For anyone who would make reference to the peer-reviewed Prof Giuseppe Novelli as somehow sustaining Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni and her work with relation to the prosecution of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox......
Did you know that Prof. Novelli rates not one mention in the Massei report from 2010? Not one.
In the Fall of 2013 for the Florence Trial, Judge Nencini tasked officers of the Carabinieri in Rome to provide technical expertise on:
In other words, Prof Novelli reported to the Hellmann court in 2011 purportedly in support of Dr. Stefanoni.
Of that 6 Sept 2011 report, Nencini quotes it as sustaining the 1 in 300 million billion that the knife trace was no one's other than Meredith Kercher's. With the exception of the issue of trace 36I, the RIS Carabinieri said nothing about Novelli's alleged support of Stefanoni's overall work.
Nencini then goes on examining Novelli's testimony to the Hellmann court - incredibly, Nencini accepts Novelli's tortured logic that:
- if this had been a paternity case then the quantity of available DNA would be unlimited, and therefore able to produce a result beyond doubt
- why should, then, this logic NOT apply to a one-off sample when there is no "quantity of DNA" to retest.
- therefore, the 1 in 300 million billion odds of identity with Kercher should stand
Once again, it should be noted that this is not necessarily Prof. Novelli talking -
this is Judge Nencini outlining what he regards as definitive in Prof. Novelli's report!
And further, this is not Prof. Novelli defending his own work, it is
Nencini commenting on Conti-Vecchiotti's criticism
of Stefanoni's work.
Then to the chase - the issue of multiple amplifications as part of protocol. The evidence that interested Judge Nencini is what Prof. Novelli said about this imperfect world we live in.
- incredibly, Prof. Novelli (rightly) says that multiple amplifications IS part of the protocol.
- more incredibly, "but there is also experience, common sense and the ability of a technician to be able to decide, faced with a given situation, what they should do."
In other words, we are thrown back into what was wrong with Massei's 2010 reason for believing Stefanoni. We should trust her. Why?
What follows in the Nencini report is this: Nencini sets it up by saying that the defence was right - yes, Nencini admits the defence objections were right - to object to only a single amplification being made.
Read that again. Nencini agrees with the objection that the defence made on this whole line of "support" Nencini draws from Novelli about Stefanoni.
And what Nencini then does - which is a reason stated by Marasca-Bruno as a reason to annul his conviction - Nencini then substitutes himself as a jurist for this seemingly scientific saw-off in the evidence; which is actually not a saw-off when you think about it - even Nencini agrees with the defence objection.
It's just that Nencini on his own, with no outside scientific, third-party support - substitutes his own opinion for the obvious scientific one:
Read that rationale again. The evidence is not a rigorous element of proof - but we should keep it anyway.
In the face of the only independent experts who say otherwise (Conti-Vecchiotti) Nencini simply substitutes himself as knowing better.
For heaven's sake, Nencini even admits that Conti-Vecchiotti handed in
an expert report. What "expert reason", then, did Nencini appeal to to ignore it? The RIS Carabinieri? No, all the RIS Carabinieri did at the Nencini trial, particularly under cross examinination by Bongiorno, is echo what Prof Novelli had written in 2011 - that protocol demanded multiple amplifications; and perhaps one might also be guided by statistics when none are possible. But the RIS Carabinieri expressed no opinion as to whether or not Stefanoni might be trusted with that special talent.
So who supported Stefanoni's work?
No one. Neither Novelli in 2011 nor the RIS Carabinieri in 2013,
who both had actually sustained the need for multiple amplifications so that protocol can be met; while at the same time failing to identify Stefanoni as one of those rare, experienced technical operators who should be allowed to throw protocol away.
One final thing about the alleged presence of the negative controls.
Nencini actually blames Vecchiotti for not specifically asking Stefanoni to hand them over. That's right - Vecchiotti is blamed by Nencini for something Stefanoni should have done as a matter of course.
On top of this Nencini compounds his lunacy by saying that Prof Novelli claims to have seen the negative controls at the Hellmann Trial in 2011. If that were true, why would Vecchiotti have had to have asked Stefanoni? They simply would have been part of the trial record in 2011!
For one thing, did any court, anywhere prove there was the absence of contamination? No. The courts from Chieffi's 2013 ISC ruling onward said it was the defence's role to prove a route of contamination.
The rest of the "argument" Nencini uses about Novelli's opinions relates to the testability of trace 36I, which in the end, once tested, added nothing to the case.
Does anyone still wish to pull out Prof. Novelli as being a peer-reviewed (which he is) forensic-DNA expert who supports Stefanoni's work? I know that Nencini did exactly that; yet couched it in terms reminiscent of Judge Massei in 2010 who decided things in terms of "who do you trust, the prosecution (Stefanoni) or the defence."
Massei refused to appoint an independent forensic-DNA expert so as to relieve himself, acc. to law, of the burden of substituting the judge as an expert over the experts.
Nencini did the same thing. With the exception of the issue of trace 36I, the RIS Carabinieri said nothing about Novelli's alleged support of Stefanoni's overall work. The RIS Carabinieri talked about applying a "Likelihood Ratio", but in fact themselves simply restated the need for international protocols to be followed, and Nencini cites nothing that the RIS Carabinieri tells his court, as to why this "likelihood ratio" applies to Stefanoni and her work.
Marasca-Bruno (in part) spotted that and trashed all the judicial renderings which convicted, convicting on the basis of a judge substituting himself as a supra-expert on these matters.