The story of the “confession”

For many people who believe that Amanda Knox is guilty, including the benighted Ann Coulter who doesn’t have even superficial knowledge of the case, the single most important fact indicating Knox’s guilt is her “confession” to police in which she falsely implicated Patrick Lumumba. In fact, that statement was excluded as evidence from the criminal trial. According to the Wikipedia article on the murder of Meredith Kercher:

The Italian Supreme Court later found that Knox’s human rights were violated because the police did not tell her of her legal rights, appoint her a lawyer or provide her an official interpreter and that her signed statement was inadmissible for Knox’s and Sollecito’s criminal trial.

Interesting that Knox’s accusers’ rely on a “confession” so tainted that it was not even allowed at trial.

Here is the section of the Wikipedia article (see original article for footnotes) that deals with the final interrogation of Knox leading up to her false “confession” and her arrest:

On 5 November 2007, after Sollecito had confirmed that he and Knox had spent the night of the murder at his flat, the police reported that a “confused and nervous” Sollecito stated that Knox could have left his home sometime when he was asleep. The police then questioned Knox, who had accompanied Sollecito to the police station. Starting at 11 pm that evening, Knox was questioned first by the police alone and, later that night, in the presence of a prosecutor. She claimed that she was initially interviewed in Italian—although she had been studying the language for only two months—without an attorney present and without being recorded. These claims were denied by prosecutors. She later claimed that she underwent a hostile interrogation of 14 hours, that she was struck and yelled at, denied food and water, and caused to make incriminating statements. In the end she signed a statement in Italian saying, in part, that she had seen Patrick Lumumba (Knox’s boss) and Kercher enter Kercher’s room.

Knox stated that during her interrogation the police asked her to imagine what might have happened at her flat had she been there, and that she explained this vision of Lumumba at the crime scene in response to that question. Lumumba was arrested on 6 November 2007 as a result of Knox’s statements.

Knox was arrested on the morning of 6 November. Later that day she wrote a note to the police saying that she felt confused because she had been told in the interrogation that there was hard evidence which placed her at her flat at the time of the murder so that memories and “flashes of blurred images” had begun mingling in her mind during the interrogation. She partially retracted her earlier statements. Knox wrote, “In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressures of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion. Not only was I told I would be arrested and put in jail for 30 years, but I was also hit in the head when I didn’t remember a fact correctly.” She also wrote she couldn’t “fully recall the events that I claim took place at Raffaele’s home during the time that Meredith was murdered”, adding that while she “[understood] that the police are under a lot of stress” so that she “[understood] the treatment [she] received”, she denied involvement in the killing.

Capanne prison entrance, Perugia

In February 2009, Knox spoke in court of her November 2007 interview, stating, “I was treated as a person only after I made a statement. Period. That was when I was brought something to drink, when they let me go to the bathroom.” A police officer testified that Knox had been questioned “firmly but politely”. In June 2009, Knox repeated her description of the interrogation at trial. Her lawyer, summing up at the end of her trial, stated that the interviews over the course of four days had lasted a total of 53 hours, causing “stress and fear”. Knox also stated that there had been no interpreter present. Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini was in the room conducting the contested interrogation where the misconduct by officers was alleged. Both the police and Mignini denied her allegations that she was abused and that there was no interpreter, and she has been charged with slander in a separate trial.

The Italian Supreme Court later found that Knox’s human rights were violated because the police did not tell her of her legal rights, appoint her a lawyer or provide her an official interpreter and that her signed statement was inadmissible for Knox’s and Sollecito’s criminal trial. However, the court allowed the statement to be used in the concurrent civil, calunnia trial in which Lumumba prevailed against Knox. Both trials had the same jury which heard Knox’s confession.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 06, 2011 09:39 AM | Send