Dysfunctional, absolutely. It's about as bad as it gets in Western Europe. It's not just the the number of violations for the right to a fair trial, it's also their execrable record on the length of trials, which is ridiculous, laughable even.
As for corrupt, I'd put it this way: it's too easily
corruptible. It
requires a saintly prosecutor for the system to be fair, otherwise the system can be manipulated by an unprincipled PM like Mignini.
Personally I don't think
Massei was either corrupt or incompetent. He made some errors, but considering his environment they were understandable. It would be natural for him to have a great deal of confidence in the integrity of the police and prosecutor, it's something he
wants to believe and the odds are extreme they don't always screw up this badly. Mignini and especially Comodi no doubt put criminals behind bars on a regular basis. The
Polizia di Stato likely get
real confessions employing those tactics as well, they did reel in Rudy Guede from Germany and the
Polizia Scientifica are perfectly capable of getting good evidence as well, as can be seen by them finding copious evidence of Rudy Guede's murder. It's the 'second trip' which is egregious forensic malpractice, the first was sloppy but not every country is going to have the resources of the FBI and I can cut some slack if training and materials aren't quite up to that standard.
His report was fine as far as I'm concerned. The facts are reliable with only the errors one might expect from having to compile so much mind-numbing minutia, and the conclusions were required by the verdict. Thus one often sees him represent the prosecution and defense arguments and pick the less plausible argument, invariably from the prosecution, which makes him look stupid, but in reality that was required by the verdict and in that three trial system the first verdict doesn't matter much, had Raffaele and Amanda been acquitted they'd still have had to face another trial. The first trial is where most of the evidence is laid out and the initial arguments made, then the motivations document is published and the defense (or prosecution) writes the appeal document which will serve as the basis for the next trial, the one that
really matters.
You can be acquitted in the first one and still end up convicted in the second and end up in prison if the Supreme Court confirms, which it
usually does. That first trial may well just give lip service to the idea of beyond reasonable doubt and if I recall correctly Mignini even asked for a lower burden of proof in his close as Amanda might leave the country and be out of reach (he did this for his close before Hellmann too). Thus the motivations document reads that way and it's apparent that Massei has to string it together with implausible conjectures and going from 'possible' to 'probable' without bothering with evidence or argument. That will be noticed by the appeals court like it was in this case, and additionally the appeals, especially Raffaele's, point out so many egregious errors if they weren't apparent from just reading Massei.
Hellmann's court did fine, though his weakest reasoning was the
calunnia conviction but the narrative in the motivations accurately represented the circumstances. I thought at the time it may have just been a bone thrown to the police as the jury might not have wanted to imply misconduct on the part of their own police force, later Hellmann basically confirmed that suspicion in an interview where he said something to the effect of having to either convict Amanda on that charge or accuse police. I can't help but wonder if he wrote that motivations thinking it might be rejected, separated from the murder (and other) charges and re-tried or even dropped later.
Then we get to
Galati, a true villain and where the weird gets
weirder. It's a fundamentally dishonest document that should have had him called in and wedgied until his undies were bloody; instead it was confirmed and naturally the
Chieffi document, which explains the reasoning behind the quashing of Hellmann, is little more than a summary of the Galati appeal. Even someone who knows nothing about the case ought to be able to realize there's something
very wrong with the Italian justice system if they read the sections on Curatolo and Quintavalle from
both Hellmann and
then Chieffi. All they have to know is
anything about eyewitness testimony, or memory in general, and enough streetsmarts not to go running to a dictionary when someone claims that the word 'gullible' isn't officially an English word.
At that point I lost all confidence in the Italian System. That document from the Italian Supreme Court basically ordered a show trial and allowed
Nencini to use evidence and
conclusions from Rudy Guede's fast-track trial where both parties were eager to agree that someone else had been present and that the break-in had been staged. Upon reflection that show trial may simply have been an attempt to produce a appeals motivation from a convicting judge to see if it would stand scrutiny, and if it did not then it would serve to determine that no guilt narrative could employ evidence and be confirmed, but it's very difficult to have any confidence in a body that could produce a document as execrable as the Chieffi motivation. That's not hyperbole, that's reality, and it makes the Italian Court System look like a welfare program for delusional sophists.
Had Hellmann been confirmed and eventually the
calunnia charge voided then I'd have said the Italian System just had a brain-fart that it corrected, in part due to the media frenzy and that they allow people like Mignini to abuse their system which absolutely requires prosecutors to be intellectually ethical. However with the highest body in the land producing such an embarrassment as the Chieffi document and the Nencini show trial they confirmed that it's more than just a local problem and it took almost eight years for it to be (mostly) corrected.
During the the time the Amanda Knox saga went through the Italian Courts Nicaragua managed to right two injustices and free both
Eric Volz and
Jason Puracal with a total time served of 22 months. Those two also have the added benefit of clean exonerations while Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito have to endure the possibility of sickos, chest-thumpers and dingbats stalking them online and in person for years to come because the Italian police and prosecution produced so much garbage 'evidence' against them in the courts and press that it generated a hate cult online that may not wane for years to come.
There are no doubt good and honest men and women serving Italy in their court system, there were heroes who emerged like Hellmann, Zanetti and the Supreme Court Justices that quashed the Nencini verdict, but the system is too easily manipulated by the corrupt who can manage to pursue bizarre theories and victimize innocent people by the dozens. We now know that Mignini filed suits or started 'investigations' on somewhere over forty people in just the Monster of Florence and Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito cases and while he was convicted on charges of abuse of power in the MoF case he managed to manipulate his way out of that on a jurisdiction claim and the case being dropped, another apparent problem with the Italian Court System: a lack of accountability.
The police have the same problem if Machiavelli is correct. I used to include Biondi, Patrizia Stefanoni's superior, when attributing blame for the DNA work as he went into court and approved of her work. However I was informed that there's no inherent accountability in Italy, a superior does not take any responsibility for the errors of their subordinates, apparently even when they approve of the work in court. I do not know if Renato Biondi has any qualifications to head a police DNA lab outside he looks good in a suit, but being as he officially 'confirmed' Patrizia Stefanoni's work I'd like to think he should bear some responsibility for it. It is unlikely that such poor DNA work could be a one time affair, it is probably systemic and widespread thus an investigation like those necessary in other countries, including the US, would be beneficial.
It is possible to empathize somewhat with Patrizia Stefanoni. Imagine: all of a sudden she becomes attached to a famous prosecutor and goes from a lab tech to running a forensic investigation and part of said prosecutors team on a high profile murder case. It must have been a heady moment for her and it wasn't
her mistakes which started this debacle, the initial forensic investigation clearly identified the perpetrator and as I understand it Mignini was responsible for ensuring the body temperature of the victim wasn't taken, he gave orders to that effect. Her problems began when the
Polizia di Stato with the 'aid' of Pool Boy Giobbi (demoted from Clueless Clown) and his cast of thugs arrested three people on the gibberish they got out of an exhausted college girl in the middle of the night.
The problem was they didn't actually get a confession from this gaslighting expedition and the one Amanda Knox 'confusedly' remembered being there wasn't 'Unknown Male #2' who'd left the evidence inside the victim and on the toilet. Worse luck for them, it soon became apparent he had a host of people at his bar that night giving him an alibi. The kitchen knife that had been inexplicably 'collected' the day after the arrests by being plucked out of a drawer arbitrarily was soon announced as the 'murder knife'--despite the fact it didn't match the wounds or the outline left on the bed in blood. At this point the police are using psychological pressure to get a real confession from Amanda Knox by announcing false evidence to the press, such as the CCTV video they claimed was a 'clear cut' shot of Amanda, so I have often suspected the knife was just a bluff and they never intended to produce it in court because they expected to get a confession or find real evidence.
Claiming evidence that doesn't exist is a tactic used for this purpose by police sometimes, so perhaps
at first Patrizia Stefanoni was just being a bit naughty and did not intend to ever produce that lab contamination in court. However since they never did get that confession and the 'second trip' to the murder scene drew a blank (again!) on finding any evidence of Amanda in the murder room, all of a sudden that lab contamination became their very best evidence--as long as no one looked at it very closely. Thus Stefanoni may have just been dragged along by forces beyond her control and could well have never intended to cheat as outrageously as she was eventually forced to.
The real problem here is the lack of accountability in my opinion. Had she ever confessed or at least released that data I would have stopped being so condemning, I'm more interested in fixing problems than collecting scalps. However since she failed to come clean and that DNA 'evidence' is
still considered valid by kooks and used by hatemongers to cast doubt upon the acquittals of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, I still think that it's necessary for the practices of that lab to be criticized harshly and if the Kerchers are going to demand a search for additional attackers the obvious place to start is to get the data behind the DNA work that Stefanoni has managed to keep hidden until this very day.
Question for anyone who managed to get this far down:
Why is it that the other European countries with a Civil Law system don't have such an embarrassing record with the ECHR? Why does it appear that Germany, for example, makes so few mistakes in comparison?
