The problem is we are at the limit of your knowledge of the Italian legal system.
Guede opts for a fast track trial giving up the right to challenge prosecution evidence. He pleads not guilty. The prosecution presents a case where he is one of three participants, and did not weird a knife himself. Guede has no interest in challenging these assumptions. It is easier for him to accept the murder was done by more than one person and just argue he was not one of those persons. He is certainly not going to argue that he did wield the knife. Being a fast track trial process the evidence cannot be challenged.
So the case for one vs more than one was never tested. The case for Guede wielding the knife was never tested.
You have previously said that these facts were decided BARD. I doubt this is true, there is a default position in convicting a person, the presumption of innocence and guilt needs to be BARD. There is no default for one vs more than one (even assuming this is a dichotomous choice), for Guede wielding the knife one might argue the presumption is Guede didd not wield the knife, therefore it would be necessary to prove he wielded BARD. In the latter case it means that the more probable case might be that Guede wielded the knife but it was not proven BARD.
So these issues become legal certainties despite the fact that they were never tested in court. We do not know what degree of certainty a court needs to decide these facts, on the balance of probability, or BARD. If the latter what is the default position. Are judges required to rule on all facts? In England a court could just say that who wielded the fatal blow is unknown, can Italian judges say some facts are unknown? Or are the forced into a decision despite uncertainty?
We here are not bound to the absolute certainty of facts ruled by an Italian court. We can say there is uncertainty.
What is concerning is that such facts that were never subject to testing in court can be imported as judicial facts. That they are imported as absolute certainty whilst the reality is they are probabilities. What may have been a 51% probability is converted by court into a 100% certainty.
There is no uncertainty the burglary was staged.
Quote from Massei:
But the fact that all this was in fact just a simulation, a staging, can be deduced from
further circumstances. From the photos taken by the personnel of the Questura
(photos 47 to 54 and 65 to 66) one can perceive an activity which appears to have
been performed with the goal of creating a situation of obvious disorder in
Romanelli's room, but does not appear to be the result of actual ransacking, true
searching for the kind of valuable objects that might tempt a burglar. The drawers of
the little dresser next to the bed were not even opened (photo 51, for example.
Given this key fact, the question has to be asked, "
Cui bono?" from such a staged ransack. OK, so the PIP will dream up an "explanation": "Rudy was interrupted" (note, it has to be Rudy and nobody else to fit their shoe-horned theory).
Be that as it may, Massei further comments:
The objects on the shelves in photo 52 appear
not to have been touched at all; piles of clothes seem to have been thrown down
from the closet (photo 54) but it does not seem that there was any serious search in
the closet, in which some clothes and some boxes remained in place without
showing any signs of an actual search for valuable items that might have been there
(photo 54). It does not appear that the boxes on the table were opened (photo 65) in a
search for valuable items. And indeed, no valuable item (cf. declarations of
Romanelli) was taken, or even set aside to be taken, by the - at this point we can say
phantom - burglar. One last aspect which bears repeating is the presence, noted and
checked by several witnesses, of pieces of glass on top of the objects and clothing in
Romanelli's room. This circumstance, which also reveals an activity of simulation, ...there are no two ways about it, the "burglary" was a sham, to conceal the true identity of the perpetrator/s of Mez' murder. The only person having such a motive would be someone who lives there, with direct access to the victim. Amanda herself boasted that she had faked a "prank" burglary on a student colleague once and had been forced to apologise. What type of person could fail to realise the effect of such a "prank"?
Further, Massei ruled:
[49] Against any such need to dissimulate, which Amanda would have had, it has
been argued that the aim of sexual violence which the crime appeared to display (the
victim was a young girl and her body was almost completely naked and was in her
own bedroom) should have removed all suspicion from Amanda.
Despite Papa Raff testifying his offspring claimed he had just washed dishes after dinner and had had a mishap with the pipes under the sink when he last spoke at 20:42 of the murder night, Massei comments, "
the statements by Amanda Knox in which the hour of dinner is
postponed until 10 pm or even 11 pm constitute an attempt to reduce insofar as
possible the length of time devoid of activity that could be documented in some
way, during the final hours of November 1, 2007, thus creating an alibi that could
put her and Raffaele away from the Via della Pergola house where, precisely during
that time, the murder of Meredith Kercher was being perpetrated."
As we know, a great flurry of activity occurred at the cottage between Mez' last phone signals circa 22:13 and 23:00, with four or five independent witnesses reporting various commotions of some sort. Therefore the PIP expend a great deal of energy trying to contrive a scenario wheein "Rudy killed her straightaway", asserting not only was he there from circa 20:45, but that he hung around until after 22:13, a whole hour and a half or more, and only bothering to steal Mez' two phones, one credit card and €300 in cash, completely ignoring all other valuables in the property, disregarding Filomena's gold jewellery and Amanda's €300 rent, he could easily have stuffed into his pockets, whilst he was busy at his PIP alleged profession of, hello?
burglar.
Mez' meal with the "British birds" was any time between 18:30 and 20:30 "
Dr. Lalli, knowing that the duodenum was
still empty "because the stomach had not even begun to empty itself" (page 19 of the
transcripts), the time of death must lie between 21:30 pm (three hours after 18:30)
and 22:30 pm (four hours after 18:30), and that this timing agreed with the less rigid
133
data provided by the analysis of the hypostasis, of the rigor mortis and of the body
temperature, considering the uncertainty of the body weight which was guessed
without weighing the body. " Therefore, Rudy by the PIP imaginary timeline must have hung around the cottage at least three-quarters of an hour, if we accept their proposed early time of 21:30 (some half an hour after Mez supposedly "interrupted Rudy the burglar").
As for the strong DNA of Raff found on the bra clasp which was underneath the body and sheet, contamination from other objects was ruled out. None of the hooks were deformed and ruled out having been stepped on. Tertiary transfer would have rendered a negligible amount of DNA, and the defence at no point provided a credible scenario of how that would have happened, anyway, Massei states:
For the elements and the considerations indicated above, it is ruled out that the
hooks could contain DNA transferred by contact with other objects.
...
It can thus be asserted that no contamination occurred on the hooks on the piece of
bra seen on November 3rd and collected on December 18th. These conclusions are
based on the arguments given above and are consonant with the manner of finding
of the hooks: they form a tiny surface which would be difficult to contaminate; the
piece of bra shows, from the attachment of some threads from the strap of the bra
and by the partial deformation of one of the hooks, that a rather firm and violent
pressure was applied to that piece and in particular to the hooks, a pressure which
adequately and convincingly explains the presence of DNA of the person exerting
this firm and violent pressure.
We know the phone which received a signal at 22:13 was at the cottage
at 22:13:19, the phone connected to the 30064 Strada Vicinale Ponte Rio Monte La
Guardia cell, the base radio station which Chief Inspector Latella referred to as the
same one that was detected by their measurements near Meredith’s bedroom (in
addition to having reception in the courtyard of the cottage).
The immediate deduction which the Polizia Giudiziaria arrived at is therefore that
Meredith’s English phone was at Via della Pergola 7 on the date 1 November 2007,
in the time period from 14:31:43 to 15:55:57, and lastly at 22:13:19, when the phone
made a GPRS connection (to which we will return) rather than a voice connection.
Without even mentioning the luminol, footprint and shoeprint evidence and evidence of computer activity which proves Raff was lying when he said he was surfing the net all evening until 03:00,
These facts also provide proof of the presence of Amanda Knox and of Raffaele
Sollecito in the house on Via della Pergola when Meredith was killed and clarify the
role that they played, outlining a framework of evidence that leads to a declaratory
judgement of guilt with regard to the crimes imputed to them.
The fact-finding court determined that Amanda wielded the knife which inflicted the fatal wound
dynamic requires the presence of a second attacker, of a second knife. This
Court holds that the second attacker is Amanda Knox and the second knife is Exhibit
36. This is not hypothetical or open to argument, it is factual, and in circumstances of
This eventuality of death, highly probable, came to be accepted [by the attackers]
and the harmful actions [were] carried out and followed through both by Amanda
and by Raffaele, who acted pursuing the same objective that made them similar to
Rudy: there is therefore the awareness and the will to cause death in the context of
sexual assault.
The pair were acquitted by Bruno-Marasca on the grounds of "insufficient evidence" based on "investigative flaws" and "media attention pressures". They affirmed the facts found by the merits courts stood, save for the fact that although Amanda definitely, and Raff probably, were there at the cottage during the murder, with Amanda washing off Mez' blood from her person (blood dries within half an hour, so she came into contact within that time range) and Amanda covering up for Rudy as the grounds for her criminal calunnia, they couldn't know for sure they had done it.
NB Massei is in the public domain.
what now you're English?
Blame it on the Samsung spell checker.
