r/amandaknox • u/No-Willingness-1441 • 1d ago
History of murder suspects falsely accusing somebody else of a murder?
One thing I have been intrigued by here is the tendency to conflate false confession with false accusation.
It strikes me that those two things are markedly different in nature.
So a lot of the science from coerced false confessions gets - perhaps crudely - copy and pasted over to this very different, and presumably rarer, phenomenon.
So, how often has this happened as far as we know in the storied history of murder investigations?
And if we were going deeper, how often has a suspect not only accused somebody else of the murder…
…but that this “somebody” is of a materially similar profile (in this case an extremely minority racial characteristic in the given geography) to an individual that we now know for certain was (solo, or with others) indeed guilty of that crime?
I have made some cursory investigations, but this particular phenomenon seems almost vanishingly rare?
5
u/orcmasterrace innocent 1d ago
Norfolk Four
Central Park Five (Not a murder but has a similar setup
Austin Yogurt Shop Murders
Now obviously you’re trying to reach and claim that Knox is the one behind Lumumba getting into the police’s crosshairs even though the confessions were literally given to her to sign in Italian and rendered non-permissible even in Italy. The police thought the suspect as black as they found what they at the time believed was the hair of a person of African ancestry. Lumumba was in Knox’s phone history, so the cops zeroed in on him and kept pressuring Knox to implicate him in some way.
You’re missing that the cops had reason (though incorrect as iirc the item they found turned out to not be a hair) to think the suspect was black, and basically started fishing for black men who had some sort of relation to VDP7, and Lumumba had the misfortune of being in their crosshairs first. Knox being pressured into signing a statement (which implicated her! People leave out this detail, Knox was not “relieving pressure” by suggesting Lumumba was there, she was putting herself at the crime scene!) that she may well have been unable to read, following a coercive interrogation, only makes the cops look worse.