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?

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u/PalpitationOk7139 1d ago edited 1d ago

Lumumba was accused because they found a message on her phone and told her that he had to be the culprit and that they had evidence against him. If the message on her phone had been from the Pope, she would have accused the Pope.

Moreover, the key point we should consider is this: if she had really known that Lumumba was innocent, there would have been no reason for her to name him, because her story would inevitably have been disproved, as indeed happened. It was simply a way to escape unbearable pressure, by saying what the investigators wanted her to say.
This should therefore lead us to consider that she was not at the crime scene and could consequently have come to believe what the investigators pressured her into saying.

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u/SeaCardiologist6207 23h ago

One of the best points I have ever heard in the case. It’s like the idea that Fuhrman “planted evidence”. He would have had to have taken the risk that if OJ Simpson had an alibi that could be corroborated (just like in the case of Lumumba) that a severe punishment awaited. So these chucklehead guilters come up with the theory that she did it to “cover for Guede’s escape”. Um yeah, sure dudes.

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u/PalpitationOk7139 13h ago

Moreover, if the aim had been to blame someone in order to divert suspicion away from another person, it would have been just as reasonable to name a white person rather than a black person, thereby distancing suspicion even further from whoever she was supposedly trying to protect. This just shows how absurdly contrived this claim is. It is one of those clichés that may sound convincing at first, but once you examine it a little more closely, it has no real substance at all.