Continuation Part 14: Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito

[RoseMontague]

Chieffi et al didn't just say "go back and test 36I"; they took every one of Galati's sophistic objections to Hellmann's reasoning -- on all parts of the case, including the "staged" burglary, Curatolo, Quintavalle, you name it -- and said "yep, that's right; Hellmann is wrong". They even implied that Hellmann should have adhered to "facts" stated in the Guede ruling, for goodness' sake. No judge with the slightest sense of how justice is supposed to work could possibly make a ruling like that -- violating as it does the very concept of a "fair trial" -- unless, perhaps, they thought that said "facts" were actually true, and were taking it upon themselves to exceed their technical purview and do "justice" in the case at hand.

Yes. The problems with the Chieffi ruling has to do with getting the facts of the case wrong. Raffaele's appeal did a good job pointing that out.

 

[Bill Williams]

Chieffi et al didn't just say "go back and test 36I"; they took every one of Galati's sophistic objections to Hellmann's reasoning -- on all parts of the case, including the "staged" burglary, Curatolo, Quintavalle, you name it -- and said "yep, that's right; Hellmann is wrong". They even implied that Hellmann should have adhered to "facts" stated in the Guede ruling, for goodness' sake. No judge with the slightest sense of how justice is supposed to work could possibly make a ruling like that -- violating as it does the very concept of a "fair trial" -- unless, perhaps, they thought that said "facts" were actually true, and were taking it upon themselves to exceed their technical purview and do "justice" in the case at hand.

Yes. The problems with the Chieffi ruling has to do with getting the facts of the case wrong. Raffaele's appeal did a good job pointing that out.

There's an argument to be made that any time a Cassazione section rules as radically as the Chieffi one did, that they mainly cut and paste from the winning side's document.

Anywa, it is tough arguing the 1%, as in I'm not sure the needle can be stuck on being 100% sure that Chieffi was arguing for a directed verdict of guilty from the Nencini court.

The biggest gift which Nencini did, was delivering on a guilty verdict, but did it by ignoring whole parts of Chieffi's direction - if indeed it was that.

 

[sept79]

komponisto,

I don't disagree with anything you wrote. I do want to point out that the results of the test (sample 36I) were favorable to the defense, yet Nencini convicted them anyway. That makes me doubt the quality of thinking of both the Chieffi court and the Nencini court.

What would an unfavorable finding of sample 36I really have meant what with the lack of blood on the knife, the strong implication that 36B was the result of contamination, the knife doesn't match the wounds on the victim, and the knife doesn't match the bloody imprint left on the bed?

Of course I am quite sure that the prosecution would have been cartwheeling themselves silly/dizzy . . .

 

[Grinder]

What would an unfavorable finding of sample 36I really have meant what with the lack of blood on the knife, the strong implication that 36B was the result of contamination, the LCN testing which had been conducted in an uncertified lab?

Of course I am quite sure that the prosecution would have been cartwheeling themselves silly/dizzy . . .

Both good points.

Disappointing that the importance of lack of a proper lab and protocols doesn't seem as clear to the PGP and some of the media. How many picograms of DNA did Steffy claim was on the blade?

 

[whoanellie]

Why is it not a great precedent?

Everything is backwards in platonov`s world.

 

[acbytesla]

Everything is backwards in platonov`s world.

It's not just backwards, it is upside down. Trying to actually having a dialog with him is impossible. All his remarks are hit and run. I know he thinks he is being clever, but what it really is is incomprehensible. I've tried to get him to explain his remarks but he never does.

 

[Bill Williams]

Yes. The problems with the Chieffi ruling has to do with getting the facts of the case wrong. Raffaele's appeal did a good job pointing that out.

Did Chieffi get the facts wrong, or was it a problem with first and foremost siding with the Party of the PMs, and then cutting and pasting from the Galati report?

Chieffi simply could have been sloppy, no proof-reader to say, "Ah, er, the Supreme Court should not be ruling that that particular point!!!!"

Between Chieffi and Nencini, the Section 5 of Cassazione (Marasca/Bruno court?) had no choice but to acquit. Completely. Otherwise booberie was hard-wired into Italian law.

 

[Dan O.]

In a forum carrying the best debate on the subject, it is amazing how many bite at the bait put out by the trolls.

Shall I assume that those that respond to such posts do not themselves have any arguments on any higher level and filter my view of the forum accordingly?

 

[whoanellie]

It's not just backwards, it is upside down. Trying to actually having a dialog with him is impossible. All his remarks are hit and run. I know he thinks he is being clever, but what it really is is incomprehensible. I've tried to get him to explain his remarks but he never does.

He thinks he is ooh so clever calling Amanda "Britney". Only he gets it, but he is sure he is very clever.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

the eye of the beholden

What would an unfavorable finding of sample 36I really have meant what with the lack of blood on the knife, the strong implication that 36B was the result of contamination, the knife doesn't match the wounds on the victim, and the knife doesn't match the bloody imprint left on the bed?

Of course I am quite sure that the prosecution would have been cartwheeling themselves silly/dizzy . . .

sept79,

IMO it would not have meant much of anything, but in the eyes of the judges it might have meant a great deal.

 

[acbytesla]

In a forum carrying the best debate on the subject, it is amazing how many bite at the bait put out by the trolls.

Shall I assume that those that respond to such posts do not themselves have any arguments on any higher level and filter my view of the forum accordingly?

You're right .

 

[Chris_Halkides]

luminol and "false negatives"

Heh, I thought of that too, I wonder who Chris was rooting for, he may have had interest in both teams. Oh, well, we lost. Wait 'til next year!

At a forensic science blog entry on presumptive tests for blood, Peter Gill posted a comment. I will quote a portion: "In a Sydney murder trial of 2014, luminol testing of a tiny "bloodstain" was negative. The police and prosecution therefore assumed it was a false negative. They seem to assume whatever their case requires them to assume. The tiny "bloodstain" has taken on a major role in the case." This illustrates a general problem at the intersection of forensics and police work, one that is vexatious.

EDT
The author of the blog wrote, "His Honour, Lasry J, also referred to the decision in R v Berry & Wenitong [2007] VSCA 02 at [69] where the judge noted that an expert will not be permitted to speculate as to inferences when there is no evidence that could support such an inference." So much for Massei saying, "Well, there is blood nearby..."

Although I am fond of Duke, I was rooting for Wisconsin, because I attended there.

 

[lonepinealex]

In a forum carrying the best debate on the subject, it is amazing how many bite at the bait put out by the trolls.

Shall I assume that those that respond to such posts do not themselves have any arguments on any higher level and filter my view of the forum accordingly?

Heh. Well I don't respond to the bait or make any higher level contributions!

 

[Strozzi]

He thinks he is ooh so clever calling Amanda "Britney". Only he gets it, but he is sure he is very clever.

He projects something onto Knox. I've wondered if "Britney" is the name of a woman who dumped him.

 

[Grinder]

Heh. Well I don't respond to the bait or make any higher level contributions!

 

[Grinder]

He projects something onto Knox. I've wondered if "Britney" is the name of a woman who dumped him.

Dear Dog it's about the stupid youtube where the guy whines that people should leave Britney (Spears) alone.

As for the other comment about the sniper - clearly he is saying Americans that kill people overseas lose defamation cases even when they are thought of as an hero by many Americans. Therefore Britney Amanda won't win.

 

[Grinder]

sept79,

IMO it would not have meant much of anything, but in the eyes of the judges it might have meant a great deal.

Chris how much did the "sample" from the knife blade weigh?

 

[Strozzi]

Dear Dog it's about the stupid youtube where the guy whines that people should leave Britney (Spears) alone.

As for the other comment about the sniper - clearly he is saying Americans that kill people overseas lose defamation cases even when they are thought of as an hero by many Americans. Therefore Britney Amanda won't win.

So that's him whining in the YouTube video?

(don't answer that. . )

 

[komponisto]

Did Chieffi get the facts wrong, or was it a problem with first and foremost siding with the Party of the PMs, and then cutting and pasting from the Galati report?

Yes.

Chieffi simply could have been sloppy, no proof-reader to say, "Ah, er, the Supreme Court should not be ruling that that particular point!!!!"

Come now. Supreme Court judges are highly educated, discriminating connoisseurs of Italian law (displaying considerable adeptness in the art of selecting the parts of it that are to their taste), and they know exactly what they "should" and "should not" be ruling on.

Chieffi et al were sloppy indeed, but it wasn't that kind of sloppiness. Their sin was a lack of care in avoiding a prejudiced view of the case (from media, as well as "loyalty" to their "party").

Given how blatantly they violated their ostensible mandate, their skill (or rather, Galati's, since -- as you correctly suggest -- he and Costagliola basically wrote the ruling) in constructing verbal rationalizations purporting to show the opposite is admirable, in its way.

Between Chieffi and Nencini, the Section 5 of Cassazione (Marasca/Bruno court?) had no choice but to acquit. Completely. Otherwise booberie was hard-wired into Italian law.

Of course they had a choice. They could have made whatever decision they wanted, limited (at most) only by their cleverness in rationalizing it in erudite-sounding written form afterward (the principal skill of their trade). The supposed institutional constraints are completely illusory, a total fiction.

This is one of the more important lessons of this case for a skeptics' forum: institutions -- that is, machines made of humans -- do not work as designed. One of the things that worries me about this case is that, given that something like the correct result happened to be finally achieved, people will go back to thinking that "the system basically works". No it doesn't. It sometimes does, but in order to be considered a functioning system worth the name it needs to function reliably. The old proverb about broken clocks is applicable here. Amanda and Raffaele escaped by the skin of their teeth, literally by the pure luck of the draw, in the sense of their fate having been entirely determined by which particular half-dozen-member subset of the several-hundred-member Supreme Court happened to be hearing their case this time. Whereas, in a (hypothetical) functional justice system -- which no country in the world actually has! -- the outcome of the (first!) trial would be confidently predictable on the basis of the evidence. If somehow the wrong answer was arrived at, there would be a mechanism for correcting it, and that mechanism would work instead of undoing itself (and then maybe redoing itself again later if you get lucky).

I didn't use to have this view. I used to believe in institutions and systems -- courts, governments, corporations, universities,... -- in the sense that I thought they "basically worked" (as opposed to merely giving a convincing enough illusion of working to forestall any coordinated attempts at dismantling them on grounds of inefficacy). Massei was a shock, but I was still willing give the justice system a chance to operate like it was designed, and my basic belief in institutional soundness remained: sometimes things were difficult, but they would eventually sort themselves out, with high probability. Chieffi was the end of that, the death blow, the nail in the coffin, a self-sufficient definitive refutation of any fanciful notion that courts constituted a reliable information-processing system as far as factual guilt or innocence of a particular crime were concerned.

I could hardly have envisioned a better test for the epistemic reliability of courts than this case. Here we had two defendants who, at least in real life, were more or less maximally sympathetic characters, whose innocence is completely obvious to anyone with an understanding of the real-life implications of probability theory (yes, probability theory -- the Bayesian kind), who found themselves accused of a crime by the police for utterly silly reasons and suspected by the general public for reasons that were probably even sillier. If you think courts are supposed to be able to distinguish guilt from innocence independently of the prosecution and independently of public opinion, here is your paradigmatic test case.

The final, five-years-too-late positive outcome notwithstanding, I do not consider this to have been a passing result.

 

[Bill Williams]

For the record, Winterbottom's, "The Face of an Angel" has dropped to #52 in the U.K. in just 9 theatres, with about £2,000 in receipts. Anecdotal math means that it is averaging 20 patrons per viewing. (I didn't think that there were 52 films in release at any one time!!!)

I may have been the only person in the world who liked it.