Continuation Part 13: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[Numbers]

The ECHR finds arbitrary or manifestly unreasonable judgments unfair - violations of Convention Article 6.1. Domestic court judgments that misinterpret ECHR judgments are considered arbitrary and unfair and violations of Convention Article 6.1.

There is great relevance to the AK-RS case where arbitrary court judgments are found in the Massei motivation report, the CSC quashing of the Hellmann acquittal, and the Nencini motivation report.

Bochan v. Ukraine (No. 2) (application no. 22251/08) [Grand Chamber]

The Court {ECHR} reiterated that it was not its role to act as a fourth instance and to question under Article 6 § 1 the judgments of the national courts, unless their findings had been arbitrary or manifestly unreasonable. However in Ms Bochan’s case, the Supreme Court, in its decision of 14 March 2008, had grossly misrepresented the Court’s findings in its judgment of 3 May 2007. Indeed, the Supreme Court had found that Ukrainian courts’ decisions in Ms Bochan’s case had been lawful and well-founded and that she had been awarded just satisfaction for the violation of the “reasonable-time” guarantee, when the Court had in fact found a violation of the Convention on account of the unfairness of the original domestic proceedings.

The Court observed that the Supreme Court’s reasoning could not be considered as a different reading of a legal text but rather as being “grossly arbitrary” or as entailing a “denial of justice”, as the distorted presentation of the Court’s 2007 judgment in the first Bochan case had defeated Ms Bochan’s attempt to have her property claim examined in the framework of the cassation-type procedure provided for under Ukrainian law in the light of the Court’s judgment in her previous case.

As a consequence, there had been a violation of Article 6 § 1 on account of the unfairness of the proceedings culminating in the decision of the Supreme Court of 14 March 2008.

 

[Samson]

I'm quite interested in this phrase "noble cause corruption", which I haven't really encountered before. It seems to me that this might explain quite a lot of what is sneered at as "conspiracy theorising" in relation to miscarriages of justice.

*Goes off to google it*

I have posted more than once that Arthur Allan Thomas was a victim of noble cause corruption, a case I grew up alongside. The parallels with the bra clasp are very strong, late discovery of evidence needed to convict and so on. That is why I am biased to like DanO's jail cell dna collection theory.

A commission of inquiry found as fact that the bullet case had been planted by a specific inspector in the garden.

 

[anglolawyer]

I'm quite interested in this phrase "noble cause corruption", which I haven't really encountered before. It seems to me that this might explain quite a lot of what is sneered at as "conspiracy theorising" in relation to miscarriages of justice.

*Goes off to google it*

It comes into play when you know the guy did it but fear you can't prove it, so you sort of help the process along a little. A wider interpretation allows you to nail a bad guy for a crime you know he didn't commit on the ground that he will have got away with others.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

falsehood about the bra clasp DNA

It's false. Nencini never attributed Y profiles to males, as I have already shown. You ate lying about what people said, as usual.

Machiavelli,

Nencini admitted to not knowing anything about DNA forensics, and for once I agree with him (I will have to mark this day in my calendar). On the other hand I do recall the story being floated here and elsewhere (circa 2010, courtesy of Fulcanelli) that there were several female contributors to the clasp (this was ascribed to shared laundry facilities IIRC). Nencini's report reads as if he cobbled together every pro-guilt argument he could find, regardless of whether or not it had been debunked. His nonsense about a woman's shoe print being found in blood in Meredith's room, and his getting the cell phone tower business wrong are other examples.

 

[Strozzi]

It is this "team spirit" rather than a highly planned conspiracy that is, I believe, responsible for much of the official misconduct in this case. The team players fudge their actions or statements to accommodate and preserve the cheating of a very few primary conspirators.

I'm interested in trying to understand how police and prosecutor self-identifying with/not identifying with Amanda allowed them to treat Amanda with suspicion, and whether it would have been the same or different if a young woman/survivor in the house had been one of their own (fellow Perugian, a home-team member) rather than an outsider/stranger/foreigner.

Suppose Amanda was not studying in Perugia that year and that there were only three young women residing upstairs in the cottage. Suppose it had been Filomena, a then 26 year old Perugia native, law graduate of the local university, working as an apprentice lawyer at a Perugia law firm, who had returned to her shared cottage one morning after spending the previous night with her boyfriend, sensed that something was out of place after showering and dressing, and had then returned to her boyfriend Marcos' apartment, who determined they should go back to the cottage to check.

Would the Postal Police have suspected the rock through the window was staging for insurance fraud? Upon finding the dead English girl, would Perugia police and Prosecutor Mignini rushed to judgement against Filomena the way they did against Amanda? Would they have treated it differently, assured by the feeling that Filomena was one of them, a native of Perugia, graduate of the local law school, apprentice lawyer working in a Perugia law firm?

Would they have quickly realized a burglar was in the house when the English girl returned home the previous evening. Would they have accepted the digestion facts as proof that the murder occurred not long after 9 pm?

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Nencini doesn't have a clue about YSTR testing

I know this is one of Bill's favorites, but I think we found (courtesy of vibio no less), that a translation of Nencini has him finding 2-4 other profiles, or maybe even male profiles - so he takes the lower number of 2 - then assigns one to Raf and one to Meredith's boyfriend and ignores the other two, so that his motivation report is "compatible" with the evidence.

I may be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure we concluded Nencini was not actually suggesting women have "Y" DNA. He was just taking the lowest possible number of males, and assigning one extra to Meredith's boyfriend - purely speculatively and without a reference profile.

carbonjam72,

I don't think that Nencini knows what YSTR DNA profiling is. But even with the lower bound figure of two male contributors besides Sollecito, Giacomo could not account for more than one of the two. Moreover, it is appalling that Nencini was able to claim that Giacomo was a contributor without evidence. Judges should not be allowed to engage in pure speculation. Finally, two additional contributors is a lower bound. If Stefanoni gets to count peaks below 50 RFU for the clasp, why not count them here? That increases the number of contributors.

 

[Desert Fox]

Desert Fox,

What about the jacket in the Hank Skinner case? That has been lost, yet it might be very exculpatory for Mr. Skinner if it belonged to the deceased uncle, as it may well have. BTW, Skinner is the subject of a dead thread here, which could be resurrected. This might or might not be noble cause corruption. More generally it is difficult to distinguish between biased forensics and outright fraud. The Lindy Chamberlain case is one example.

I know several cases of evidence having been lost but I look at it as a little different than destroyed. . . . The classic "lost" case I can think of is Mr Bojangles with the West Memphis Three.

 

[Desert Fox]

I'm interested in trying to understand how police and prosecutor self-identifying with/not identifying with Amanda allowed them to treat Amanda with suspicion, and whether it would have been the same or different if a young woman/survivor in the house had been one of their own (fellow Perugian, a home-team member) rather than an outsider/stranger/foreigner.

Suppose Amanda was not studying in Perugia that year and that there were only three young women residing upstairs in the cottage. Suppose it had been Filomena, a then 26 year old Perugia native, law graduate of the local university, working as an apprentice lawyer at a Perugia law firm, who had returned to her shared cottage one morning after spending the previous night with her boyfriend, sensed that something was out of place after showering and dressing, and had then returned to her boyfriend Marcos' apartment, who determined they should go back to the cottage to check. Would the Postal Police have suspected the rock through the window was staging for insurance fraud? Upon finding the dead English girl, would Perugia police and Prosecutor Mignini rushed to judgement against Filomena the way they did against Amanda? Would they have treated it differently, assured by the feeling that Filomena was one of them, a native of Perugia, graduate of the local law school, apprentice lawyer working in a Perugia law firm?

She would have been smart enough to grab a lawyer first thing.

 

[Strozzi]

She would have been smart enough to grab a lawyer first thing.

What you are referring to is "equality or arms". Filomena would have faced Mignini with equality of arms. Mignini would then have realized that there was a burglar in the house and would have Identified and gone after Guede.

 

[Machiavelli]

Just saw the end of the Italy v Ireland rugby international, with Ireland (by far the stronger rugby nation) winning 26-3 (2 converted tries and 4 penalty goals to just 1 penalty goal).

In the last few minutes, Italy pressed hard and scrambled a bouncing ball down for a would-be try (touchdown), but the decision had to go to the TV replay. It became clear, unfortunately, that an Italian player reaching for the ball had just fractionally knocked it forward with his fingertips, nullifying the try before it went loose for another Italian player to scoop it up and get it down.

Of course the disappointed crowd booed and whistled, but the boos and whistles started not when the decision was announced but as the TV images - also visible in the ground - revealed the dreaded fact of the fingertip contact. Sadly, the team didn't have the Italian Supreme Court on their side to make up their own facts. In sport, objectivity and video recordings take precedence over national pride.

If the Supreme Court would have wanted to endorse national pride, it would have been very easy for them to do pursue that goal by upholding Hellmann's verdict.
The Hellmann-Zanetti court was a national Appeals Court, it looked good in the eyes of American media, they could have easilly used it to make the judicial system look good, especially if they believed it had come truly to the right and legally correct verdict.

This would have happened if the Supreme Court were after national pride, of course.

 

[Desert Fox]

What you are referring to is "equality or arms". Filomena would have faced Mignini with equality of arms. Mignini would then have realized that there was a burglar in the house and would have Identified and gone after Guede.

I believe that if Amanda did not "kind of / sort of" confessed, the case against them would have evaporated. They scared a young American girl into some sort of confession and that has been used against her since. The rest of the evidence is basically just bad window dressing.

The confession of a defendant can be the worst confession which either matches nothing in the crime scene and/or the defendant is led by the nose by the investigators, it does not matter. Confessions seem to be this thing that everybody believes in spite of the fact of solid evidence with regards to false confessions.

 

[Desert Fox]

If the Supreme Court would have wanted to endorse national pride, it would have been very easy for them to do pursue that goal by upholding Hellmann's verdict.
The Hellmann-Zanetti court was a national Appeals Court, it looked good in the eyes of American media, they could have easilly used it to make the judicial system look good, especially if they believed it had come truly to the right and legally correct verdict.

This would have happened if the Supreme Court were after national pride, of course.

While I don't think it is the only reason, it would have put the forensic evidence for thousands of trials under scrutiny.

 

[Strozzi]

While I don't think it is the only reason, it would have put the forensic evidence for thousands of trials under scrutiny.

You are absolutely right. Are Italian judges prepared to repudiate the illusion that the police forensic labs' techniques are scientifically accurate and reliable? The answer, we see, is NO. Even Hellman was not ready to expose Stefanoni's lab, for if he was he could have backed up his orders to her with arrest for contempt, obstruction of evidence, and denial of a fair trial. Imagine the public message if he had sent carloads of Carabineiri to seal her lab and garage, pending inspection by court-sanctioned inspectors from a separate agency to inventory and take control of all documents, machine records, and physical evidence

 

[Bill Williams]

While I don't think it is the only reason, it would have put the forensic evidence for thousands of trials under scrutiny.

From the Chieffi report:

Also well founded is further criticism raised by the public plaintiff,
according to which the signs of the experts were passively incorporated, as
to the mere inadequacy of the investigations carried out by the Scientific
Police, who were not renewed, the experts having considered inadequate
the two samples in question ( 36 and 165 B) for the detection of the genetic
profile and due to the fact that it could not be ruled out that the result was
derived "from contamination phenomena occurring at any stage of
sampling and/or handling and/or analytical processes made” . From p. 75
p. 82 the Court adopted the arguments developed in the assesment that,
indeed, had been the subject of severe disagreement with both Prof. Novelli
that Prof. Torricelli, consultants of the Procurator General and the civil
parties, whose authoritative voices were completely neglected. Prof.
Novelli had agreed that there are protocols and recommendations, but
added that first of all the operator had to contribute his common sense (ud.
6.9.2011, p. Transcription 59.), otherwise it put in question all the DNA analysis done from 1986 onwards.​

 

[Machiavelli]

While I don't think it is the only reason, it would have put the forensic evidence for thousands of trials under scrutiny.

That's a theory. Unproven. But if the case was that the outcome "thousands of trials" would be lost, that would look like a matter of public security, rather than of national pride, don't you think? And possibly, a matter of jurisprudence and justice.

But, if you believe the Supreme Court wold be ready to "cover up" alleged false evidence findings, your belief would equate to assuming that the Italian Supreme Court normally doesn't pursue justice at all, that it is rather a kind of Mafia power who would act systematically with the utmost contempt of truth and justice, actually with the purpose of pursueing injustice.

 

[Desert Fox]

You are absolutely right. Are Italian judges prepared to repudiate the illusion that the police forensic labs' techniques are scientifically accurate and reliable? The answer, we see, is NO. Even Hellman was not ready to expose Stefanoni's lab, for if he was he could have backed up his orders to her with arrest for contempt, obstruction of evidence, and denial of a fair trial. Imagine the public message if he had sent carloads of Carabineiri to seal her lab and garage, pending inspection by court-sanctioned inspectors from a separate agency to inventory and take control of all documents, machine records, and physical evidence

This is also a issue with the restrictions on the press which we see in Italy.
There are plenty of forensic scandals in the United States but we can freely criticize the government / police / courts.

 

[Desert Fox]

That's a theory. Unproven. But if the case was that the outcome "thousands of trials" would be lost, that would look like a matter of public security, rather than of national pride, don't you think? And possibly, a matter of jurisprudence and justice.

But, if you believe the Supreme Court wold be ready to "cover up" alleged false evidence findings, your belief would equate to assuming that the Italian Supreme Court normally doesn't pursue justice at all, that it is rather a kind of Mafia power who would act systematically with the utmost contempt of truth and justice, actually with the purpose of pursueing injustice.

My reasons may be wrong or right.

If you look at just about every legal system in the world, there are incidents of covering up indiscretion on the part of police, prosecutors, and courts. There are some psychological and sociological reasons behind this. Rick Perry likely signed off on the execution of an innocent man for his own ambitions.

The thing is that you are trying to argue that Italy is somehow immune to this.

 

[Machiavelli]

This is also a issue with the restrictions on the press which we see in Italy.
There are plenty of forensic scandals in the United States but we can freely criticize the government / police / courts.

You can criticize what you want in Italy.
But if one has evidence of misconducts, besides criticizing he should also bring their evidence to a magistrate.

 

[Desert Fox]

You can criticize what you want in Italy.
But if one has evidence of misconducts, besides criticizing he should also bring their evidence to a magistrate.

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...y/31/europe-must-protect-italy-freedom-speech

What has the EU done so far to secure media pluralism and protect Italian democracy? In 2004, both the Council of Europe and the European parliament explicitly denounced the open conflict of interest between Berlusconi's media interests and his political role as prime minister. Last year Freedom House – an independent watchdog organisation based in Washington DC – downgraded Italy from "free" to "partially free" country, the only case in Europe to be ranked so low.
Yet Europe has never really acted to amend this situation. Even on 21 October 2009 the European parliament rejected a resolution denouncing the lack of media freedom in Italy and dismissed it as a national matter. Is democracy just a national issue for Europe? Or shouldn't all European states share at least a core set of democratic values?

Edit:
http://www.osce.org/fom/108180

BILISI, 12 November 2013 – OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatović today welcomed improvements made by Italian authorities in the draft law on defamation, but also pointed to important problematic provisions that still need to be changed.

“I welcome the abolishment of prison sentences for insult and defamation. However, the decision of the Chamber of Deputies to retain criminal liability for these offences is a missed opportunity to comply with international standards and best practice”, Mijatović wrote in a letter to the Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino.

She also said the suggested increased fines in the Criminal Code and Press Law in the current draft of the law are problematic.

“The fines are excessive. They could create a chilling effect on the media and in some cases pose a significant threat to journalists in smaller media outlets where finances are limited, thus threatening media pluralism in Italy,” Mijatović said.

“I urge members of the Italian Senate to consider further amendments to fully decriminalize defamation. Free speech should not be subject to criminal charges of this kind,” Mijatović said.

Mijatović has been consistently calling for the decriminalization of defamation in the OSCE region. She presented the legal review and recommendations to the Italian authorities to further improve this law.

The full text of the legal review, commissioned by the Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media and carried out by Senior Legal Officer Boyko Boev of Article 19, a non-governmental UK-based organization, is available here: http://www.osce.org/fom/108108

Mijatović is in Tbilisi attending the 10th OSCE South Caucasus Media Conference.

It is really clear from the second item I posted that the Italian legal system is stifling to free speech.

 

[Samson]

You can criticize what you want in Italy.
But if one has evidence of misconducts, besides criticizing he should also bring their evidence to a magistrate.

If you supply a useable address and the means of addressing in Italian, I will send them my summary of evidence under my name and country, backed up with the testimony of a gastroentoroligist etc.