I don't even know where to start with all this.
I will, however, make the following short observations, since I'm on my way out:
1) People often think that they hear things which they haven't actually heard. Particularly when they learn about a brutal murder in their vicinity the previous night.
One thing I`ve understood; in this case there is no way, that any witness, that doesn`t fit in the agenda of the Knox-supporters, can be found (in their opinion) reliable.
The four independent witnesses, that heard the scream and/or heard running of people shortly after that, are useless because all of them are retarded daydreamer, as they falsely connect their "imaginative" hearing of the scream to a total "common" day, on which a negligibility like a murder in their neighbourhood had just occured. One of them even had such a great fantasy, that she heard such a harrowing scream, that she couldn`t sleep anymore that night and obviously is haunted by this event up to the present day. If this wasn`t enough, all of them went to court to tell their fantasy story, because, whether thier story is true or not, it doesn`t really matter, because their terstimony would be correlated to a totally unimportant matter like murder.
The witness, who saw AK & RS at the basketball court at the crucial time on Nov1, is also rubbish, because he`s homeless.
The witness, who is a shopowner, and who saw AK early in the morning of Nov2, is a bloody liar. He lied, because either he had fun seeing at least one "innocent" person rot in jail for 30 years due to his testimony or because he was just bored, and through his evilness, he thought about creating a story, which would bring one of the accused in big trouble, as he thought they were guilty by his knowledge of the case, which came from his newspaper study.
2) The defence experts may have been lacking in certain areas (well, that's my opinion); the pathologist certainly was incompetent in certain areas of the autopsy; the court was seemingly in thrall to Mignini, who was out to get Knox and Sollecito; the more I read of Massei's reasoning the more I'm concerned that he meets your description.
3) You have conflated and confused methods of working out time of death. Estimating ToD from residual body temperature does indeed involve complex formulae, which include variables such as body weight (which the autopsy pathologist didn't bother to measure), ambient temperature (which, again, was only guessed at), and state of insulation of the body. Estimating ToD based on stomach/intestinal contents, on the other hand, only relies on known medical information on stomach emptying times and times of passage through the intestines. And the state of Meredith's stomach/duodenum contents, coupled with the known time of her last food intake, indicates a ToD between around 8.00pm and 9.30pm. Since it's known with certainty that Meredith was still alive just before 9.00pm, the ToD can be narrowed down to 9.00-9.30pm. This is not "ridiculous", as you claim. What IS ridiculous is to correlate Meredith's stomach/duodenum contents with the prosecution's ToD of 11.30-11.50pm. This is more than ridiculous in fact, it's medically practically impossible.
First of all I have no medical expertise at all and I don`t believe in getting it through googling some papers, that deal with the issue of estimating Tod in terms of pathology.
I just wanted to approach the issue in
mathematical respect. First of all, it`s funny to see, that your knowledge of the method of "Estimating ToD based on stomach/intestinal contents" and your "knowledge" of the autopsy details in this case leads you to a time frame of
1.5 hours, in which ToD must have occured. This again implies, that this method gives a lot of space in terms of statistical interpretation. What I`ve said before, the occurance of such an event (be it stomach emptying times, grade of digestion or whatever) is of stochastical nature. That means (please note, that the only thing I try to point out is the mathematical side of such a method; if my following examples are nonsense in terms of pathology, that doesn`t change anything in the mathematical approach on such a method), if you reproduce, say 3 times
the exact same conditions, for example: if a person (theoretically) eats three times the same steak under the exact same conditions (exactly the same steak, exactely the same day and time, eats the steak in exactly the same way etc. etc.) and then you measure the value, you are interested in (say percentage of the steak, that has left your stomach in the cause of digestion) 3 times in
exact the same way, for example 3 hours later you get three different measured values. Why? The conditions were the same all three times.
The answer is, that this event is of stochastical nature, and even under the same conditions you get different measured values.
But the reality of measurement is far worse, as the measurements are adulterated by systematical errors, as for example imprecise measurement devices, incompetence of the person, who is doing the measurement etc..
Another problem is, that, for estimating the real parameters for the distribution function (in "our" case a normal-distribution) of our random-variable ToD, that is mean-value and variance, you need an extremly big control sample (the bigger the control sample the better the estimation of the unknown parameters(mean value, variance)). In "our" case, this would mean (theoretically) reproducing the way of death of MK (I know that sounds horrible) numerous times and then, every time, measure the value you are interested in. What a statistician is doing in the end after having acquired all the "relevant" data is the following. Through his data, he
estiamtes the two relevant parameters (mean-value, variance) with a given formula and then, with the help of these two parameters, he builds a, say 95%-confidence intervall for the mean value (that is an intervall, which for "our" random variable Tod would be for example: 21:15-24:00), which says the following: the real value of the parameter mean-value (in our case the mean-value is also the value, which has the highest probability, which is a special attribute of the normal-distribution) lies with probability of 95% in the calculated intervall (21:30-24:00).
So, which conclusion can be drawn for "our case". First of all, our control sample has the size one, which means we can`t estimate the variance with the given mathematical formula. To "solve" this problem, as I suspect was done, you look for cases, which are
similar to the Mk-case. It is cases, where, for example, a similar degree of the last meal was digested and, where the date of last meal and date of ToD are known , weigth of the person is similar to MK etc.. As said, the condition of those cases are just
similar to these in "our" case and not exacly the same. Then, there are systematical errors, that were made in these cases, too (which add up, when they are evaluated). This means, that the "expansion" of our control sample is to a remarkable degree defective. Of course , the data acquired in our case is to some degree defective, too (systematical errors)
So, what we get, in the end, is, a
defective (confidence)-intervall of time, which
only tells us, that the
event (ToD in "our" case)
with the highest probability lies in there, with probability of, as said, for example 95%.
Taking all this into account, the claim, that Tod must have occured shortly after 21:00 is ridiculous.
I've been reading the report. This observation doesn't necessarily have to do with the time of death debate, but yes, Massei does sound just plain stupid. Micheli seems to be the smart one of the whole lot. Maybe Massei's pretending to be stupid though. Didn't Massei also "accept" that the events were Manga Comic and Marijuana inspired? The guy is a real Einstein....
Sorry, but your purpose to show, that Massei is stupid, because he "accepted, that the events were manga and marijuana inspired" doesn`t work.
Before that "conclusion", he talked for over 350 pages about
the evidence in this case. This evidence told him, that both defendants were guilty of the crimes ascribed to them and so, in the end, he looked for an "explenation" for the occurance of this crime.
We know, that RS loved mangas, that combines sex with violence, we know, that both AK & RS liked drugs, sex and that boh were thrill-seekers. So he just tries to explain, why those two people commited (of which he is convinced due to the evidence) that crime with the use of some aspects of their character, that would be "consistent" with that crime.
"If it`s such a hard scientific fact, that MK lost her life shortly after 21:00, why the hell didn`t the court accept it?". Terrible, terrible inherent logic exhibited in this statement of yours. Even if you're right about what you believe about the TOD, comments like these are pretty useless--your logic is really bad. If a judge accepts the world is flat, that doesn't lend any credence to whether the world is flat does it?
No, this would just mean, that the judge is either plain-stupid or incredibly dishonest. I think Massei is neither of that.
Once again, all I can say is that it's indicative of poor logic skills to take fallible witness testimony as being more reliable that physics, chemistry and computer records. If my recollection of how an event went conflicts with the laws of physics, it's far more likely that I am wrong than that the laws of physics are wrong.
Yes, you got it, you`re (in "our" case the pathologist) measuring different physical values, you evaluate them and use them to derive further physical values. The problem is, that every measurement of a physical value is defective and so you need error calculation (i.e. statistics), which uses the same methods as desribed in length above. A publication of a measured physical value, without (confidence) error-intervall is just useless. For example, a measured temperature, must be, if published look like:
T=20 +/- 3.2 °K
Of course, you`re right, that physics is an "exact", science, but the measuring of physical values is far from exact, it`s defective and of statistical nature, as shown above.
The fact, that so many experts came to so different conclusions for ToD in respect to the size of the time intervals and placed them at so different times, speaks volumes for me in terms of reliability of this method.
The witness testimonies are much more profundly for me in that respect.
Finally this will be my last post on this thread, as it seems to be an unreachable task to change the belief of AK-supporters in her innocence, regardless of what had happened and what will happen.
