Massei's verdict is the one I understand the least.
Vixen is telling us, that he bend backwards (to do what exactly?), to me it looks like he twisted himself into a pretzel to get the two convicted. Each and every time when he had a decision to make about a piece of evidence, he sided with the prosecution, no matter how flimsy the reasonig was...
The DNA evidence was reliable, because there was no reason to think, that Stefanoni's suspect centred investigation methods would somehow make her biased against the defendants, no way...
The luminol footprints had to be made in Meredith Kercher's blood because "what else could the luminol have reacted to?"
There must have been a cleanup because no traces were found connecting the luminol hits in the small corridor with the ones in Romanelli's room.
Curatolo destroys their alibi, because he has seen them that night while they say that they were at Raffaele's, it doesn't matter that he places them in Piazza Grimana at the most likely ToD, all that counts is that he said they were there, while they are saying they were elsewhere.
The same with Quintavalle.
The footprints are attributed to Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito despite Rinaldi putting into his report, that "they are not usable to make a positive identification" or "aren't usable at all". Remind me how many reference prints were taken?
And, last but not least, there is his reasoning about the multiple attackers.
When he is told by six of the seven experts that "there is no way" to determine - based on the physical evidence - if Meredith Kercher was killed by one or more persons, he simply decides that "It would have been against Meredith Kercher's character" to have been overwhelmed by just one person. It doesn't matter that she was described as "petite" by her friends and it also doesn't matter that her killer was armed with a knife.
And of course the multiple attackers where needed to explain away the incompatibility of "The Knife" with the smaller wounds, the knife that was "not incompatible with the mortal wound". Hey, we have "more than one person attacking her" so why not just invent another knife (or better let's put the real murder weapon, the one a certain Rudy Hermann Guede used to kill Meredith Kercher, into Raffaele Sollecito's hands and assume that he would throw away one of his knives but would keep the kitchen knife because it was on the inventory), one that was never found, one that solves that pesky problem and is also able to back up our multiple assailants theory. A perfect merry-go-round of reasoning.
This one should have ended with an Art. 530.2 acquittal in December 2009, latest.
As I said, Massei is the judge I don't understand, his court was the one that heard "all the evidence".
Matteini only had the prosecutions' file to work with, and asked no questions. The remarkable thing is, that she tells Amanda Knox in her
denial of house arrest that:
Micheli could have ended it, especially after Stefanoni refusing to come up with the raw data from her tests, actually telling him, that "wanting that data was accusing her of cheating". Micheli sent them to trial maybe thinking "Let somebody else sort this mess out."
Hellmann tried to do the right thing plus some damage control. Convicting Amanda Knox for calunnia placed the blame for the ills that befell her solely on herself and took the investigators out of the line of fire...
Chieffi went a step further. His verdict was a copy and paste of Galati's appeal aimed at restoring the good names of everyone involved in the investigation, especially Stefanoni, by re-defining how forensic science has to be done, he just didn't want Stefanoni to become Italy's
Annie Dookhan.
Nencini just followed the orders he got from Rome and delivered the verdict he was asked for after a six, or was it seven, sessions show trial/trial show.
Marasca and Bruno finally put an end to the saga, bound by what Chieffi decided and also interested in this case not having consrquences for anyone involved on the police/prosecution side, they just threw it out basically saying, the case never should have brought to trial... Plus some sand throwing in the final parts of their report...
My 0.02 Deutsche Mark