Utopianstates Blog

While Guede was in Germany, police monitored a phone call during which he explicitly stated that Knox was not present when the murder took place.  This means that Guede, the man already convicted of this murder is, indeed guilty.  This also means that Amanda, now also convicted, wasn’t even there.

 The alleged murder weapon – the key prosecutorial evidence – did not have any blood residue on the blade.  The DNA on the blade was too small to reproduce the results with a repeat test.  [It is ABSOLUTELY necessary to reproduce the results since lab and other contamination could cause errors more than fifty percent of the time.]  The blade was too large to fit the outline in blood of the blade on the sheets and also too large to have produced most of the wounds.  Furthermore, Amanda’s DNA on the knives meant nothing since she used them to cook.  Kercher’s DNA on the blade could have been caused by a distant sneeze or by contamination.  Remember that sensitive tests did not reveal any blood on the blade and that this knife was randomly selected from several in the drawer.  The other knives weren’t tested.  Perhaps the steak knives had blood on the blade.

 There was no comingled blood found in the apartment, just Kercher’s blood comingled with Amanda’s DNA in the apartment (hair, dead skin cells, dandruff, sneeze residue, etc).  Only Guede’s fingerprints, and DNA was found in Kercher’s room, on her body, in the toilet and in her Kertcher’s body.

 The probability of Amanda’s guilt is extremely low.  If the prosecutor framed Amanda, he should go to jail.  The prosecutor’s guilt will never be discovered, however, as he will cut a “deal” with Amanda and reduce her sentence considerably in exchange for a signing a “confession” that he (the prosecutor)  will write. 

The source for this article is from the defense as stated in www.friendsofamanda.com.  A statement that no test is significant unless it can be repeated is mine as well as the prediction that the prosecutor will cut a deal for a lesser sentence in order to protect himself.

This is saved in the category of dystopian justice.  Justice is a crutial test of any utopian society for two reasons:

People have two responses to an attack.  They can fight or take flight.  People can fight two ways.  The can fight with force or truth.  When the truth fails, force is the result.  Any battle of truth requires that all people in that society can recognize source, fact and logic.  All members of a utopian society must be educated to participate intelligently in society.  Truth is a scarce commotity and requires proper validation.  Furthermore, people have to be trained to recognize the truth when they see it.

The Millgram experiment may explain why Amanda Knox is now in an Italian jail rather than at home, celebrating Christmas, graduating, getting a job and getting married.

From: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/6759992/Amanda-Knox-prosecutors-in-Italy-hit-back-at-US-critics.html

The chief prosecutor in the Amanda Knox case, Giuliano Mignini, said the criticism from the US was “unacceptable”. There have been accusations of unreliable DNA evidence and a coerced confession. But Mr Mignini said: “[The Americans] are saying there’s not enough proof to convict these two kids, but how is it possible to argue that? The evidence was scrutinized by 19 judges.” Lawyers for Knox and Sollecito are already beginning to prepare their appeals against the verdict. The first appeal is expected to start in late 2010. 

The following is from: www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

 The Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,  and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: “Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?” In other words, “Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?”

Milgram’s testing revealed that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.  Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”, writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources

The lead prosecutor has introduced not one, but 19 quasi authority figures.  However, one good fact, one good video is worth 19 million quasi  authority figures.

Another way to express the prosecutor’s tactics the fallacy of an appeal to authority.  From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority

Argument from authority or appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, where it is argued that a statement is correct because the statement is made by a person or source that is commonly regarded as authoritative. The most general structure of this argument is:

Source A says that p.
Source A is authoritative.
Therefore, p is true.

This is a fallacy because the truth or falsity of the claim is not necessarily related to the personal qualities of the claimant, and because the premises can be true, and the conclusion false (an authoritative claim can turn out to be false). It is also known as argumentum ad verecundiam (Latin: argument to respect) or ipse dixit (Latin: he himself said it).

On the other hand, arguments from authority are an important part of informal logic. Since we cannot have expert knowledge of many subjects, we often rely on the judgments of those who do. There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism.

The UtopianStates would send in the A team to rescue Amanda if that billionaire ever helped us…