now, if she did it *intentionally* - I'd say that leans towards her guilt. (Susan Smith, anyone?) But it's not clear that's what she did or what she intended.

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Am I allowed to show my "solidarity stripes" by hoping that the murderers of a 19-year-old woman be bought to justice?

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As in so many crimes, nobody except the killer and the dead has any fucking clue what really happened.

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I don't think much of any evidence found in this trial is non circumstantial. She is being tried for her lifestyle, not based on actual evidence. It seems the italian police wanted to find a conspiracy, and so they hobbled one together.

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[crime.about.com]

It happens more often that you portray it to occur. Plenty of innocent people confessed to whatever their interrogators wanted them to confess to. Just ask victims of the various South American dictators, Nazi victims, and the millions persecuted in Stalin's Russia...or, ask the many many black men that confessed to crimes they didn't commit in the South under interrogations by racist police since the civil war.

As far as Knox goes, at this point, the Italian police care less about justice than simply getting a conviction and not looking incompetent. The evidence so far presented in the media against Knox is weak at best. The Italian police's theory of the crime tests the bounds of rationality and absurdity. Sadly, Knox will probably be convicted based on her lifestyle and not on actual hard evidence that she is actually guilty.

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My hesitation isnt even really centered on her confessing, but on the technicality of bringing in another person and placing blame. It is one thing to incriminate yourself and just confess because it is easier, but not nearly as common to look around and point a finger at someone. I don't necessarily think that means guilty, but I think it does mean she should be doing a lot more talking, which hopefully over the course of the past year has happened.

You want to know my gut instinct? I think she is covering for someone, maybe the boyfriend.

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More and more people are being found innocent after years in jail by DNA tests finally being applied to their cases, and many of them had falsely confessed. There is growing recognition of this phenomenon, and accompanying calls for reform of interrogation techniques, and things like mandatory videotaping of all interrogations.

[www.innocenceproject.ca] However, the most significant factor which gives rise to false confessions is the police interrogation technique. While the common assumption is that the police investigation is solely aimed at accurate fact-finding, this is usually not the case. The method used by police to question individuals arrested for crimes has one singular purpose - to obtain a confession. An illustration of this is available in the "Reid Technique", an interrogation technique, taught to police officers around the world. Step 3 of the technique is explicitly stated as "never allow the suspect to deny guilt". If the suspect claims innocence, the officer is to continue interrogation until they eventually obtain the confession. Police can even go as far as lying about the available evidence against an accused in order to persuade them to confess (possibly in exchange for leniency, as described above).

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This is absolutely not true; I have spent days and days in training with Reid. It is completely illegal to lie or falsify evidence for the purpose of obtaining a confession. It is also illegal to promise or imply leniency in sentencing in exchange for a confession. Does it happen? Yeah probably. Is it part of that technique? No.

Anyway, my point was not that her confession is necessarily valid, but that implicating someone else is a red flag that is usually and OF COURSE not always, a sign that someone is lying to some extent about their own involvement.

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I hope you don't think I was implying that *you* would or have used improper interview techniques, just that as you said it does happen that they are misused, and when they do I think it could easily lead to false confession.

It may have happened here (but we have no way of knowing for certain), especially given the reputation of the Italian police force.

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Emilyanne's comment below mentions one of the reasons I think she's guilty, FWIW.

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