Obvious. We don't have the motivations. How can I talk about what's written in it?
Maybe you forgot few little details. The Chieffi court destroyed the logic and reasons employed in the Hellmann verdict, making at least 16 points of law about the case, all valid and definitive. The Chieffi court also discredited Conti and Vecchiotti calling them "intellectually dishonest". The Chieffi court did not ask to "review" anything at all, as for the evidence it asked to complete some operations only because they were procedures started by the Hellmann court that were concluded irregularly, which were to be finished because of due procedure, and were completely unnecessary for probative purposes. Those alleged things did not change the evidentiary picture in favour of the defendants of a iota, on the contrary they made it even worse (and were used by Crini).
The Chieffi court also said Knox was guilty of calunnia and that Hellmann's attempt to separate calunnia from murder was ludicrous. Chieffi also acknowledged that Amanda's calunnia did not occur during an interrogation or statement but was a "protracted behaviour".
And the Chieffi court urged the courts to re-think the evidence in the case "osmotically" in non-parcelled out manner, so in a way contrary to what Hellmann did.
This meme is rather disconcerting. The law first requires the court to make a decision about the weight of individual instances of curcumstantial evidence - to decide whether or not they each meet a standard - serious, precise and consistent - before they may be evaluated together.
Furthermore, as we have seen and as Hellmann made clear with apposite citation, merely because a court might find that a construction of the evidence provides even probability, this is not sufficient to convict since the reworked Art 533 requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Courts can no longer elect to convict even on the basis that culpability for the crime is the most likely scenario. They must rule out all other reasonable interpretations.
In this case, Hellmann did not even need to go that far. He said that all the individual elements of evidence collapsed - the "bricks" of the case against the defendants. You cannot consider osmotically the individual elements of evidence whose validity you have rejected.
The Chieffi court did not mention the notion of "reasonable doubt" once! Instead it asked the Nencini court to find a way to arrange the circumstantial evidence in a manner which would permit a guilty verdict, notwithstanding any other consideration.
Yet Chieffi himself said the court must "...require the trial judge to perform a twofold operation:
first, he or she must evaluate the circumstantial piece of evidence individually, to establish whether or not the required precision is present and to determine its probative value..."
Yet Hellmann had previously stated:
"The condition required by.....law (C.P.P Article 533 effected by Article 5, Law no. 46 - Feb 20, 2006) to arrive at a verdict of guilty does not, therefore, allow one to formulate a belief in terms of probability: that is, to issue a guilty verdict, it is not sufficient for the probability of the prosecution hypothesis to be greater than that of the defense hypothesis, even when the former is significantly larger [notevolmente più numerose]; but [rather] it is necessary that every explanation other than the prosecution hypothesis not be plausible at all, according to a criterion of reasonability. In any other case, acquittal of the defendant is required."
This is the huge mistake with both the Massei and Nencini courts. They took it upon themselves, contrary to Italian law, to choose a version of events that they preferred, whereas what they should have done is attempted to rule out all innocent constructions of the evidence. They pulled this trick by relying on outmoded legal culture, swept away by the 2006 reform of Art 533.
As Hellmann cited:
Cass. Section 4, Ruling no. 48320 of 11-12-2009 (submitted 12-17-2009) Rv. 245879: “…In sum, the rule of beyond a reasonable doubt has definitively put in crisis that jurisprudential theory [orientamento] according to which, in the presence of more than one hypothesis reconstructing the facts, the judge was permitted to adopt one which led to conviction solely because he deemed it more probable than the others. That will no longer be permitted, because, to arrive at conviction, the judge must not only deem improbable any differing reconstruction of the facts which leads to the acquittal of the defendant, but must furthermore hold that the doubt about [i.e. arising from] this alternative hypothesis is unreasonable (that is, it must be an implausible hypothesis or at least devoid of any confirmation whatsoever).”
?!
