Continuation Part 11: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Desert Fox]

No, no, no. Everything depends on her being in the room. If she wasn't in the room, then the luminol hits have no probative value; if she wasn't in the room then the 'fake' burglary didn't happen - there would be no need for it. It would be logically incompatible and completely unnecessary. There is nothing in the autopsy report findings confirming the presence of Ms Knox in the room; the presence of the lamp is not proof of how it got there. It could have got there in a number of ways. The PG argument hinted at by Nencini is that it was used as the detection tool for evidence that was then cleaned; yet there is no evidence of cleaning. Why should I not expect to see at least a similar quantity and quality of evidence for Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito's presence in the room as for Guede? Where are the prints in blood in that room? It's a small space; there were, according to you, four people in the space, yet no evidence of Ms Knox and a few cells of Mr Sollecito? How is this possible?

Please, make your case. Explain the mechanics of the murder in that room in such a way that it is clear why there are only a few cells of evidence for the presence of two people acting in concert? And no evidence at all for one of them?

One of my ideas is create a crime scene and stage a fight which emulates what is support to have happened in the fight. Probably put fake blood on the actors involved in the staging to see how the blood gets spread. I might want to actually to create two staged crime scenes.

What I would do then is have a crew of normal people and one of a professional cleaning company. Their goal would be to clean up the evidence of two of the actors while leaving the evidence of the third.

I would bet that the professional cleaning company could not do it. Any takers?

 

[Machiavelli]

But very embarrassing to the host of judges like Matteini, who imprisoned Raffaele and Amanda on false evidence. Or the idiot who confirmed that who said something moronic and easily dis-proven like 'that window would require Spiderman to climb into' as well as Massei who allowed all that garbage evidence in his court and who failed to punish the perjuries and failures to disclose on the part of the prosecution and who took Curatolo seriously instead of laughing him out of court and having Mignini frog-marched to the brig for ever presenting him in court for the third time as a material witness in a murder case. Plus there's the fact the Squadra Mobile had all received awards for their 'work' on the case and the clueless clown Giobbi who'd put Amanda's picture on the wall in Rome as one of the SCO's greatest 'achievements' and the Police Unions who were out there 'protesting' the acquittal, the Polizia Scientifica who'd used bogus DNA work in court and actually pretended they could get precise forensic evidence from the crime scene they'd already trashed.

That's a lot of people in Italy who need for Raffaele and Amanda to be considered guilty or their own guilt in these matters might just be investigated, or at the very least they must accept their profound humiliation in being party to the travesty. One thing the Court of Cassation of Italy has shown is that they simply do not care what the ECHR has to say about their many and notorious violations and the Republic of Italy shells out hundreds of millions of euros because of it and it's been going on for decades and has never gotten fixed.

You didn't explain in a consequential manner how is it that you think the Supreme Court had an interest in taking part to a conspiracy, why it didn't let Hellmann verdict stand. But if you are happy so. I only wanted to see how you were working it out in your rationalization. The bottom line, as I can understand, is that you believe in a huge conspiracy which would have grown up to a national scale, involving the Supreme Court and almost every other person from all the various authorities and offices who happened to be involved in the case.

As for the ECHR, Italy doesn't have a very good record. It had 34 violations in 2013, among which 16 cases with violation due to excessive lenght of trials and 13 failures to protect property. However it is not that distant from countries like France, which had 28 violations in 2013. Several countries are comparatively worse: Hungary had 40 violations, Greece had 32, but their populations are 1/6 than Italy, Slovenia had 24 violations with only 2.8 million inhabitants and Austria 10 violations with a populations of only 8 millions. Compared to its population, Italy had less than half of the violations of Switzerland, which had 9 violations but is 7.5 times smaller than Italy. The small Croatia had 22 and Portugal had 11. Let's not speak about Turkey and the eastern states.

But the Supreme Court of Italy has little to do with human rights violations. The origin is politics. The system breeds a huge number of lawyers and produces a monstre number of proceedings, especially civil litigations, five times the numbers processed by a country of the same size like the UK every year. This huge number cannot help but produce a comparatively massive heap of failures and inefficiency.

 

[Kauffer]

Italian prisons again

From an article about the death in custody of Stefano Cuchi:

"In January 2013, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg fined Italy €100,000 for its inhuman living conditions for prisoners. And in 2012 the then Justice Minister, Paola Severino, acknowledged the shocking levels of violence, abuse and overcrowding in Italian prisons and pushed for reforms that have yet to be adopted."


"An agonising death in custody that shames Italy"


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ath-in-custody-that-shames-italy-9839430.html

 

[Machiavelli]

But very embarrassing to the host of judges like Matteini, who imprisoned Raffaele and Amanda on false evidence. Or the idiot who confirmed that who said something moronic and easily dis-proven like 'that window would require Spiderman to climb into' (...)

No judge ever said this.

 

[Machiavelli]

No, no, no. Everything depends on her being in the room. If she wasn't in the room, then the luminol hits have no probative value; if she wasn't in the room then the 'fake' burglary didn't happen - there would be no need for it. It would be logically incompatible and completely unnecessary. There is nothing in the autopsy report findings confirming the presence of Ms Knox in the room; the presence of the lamp is not proof of how it got there. It could have got there in a number of ways. The PG argument hinted at by Nencini is that it was used as the detection tool for evidence that was then cleaned; yet there is no evidence of cleaning. Why should I not expect to see at least a similar quantity and quality of evidence for Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito's presence in the room as for Guede? Where are the prints in blood in that room? It's a small space; there were, according to you, four people in the space, yet no evidence of Ms Knox and a few cells of Mr Sollecito? How is this possible? (...)

Sorry, but what you say is completely wrong. Your statements are false, but the problem is, your basic postulate and your "logic" is so profoundly irrational that I see discussion as a waste of time. If you think that demonstrating the "presence in the room" of Knox is a necessary logical step, then I consider your position to illogical to be meaningful of response. Maybe you are confusing a murder case with the Cluedo game. You are just building up an arbitrary game. The apartment and room are stuffed with evidence of alteration of the scene and cleanup subsequent to the murder. There are three towels soaked with blood, if that's not a cleanup, than a duvet covering the victim's body, swirl marks visible in blood in the room and in luminol in the corridoor, evidence of washing in the bathroom, spluttered mat on a clean floor, if that's not evidence of cleaning of the scene... If you don't see ths stuff, it's not worth a response.

 

[carbonjam72]

Originally Posted by carbonjam72
(...)
The question I raised with you Mach, is that if all three participated in a gang-style type sexual assault and murder as you believe, then why IN THE ROOM WHERE THE SEXUAL ASSAULT AND MURDER OCCURRED, is there only one set of footprints? (...)
No. There are still several other shoeprints inside the murder room.
Besides the disputed shoeprints on the pillowcase, there is a number of other shoeprints, some of small size, which belong to shoes that were not found inside the apartment.

Quote:
This question is the heart of the matter. I don't see any alternative but to conclude that no one else was present at the violent crime in that small bloody room, involved in a life and death struggle on that well saturated blood soaked floor.
This reasoning makes no sense. There is actually only one shoeprint clearly attributable to Guede in the murder room, at least there is no trail of prints that belong to Guede.
The only shoeprints in blood attributable to Guede are only one trail, almost all outside the murder room, and just walking away going straight out of the house.
But the murderer or murderers must have done tens or dozens or maybe hundreds of steps inside the murder room. Where are they?Simply, the fact is most of the time people do not leave shoeprints or footprints. Not even murderers. Especially not murderers who attempt to carefully alter and clean up parts of the scene.

Quote:
Be honest Mach, you know Amanda and Raf are innocent. You too smart a guy not to know it.
Don't be ridiculous.

I want to return to this post, because I feel it is so central to Mach's view, and indicative of the fundamental error he is making in regard to his analysis of this case.

The most basic truth of this case, is gravity.

When Meredith's throat was slashed, and she began to bleed profusely, her outward blood spray was continuously subject at all times, to gravity. Whatever blood was not absorbed on the walls or other persons or objects, we may be confidant that blood would make its way in time to the floor - because of gravity.

As you yourself acknowledge Mach, in the portion of your response I have highlighted, we would expect whomever was in the room, to be stepping in all of that blood on the floor - because of gravity.

The fact that there is only one set of shoe prints in that wet blood from Meredith's mortal wounds, causes only only one logical expectation: that there was only one assailant in the room at that time - because of gravity.

This basic truth must be our starting point for analysis, for to vary from it, and suggest there was more than one person in the room at the time of Meredith's death, is to dispute gravity.

The truth of Gravity, is inescapable.

Yet you maintain that there was more than one assailant in the room when Meredith was killed. That position conflicts with the evidence of only a single person's footprints - in Meredith's blood.

You argue that the autopsy report demonstrates that there were multiple attackers. But my understanding, is that 6 out of 7 experts who testified at trial believed that the attack was not incompatible with a single assailant (I'm not sure how many said it could only have been a single assailant from the wound administered).

To accept the one expert who claimed it is NECESSARY to be more than one attacker, you must be disputing the six other experts who testified that it COULD have been a single attacker.

How do we as objective observers know which of the experts to believe?

One word: GRAVITY.

We already know it was a single person in the room when Meredith died. We know Rudy Guede admits he was there, and that the foot prints in blood belong to him.

All the rest of the purported evidence against Amanda and Raf should be viewed through the same skeptical lense, and you will find the same result. Amanda and Raf never left their apartment, and all the evidence offered against them, is as Judge Hellman stated, "nonsense".

There was no trace of Amanda Knox in the room where Meredith was killed, because she wasn't there. A tiny DNA trace of Raf on the bra clasp, even if true, would not indicate his presence in the room at that time. Why not? Gravity.

There isn't any evidence that Amanda and Raf participated in the murder of Meredith Kercher, because there can't be any evidence against them, nor anyone else. Only one person Rudy Guede was there when Meredith was mortally wounded.

But this you don't accept. You won't let go of the idea that there is only one attacker. You are clinging irrationally to a concept that by necessity, is false and disproven.

So what explains your persistence in this idea? You simply refuse to engage in reason. You are making an active choice to remain ignorant.

And the convicting judges are in exactly the same position. This is why we keep hearing stories of magical clean-ups of footprints in the room, or even clean-ups of DNA. This is why Nencini infers that any trace of Amanda in her own house is 'referable to the murder'. Because they. like you, are unshakably committed to a false idea.

The distractions of argument in the multitude of disciplines you have brought to these pages, as you once put it, "multiple side-trackings", are not argument, but a distraction from argument.

Dear Mach, permit me to say, but you should take a break from posting at this time. And instead, you ought to quietly and very slowly review the argument I have just made to you (as others have been trying to do as well), step by step. Not in haste, but slowly.

I once had a truly great philosophy teacher who shared with us the following: that the secret of profound thought, is the ability to go slowly. In this way, no one ever has to concede an argument because their debating colleague is able to think or able to speak more quickly. But rather, by being slow and careful, we can be sure that we have the argument, ANY argument, correct. Fast talking, is the province of con men.

So I say to you in all kindness, now is not the time for you to add more fog to the discourse, but to allow the fog in your mind to clear, so that you may understand. You and the Italian courts, and all those who advocate guilt, are laboring under a misapprehension. You are all, first and foremost, ignoring gravity.

Thank you very much for your attention.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

<snip>

At t=150, the area under the curve to the right of this point equates to about 2%, meaning that there's a 2% probability that t(lag) is >= 150 minutes.

At t=180, the area under the curve to the right equates to about 0.2%, meaning that a) there's a 2% probability that t(lag) is >=180m, and b) there's a 1.8% (2%-0.2%) probability that t(lag) is between 150m and 180m.

At t=210, the area under the curve to the right equates to about 0.01%, meaning that a) there's a 0.01% probability that t(lag) is >=210m, b) there's a 1.99% (2%-0.01%) probability that t(lag) is between 150m and 210m.

At t=240, the curve has reached zero on the y-axis, showing that there's zero probability of t(lag) >=240m.

<snip>

Is this part correct? Do you not mean 0.2%?

 

[Kauffer]

Spiderman comment

No judge ever said this.

Sure one did. It was Ricciarelli.

 

[Machiavelli]

From an article about the death in custody of Stefano Cuchi:

"In January 2013, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg fined Italy €100,000 for its inhuman living conditions for prisoners. And in 2012 the then Justice Minister, Paola Severino, acknowledged the shocking levels of violence, abuse and overcrowding in Italian prisons and pushed for reforms that have yet to be adopted."


"An agonising death in custody that shames Italy"


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ath-in-custody-that-shames-italy-9839430.html

Do you know the name of the judge-appointed experts, whose bogus and omissive analysis of scientific evidence favoured the exoneration of the police officers accused of his death?

 

[Machiavelli]

Sure one did. It was Ricciarelli.

Really? Well, I'd like to read the Ricciarelli report. Anyone has it?

 

[LondonJohn]

This calculation is incorrect. Let's try to see where the error is. I will not consider single data figures but I will address instead another concept, which is: the need to change the sample base on which develop error analisis, that means a change in the whole statystical distribution function whenever you change the reference sample. The error in LJs' calculation consists in keeping the same reference sample. LJ does not change the population of reference of the sample.

I already made an example that has to do with age. An average Italian person currently has less than 10% probability to survive up to 88 years.
In fact, less than 50% of individuals survive until 80 years of age. So the average Italian has less than 50% probability to survive beyond 80 years.

However, wht's the probability for an 80 year old person to reach 88 years? The probability is above 50%.

It means if you pick up a random sample of 80 year old people, after 8 years you will find that more than 50% is still alive. This is much more than what you would expect if you considered the general sample.
A 80 year old person has a much higher probability to reach 88 years of age than an average person.
Why this?

Because a sample population of 80 year old people is not the average Italian population.
If you want to calculate the actual probability, once you know a value, you need to consider an appropriate sample.
The distribution becomes more diffuse and the gradient of the curve with this new sample is less steep, because the sample has changed.

In other words, if you want to calculate a probability base on gastric emptying, then you need to re-draw the curve, that shall be a curve that describes the distribution of that new, diferent sample, a sample of cases of gastric emptying later than 100-150 minutes.

If you assume as a known value that the gastric emptying has not started after 100 minutes, you need to consider a curve based on a sample population of people whose gastric emptying didn't start after 100 minutes, not the average case population. Based on a known value, you should do a research focused on a sample of people who share that value, not the average population of cases; than draw another curve based on that sample, and after that you can calculate gradient and areas.

This is an utterly invalid, and (if I might say) stunningly ignorant attempt at a comparator for rebuttal.

Life expectancy is a fundamentally different metric from something like measuring the lag period of stomach motility. That's because life expectancy does not follow any linear form of probability distribution. There is a large spike in early infancy (various infant mortality factors), a moderate spike in late teens/early 20s (in the industrialised world, owing mainly to motor vehicle accidents, and drug/alcohol deaths), and 50s-60s (mainly owing to early-onset heart attacks and strokes, which in turn are mainly due to chronic poor lifestyle and/or long-term smoking/drinking/obesity).

Therefore, the conditional probabilities (e.g. what is the probability of a person who has reached the age of 20 dying at various ages beyond that age?), while they can be worked out in exactly the same method (rebasing the y-axis moving it to the desired start age - in this case 20, then calculating the area under the curve as a proportion of the total area under the curve to the right of the rebased y-axis, often look odd because of the irregular nature of the "from birth" curve. To overcome this, you need to draw up a whole series of charts showing life expectancy starting from different ages, eliminating the probabilities associated with everything to the left of the starting age and re-basing the probabilities starting with the chosen age. Which is exactly what actuaries do every day.

But the underlying principle is still exactly the same, and it's still based on conditional probability analysis. It's still fundamentally represented by the relative areas under the curve at different cut-off points on the x-axis. You therefore can, in a very real sense, take a "life expectancy from birth" chart and use it to work out the conditional probability of death within any given age range given that the subject has already attained a certain age.

Incidentally, per your argument, LJ does indeed "change the population of reference of the sample". LJ in fact changes the population of reference to "those whose t(lag) exceeds 150 minutes"*. And all the conditional probabilities in LJ's calculations (the 90%, 99.5% and 100% numbers) are explicitly based on analysis of this "changed population" - that's exactly why they are conditional probability calculations!

* Which is entirely analogous in Machiavelli's example of choosing "men who have reached an age of at least 80 years"


Incidentally, let's show this by taking Machiavelli's example to the extreme. Suppose that "life expectancy from birth" charts showed that 90% of people die before the age of 80, but that (due to some strange anomaly) only 2% die between 80 and 90, and 8% die over the age of 90. If you wanted to calculate the probabilities of death of someone who had reached the age of 80, then you would do exactly as LJ did with the t(lag) example. You would place the y-axis at t=80, then calculate the relative areas below the curve to the right of that point; you would find that the probability of death between 80 and 90 was 20% (2%/(2%+8%)), and the probability of death beyond the age of 90 was 80% (8%/(2%+8%)).

 

[Kauffer]

Ricciarelli

Really? Well, I'd like to read the Ricciarelli report. Anyone has it?

I don't have it: Mr Sollecito quotes from the report as follows:

"It's a feat even Spider-man would have had trouble pulling off" (Honour Bound p109)

Perhaps you will confirm this from the Italian.

 

[LondonJohn]

<snip>

At t=150, the area under the curve to the right of this point equates to about 2%, meaning that there's a 2% probability that t(lag) is >= 150 minutes.

At t=180, the area under the curve to the right equates to about 0.2%, meaning that a) there's a 2% probability that t(lag) is >=180m, and b) there's a 1.8% (2%-0.2%) probability that t(lag) is between 150m and 180m.

At t=210, the area under the curve to the right equates to about 0.01%, meaning that a) there's a 0.01% probability that t(lag) is >=210m, b) there's a 1.99% (2%-0.01%) probability that t(lag) is between 150m and 210m.

At t=240, the curve has reached zero on the y-axis, showing that there's zero probability of t(lag) >=240m.

<snip>

Is this part correct? Do you not mean 0.2%?

I do mean 0.2%, yes! Thanks for spotting that typo (hopefully the context and surrounding calculations make it clear that a typo is all it was....)

 

[Samson]

What zero? There are even records of 12-hour mistakes based on the calculation of digestion time.
Sophie and friends locate the dinner at 18:00 - 18:30, which - according to defence consultant Introna - would mean that the alleged "most likely" location (21:00 - 21:10) is actually 160 minutes far from dinner as for our testimony evidence in the best scenario. Even if we strain the information and we try to make violence to the testimony, to disregard them, and we decide to locate the time of dinner where it was not, like at 19:30, still the alleged "most likely" time of s.c. "attack" will be located about 100 minutes far away from the time of dinner.
This means it is absolutely far beyond the area where the probability drops quickly. There is nothing like a quick drop in that segment.

It makes no sense to discard the autopsy results because they suggest Meredith had a unique condition. It instead makes sense to work with certainty, she was alive at 9pm with a full stomach of partly digested dinner, and those contents were exactly what were expected by the girls' description.
This accords with a simple proposition, Rudy Guede was in the house before she got home, and killed her before her stomach began emptying.
There is a complete photographic record for the investigative reporter to study, showing that there was a rock thrown from the car park.
Since this is all totally consistent with Guede's written skype "chat", the subject should be closed. In this written chat Guede says

Rudy Hermann says: (7:11:19PM) I was in the bathroom when it happened. I tried to stop it but I couldn't do anything. Amanda had nothing to do with it.
jack says: (7:11:19PM) You have to tell me who was there.
Rudy Hermann says: (7:11:31PM) Because I fought with a male.
Rudy Hermann says: (7:11:36PM) And she wasn't there.

This is a translation from Italian. Could you please verify this is a good translation, as the question is being asked.

Another point.
Recorded history shows that the longest lived human being is or was 114 years old. Correct me if I am wrong, but you would say this fact can tell us nothing about the life expectancy of a 113 year old.

 

[Numbers]

Here is a bit more on overspray (scroll down the link about halfway):

"As noted above, Luminol can in fact react with around 100 other substances and can also appear to give a positive response when it is not reacting with anything -it can “auto- luminesce”. Sometimes the scientist will add some extra spray (what the witness referred to as “overspray”) in order to enhance the quality of the glow so that it will show up in a photograph.
In speaking of a photograph of the dinghy (see above) the scientist said that “this run down here” which appears as the fluorescent streak on the photograph, is just the chemical itself running down towards the back. (651) Like “overspray” the accumulation of the Luminol is “auto-luminescing”.
The witness says, “The glow is very pale to some extent, even though I’m calling it strong and weak.” (651) It is hard to know what this means. The witness explains more about her methods when she says:
Even when it’s strong it’s not particularly bright so, we spray multiple times to enable it to come out in a photograph so that’s why there has been some overspray of the chemical which has then run down towards the back and pooled at the back. (652)
So, the desire to get a good photograph, requires repeated applications of the Luminol, which can then “auto luminesce” as appears to be the case in the above photograph.
However, as explained above, the witness claimed to be able to distinguish between such “false positive” appearances and “true positive” appearances on the basis of her experience and by the sparkle, glow, colour and longevity of the response."

I am not yet convinced that the over application of luminol must have led to auto luminescence and thus to the results seen in this case. However, the over application might still be playing a role in the results, even if it is not the sole reason for them.

EDT

Here is a little bit more on auto luminescence. James O. Pex wrote, "Luminol, once used, will oxidize when dry and cause autoluminesence when the area is re-sprayed at a later date."

The information you have reported above is important.

Since the the CL of luminol is, based on the above, dependent on the method of application (amount sprayed, number of times sprayed, and time between sprayings, for example), then to be fair to the defendants at trial the exact methods employed in application as well as the methods used to capture images must be disclosed by the prosecution. Similarly, the use of other presumptive tests (such as TMB) and confirmatory tests, if any, must be presented at trial.

 

[Kauffer]

Do you know the name of the judge-appointed experts, whose bogus and omissive analysis of scientific evidence favoured the exoneration of the police officers accused of his death?

No. I have the following from the same source I cited:

"Prosecutors say Cucchi was brutally assaulted by prison police officers. The victim’s health was thought to have deteriorated when prison hospital staff failed to treat his metabolic illness. Some of their colleagues doctored Cucchi’s medical records to conceal the violence and medical incompetence."

Why won't Italy fix this chaos in your prisons. Brutish institution you have there according to the evidence. I hope you are ashamed.

 

[Machiavelli]

I want to return to this post, because I feel it is so central to Mach's view, and indicative of the fundamental error he is making in regard to his analysis of this case.

The most basic truth of this case, is gravity.

(...)

1. The first question is: where did Meredith receive the fatal blow, which caused the massive blood loss? I mean the location in space. This spot is located between 40 and 60 centimeters from the floor, left of the wardrobe.
Meredith was facing the wall, the fatal wound is at her left, the person holding the kitchen knife (Knox) inflicted the fatal blow while she was located between Meredith and the bed. Immediately after Knox retracted the knife and herself and she let the knife on the bed sheet where the blade left an iprint (which matches the kitchen knife perfectly btw).

Note: between 40 and 60 centimeters. This is the height from which blood travelled by gravity.
Nobody could be standing under such a low spot.
Only the person who was keeping the hold on her in that kneeling position whould have been somehow get significantly dirty with blood, and may also work as a screen to blood drops.

Meredith was immediately left on the floor while the perpetrators retracted and at least two of them run immediately outside. In some minutes Meredith died of haemorragic suffocation and fatal blood loss.
Pools of blood were formed in that spot of the room over the minute following the fatal blow or so, but I don't see why some perpetrator must have necessarily walked in the pools.

2. Rudy Guede was the person holding Meredith. He had both his hands free. He was at her back, slighlty on her right, and was basically the person closest to her. At first he used a hand to commit a sexual violence but then he used both his hand to restrain her, blocking her right wirst. He pressed the palm of his hand on her mouth when she screamed, and so his palm got dirty with blood.

3. Her trousers had been removed forcedly by someone who was pulling them while someone else was holding her. The person who was holding her was Guede, and the person who pulled her trousers could have been Knox. Meredith did not remove her trousers herself, because the trousers are completely reversed and that would be a very unusual and difficult way to remove them even if she did it under threat. You need someone to pull them from a somehow distant position. But someone must hold her. Basically, you need two people.
This means there are some perpetators who are somehow in "external" position.

4. One assailant was facing her at some moment. This assailant did not have both his hands free as Guede did. This one was holding a knife, possibly a small knife, which produced a small cut on her left cheek, that looks like a kind of threat.

5. Meredith also suffered a wound on the right side of her neck. That was a rather superficial wound (4 centimeters) from a pointed narrow blade, a different knife. It's a minor wound but it's the wound that caused the soaking with blood of the bra shoulder, and this happened in another spot of the room, closer to the entrance and while Meredith's head was much more higher from the floor. But she was laid down fwith force on the floor at a certain point. Someone climbed over her, and pressed her body against the floor (the weight caused bruises at the bottom of her back).

6. Meredith was obviously resisting through all the steps of this violent assault. She was never complied with the aggrssors. Her wounds are a massive set of defensive wounds, they show how the assailants were forced to employ physical force to restrain her, they show her resistence. However, they also show that her capability to resist was being diminished, her hands were immobilized. Only one hand has defensive wounds showing contact with the blade and those defensive wounds are minimal. She has massive defensive wounds, but not defensive wounds on her hands.

 

[Machiavelli]

No. I have the following from the same source I cited:

"Prosecutors say Cucchi was brutally assaulted by prison police officers. The victim’s health was thought to have deteriorated when prison hospital staff failed to treat his metabolic illness. Some of their colleagues doctored Cucchi’s medical records to conceal the violence and medical incompetence."

Why won't Italy fix this chaos in your prisons. Brutish institution you have there according to the evidence. I hope you are ashamed.

The experts who authored the report concealing the cause of death were Albarello and Vecchiotti.

I recall how they explained the court that he didn't suffer the fracture of a vertebra from the police beating, by showing the court another vertebra. They also "forgot" to discover that Cucchi had died of starvation.

PS: Albarello, Pascali & Vecchiotti are also the authors of the infamous "Olgiata case" experts report.

 

[Kaosium]

You didn't explain in a consequential manner how is it that you think the Supreme Court had an interest in taking part to a conspiracy, why it didn't let Hellmann verdict stand. But if you are happy so. I only wanted to see how you were working it out in your rationalization. The bottom line, as I can understand, is that you believe in a huge conspiracy which would have grown up to a national scale, involving the Supreme Court and almost every other person from all the various authorities and offoces who happened to be involved in the case.

Justice systems protecting their own and being adverse to reversing themselves are not limited to Italy, the same has happened in every country I'm aware of. It becomes a political decision because they don't want to face the "apalling vista" of having made such a bad mistake.

This is called corruption not conspiracy, and is endemic to every institution devised by humans. Militaries, governments, religions, businesses, banks--all of whom can make a bad mistake or tolerate poor practices sometimes for years or decades--but instead of admitting to it and fixing it they avoid consequences instead.

As for the ECHR, Italy doesn't have a very good record. It had 34 violations in 2013, among which 16 cases with violation due to excessive lenght of trials and 13 failures to protect property. However it is not that distant from countries like France, which had 28 violations in 2013. Several countries are comparatively worse: Hungary had 40 violations, Greece had 32, but their populations are 1/6 than Italy, Slovenia had 24 violations with only 2.8 million inhabitants and Austria 10 violations with a populations of only 8 millions. Compared to its population, Italy had less than half of the violations of Switzerland, which had 9 violations but is 7.5 times smaller than Italy. The small Croatia had 22 and Portugal had 11. Let's not speak about Turkey and the eastern states.

I'm not talking about just 2013, nor am I comparing Italy to places like Croatia and Slovania which didn't even exist as nations until relatively recently and are so tiny in comparison a rate can be skewed by a small number of cases in a single year. I meant Western Europe, though this time I forgot initially to type 'Western' and went back and fixed it. Certainly Italy looks better now that so many 'Second World' nations now answer to the ECHR, but I suppose that's more to the point that Italy's legal system is more representative of a second world rather than a first world nation. Here's what was the most recent aggregate data accumulation (I could find) when I researched this years back: European Court of Human Rights
Violation by Article and by Country 1999-2006 which is the eight years before this murder. Italy has the most violations of all of them, and the most for 'right to a fair trial' in Western Europe. Taking into account population doesn't help much, as a quick glance at France, Germany, Spain and the UK will confirm. Incidentally 'length of proceedings' is not without ramifications for the 'right to a fair trial' as funds and the will to resist can be exhausted--families can be bankrupted and innocents give up the fight.

Here's the data from 1959-2013. Some of those states can't be used for comparison purposes because they didn't answer to the ECHR for some or most of that time, but the big ones (above) did, again Italy is the worst though La Belle France nudges them out for 'right to a fair trial.' Not over all though, not even close. I didn't do the math but at a glance I suspect Greece would not like it's rate known as it's probably higher than Italy's, but being better than Greece isn't much to brag about and it's not on most people's 'first world' lists regardless, and isn't exactly Western Europe.

But the Supreme Court of Italy has little to do with human rights violations. The origin is politics. The system breeds a huge number of lawyers and produces a monstre number of proceedings, especially civil litigations, five times the numbers processed by a country of the same size like the UK every year. This huge number cannot help but produce a comparatively massive heap of failures and inefficiency.

The system is a byzantine bureaucratic nightmare that serves its own interests rather than the people it's empowered to provide services for--which in this instance is justice. It is not the only institution infected, indeed every human institution is in danger of this, but it's one of the primary examples of just how badly an institution with no or limited oversight can become corrupted to the core.

 

[Machiavelli]

It makes no sense to discard the autopsy results because they suggest Meredith had a unique condition. (...)

I have no intention to discard the autopsy results. On the contrary, I intend to put them in their appropriate context. If she had an unusual condition, you have to take it in account, insted of buildings statistic calculations out of an average sample as if her condition was an average datum.