independently narrow down the same suspect who was unambiguously uninvolved, and the content of the proceedings clearly shows that the police, rather than Knox, were the first to point to that suspect.
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.
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.
As for false confessions, I’ll point out that I didn’t bring up false confessions and really haven’t said anything about them with respect to this case, in particular. In fact, I clarified, in a comment at 02 February 2014 10:51:01PM, somewhere in these exchanges, that “Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis …. They are story-changing ….” Even in my statement that you quote, above, I mention false confessions only as something that has been brought up by our fellow-poster Ander; I ask him to comment on Knox’s “changed stories,” not any confession. Yes, false confession is something I’ve discussed in these exchanges; and what I just said, two paragraphs above, about the duty of a person being interrogated applies to false confessing and to story-changing—both. Even so, they are distinct things.
Either you accept it, meet your duties, and hold others to theirs—or you are antisocial.
If you still don’t think this is easier said than done, you haven’t learned anything from this discussion. Confabulation under stress is a fact of human psychology. You can’t make it go away by just saying “try really hard to keep your story straight”.
You are missing an important fact about police: They are not your friends, especially not if they are investigating a case and (rightly or wrongfully) suspect you of being involved. Police’s incentives, and for the most part goals, are to get a conviction by hook or by crook, and they will lie and cheat to get it.
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.
Thank you for the additional information, about the way the investigation proceeded. As for the rest of your comment, well, you and I don’t see things quite the same way. I’ll add only that, in the minutes of video footage I’ve seen of her, Knox has never exhibited even a moment’s dignity.
It’s extremely common for people to give false confessions under duress, and some judicial systems take this into account. In Japan, for instance, no person can be convicted on the basis of a confession alone; they must be able to reveal verifiable information about the crime which the police could not have already provided to them.
I participated in a psychological study a few months ago regarding interrogation. I was interrogated for a minor offense which I did not commit by a person who was led to believe that I had committed it. I pretty much had the deck stacked in my favor here; I knew that the stakes riding on the interrogation were trivial, I had, if not an actual alibi, then at least extremely strong circumstantial evidence in favor of my innocence, plus strong material evidence. I was accused of stealing money, which I would not have had time or opportunity to spend or hide, but I did not have any bills on me in the denomination I was accused of stealing, and was free to demonstrate this. I am also pretty good at retaining my reasoning and rhetorical faculties under pressure, making me better at arguing in my own defense than most people.
Nevertheless, it was a really surprisingly stressful experience. If you’ve never been interrogated for a crime you haven’t committed, then I would say that this is absolutely an area where you shouldn’t try to state with any kind of confidence what you would or would not do.
As for the evidence that more than one person was involved in the crime, to make a not-that-long story short, that’s not really the case. The prosecution had already flagged Amanda Knox, and Raffaele Sollecito by connection, as suspects, on very tenuous bases, prior to processing any forensic evidence for the case, and they continued to interpret the available evidence in light of that hypothesis, but on the whole there was really an absence of evidence favoring the involvement of multiple people over a single murderer.
The evidence for the involvement of other people besides Guede pretty much boils down to
The number of stab wounds and general brutality of the murder Evidence of the break-in being staged *DNA of other individuals aside from Guede at the scene.
However, had the prosecution not already had a vested interest in flagging multiple suspects, they would almost certainly have noted that the number of stab wounds on Kercher’s body was not actually unusual for a knife murder. Knife murders routinely involve very large number of stab wounds, because it’s much harder to kill a person with a knife than people generally expect, and when a person who’s not trained or experienced in killing people with knives attempts to do so, the result is usually a frantic extended struggle. The “evidence” that the break-in was staged did not stand up even cursory analysis by the defense, and could reasonably be described as “completely made up,” and the DNA analysis only suggested involvement of multiple people after egregious mishandling.
Had the police not walked into the case with a vested interest in tying Knox and Sollecito into the case, it’s unlikely that they would have concluded from the available evidence that any perpetrators other than Guede were involved.
Edit: With regards to Knox having specfic reason to alter her testimony in absence of her guilt, it’s important to realize that the person she flagged after her extended interrogation was the same person the police had already decided to treat as a suspect based on their interpretation of her phone messages to him0, messages which were in fact quite innocuous when viewed in light of English language colloquialism. They had a suspect they wanted her to finger, and after an interrogation in which she alleges extreme duress, she eventually does so. Then, after having a short period in which to recuperate, she repudiates her own testimony. The suspect then proves to have an airtight alibi.
Under these circumstances, if her changing testimony should be taken as indication of anything, it’s that the police probably did push her extremely hard to give a response they had already settled on. It’s very unlikely that she and the police would independently narrow down the same suspect who was unambiguously uninvolved, and the content of the proceedings clearly shows that the police, rather than Knox, were the first to point to that suspect.
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.
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.
As for false confessions, I’ll point out that I didn’t bring up false confessions and really haven’t said anything about them with respect to this case, in particular. In fact, I clarified, in a comment at 02 February 2014 10:51:01PM, somewhere in these exchanges, that “Knox’s statements are not confessions or alibis …. They are story-changing ….” Even in my statement that you quote, above, I mention false confessions only as something that has been brought up by our fellow-poster Ander; I ask him to comment on Knox’s “changed stories,” not any confession. Yes, false confession is something I’ve discussed in these exchanges; and what I just said, two paragraphs above, about the duty of a person being interrogated applies to false confessing and to story-changing—both. Even so, they are distinct things.
If you still don’t think this is easier said than done, you haven’t learned anything from this discussion. Confabulation under stress is a fact of human psychology. You can’t make it go away by just saying “try really hard to keep your story straight”.
You are missing an important fact about police: They are not your friends, especially not if they are investigating a case and (rightly or wrongfully) suspect you of being involved. Police’s incentives, and for the most part goals, are to get a conviction by hook or by crook, and they will lie and cheat to get it.
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.
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.
Thank you for the additional information, about the way the investigation proceeded. As for the rest of your comment, well, you and I don’t see things quite the same way. I’ll add only that, in the minutes of video footage I’ve seen of her, Knox has never exhibited even a moment’s dignity.