He doesn't say it would be irrelevant, he says it would be a weak piece of circumstantial evidence, how weak is irrelevant since he doesn't consider it anyway.
But this was precisely an objection by Galati appeal against Hellmann: there is no legal category such as a "weak piece of circumstantial evidence"; either something is a piece of circumstantial evidence, or it isn't. Either it is relevant, or it isn't. We have reliability and relevance as dimentions. In fact, to say something would be "weak" even if it was true, that means to dismiss it preliminarily as irrelevant, and Hellmann in fact defines it "di per sé solo non idoneo a provare neanche presuntivamente la colpevolezza".
But this is illogical, because in reality, if true, the testimony would undermine Knox's account and entail further indication of cleanup.
Chieffi is right on this. Hellmann here is guilt of falsifying the rationale. It is just false that the testimony because of its nature, independently from reliability, would be unfit as a piece of circumstantial evidence. And then he calls Quintavalle's testimony "not much reliable" (what does "not much reliable" mean?).
The ambiguous slippery language of Hellmann is actually the suspicious thing, I can see a judge detects that immediately, as I detect it too.
He doesn't have a problem with it being late in general, he has a problem with it taking Quintavalle a year to be confident of his own memory, and the suspicious nature of him being more certain he saw Amanda Knox after a year, than when he was directly questioned about her right after the murder while being shown a photograph of her. A totally reasonable position, I might add.
This sums up what I said. In fact Hellmann notes that Quintavalle's testimony is "late", and links his being "late" with a concept of unreliability by speculating that he took a long time to develop a reliable memory. In other words Hellmann injects a suspicious content in his "being late", and he does so also by presenting a false description of Quintavalle's behaviour - which does not belong to trial papers -and drawing illogical conclusions from it.
Litarally Hellmann says "It took a year to the witness to become sure about the correctness of his perception and about the identification with Knox".
If the judges applied Hellmann's logic (speculation) in other cases, they would have never solved the Aldrovandi case, for example. Quintavalle acted exactly the same way as reliable witnesses do. Witnesses don't want to testify - they don't want to provide relevant details. Quintavalle is no exception. And he explicitly admitted to that. Mignini said in the courtroom "we all know why a witness talks only one year late". It's normal there is nothing suspicious in that.
But Hellmann's speculation is in fact, his own speculation. It is not true that it took Quintavalle one year to become sure about his perception - facts are that it took a year for him to talk. Hellmann only makes unsupported suppositions stemming from his own speculations "he could have realized the importance of his testimony earlier".
Chieffi nitpicks on am ambiguous point in the testimony where Quintavalle claims he "never saw her head on" but later saw her "close" but still didn't say head on.
It is not true. Quintavalle was questioned at lenght and he said he clearly recognized Amanda Knox and could see her in the face. His testimony was not ambiguous.
Chieffi then buys Quintavalle's absurd lie about blue eyes not being seen in the newspaper photo, but forgets that Quintavalle was shown a full color police photo being questioned just days after that, so his excuse about blue eyes is BS. But that's the problem with the ISC re-interpreting and re-examining the evidence in a couple days in chamber, vs Hellmann who actually sat in trial for a year, you pick up on important details like that.
No, by the way the fact is Hellmann never questioned Quintavalle. He could have done so, if he suspected Quintavalle was unreliable. There is a procedure point here, first thing, which makes Hellmann unreliable. This is another thing that makes Hellmann himself suspicious.
But then, first it is not true that Chieffi buys Quintavalle's testimony - Chieffi slams Hellmann for not addressing it. The SC does not re-interpret the testimony. The SC reads the arguments that Hellmann brings up to disprove the previous court's assessment of Quintavalle's testimony, and finds that in Hellmann there is a misrepresentation of the testimony itself.
And also, the Prosecution General was able to point out that Hellmann misrepresents the testimony of Quintavalle and his behaviour, since in fact Quintavalle had provided a convincing explanation about why he didn't mention certain things to Volturno, and inspector Volturno confirmed his version. There is in fact no logical basis to assert that Quintavalle is lying. Quintavalle did not tell everything to Volturno, but he limited himself to answering Volturno's questions. Any reasoning about colour of the eyes in the picture is pointless, since Quintavalle had no problem recognizing the girl in the picture. He said he knew the girl at sight. He only did not say the girl had come into his shop on that early morning, but Volturno did not ask him when the girl came to his shop. Quintavalle decided to shut up on this circumstance but he talked about it with his employees.
It should be pointed out that Quintavalle's testimony is supported also by the testimony of his employee Chiriboga.
Nothing is going to salvage the Chieffi report, because it is matter-of-factly Chieffi re-interpreting the evidence (poorly) to his desired viewpoint.
Chieffi does not re-interpret evidence. Chieffi only interprets Hellmann. Theoretically any judge could have still ruled that Quintavalle was an unreliable witness. But
not based on the arguments presented by Hellmann.
