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Coulter still believes in Knox and Sollecito’s guilt
Jake F. writes:
I know you’re not a Coulter fan per se, but her take on the Knox case (published September 7, 2011) gives me some pause.
LA replies:
It shouldn’t give you pause. The column is pathetic.
For example, she portrays Knox’s “confession” as a deliberate, thought-out act, an “effort to frame an innocent man,” when in fact it was a “scenario” that the police solicited from her over many hours of interrogation through a sleepless night, after she had already been sleepless for the previous several days and was out of her head with sleeplessness and stress, and they pushed her to “imagine” what might have happened, and that’s what she did. It was not, “What happened?”, but, “Can you imagine what might have happened?” For Coulter to present this forced imaginary scenario as a deliberate attempt to frame Lumumba is despicable. Needless to say, if police in the U.S. had behaved like this, the case would have been thrown out.
On numerous other issues, Coulter seems to have no recent knowledge of the case but is repeating false ideas from three years ago. For example, she says that experts have “conclusively” found that the wounds on Meredith could not have been done by one person; she is unaware that experts in the appeals trial have said that all the wounds on Meredith could have been done by one person. She doesn’t register that various key pieces of supposed evidence have been discredited in the appeals trial, such as the DNA on the knife. She ignores the fact that there is no evidence of Amanda and Raffaele in the murder room.
And then she absurdly politicizes the case, fitting it into her “Demonic” script, saying that “the only people who believe Knox and Sollecito are the usual criminal apologists and their friends in the American media”—the kind of people who believe in the innocence of Mumia and Tawana Brawley!! Well, I’ll use my own overcharged historical-political metaphor. This is Ann Coulter’s Stalingrad.
Jake F. replies:
Wow. Thank you very much for your rapid and comprehensive reply.
LA replies:
I don’t have answers to all of Coulter’s points. The business of the broken glass and the clothing has always been obscure to me. I don’t have a complete picture of Amanda and Raffaele’s behavior after the murder and their various statements. But the fact that Coulter would make so many gross errrors in the areas I am familiar with is telling.
I’ve sent the Coulter article to someone who has read extensively about the case and asked her to reply to it more fully.
LA continues:
And here’s another point. If Coulter is right, if the evidence of guilt is as overwhelming as she says it is, then why did the court overturn the original verdict and find Knox and Sollecito innocent? And remember: this happened in a country that had been virurently against Amanda. The answer is that the judges and the jury realized that much of the evidence in the first trial did not hold up. Coulter’s not aware of that. She’s living in the past. She’s believing in prejudices that have been discredited.
Jake F. replies: Thank you. I just read John Hindraker’s write-up on Powerline, and he also is outraged at the behavior of the Italian police and prosecutor.
LA continues:
Another point: if the case is on the up and up, why did the prosecutors in the appeals trial demand that the Knox and Sollecito, after having already spent four years in prison, serve several months in solitary confinement? Doesn’t that suggest some kind of out of control vindictiveness on the prosecutors’ part?
Which in fact characterizes their conduct from the beginning of the case.
October 4
LA writes:
Now consider this whopper by Coulter:
Knox later said she falsely accused Lumumba only because the police wanted her to do so.
But absent Knox’s false accusation, there would have been no reason for the police to consider Lumumba a suspect in the first place. He was a successful entrepreneur in Perugia, married with a child, and had no connection whatsoever to the murdered girl.
Knox’s effort to frame an innocent man was nothing but a desperate attempt to throw suspicion off herself. In the process, she inadvertently revealed that she knew something only the police knew about the murder: that Meredith had also been sexually assaulted.
As Carol Iannone reminds me, Patrick Lumumba came into the investigation because he had texted Amanda that she needn’t come to work that evening, and she had texted back, “See you later.” And the police in their witch-hunting mentality built that commonplace exchange into an agreement to meet and commit murder. During the all night interrogation, they kept pushing Knox to bring Lumumba into it, so she worked him into her imaginary scenario. Then when Rudy Guede turned up as a suspect, the prosecutors, instead of re-thinking what they had plotted out, simply put one black man in place of the other. They charged that instead of planning to meet Lumumba that night to commit murder, Knox planned to meet Guede that night to commit murder. And how did this “Knox conspired with Guede to commit murder” scenario originate? In the innocent text exchange between Knox and Lumumba.
That’s how insane this case has been. But Coulter knows nothing of this—knows nothing of how Lumumba was brought into the case, not by Knox, but by the police who pushed the “you conspired with Lumumba” scenario on her during the all-night interrogation. Instead, Coulter presents Knox’s imaginary Lumumba scenario as originating solely from Knox’s evil brain. That’s how ignorant Coulter is of this case.
Jake F. writes:
That really is insane.
I was going to quibble with your headline—do we really know she still believes in Knox’s guilt, since her article was written three weeks ago?—but then I saw her tweet stream from the last few days:
If Amanda Knox gets off today, CNN is pairing her with Casey Anthony for “Knox/Anthony” to replace the “Parker/Spitzer” slot.
Amanda Knox not guilty, Casey Anthony rolls eyes, says; “we’ll, duh … “
Amanda Knox begins search for real killer.
Mussolini family challenges il Duce’s guilt. Claims DNA evidence was contaminated.
Troy Davis must be rolling over in his grave that he didnt kill at an Italian Burger King. Congrats Amanda Knox (still dont trust u) [Note: this is a retweet sent by Coulter; she didn’t write it, but she is agreeing with it. See Jake F.’s explanation below.]
Former OJ jurors on Mediterranean cruise, Amanda Knox not guilty … coincidence?
When I first read her column, knowing nothing about the case, I thought she was right: Sounds like another stupid liberal death penalty cause célèbre. The more I know, the more unsettling and disturbing I find her comments.
LA replies:
Coulter sarcastically writes, treating Knox like O.J. Simpson: “Amanda Knox begins search for real killer.” But of course there is a real killer who has already been found. Thus Coulter, along with all the liberals, along with the Kercher family, has blocked out Rudy Guede from her consciousness. Guede, who was convicted, whose guilt no one questions, and who is in prison now, doesn’t exist. Why? Because he’s not the Caucasian sexual witch who satisfies some people’s need to hate and punish a sexually promiscuous young woman.
The blogger Stogie writes:
I rebutted Coulter when her last article came out about the Knox case. Here is what I wrote about the “glass on the clothes” argument:
That the break-in had been “staged” by Knox and Sollecito to hide their own guilt. The evidence: broken glass from the entry window was scattered about the room on top of clothes on the floor, which were allegedly thrown around to make the room appear ransacked by a burglar. If the clothes were thrown around after the break-in, they would have been on top of the glass, not the other way around. Therefore, the prosecution concluded that Knox et al must have broken the window AFTER they had strewn clothes around to simulate a break-in. The “staged break-in,” however, was nothing but unproven speculation.
The truth: the entry room was very small and the resident who lived there had very limited closet space, so she stored a lot of her clothes on the floor. Some of her clothes were dirty and in messy piles, and so when Rudy Guede broke the window with a rock, the glass naturally landed on top of these existing piles. The clothing was not put there by Knox or Sollecito. Further, the rock that broke the window damaged the wooden window shutter, hit the floor, hit a paper bag on the floor, and rolled to a stop further in the room, where it was later found. Coulter bases her argument simply on the false scenario painted by the prosecution, who had prejudged the case from the beginning and was looking for “evidence” to support its preconceived notions.
October 5
LA to Jake F. (Oct. 3):
Have you got the links for this?
Jake F. replies:
They’re on her Twitter feed. http://twitter.com/anncoulter Unfortunately, that’s a transient thing indeed, by design. If you just want to see them now, that’s all you need. If you want permanent links for these tweets for VFR, they are:
http://twitter.com/#!/AnnCoulter/status/120941204648116225
http://twitter.com/#!/AnnCoulter/status/120941204648116225
http://twitter.com/#!/AnnCoulter/status/120964546117640192
http://twitter.com/#!/AnnCoulter/status/120964805124304896—> Cited: “Amanda Knox begins search for real killer.”
http://twitter.com/#!/AnnCoulter/status/120966746415972352
http://twitter.com/#!/Wittorical/status/120953688629063680—> Retweet: “Troy Davis must be rolling over in his grave… “
http://twitter.com/#!/AnnCoulter/status/121006579989495808
I highlighted two:
1. The first is because you cite it in your post, so you may want to link it.
2. I mistakenly included the second even though it wasn’t her original comment. She had retweeted it, so it showed up in her tweet stream. Retweeting is generally a sign of agreement, though not always. In this case, it certainly is. Sorry about the error.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 03, 2011 11:38 PM | Send
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