Continuation Part 11: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Machiavelli]

Please Mach, there must be some elderly people in Italy. And why is this an ad hom attack? Nara isn't to blame for being half-deaf, and having been involuntary committed to an asylum (at least according to Candace Dempsey's book, but I'm guessing you don't find her reliable).
?

But of course Candace Dempsey is "unreliable", just like Nina Burleigh. But to say unreliable is an euphemism. Those are among the earliest on the PR team.
No, Nara had never been in an asylums. Also, there are no real asylums in Italy. People can be involuntary committed to some hospitals only if they commit some serious crime.

 

[Diocletus]

Also, there are no real asylums in Italy. People can be involuntary committed to some hospitals only if they commit some serious crime.

The rest of the insane become magistrates.

 

[Machiavelli]

Nencini covers this in his motivations report. The first extra-male trace is probably Meredith's boyfriend. Nencini says this with no testing of that extra-male trace to discover its identity, he just assumes it because otherwise..... well, Raffaele is guilty so there is no otherwise, so it must be Meredith's boyfriend's.

The other two extra-male traces belong to Meredith's "amica". The reason why this is not suspicious is because "amica" according to Nencini are always touching each other's bra-clasps. Nencini says this with no testing of those extra-male traces to discover their identities, he just assumes it because otherwise..... well, Raffaele is guilty so there is no otherwise, so it must be two of Meredith's girlfriend's.

What a BS. Nencini never concedes there are even two "extra males". And he does not mean to make any complete list of possible contributors.

 

[analemma]

But this happens often in Italy. Witnesses don't want to testify, they are often reluctant until a journalist drives them out. It's very typical. During the cross questioning Mignini discussing with the defence pointed out "The fact that he comes forward only after some time is sadly because of reasons we all know about" (Follain quotes him, p. 285).
This is part of the Landscape, what you need to know of the context if you want to undersatand things.



But the SC says that. Hellmann basically misreported what Quintavalle said. He presented a false report of the witness' testimony. Hellmann suppressed ("forgot") parts of the content of Quintavalle's testimony, then painted a picture of his testimony as vague and uncertain in a way which was not.



Exactly. It's impeccable under the procedure viewpoint. Nencini is compelled to refuse. There is no reason for calling back the witness. You can't "recall" a witness just to "clear up" something that was already in the content of his first witness report.You need to put your questions only once and deal with a topic only once.



I don't understand this tense "not being allowed to challenged" (you are saying to challenge, I think). Anyway I don't see how there can be a point tha makes sense. Hellmann's assessment of Quintavalle was illegitimate and unacceptable since it is inconsistent with the testimony itself, and also contains some unfounded deductions. Ok. So Hellmann is annulled. Doesn't exist any more. Nothing of what Hellmann assessed matters. So we are back to another appeal judge, who is asked to re-assess again (after Massei) the testimony of Quintavalle. The judge (Nencini) says there is no reason to hear the witness again (what judges say 95-99% of the times). What's the problem. I don't understand.



But Quintavalle said he was not questioned about just having seen the girl. He also explained that he did not want to come forward on his own decision, his journalist friend needed to drive him out and pressure him, because he was absolutely not keen to become a witness. He said clearly that he didn't speak about it before because he didn't want to.

But Quintavalle is unquestionably a LIAR.
He lied at one time or the other.
He lied to the COP or he lied to the court after being "primed" by his reporter friend.
It really says something about Italian justice when you say it is so common for people to say one thing to investigators and another to reporters and then the court can "pick" the truth that it finds "convenient".
This is just one of the many actions of the judicial system in this case that convinces all who look carefully(and are not in the employ of the Italian Judiciary) that the guilty verdicts are contrived from "cherry picked" evidence and innuendo.

 

[Machiavelli]

From Judge Massei's motivations report:



The distinction you are making does not get Stefanoni off the hook, nor Judge Massei for accepting such nonsense.

Stefanoni is on no hook; there us no suspicious answer no lie in her questioning, and certain not on this point: here her answers are absolutely ok and it seems paranoid to see something wrong in the fact that she never had experience of a contamination incident in her lab. You really should try some better ground for your attacks.

 

[Machiavelli]

But Quintavalle is unquestionably a LIAR.
He lied at one time or the other.
He lied to the COP or he lied to the court after being "primed" by his reporter friend.

Why? There is no evidence of this. Either you believe Volturno, or you don't. If Volturno tells the truth, there is no evidence Quintavalle ever lied.
In addition to that, Quintavalle would have no motive to lie.

 

[analemma]

But Quintavalle is unquestionably a LIAR.
He lied at one time or the other.
He lied to the COP or he lied to the court after being "primed" by his reporter friend.
It really says something about Italian justice when you say it is so common for people to say one thing to investigators and another to reporters and then the court can "pick" the truth that it finds "convenient".
This is just one of the many actions of the judicial system in this case that convinces all who look carefully(and are not in the employ of the Italian Judiciary) that the guilty verdicts are contrived from "cherry picked" evidence and innuendo.

And to make this even worse, the other witness in the store, who knew Knox did not see either of the kids.
So we have a Nencinni and Massai cherry picking to accept the testimony of a proven liar over the testimony of someone who is not a PROVEN LIAR and then accepts the version from the LIAR which is most harmful to the defendant when the court is supposed to view the defendant as innocent until proven guilty and look at evidence with the innocence of the defendant as a starting criteria.
In this case, in these two courts, EVERY decision to accept doubtful evidence from LIARs or confused addled witnesses has come down as a decision to accept the most unlikely version as long as it is most harmful to the defendants.
This anti defendant bias is a main characteristic of the Italian courts mode of operation in this case that makes this travesty of justice both obvious and disgusting.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Stefanoni is on no hook; there us no suspicious answer no lie in her questioning, and certain not on this point: here her answers are absolutely ok and it seems paranoid to see something wrong in the fact that she never had experience of a contamination incident in her lab. You really should try some better ground for your attacks.

Actually all good labs have a log book in which contamination events are recorded. Even the best labs regularly have such events.

Your claim that Stefanoni with her Bachelor's degree was such a master of laboratory technique that she has achieved perfection, which no other lab in the world has ever achieved, is simply ridiculous. She didn't even have the proper equipment to do LCN DNA analysis safely.

 

[Machiavelli]

"the defence did not make a request that was not fulfilled with the rules and opportunities provided by the system"
ABSOLUTELY FALSE. HOW CAN YOU EVEN SAY SUCH THINGS WITH A STRAIGHT FACE??????
In the Florence trial the Knox lawyers made 20 requests for tests against the evidence, including a sound test to see if there was any scream from inside the cottage that the old woman could have possibly heard from her house.
All the knox lawyer requests were denied!!!!!!
And yet you make these statements.
Amazing

Obviously I was referring to the investigation and preliminary hearing. The first request that could have been interpreted as a request of raw data was made orally in 2009, by only one lawyer and was hardly understandable, after the DNA evidence had been already debated.

 

[Machiavelli]

Actually all good labs have a log book in which contamination events are recorded. Even the best labs regularly have such events.

Your claim that Stefanoni with her Bachelor's degree was such a master of laboratory technique .....

This false allegation disqualifies you. Stefanoni was assistent professor for 8 years before working for the Polizia Scientifica.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

keeping a good laboratory notebook

Mach, the problem is that so much of what is described is what one sees in poorly run laboratories. One keeps a laboratory note book, one records contemporaneously what one does (for a good example of what happens if you fail to keep contemporaneous records read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson RL, Longman Green & Co. London 1886) Stefanoni obviously had not.

Planigale,

I seem to recall discussing Stefanoni's testimony with a PG commenter where this point came up. Stefanoni had acknowledged providing information for a report months after the work had been done. One of the points I emphasize most strongly about laboratory notebooks is that they should be an up-to-the-minute description of what one is doing. These sorts of errors should dent the credibility of anyone making them. Only in the never-never land of this case are they ignored.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

a claim about the YSTR result that is pure nonsense

What a BS. Nencini never concedes there are even two "extra males". And he does not mean to make any complete list of possible contributors.

Machiavelli,

Nencini invoked Meredith's boyfriend as a contributor without having his reference profile in evidence. Even taking this attribution alone, it discredits Nencini as a judge. It is imbecilic to make such a claim without evidence. Putting it in the context of the YSTR egram, where a minimum of two additional male contributors is undeniable (I posted a portion of the egram in these threads), it looks even worse.

 

[Wattson]

This false allegation disqualifies you. Stefanoni was assistent professor for 8 years before working for the Polizia Scientifica.

I find Stefanoni to be an incompetent liar. If it was up to me she would never be allowed back in any laboratory.

 

[RWVBWL]

Hi Machiavelli,
Is it common in Italy for witnesses to appear on national TV
and tell the viewing audience what they saw or heard before a Trial has even convened?

This post snippet from Perugia Shock regarding Marco Q. bothers me abit:
The presumed genius of memory already betrayed himself during his exclusive interview at the talk show: he said that he knew Raffaele very well because he was coming there for years. So we have another superwitness who didn't study the part too well, it seems: he doesn't know that Raffaele had just moved there...


How does a person get a fair trial in Italy if the witnesses are all talking to the news media or are on reality talk shows?
RW

 

[Bill Williams]

Machiavelli,

Nencini invoked Meredith's boyfriend as a contributor without having his reference profile in evidence. Even taking this attribution alone, it discredits Nencini as a judge. It is imbecilic to make such a claim without evidence. Putting it in the context of the YSTR egram, where a minimum of two additional male contributors is undeniable (I posted a portion of the egram in these threads), it looks even worse.

Quoting Tennessee Williams (no relation ) my work is done here.

 

[Numbers]

.

It's not that I am not interested in the truth. I am very interested in the truth, and I think it has been found. I am only not that interested in forensic science. I don't accept that a trial is mistaken for an investigation on forensic science. And I also radically object to the ideology that the "whole truth" is to be found only within a comprehensive release of all the data and for that data to be peer reviewed. I believe the only review of evidence must be within the trial, and subject to the interest expressed by the judge and by the parties. The only trial must take place within the courtroom.



There is no standard of any kind for pieces of evidence.Pieces of evidence cannot be subjected to evidentiary laws of the kind you have in jury based systems.

Some comments:

1. To not release all the forensic data and other evidence gathered by the police and prosecutor to the court and the defense is to hide (suppress) that data and evidence. It is a destruction of the search for the truth, which must be the whole truth, in the trial. "Equality of arms" (Convention Article 6; called "discovery" in the US) is a critical part of the adversarial trial process. Violation of equality of arms makes any trial unfair. And it is not only the whole of the forensic data including the original raw data that is to be made available to the defense by the police/prosecution, all other evidence must be disclosed.

2. It is up to the prosecution and the defense each to enlist as many expert consultants, paid or volunteer, as they wish to evaluate data.

3. In Italy, it seems the trials take place in the media as well as the court room. In some countries, at least for some trials, the information that the prosecution and defense are allowed to make public is limited. And this limitation must apply to the prosecution from the beginning of the investigation.

4. Italy may not have any standards for the evaluation of evidence, especially forensic evidence. This is a sad flaw in the Italian justice system that the Italian people should address, one hopes. The ECtHR regards judgment of or standards for the reliability of evidence generally the responsibility of each state. Perhaps the CoM of the CoE will help Italy formulate such standards if they are indeed lacking.

5. Standards of evidence are as important in judge-based judicial systems as they are for jury-based systems. In fact, in jury-based systems a defendant may opt for a judge only trial; the judge must still follow (at least at the US Federal level) certain rules of evidence.

 

[Numbers]

An interesting case from the ECtHR:

CASE OF AGNELET v. FRANCE 61198/08 10/01/2013

A 29-year-old woman, A.R., went missing in 1977 in unexplained circumstances and for unknown reasons; she has never been seen again. A.R. was a director and partner, together with mother and others, in a casino in Nice. In 1983, the applicant, who was her lawyer and her lover, was charged with her murder, but in 1985 the charges were dropped as "no case to answer". There was no actual evidence of a murder or kidnapping; no body had been found; there was no specific explanation of the crime. A.R.'s mother R.R. had been the complainant.

In 2000, after renewed complaints by R.R., and an admission by the estranged wife of the applicant that she had in 1979 falsely stated that she and the applicant had been away from Nice around the time of the disappearance, murder charges were reopened.
The applicant was tried and convicted of the murder of A.R., finalized in 2008.

However, there was no specific information in the indictment confirming that a murder had taken place, or linking the applicant to any such murder. The indictment serves as a document providing reasons for a conviction in jury trials in France; in addition, the prosecutor directs questions to be answered by the jury.

Copied from the judgment of the ECtHR:

67. The Court further notes that a great deal was at stake as the applicant was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment having previously been told that there was no case to answer and having later been acquitted.

68. Since the subsidiary questions in his case were found to be devoid of purpose, only two questions were put to the jury: the first was whether the applicant had intentionally murdered A.R. and the second was, if so, whether the murder had been premeditated.

69. The Court can only conclude, in view of the considerable complexity of the case, that these questions were succinctly worded and made no allusion to the specific circumstances. It notes, firstly that the applicant had been acquitted at first instance and, secondly, that the reasons for and manner of A.R.’s disappearance, including the possibility of premeditated murder, were based on mere suppositions in the absence of formal evidence, such as the discovery of the body or physical evidence firmly establishing the place, time and modus operandi of the murder of which the applicant was accused. Accordingly, the questions made no reference to “any precise and specific circumstances that could have enabled the applicant to understand why he was found guilty” (see Taxquet, cited above, § 96).

70. Admittedly, the prosecution appealed, which, as the Government noted, made a review of the first-instance judgment possible (see paragraph 53 above). However, besides the fact that no reasons were given for that judgment either, the appeal resulted in a differently constituted assize court being given the task of re-examining the case file and reassessing the factual and legal issues in the course of a fresh trial. It follows that the applicant was unable to infer any relevant information from the first-instance proceedings as to why he was convicted on appeal by a different jury and different professional judges, especially as he had initially been acquitted.

71. In conclusion, the Court considers that the applicant was not afforded sufficient safeguards enabling him to understand why he was found guilty.

72. Lastly, the Court takes note of the reform implemented since the time of the events, following the enactment of Law no. 2011-939 of 10 August 2011 which, among other things, introduced a new Article 365-1 into the Code of Criminal Procedure providing that the reasons for the assize court’s judgment are now to be set out in a “statement of reasons form” appended to the question sheet. In the event of a conviction, the Law requires the statement of reasons to refer to the evidence examined in the course of the deliberations which persuaded the assize court in respect of each of the charges brought against the accused. In the Court’s view, this reform appears, on the face of it, to significantly strengthen the safeguards against arbitrariness and to help the accused understand why they were convicted, thus meeting the requirements of Article 6 § 1 of the Convention.

73. There has therefore been a violation of Article 6 § 1 of the Convention in the present case.

ETA: In the AK-RS case, there are reasons (the motivation reports) provided for each trial level and for the CSC decisions to date. However, the quality of the reasons in terms of logic and law may be questioned in these motivations. Of course, the CSC quashed the Hellmann court acquittal verdict and severly criticized its reasons. However, IMO, objective and unbiased persons would find quite the opposite: the Massei court conviction, the CSC decision quashing the Hellmann acquittal, and the Nencini court conviction all suffered from defects of logic and law. Time will tell what the ultimate outcome will be, since Amanda Knox has applied to the ECtHR regarding her conviction by Hellmann for calunnia.

 

[anglolawyer]

Not only deficiencies in logic and law, Numbers, but also in comprehensiveness. We have already been told by His Nemesis that it is quite normal for there to be an unspoken part of the judgment. That is obvious baloney. Keep up the good work. These cases are very interesting. Thanks for digging them up.

 

[anglolawyer]

Mach's great post

This is your opinion about the Polizia Scientifica report. I don't subscribe to it, I don't think that is a crappy work at all. I also don't consider it a laboratory work, and not as a report produced by one individual. I think it is also an unfounded assertion to say that operational procedures were not in place. Yet, I am not going to argue about your opinion. I will put it on a shelf. The point is elsewhere.
This is a murder case. There is a judge, and the focus of judgement is the defendant alone (and this is true even more when there is an inquisitorial principle in the system). Not the quality of the investigation, not the professionalism of this or that expert or witness or party, not even the quality of a piece of evidence: just the defendant alone. It's no zero sum game: the defendant does not become innocent if the detectives are unprofessional or the forensics are not good and not even if the prosecution is sloppy. Guilt or innocence of the defendant can only be asssessed by a judge directly and independently from all these external elements.
Second, this is a murder trial means it is about an overall system of evidence; it not a trial about DNA, nor about forensic evidence. It is only about evidence as a whole. And DNA, in this case, is an unnecessary element. Even if the forensics had been completely sloppy and had provided no DNA evidence at all, had I been the judge I would have convicted anyway. I would find them guilty beyond reasonable doubt with no need of DNA at all.
Yet, DNA here is not a "crappy" result at all. The bra clasp and the knife are valid results and good evidence simply because they fulfill the intrinsic property of good pieces of evidence: there is no likely explanation for them. The myth og "contamination" is in fact a conspiracy theory and thus is worth nothing.
And DNA findings on the knife are also part of a contiguous system. The victim's blood on the knife, for example, is not just backed by the DNA result, but also by the defendant's own admission that the knife came into contact with the victim. There was also the defendant admission that the victim's DNA might be found on the cleaning rags, there was Knox's admission in prison saying she was worried by the knife, there was Knox's DNA on the handle and on the blade at the handle insertion and there was her own blood on the tap where the murderer washed him/herself together with the victim's blood. Knox's DNA on handle, Sollecito's double and repeated admission, Knox's admission, Knox's DNA on blade, Knox's blood: this is a contiguous pattern of elements. In Italian legalese we say conducenti, they are "conductive". The knife is also an incredible match to the bed sheet imprint.
All this is what makes the knife a piece of circumstantial evidence.

This is a great post, to which it may be necessary to return from time to time. Just one point for now. If you chuck out the DNA evidence which, you say, is not essential, does that mean you really believe the cop randomly selected the correct knife from Raf's kitchen draw based on a hunch? I mean, he didn't say it was the right size, did he? They had all those knives in the apartment itself, all the knives at Patrick's home (the killer's home, as of 06 Nov) and all the knives at Le Chic but the guy homed in on the right one (holed the approach to the 18th to make the play off) just like that. You seriously believe that?

Actually, the same question presents itself whether you buy the DNA evidence or not but it stands out just a bit more insane this way, if that is possible.

What do you think of Nencini's reason for rejection of the defence request for further testing of 165B? He said if he allowed it it would only be on the basis that the work of Conti-Vechiotti had been incomplete and therefore incompetent, obliging us, if acting reasonably, to discard all their evidence. Can we apply that principle anywhere else in this case?

ETA two questions (for anybody) while I think about it because we seem to have some new evidence of which I was unaware:

Q1 is the knife print in fact a match for the kitchen knife? Where does the evidence for this come from? I thought it was clearly accepted the print was too small. What did Massei find?
Q2 is there a female footprint in blood in the bedroom? Is this a shoe print or a bare print? Did it feature in Massei? How do we know it's not Meredith's?

 

[Kauffer]

Evidence

.

It's not that I am not interested in the truth. I am very interested in the truth, and I think it has been found. I am only not that interested in forensic science. I don't accept that a trial is mistaken for an investigation on forensic science. And I also radically object to the ideology that the "whole truth" is to be found only within a comprehensive release of all the data and for that data to be peer reviewed. I believe the only review of evidence must be within the trial, and subject to the interest expressed by the judge and by the parties. The only trial must take place within the courtroom.



There is no standard of any kind for pieces of evidence.
Pieces of evidence cannot be subjected to evidentiary laws of the kind you have in jury based systems.

But this is all very unsound. The reliability of forensic evidence can only be determined by reference to expert opinion and such opinion can be in the form of direct testimony or experiment located, for example, in academic papers. What you cannot do is introduce novelty at trial. Good science is all about repeatability of results, verification and consistency in the value of information. So in this trial we have numerous problems relating to collection, testing and interpretation of the results obtained by polizia scientifica. Additionally, the court has invented a new standard, which we can call, "Novelli's burden", applied to the question of contamination, and which is unsupported by the scientific community.

The idea, in the modern age, that trials take place in courtrooms in the sense that they are hermetically sealed environments, which permit themselves to admit and examine evidence in a perverse and different manner from the way such evidence would be admitted and examined outside the courtroom, is dangerous and foolish.

With regard to your last paragraph, you are simply wrong. Italian law requires that each individual piece of evidence is examined for its efficacy before it is permitted to be used in an osmotic evaluation of the whole body of evidence. Hellmann discussed this in his motivation report.

You seem to be suggesting that this prosecution could and should be sustained without the knife and the clasp. What evidence could we throw out before you would agree there is not enough left to sustain a conviction?