Continuation Part 13: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

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tsig said:
That's why all this speculation on evidence, contamination, he said/she said is completely meaningless.
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No, it's not, as has been pointed out we would be at this stage if Cassation hadn't already ruled on evidence. Regarding contamination, the prosecution argument that contamination must be proven is about as bog standard an example of the reversal of the burden of proof as there could be.
 
Kaosium said:
I believe what they're getting at is something I explained in this post where I went through the various electropherograms Stefanoni produced (one in the RTIGF in 2008, one supplied to the Massei Court in 2009 and finally the one the independent experts received in 2011) and demonstrated how Stefanoni had hidden many alleles by not labeling them and not giving them peak data, but instead pretended those peaks were stutter.

In that post I linked those electropherograms and followed one loci (D8S1179) on the autosomic and showed how more alleles 'appeared' as more information was demanded of Stefanoni. For D8S1179 there were two peaks hidden in this fashion (going by a 50 RFU cut off) but the grand total for the entire electropherogram was 19 for the autosomic and 14 from the Y-STR results which I didn't address. Note that there were two basic DNA tests run on the bra clasp, the autosomic which is what many commonly think of as standard DNA testing and the Y-STR test which just checks for male DNA.

All of those electropherograms were derived from the same data, the EDFs, but by changing the parameters of what got labeled and given peak height and area data Stefanoni was able to conceal that many of the peaks she called 'stutter' were in fact alleles by the standards she claimed in her court testimony that she followed.
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This is excellent - thank you for the expertise and clarity.

And of course there's the original egram, Diocletus describes from plate 410 and is discussed at the wiki, which has been suppressed.
 
Kauffer said:
This is excellent - thank you for the expertise and clarity.

And of course there's the original egram, Diocletus describes from plate 410 and is discussed at the wiki, which has been suppressed.
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So, we have Stefanoni manipulating parameters to cause the raw data to produce different-looking egrams, while simultaneously complaining to the court that if it ever compels production of the raw data, then it should require the defendants to examine it under Stefanoni's parameters. Is this chutzpah for real?
 
CoulsdonUK writes:
How do you envisage “proof of contamination” being presented in any judicial context? The ECHR deals with human rights violations. As far as I know, there is not a legal mechanism in the Italy\US extradition process to re-examine evidence. Indeed, the scheduled Court of Cassation hearing does not review evidence.


Tsig responds with:
That's why all this speculation on evidence, contamination, he said/she said is completely meaningless.


LondonJohn responds to Tsig with:
No, you're totally wrong. The Italian Supreme Court has the right and the duty to rule on matters of law. There is a strong argument to be made that the various trial judges gravely erred in law when they failed to ensure full discovery of DNA source data to the defence. It's that little thing called "the right to a fair trial". You may have heard of that. And the ECHR, likewise, has the remit to examine whether an applicant's human rights were violated - and one of the key ways in which such a violation can occur is if the applicant was denied the right to a fair trial. It's Article 6 in the Convention. And in order to adjudicate whether or not there was a fair trial, the ECHR will be rather interested in whether there was fair and proper discovery, and whether the DNA evidence was treated fairly and properly. And on your simplistic point of "he said/she said", that also will indeed be of direct interest to (and well within the remit of) both the Italian Supreme Court and the ECHR - there are numerous points of law that were arguably breached in the admission of this evidence and the logical knots in which the Nencini court in particular tied itself up.


And Tsig responds to LondonJohn with:
I somehow doubt the ISS will consider this thread as evidence. I doubt they even know that this forum exists.



And..... the award for "Most spectacular goalpost shifting of the year (with an added commendation for creation of a straw man in the process)" goes to................................................................. :D
 
Kauffer said:
My mistake. I've just read the relevant section of C and V. There's an epg for 25/09/09 and one for 10/06/2008 (British date format). With the latter attached to Stefanoni's original report. The peaks present RFU levels differently. Ok. Sorry Planigale et al.
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That's an indication of something different: Stefanoni should have repeated the entire (autosomic) process on the bra clasp from the beginning, i.e. take a sample, quantify/amplify it and run it through electrophoresis. That (differing RFU values but the same basic results) suggests that she just used the same amplified product from one sample and did two different electrophoresis runs, which is how she could end up with different RFU levels. That's what Conti and Vecchiotto figured and what Mehul Anjar thought was suggested as well ("different injection times of the same sample"). Note that this is not in reference to her doing two basic tests (autosomic and y-str) but that the autosomic had two different results generated through electrophoresis.

As for why she did that I've not yet read a good explanation, but from a cursory glance it looks like Diocletus has some ideas. Another is that she thought she'd attempt to fulfill the requirement for 'repeating the test' by running the same amplified product though electrophoresis again, but that doesn't actually repeat the test, it just repeats the results of the first.
 
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LondonJohn said:
CoulsdonUK writes:
How do you envisage “proof of contamination” being presented in any judicial context? The ECHR deals with human rights violations. As far as I know, there is not a legal mechanism in the Italy\US extradition process to re-examine evidence. Indeed, the scheduled Court of Cassation hearing does not review evidence.


Tsig responds with:
That's why all this speculation on evidence, contamination, he said/she said is completely meaningless.


LondonJohn responds to Tsig with:
No, you're totally wrong. The Italian Supreme Court has the right and the duty to rule on matters of law. There is a strong argument to be made that the various trial judges gravely erred in law when they failed to ensure full discovery of DNA source data to the defence. It's that little thing called "the right to a fair trial". You may have heard of that. And the ECHR, likewise, has the remit to examine whether an applicant's human rights were violated - and one of the key ways in which such a violation can occur is if the applicant was denied the right to a fair trial. It's Article 6 in the Convention. And in order to adjudicate whether or not there was a fair trial, the ECHR will be rather interested in whether there was fair and proper discovery, and whether the DNA evidence was treated fairly and properly. And on your simplistic point of "he said/she said", that also will indeed be of direct interest to (and well within the remit of) both the Italian Supreme Court and the ECHR - there are numerous points of law that were arguably breached in the admission of this evidence and the logical knots in which the Nencini court in particular tied itself up.


And Tsig responds to LondonJohn with:
I somehow doubt the ISS will consider this thread as evidence. I doubt they even know that this forum exists.



And..... the award for "Most spectacular goalpost shifting of the year (with an added commendation for creation of a straw man in the process)" goes to................................................................. :D
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I thought tsig's original response to CoulsdonUK was tongue in cheek sarcasm. I thought it was funny actually.

What a disappointment when I realized it was meant to be taken serious. Oh well.

Cody
.
 
“If DNA, Then Guilty: Strategies for Overcoming Juror Assumptions About DNA Evidence In Criminal Trials” By Christina T. Kline, Demosthenes Lorandos, and Michael Spence, The Champion, January/February 2015.

This article goes through a possible sexual assault case, one that shows how important diligence by the defense is.
 
The CSI effect and DNA

“If DNA, Then Guilty: Strategies for Overcoming Juror Assumptions About DNA Evidence In Criminal Trials” By Christina T. Kline, Demosthenes Lorandos, and Michael Spence, The Champion, January/February 2015.

This article goes through a possible sexual assault case, one that shows how important diligence by the defense is.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
“If DNA, Then Guilty: Strategies for Overcoming Juror Assumptions About DNA Evidence In Criminal Trials” By Christina T. Kline, Demosthenes Lorandos, and Michael Spence, The Champion, January/February 2015.

This article goes through a possible sexual assault case, one that shows how important diligence by the defense is.
Click to expand...

This is essentially the suspect-centric decisions both Massei's court and Nencini's court adopted.

Massei was completely uninterested in going at all beyond, "Raffaele found, Raffaele guilty," on the bra-clasp. Even though Massei tantalizingly makes reference to 165B being composed of "minor contributors" (plural), he rejects any investigation into their identities because he simply takes Stefanoni's word for it on two issues:

1) there was no contamination
2) this was not a suspect-centric investigation​

So, he saw no need to appoint an independent verification of Stefanoni's claims. It's not proper to say, "Stefanoni's results", because without the EDFs it is not possible, really, to talk about anything other than Stefanoni's claims.

Massei took the further view that he could see no reason for Stefanoni to lie to the court. (As Machiavelli says: Stefanoni is not the one on trial here! So, apparently, she doesn't even need to bring her credentials to court!)

Judge Hellmann, in his now annuled decision, DID appoint an independent expert to analyse Stefanoni's work. Amongst other things, C&V report back to the court that Stefanoni either through ignorance or ill-will purposely masked that there were peaks above 50 RFU, which perhaps should have been counted as alleles, not stutter.

The real issue is that Stefanoni did not even report the implications of this to the Massei court, so Hellmann saw that as reason to reopen the contamination issue with regard to 165B.

But the ISC in March 2013 and the Nencini court turned the clock back. Nencini takes the peculiar view that regardless of any-claimed reality of extra "minor contributors" to 165B, the real issue is the suspect-centric one - "Raffaele found, Raffaele guilty".

Kline, Lorandos and Spence above would more than likely cringe, at least that's a fair assumption.

But one thing is for sure, the suspect-centric view is bound to return the verdict one was looking for to begin with.

At base, ISC in 2013 and Nencini in 2014 returned to the reasoning - if Stefanoni said she was not suspect-centric and that there was no contamination, that's good enough for us.
 
I found this in the PMF English version of the Nencini motivations report!

Faced with these assertions by his co-defendant, directly implicating him, Raffaele Sollecito has not made any statement to address them, never explicitly denying what Amanda Marie Knox claims. Instead, he has credited in spontaneous statements the notion that he was in her company from the night of 1 November 2007 until the morning of 2 November 2007.

Raffaele Sollecito, moreover, mounted a defense at trial by which he seeks to objectively prove that he must have been at his home during the period within which the murder was committed and in his spontaneous statements he has never distanced himself from the statements of Amanda Marie Knox. In the last statement he made to this Court on 6 November 2013, he once again testified to his shared innocence with his co-defendant, saying:
[116]

(…) As I was saying ... at that particular time, the furthest thing from my mind was to be so cruel and disrespectful towards a human life. And it is for this reason that I would like to first of all make you realize how absurd these charges against me are. Us, even, to put it in the plural, against us. Because, at that point in my life, I was a week away from graduation and I had my life ahead of me. No. There’s no way. It is unreasonable to accuse me of such a thing without first having a basis (…). (p. 52 of the transcript of the hearing before the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Florence, 6 November 2013)

The conclusion of this brief note is that, in the absence of defense assertions to the contrary on the part of Raffaele Sollecito and, moreover, noting the consistent spontaneous statements made by the defendant, who still places himself with Amanda Marie Knox between the evening of 1 November 2007 and the morning of 2 November 2007, the Court deems that it must consider the alibi provided by Amanda Marie Knox as the only version of events provided by the defendants and valid for both or, at least, not contradicted by either of them.​
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This should set aside forever that Raffaele ever "threw Knox under a bus." Indeed, if Raffaele or his defence team had done that at the Florence trial, Nencini must have missed it.

People really need to actually read the court documents, rather than make "wishful thinking" assertions about issues.
 
Diocletus said:
But what about the pillowcase!??

Link
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Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote that 'all stories are true, because everything happens to someone somewhere'.

I wonder if Dr Gill mentioned the semen stain last night on Porta a Porta?

By the way, if anyone has a link to that program, I'd love to see it. Especially with subtitles.
 
Chris_Halkides said:
“If DNA, Then Guilty: Strategies for Overcoming Juror Assumptions About DNA Evidence In Criminal Trials” By Christina T. Kline, Demosthenes Lorandos, and Michael Spence, The Champion, January/February 2015.

This article goes through a possible sexual assault case, one that shows how important diligence by the defense is.
Click to expand...

Here is an excerpt from the cited article with the pertinent points that need to be critically evaluated; only a positive answer ("true") to each point suggests guilt; a negative answer ("false") to any point indicates reasonable doubt:

It is the job of defense attorneys to understand the “if DNA, then guilty” paradigm. The analytic journey from DNA evidence to a guilty verdict is grounded in several assumptions:
(1) The DNA evidence itself is reliable and accurate;
(2) The DNA evidence identifies the defendant, complainant, or other party necessary to prove guilt;
(3) This identification means that the individual was present at the scene where the DNA evidence was recovered;
(4) The identified individual had the opportunity to commit the alleged action;
(5) The DNA evidence proves that the identified individual engaged in the
specific acts alleged; and
(6) The proof that the identified individual was present, had an opportunity,
and did actually commit the act demonstrates guilt.
 
There are many strange reasons why the convicting judges denied defence requests for evidence testing/independent evaluation.

Perhaps the strangest was that all courts rejected the request to have the presumed semen stain on the pillow tested.

But Massei's 2009 reason not to allow independent DNA analysis is up there as well.

Why did he disallow it? Are you ready?

Because he said an independent analyst would simply side with either the prosecution or the defence, and both the prosecution and defence had already laid out their positions.....

..... so the court would be no further along, and still would have to make a judicial decision as to which was right. So why waste everyone's time with a third opinion which would add nothing to the court's ability to rule?
 
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Calendars – how do they work?

Bill Williams said:
I found this in the PMF English version of the Nencini motivations report!

​

This should set aside forever that Raffaele ever "threw Knox under a bus." Indeed, if Raffaele or his defence team had done that at the Florence trial, Nencini must have missed it.

People really need to actually read the court documents, rather than make "wishful thinking" assertions about issues.
Click to expand...




Oh Bill - This is hopeless :(

You might need [like Raffy when he first threw her under a bus] to consult a calendar.
The section you quoted deals with the situation as it stood at the end of the Nencici appeal – here he is explaining his refusal of the request to split the defence.
We are currently dealing with RS’s Cassation appeal doc where he has again thrown AK under the bus.
Do you see?

The situation as it currently stands is summed up in this post;


platonov said:
<snip>


Don’t you find it a little interesting that she places more value on an ‘alibi’ [of the Macavity variety at that and thus less than worthless] provided by a homeless heroin addict [as she and the groupies liked to emphasise] than one provided by Britney.

What’s up with that? It’s like she doesn’t place much value on the word of a sex killer.
Now if you recall she put a baby killer on the stand in the Hellmann appeal. But she draws the line at Knox.
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I had a thought. . . .I am currently in a hotel room 200 miles and 4 hours from home.

I can see me going home tonight and two days later a woman is raped and murdered in the same hotel room. The odds are against it is pretty astronomical but could happen.

My DNA is around the room after being here for four days. The police check for DNA and find my DNA on her bra clasp.

The Italian legal system would arrest me and try me for rape and murder. They would somehow manage to fry the hard drive of the computer I was on during the period of time where the crime occurred.
 
platonov said:
Oh Bill - This is hopeless :(

You might need [like Raffy when he first threw her under a bus] to consult a calendar.
The section you quoted deals with the situation as it stood at the end of the Nencici appeal – here he is explaining his refusal of the request to split the defence.
We are currently dealing with RS’s Cassation appeal doc where he has again thrown AK under the bus.
Do you see?

The situation as it currently stands is summed up in this post;
Click to expand...

Oh Platonov - this is utterly hopeless and desperate.

I thought you had actually got it for a moment, but, nope, you didn't. The mutual alibis of the defendants are not germane to the case.

No-one, including you, thinks that Mr Sollecito stayed in and Ms Knox went out, and Mr Sollecito has never accused her of doing so. The bus throwing metaphor does not work. If Ms Knox had actually been 'thrown under a bus', this would mean her case had been dealt a fatal blow as a result. She must be found guilty because of it. And yet, here we are trying to find yet another way to get it through to you, that nothing Mr Sollecito has said or done has damaged Ms Knox's case.

Secondly, you do not understand Mr Sollecito's defence, which has been eloquently explained to you on numerous occasions.

Thirdly, the treatment of Curatolo's evidence really isn't difficult to understand either. You see everyone (except you and a few others) gets that Curatolo was a heroin addled unfortunate who made up a story presumably at the behest of the prosecutor, a year after the event. Its all utter nonsense, of course, but if the prosecution wants to rely on it, they should at least appreciate what he actually said - and this is to provide an alibi for both Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito - they were in the square and not the cottage. Have you not had this explained to you before?

Have you abandoned your illeisms, finally? Probably for the best...
 
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Numbers said:
Here is an excerpt from the cited article with the pertinent points that need to be critically evaluated; only a positive answer ("true") to each point suggests guilt; a negative answer ("false") to any point indicates reasonable doubt:

It is the job of defense attorneys to understand the “if DNA, then guilty” paradigm. The analytic journey from DNA evidence to a guilty verdict is grounded in several assumptions:
(1) The DNA evidence itself is reliable and accurate;
(2) The DNA evidence identifies the defendant, complainant, or other party necessary to prove guilt;
(3) This identification means that the individual was present at the scene where the DNA evidence was recovered;
(4) The identified individual had the opportunity to commit the alleged action;
(5) The DNA evidence proves that the identified individual engaged in the
specific acts alleged; and
(6) The proof that the identified individual was present, had an opportunity,
and did actually commit the act demonstrates guilt.
Click to expand...

What's striking is that barely a single point is favourable to the prosecution; none in the case of the bra clasp - and only that Amanda handled it at some point, in the case of the knife.

The DNA evidence wouldn't indicate guilt even if it were genuine - and there is every reason to think it is not.
 
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