Back to beating the proverbial dead horse
The point I tried to make - and no doubt not well enough - is that a person becomes a suspect in the ECHR human-rights view when that person is in the custody of police and is being interrogated: asked questions or otherwise treated in a way to induce self-incriminating or (in some situations) other-incriminating answers.
Formal designation by the State judicial system of the person interrogated as a "witness" or any other category does not change the above principle.
Whether or not the person prior to the initiation of the questioning was suspected of a crime, whether in good faith or bad, is not an issue from the human rights viewpoint. The person under interrogation must be cautioned and told he or she is entitled to counsel at the start of the interrogation, and if the person chooses to waive counsel, must give informed written consent, according to ECHR case-law. ("Informed" may mean the person must have counsel to advise whether or not to waive counsel.)
....
Last week I used Google Translate on the whole testimony of Giobbi.
While taking excerpts of Giobbi's testimony literally could mean that Amanda was "suspected" because of her behavior - he does state she became an investigative target when she, in his perception, wiggled her hips and shouted "voila" after putting on booties - I was struck by some other testimony. Early on in his testimony, he states that there was a focus on the people in the cottage, and that Amanda had a relatively weak alibi. Then, later in his testimony, when he is asked to explain the blood on the light switch in the downstairs flat, where the other blood there was attributed to a cat with a bleeding ear, he says "the cat jumped".
Having read that last statement about the jumping cat, I have come to the opinion that Giobbi's references to Amanda's behavior as a source of suspicion was likely a smoke screen or cover-up. The decision to focus on Amanda was solely due to her being a "suspect of convenience" to corrupt police and an obsessed pathological prosecutor who wanted to close the case quickly and, for the prosecutor, in line with his obsessions. This line of thought about the police suspicions may be obvious to others (who believe there was a frame-up from the very beginning) or not (to those who believe there was a good-faith suspicion of Amanda based on, for example, the police believing the break-in was staged). In my hypothesis, the police decided the break-in was staged because they were framing Amanda, a key holder, who did not need to break-in to her flat. While Giobbi stated the break-in was staged and that there were glass fragments on the clothes, IIUC, there was no objective evidence presented to support this. (Please correct me if some objective evidence was presented.)
Thus, when Amanda and Raffaele were interrogated on Nov. 5/6, 2007, they were indeed "suspects". IMO, they, or at least Amanda, was a suspect as of Nov. 2, 2007. But she was a "suspect of convenience" and not because of anything an honest, rational, and objective person would consider reasonable and sufficient for an arrest. IMO, the police and prosecution motivation for the Nov. 5/6 interrogations was to obtain false "evidence" that could be placed on the arrest warrant in the explanation of "reasonable suspicion" and survive a (superficial) judicial review.
If anyone believes differently, that person is entitled to his/her opinion.
But I believe my opinion makes sense of the behavior of the police and prosecutor and is supported by an "informed" reading of Giobbi's testimony.
Again, from a human rights view point, it appears to me that the "suspect" becomes a suspect no later than when in police custody and questioned as in an interrogation - that is, questioned in a way to induce an incriminating statement, whether or not that person was a "suspect" prior to the beginning of the interrogation.
)
