Continuation Part 14: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[anglolawyer]

Can someone please ask Raffaele's attorney Giulia Bongiorno Esq.
to point out in the Crime Scene video + show this to the Italian Supreme Court that Dr. Stefanoni wanted the seminal fluid tested on Nov. 3rd, of 2007, the very next day after Miss Kercher was found raped and murdered?

Where are the results, Dr. Stefanoni?

I betcha that the seminal fluid is not from Raffaele!!?


Can they also ask Giulia Bongiorno, Esq.
to play the snippet where the Forensic Officers mention using cocaine as they work?
Surely someone knows where it is at in the Crime Scene video's, right???


Can someone also ask Giulia Bongiorno, Esq.
to show the Court the Crime Scene video clip where Dr. Stefanoni is wearing dirty gloves as she handles that bra clasp and the Forensic Officers pass it around like a spinello?

Thanks,
RW

It might be an idea not to address her as 'esquire'

 

[RWVBWL]

Hi AngloLawyer,
The Esq. is what my bro's who surf and are lawyers have on their business cards.
If that is a no-no in Italy, what do you suggest, Avvocato?

Speaking of suggestions:
Come on, folks,
Raffaele is facin' 25 years, err maybe it a lil' less, I forget and do not feel like lookin' it up right now,
but hey, what evidence would you ask that his lawyer Giulia Bongiorno point out to the Italian Supreme Court
before they render verdict upon him, and Amanda?

I'm wide awake,
and wonderin' in Los Angeles...
RW

 

[Antony]

What you don't seem to understand, I don't have any poop theories, it's the PIP's that seem to. Amanda didn't smell it, she has never said she did, she does say she saw it though, and from where she pointed out that she saw it, it is not possible, now if any PIP's want to explain that, then it is their theory. This is exactly why trying to reason with almost anyone on here is not possible, they can only see thing through Amanda's innocent eyes.

Sherlock, that (highlighted) is what is known as the "presumption of innocence". Does the phrase mean anything to you?

 

[RWVBWL]

The Seminal Fluid tests
that Dr. Stefanoni is telling her lab assistant Alessa' to do was on Nov. 3rd.

Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlXKyMh48KQ&app=desktop

This was days before Raffaele was even arrested due to the interrogation techniques of police officers
who also, most likely interrogate Mafia suspects. Hardcore cops, well versed in interrogation.

Heck, if I recall correctly,
the whole 3rd floor of The Questura is off limits to the public,
it's where the big boyz work, those who bust Mafioso , I believe I read of...

The Seminal Fluid,
if tested on Nov. 3rd, should have a reading that is trust-worthy,
since Raffaele, nor Patrick, nor Rudy Guede, who left his DNA inside of Meredith,
were not even suspects yet.

Even though lawyers are not supposed to ask questions in a court without already knowing the answer,
I'd ask this 1, for the stakes are high. If it were you facing 25 years in prison, I bet that you'd want your lawyer to ask these questions: Where and What are the results of the Seminal Fluid tests, Dr. Stefanoni?!?

 

[Diocletus]

An article 6 violation changes the trial outcome. Have you finally learned this today?

Yes, I love Machiavelli's new position: if the echr finds a violation, then the Italian courts will get to define the relief (and they will deceitfully screw over Knox to uphold their Bella figura).

However, the us does not extradite human rights victims.

 

[Diocletus]

Why don't you do a bit of research for yourself - when we give you stuff, you have a habit of posting back with evidence absent denunciations in relatively rude fashion. I find it rather trying

The data is available at the court's websites. You find it and you report it to us. Let's get a different kind of conversation going.

In fairness to griffinmill, all that stuff on that website isn't helpful to him, and it's easier and more fun to clap hands over ears and chant "na na na I can't hear you".

 

[anglolawyer]

Hi AngloLawyer,
The Esq. is what my bro's who surf and are lawyers have on their business cards.
If that is a no-no in Italy, what do you suggest, Avvocato?

Speaking of suggestions:
Come on, folks,
Raffaele is facin' 25 years, err maybe it a lil' less, I forget and do not feel like lookin' it up right now,
but hey, what evidence would you ask that his lawyer Giulia Bongiorno point out to the Italian Supreme Court
before they render verdict upon him, and Amanda?

I'm wide awake,
and wonderin' in Los Angeles...
RW

Esquire is for guys only. Avvocato sounds fine to me.

 

[Diocletus]

It's only here that ECHR "precedents" carry weight. I can't count the posts that have ensured beyond any doubt Italy committed civil rights offenses against AK.

I don't believe any of them. First, I doubt that non lawyers cherrypicking ECHR judgements truly understand the law or how it is applied. Second, I believe that the calunnia conviction is pretty airtight.

Ah, yes. The old well-your-cases-might-say-what-you-say-they-say-but-lawyers-know-secret-stuff argument. Care to enlighten us?

 

[Diocletus]

Esquire is for guys only. Avvocato sounds fine to me.

Avvacato sound like guacamole to me. Yum.

 

[Samson]

Hi AngloLawyer,
The Esq. is what my bro's who surf and are lawyers have on their business cards.
If that is a no-no in Italy, what do you suggest, Avvocato?

Speaking of suggestions:
Come on, folks,
Raffaele is facin' 25 years, err maybe it a lil' less, I forget and do not feel like lookin' it up right now,
but hey, what evidence would you ask that his lawyer Giulia Bongiorno point out to the Italian Supreme Court
before they render verdict upon him, and Amanda?

I'm wide awake,
and wonderin' in Los Angeles...
RW

Esquire is an old fashioned addendum to a name denoting male.
I hope the freedom of the sea creatures in the latest edition of your avatar is prophetic

 

[Diocletus]

Being deprived of your liberty surely counts as irreparable harm. You cannot get the lost time back.

She won't be deprived of liberty just by being convicted, though. They have to try to get her first, and then she might have an argument. It seems to me that the echr will not enjoin the commission of art 6 violations, although it should.

 

[carbonjam72]

Esquire is for guys only. Avvocato sounds fine to me.

So are "Y" halotypes.

 

[Kaosium]

This is very highly diluted, about 1 drop of blood in 20 litres water. Certainly not visible blood. I have not done the experiment but it would I suspect be compatible for instance with Knox standing on the bath mat with damp feet and then walking down the corridor. It could be dilute rust or iron rich soil. Possibly even a cleaning product previously used on a floor or the shower. Lots of possibilities. The one thing it could not be is the consequence of standing in a pool of undiluted blood.

Heh, it took a while for that to sink in for me when I first started reading about this case. I was still trying to keep straight all the marks made by feet and their locations. That hall had the barely visible shoeprints of Rudy found in the initial forensic investigation, then the invisible (bare) foot and shoe prints revealed by luminol six weeks later during the bra-clasp collection debacle. It finally dawned on me when reading that the visible threshold for blood in water was roughly 10k:1 that if those prints did light up the luminol because of minute quantities of blood, it wouldn't even have been pink, let alone red, it would have just looked like water, the blood would be invisible even then. That would have been invisible, invisible blood that the luminol revealed! It couldn't have been residue from cleaned up prints because they were still recognizable as feet when they'd have been smeared all over had they been cleaned up.

Incidentally, if I correctly recall a post of yours a while back, we've something in common. My grandfather ended up jumping out of a plane over occupied Holland in October of '44, he wasn't a paratrooper though, the jumping part was OJT (on the job training) when the B-24 he was the nosegunner for lost its wings and realized that it was heavier than air.

The way you phrased it I couldn't help but wonder if your grand (?) uncle was someone I read about, the one whose name was changed for the movie to prevent confusion with another character.

 

[carbonjam72]

OK then, how about this - being convicted of murder based on evidence tainted by illegality? Surely that is irreparable (aside from appeals, compensation etc which can repair everything except death so that 'irreparable' must have some special meaning).

I may be wrong, but I get the sense that for the ECHR, maybe due to budget constraints, short of death or possibly torture, spending years in prison, being financially ruined, socially ostracized, all these kinds of ancillary costs of the judicial system, are seen as just a 'cost of doing business', and something all good citizens, like taxes, are obliged to cheerfully endure.

 

[Samson]

Ericparoissen has posted this at PMF, but not here.

Bongiorno speaks

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2kn6l4_giulia-bongiorno-25-03-2015_school

 

[katy_did]

This is very highly diluted, about 1 drop of blood in 20 litres water. Certainly not visible blood. I have not done the experiment but it would I suspect be compatible for instance with Knox standing on the bath mat with damp feet and then walking down the corridor. It could be dilute rust or iron rich soil. Possibly even a cleaning product previously used on a floor or the shower. Lots of possibilities. The one thing it could not be is the consequence of standing in a pool of undiluted blood.

I've never understood why the defence lawyers have never suggested this as a possible explanation for the luminol prints. I mean, Amanda takes a shower the morning after the murder, wipes her bare feet on the bloody bath mat and even wanders up the corridor with it (something she mentioned long before the prints were found). And no one in court ever says, "Maybe that's where the prints came from?"

It seems like a glaringly obvious explanation, yet as far as I know hasn't been mentioned at all by the lawyers, even as they managed to talk about turnip juice and fruit juice. The only reason I can think for not mentioning it is that the prosecution claimed one of the prints was Raffaele's (an argument I suspect was designed precisely to counter the obvious explanation for the prints) but surely that nonsense argument wouldn't have been too difficult to tackle if it had been their main focus. Anyone with eyes can see that you can't tell much more from the prints except that they were probably made by feet.

I think maybe Frank Sfarzo is right that offering too many explanations sometimes weakens the stronger arguments.

 

[Diocletus]

So, apparently the Kerchers mouthpiece was called out yesterday for misconduct in court. More dignified silence.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

luminol and the courtroom

-In these episodes, it's explicitly stated (if I recall, it's the FBI agent speaking who led the investigation on deaver) during court proceedings that one of the things deaver did wrong in other cases was not reveal negative confirmatory test results. Eg. luminol gives a positive reaction, the confirmatory test says it's not blood, and duane deaver kept that information to himself.

-I don't know what standards italian courts have, but in american courts it appears a luminol test has to be followed by a confirmatory test to prove presence of blood. A luminol reaction alone is not proof of blood.

Samzilla,

Modern confirmatory testing (HemaTrace) is capable of detecting blood at much higher dilution factors than the older methods that Deaver used (IIRC Takiyama or Teichman crystallization tests). Some jurisdictions allow luminol evidence with the understanding that it is a presumptive test, but others do not allow the evidence into court unless their is additional information. I am not aware of any jurisdiction which explicitly treats luminol as a confirmatory test.

 

[katy_did]

Not only am I being a bit sweeping and vague, I am also changing the goal posts! (Not too much, I hope.) In other words, you are placing too much weight on one element of unfairness, when in fact ECHR evaluates over a range of elements of unfairness. I may have unintentionally mislead readers by not stressing that it is the question of the over-all fairness of a trial that is at issue, not merely one issue.

That ECHR does not approve a conviction after acquittal in which the convicting court did not hear the witnesses while the acquittal court did is true, but may not be as relevant here (the AK-RS case) as in other cases. It may have almost no importance with respect to Curatolo.

I am not disputing that Massei convicted; but if the ECHR were reviewing Massei alone, would the motivation report be considered reasonable or arbitrary? My reading of that motivation report is that is was full of arbitrary choices, essentially always in the direction of conviction, even when the evidence showed reasonable doubt.

If one accepts that Massei was not valid in terms of its violations of Convention Article 6, then Hellmann becomes the first valid trial generally in conformance with Article 6. And the Hellmann court engaged the independent experts Conti and Vecchiotti to review the DNA evidence; that is unique to that court over Massei. So Hellmann was not simply an appeal court in the US sense. Conti and Vecchiotti demolished the DNA evidence of the bra clasp and knife blade, as profoundly unreliable. Hellmann also demolished the other major points of Massei, although not very clearly dealing with the entry of a burglar by climbing up the grill over the ground-floor window or the "judicial truth" of multiple attackers.

The CSC in annulling Hellmann, on arbitrary grounds to my reading, whether legal or evidential, did not show any valid reason why the C&V report was not to be still considered extant. Did Nencini present a valid argument against the C&V report? IMO, not at all. Nencini then reverts to use of the bra clasp and knife blade alleged DNA evidence for conviction. He has "reasons" for the extra male DNA on the bra clasp, for example, but he has manufactured them with no evidence, only speculation, attributing the DNA to Meredith's boy friend and her girlfriends (although the non-Meredith DNA is apparently from several males, possibly including Raffaele). That is an example of arbitrary reasoning.

So here is my correction: the ECHR does not approve of the use of arbitrary reasoning to achieve a conviction after an acquittal, based on essentially the same evidence. It further objects to conviction after acquittal when the convicting court does not hear significant witnesses, or does not examine significant evidence, or arbitrarily deals with significant evidence, that the acquitting court has dealt with fairly, based upon the ECHR's opinion [the opinion of the majority of the Chamber or Grand Chamber panel of judges]. The ECHR judges against the Convention and its case-law, not against national law; it can find that national law, including constitutional provisions, was contrary to or was applied contrary to the Convention or case-law.

Well, I didn't like to say anything...

Your explanation above sounds a bit overly complex actually, in that you're saying the validity of Massei's ruling is the issue, rather than the fact there was an acquittal and then a conviction. Obviously if there's something about Massei's ruling which the ECHR would consider a violation, that in itself could be enough for them to rule in favour of A & R, regardless of what went on afterwards. The main thing would be that the conviction was based on a flawed consideration of the evidence, not that there was an acquittal at some point.

The more I think about it, the more I think the DNA issue really is the crucial one - the statements from the SC and Nencini that the defence need to prove the way DNA might have been transferred or items contaminated (it isn't enough to show that the scene was handled poorly), and the refusal to hand over documentation. That principle, that the defence need to prove contamination, is why they were convicted, so it's absolutely decisive. I'm not sure how that would fit into an application to the ECHR, what particular violation could be claimed; it would be nice to think the SC might refer the case to the Joint Section to sort the issue out, but that seems unlikely.

 

[Dan O.]

I've never understood why the defence lawyers have never suggested this as a possible explanation for the luminol prints. I mean, Amanda takes a shower the morning after the murder, wipes her bare feet on the bloody bath mat and even wanders up the corridor with it (something she mentioned long before the prints were found). And no one in court ever says, "Maybe that's where the prints came from?"

It's one of the thoughts I had. But the negative TMB goes against any recent source being the cause of the luminol hit.