It's not a footprint, it's a track!
This is Judge Massei's 2010 discussion on the bathmat footprint. So far, Nencini's reasonings about it don't seem to add anything, and his whole report is truly bizarre anyway.
Judge Massei assumes that whoever it was who left a bare footprint on the mat (in Meredith blood) must have picked it up by being barefoot in the murder room. However, there is no indication at all in the murder room that anyone was barefoot.
Massei p 300 said:
Furthermore, the sky-blue bathmat with the print of a bare foot in blood, blood which also was shown to be from the victim, indicates that whoever went into this bathroom was barefoot, and must therefore also have been barefoot in Meredith’s room where she had been repeatedly struck, a room which had great blotches of blood, and in one of these whoever transferred the blood to the bathroom and the sky-blue bathmat must have placed his or her foot, and thus must have been moving about that room with bare feet. The above observation leads to the deduction that whoever went into the bathroom at that point (after the stabbing of Meredith) must have had to do so to clean him/herself of Meredith’s blood with which he/she was staining the various things he/she touched or leaned against: the door, the light switch, the mat.
(The following is where Massei is infinitely superior to Nencini, because Massei at least discusses the issues, even if in the end he gets most things wrong!)
Massei summarizes Professor Vinci's conclusions which "openly contradict" what Mignini's consultants said they found in 2008.
First of all, acc. to Vinci, what's on the bathmat is not a print, it is a track. The difference is important and overlooking this leads investigators (and internet posters) astray.
Massei p 376 said:
Vinci dissents from the methods used by the technical operators of the ERT, and also from the R.I.S. of the Carabinieri, of placing the foot on an inkpad and then on sheets of paper (a method suitable for studying fingerprints). He recommends a more modern method, approved by the scientific community, which would have those submitting to the procedure of footprint acquisition walk for a length of at least six metres along a paper-covered gangway.
Vinci also said that the wrong set of experts was obtained by Mignini - Mignini should have used experts in forensic medicine, as they require mandatory orthopaedic and anatomical knowledge.
And Vinci, acc. to Massei, is also clear that
it is the bathmat itself which needs to be examined, not photographs of it. Presumably this is because of the "receiving medium", ie. the mat itself. It's not as if this is a print, like fingerprints received on special paper, ready to receive inked fingertips, the bathmat is a varying medium, with a lot of vertical play and absorbency to it.
Looking at a photo only does not show the investigator anything firm really, and this is how Mignini's experts examined the mat - meaning they did not examine the mat, they examined photos of it.
One really should read Massei on these pages because when someone like Vinci actually does the proper forensic analysis, not based on photographs and with the real morphology of the accused's feet known, this is what Vinci, acc. to Massei, concluded:
Given these two features which make Sollecito's foot morphologically distinctive, Professor Vinci's study basically arrives at the assertion that, while the second toe of Raffaele Sollecito's right foot is entirely absent from the footprints known to be made by him, on the contrary the footprint on the bathmat does contain the imprint of the second toe.
However, by the time page 381 rolls around, Massei is debunking Vinci on what can only be regarded as arbitrary criteria. It is basically that
"the Court cannot share the conclusion that the print revealed by Luminol was made by a foot much smaller than Raffaele Sollecito's."
Be that as it may, Judge Massei has all the reasons to doubt that the bathmat footprint belongs to Raffaele, and has someone in front of him who approaches the analysis in the proper forensic way -
by actually examining the mat, rather than photos of it.
And then Massei simply chooses to believe it is a print of Raffaele's right foot.
