Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Dan O.]

Here's the report with a picture of the open hard drive:

http://www.friendsofamanda.org/computer_consultant_report.pdf
http://www.friendsofamanda.org/computer_consultant_report_google_translation.doc

I'm prepared to give these guys the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are stupendously ignorant and this was not intentional.

Thanks Charlie. Apparently two of the drives were fully recovered by the professionals. Did the defense receive that data or were they just told that the drives contained nothing of interest?


The first thing I noticed is that the toshiba drive requires 1 amp. USB 2.0 can supply a maximum of 0.5 amps. This alone could be the cause of their initial problems. Only the newer laptop drives are low enough power to run directly off a USB adaptor without an external power source.

The connection to the 2" drives is keyed by 1 missing pin near the middle of the block. This is visible in the photos if you look carefully. The mating connector should have that hole plugged so it is impossible to insert the connector improperly. If the plug was missing on their adaptor, they should not have been playing russian roulette by guessing which way to plug it in. The end of the report mentions confusion with the extra 4 pins that aren't covered by the connector. Again, if the connector is properly keyed it is impossible to accidentally connect it wrong. If not, they should have verified how it should connect and taken extra precautions to insure that it was connected properly.

I noticed in the last image that there is additional damage to the connector pins that wasn't there after the drive was returned from the professional recovery service. Some fumble fingered idiot must have been trying to read the drive again.

Since this drive fully unloads the heads when spun down, I wouldn't expect a head crash as mentioned in one of the recovery reports to be the problem with read errors. I would rather suspect alignment issues caused by removal of the top cover which includes one screw that helps stabilize the head arm assembly. "Head crash" would be a catchall explanation for failure to recover data but shouldn't be an excuse where there is no physical evidence of the crash.

I also wonder if the local idiots remembered to put the original logic board back on the drive before sending it off the the pros.

 

[Justinian2]

Just back from a vacation in a secluded place. I'm trying to get caught up.

So you are suggesting that the entire sexual assult occured in only five minutes (9.05 - 9.10)? How? Your theory involves Rudy as the lone attacker, holding a knife against Meredith with one hand and using the other to undress and sexaully assult her while she barely fights back. Highly unlikely. She was young, healthy, fit and her sister said she would have fought for her life, "110%".

I agree that the attack against Meredith probably occured around 9:05 or so. The lack of defensive wounds indicates she was restrained by more than one person.

The vaginal DNA could have been left after death couldn't it?
Wouldn't you undress yourself if someone held a knife to your throat?
I wouldn't defend myself against an attacker before first grabing a weapon - like a bedside light. I don't see that any conclusion can be reached from the lack of defensive wounds.

I also fail to see that this comment has any bearing on anything:

She was young, healthy, fit and her sister said she would have fought for her life, "110%".

Sorry, but those statements are NOT facts, but merely theories that can be broken.

 

[Justinian2]

If you tried to have that discussion on PMF I think you'd get banned quick smart. They are very sensitive about people trying to bring up the topic of evidence for an early time of death.

I think they know that they have an argumentative weakness there, which is why they'll ban you if you try to discuss it. However I don't think they actually realise that this issue, as you say, blows the prosecution case completely out of the water. That requires rigorous, joined-up thinking to grasp.

If we can prove using hard, scientific data that Meredith died around or before 21:30 then we lock that data point in and move forward from there. All sorts of things follow directly from that if you think this way:

The prosecution timeline is total rubbish.
The prosecution witnesses who claim to have heard a scream and running feet are mistaken or irrelevant.
Amanda's coerced confession where she claimed to hear a scream is proven to be false on that point as well.
If Curatolo is honest and accurate instead of being a police stooge then his testimony exonerates Knox and Sollecito, however it's more likely he's just a police stooge.
If Curatolo is a lying stooge, then Knox and Sollecito's claim to be at home at the time, backed up by the computer evidence, is very strong indeed, and it follows immediately that Curatolo's statement was a deliberate frame job.
If Curatolo's statement was a lie arranged by the police, it follows that we should also be highly skeptical of other "convenient" pieces of evidence such as the bra clasp and the double DNA knife.

That's all really obvious to us. However they just don't think that way. They don't reason from established facts to inescapable consequences, which is in fact the definition of logical argument. As far as they are concerned hard scientific proof that Amanda died at 21:30 or earlier can be erased and replaced by a sufficient number of "expert" statements, personal opinions or other bits of non-scientific fluff supporting a later time of death.

To us, a 21:30 or earlier time of death leads inescapably to the conclusion that Knox and Sollecito are definitely innocent and almost certainly the victims of a malicious frame job. To them, it's just an annoying bit of trivia which they would rather not talk about. I honestly don't think they realise the logical implications.

I always go out for a walk so that the bouncing up and down will help move the food out of my stomach more quickly. MK did walk home. That should have sped up the digestive process. Walking seems to speed up my digestion.

Of course, if you're bound up, then nothing seems to move.

There is a HUGE variablity in the Tod. HUGE. To call the Tod with any certainty is irresponsible. That applies to us as well as the fiends of the prosecution.

The ping and digestive data seem to move up the Tod to the point where even the alibi proves innocence.

 

[LondonJohn]

I always go out for a walk so that the bouncing up and down will help move the food out of my stomach more quickly. MK did walk home. That should have sped up the digestive process. Walking seems to speed up my digestion.

Of course, if you're bound up, then nothing seems to move.

There is a HUGE variablity in the Tod. HUGE. To call the Tod with any certainty is irresponsible. That applies to us as well as the fiends of the prosecution.

The ping and digestive data seem to move up the Tod to the point where even the alibi proves innocence.

I'm afraid your theory about walking and stomach emptying is wrong! The entire digestion process is in fact optimised under resting and relaxed conditions. Strenuous exercise may in fact slow down the process of food through the gastro-intestinal system, as blood can be diverted away from the stomach and intestines to maximise oxygen delivery to muscles. In the case of a moderate-paced walk, though, there will most likely be no change whatsoever in the speed of food passage through the stomach and intestines. And I'm at a total loss to know how you can sense food moving from your stomach to your duodenum.....

Regarding time of death in this case, you're right to say there is a good amount of variability involved with correlating stomach/intestinal contents with ToD. However, the variability is not nearly as wide as you would seem to suggest - for the state of contents of Meredith's stomach/duodenum, there would probably be a 1.5-2.0 hour spread for the time of death. Knowing when Meredith consumed the pizza meal, her stomach/intestinal contents imply a ToD between 8.00 and 10.00pm (and most probably 8.00-9.30pm). And since we know that Meredith was still alive just before 9.00pm, it's overwhelmingly likely that she was killed between 9.00 and 10.00pm (and extremely likely that she was killed between 9.00 and 9.30pm).

With all this in mind, I believe that some people are trying to use the "imprecision" argument as a bit of a smokescreen. Of course stomach/intestine contents can't pinpoint ToD with much precision, but in this specific case we are in luck because a 9.00-9.30 ToD is already at the extreme outer end of time variability for a half-full stomach and a totally empty duodenum, given that the pizza was consumed at 6.00-6.45pm. The fact that Meredith was definitively alive at around 8.50pm takes out a lot of the inherent time spread.

And what is beyond doubt (in my view) is that Meredith could not have been killed any later than 10.00pm - let alone the 11.30-11.50pm claimed by the prosecution and accepted by the court. Needless to say, I believe the defence did not do enough to establish this in the first trial - but I believe they will argue strongly in this area in the appeal.

 

[RoseMontague]

Rose,

I think that you and Christiana are interpreting the term "database" in different ways. The standardized DNA database that Stefanoni used to compare the prints against is purely a reference tool designed to help calculate match probabilities (and it's sometimes used to isolate things like racial groups from partial profiles).

However, what I think you're referring to is a small reference database of all people who were possible sources. This group would include all the house-mates, any regular visitors to the house (e.g. Filomena's boyfriend, Meredith's boyfriend), all police officers and forensic personnel, and all lab technicians. I am not aware that this group of samples was ever collected together, and compared with the "unidentified" samples found in the house.

That would certainly make more sense to me based on what I had read previously on this and it would seem to put Stefanoni's comments into better context. Based on what I have seen on video of the collection of evidence and Stefanoni's ignoring of standards and protocol for LCN DNA testing, it would not surprise me at all if none of these lab techs, etc were never included in any kind of database. Unidentified profiles on the bra clasp could very well be the result of contamination.

 

[RoseMontague]

Thanks Charlie. Apparently two of the drives were fully recovered by the professionals. Did the defense receive that data or were they just told that the drives contained nothing of interest?


The first thing I noticed is that the toshiba drive requires 1 amp. USB 2.0 can supply a maximum of 0.5 amps. This alone could be the cause of their initial problems. Only the newer laptop drives are low enough power to run directly off a USB adaptor without an external power source.

The connection to the 2" drives is keyed by 1 missing pin near the middle of the block. This is visible in the photos if you look carefully. The mating connector should have that hole plugged so it is impossible to insert the connector improperly. If the plug was missing on their adaptor, they should not have been playing russian roulette by guessing which way to plug it in. The end of the report mentions confusion with the extra 4 pins that aren't covered by the connector. Again, if the connector is properly keyed it is impossible to accidentally connect it wrong. If not, they should have verified how it should connect and taken extra precautions to insure that it was connected properly.

I noticed in the last image that there is additional damage to the connector pins that wasn't there after the drive was returned from the professional recovery service. Some fumble fingered idiot must have been trying to read the drive again.

Since this drive fully unloads the heads when spun down, I wouldn't expect a head crash as mentioned in one of the recovery reports to be the problem with read errors. I would rather suspect alignment issues caused by removal of the top cover which includes one screw that helps stabilize the head arm assembly. "Head crash" would be a catchall explanation for failure to recover data but shouldn't be an excuse where there is no physical evidence of the crash.

I also wonder if the local idiots remembered to put the original logic board back on the drive before sending it off the the pros.

Dan,
In your opinion, was Amanda's computer damaged in a different way than the other two?

 

[katy_did]

Reading through injustice's translation/interpretation of Sollecito's appeal. It reads in detail about the analysis of the testing on the bra clasp. A few points of contention the defense is bringing up is part of profile that is attributed to Sollecito has strands that doesn't match his dna profile.
( I'm assuming what they are trying to say is the dna profile the prosecution claims is sollecitos only partially matches him. therefore since there are other markers in the profile then it must be someone else. as an example, my cousin would have a dna profile that partially matches me. its also conceivable that people not related to me have a partial dna profile with me.)

I'm wondering if this is a clever tactic by the defence. What they say is that if you're using testing kits that match 16 loci, then all 16 have to match for the profile to be compatible, and that if even one of them doesn't, the individual has to be excluded; since, as they argue, 6 of the loci don't match Raffaele's profile, the DNA can't be his. Whereas the sentencing report implies that if more loci match than don't, that's good enough. It also distorts what the defence expert Tagliabracci said about being able to match profiles using only 6 loci: Massei interprets this to mean that if 11/16 loci match (as in this case), that's even better than 6/6 matching in the other case. But it isn't, because the same principle applies in both cases: all loci have to match, and the only difference is the strength of the certainty that the profile matches the suspect (in the sense that a greater percentage of the population will share 6 loci than 16).

So the defence say that the profile can't be Raffaele's because of the 6 non-matching loci (as Tagliabracci argued). Reading between the lines, perhaps the explanation for these non-matching loci is that other people's DNA is on the clasp. Therefore, by arguing that the DNA can't be Raffaele's because not all the loci match, the defence are forcing the prosecution to argue that the clasp was contaminated (by other people's DNA) in order to claim that the DNA is Raffaele's...

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Thanks Charlie. Apparently two of the drives were fully recovered by the professionals. Did the defense receive that data or were they just told that the drives contained nothing of interest?


The first thing I noticed is that the toshiba drive requires 1 amp. USB 2.0 can supply a maximum of 0.5 amps. This alone could be the cause of their initial problems. Only the newer laptop drives are low enough power to run directly off a USB adaptor without an external power source.

The connection to the 2" drives is keyed by 1 missing pin near the middle of the block. This is visible in the photos if you look carefully. The mating connector should have that hole plugged so it is impossible to insert the connector improperly. If the plug was missing on their adaptor, they should not have been playing russian roulette by guessing which way to plug it in. The end of the report mentions confusion with the extra 4 pins that aren't covered by the connector. Again, if the connector is properly keyed it is impossible to accidentally connect it wrong. If not, they should have verified how it should connect and taken extra precautions to insure that it was connected properly.

I noticed in the last image that there is additional damage to the connector pins that wasn't there after the drive was returned from the professional recovery service. Some fumble fingered idiot must have been trying to read the drive again.

Since this drive fully unloads the heads when spun down, I wouldn't expect a head crash as mentioned in one of the recovery reports to be the problem with read errors. I would rather suspect alignment issues caused by removal of the top cover which includes one screw that helps stabilize the head arm assembly. "Head crash" would be a catchall explanation for failure to recover data but shouldn't be an excuse where there is no physical evidence of the crash.

I also wonder if the local idiots remembered to put the original logic board back on the drive before sending it off the the pros.

I suppose if you hooked up the cable backwards, so the power was going in pins 1-4 instead of 41-44, you might get a puff of smoke. In my charmed life of bumbling with connectors, I would expect to run into a blocking diode. But who knows...

I am told the image of Meredith's drive showed activity on Nov. 5, 2007, meaning that someone booted up the machine and examined it before removing the drive.

This consultant was engaged by the court, but he didn't talk to the first group of people to handle the computers and drives, so of course he didn't get to the bottom of what happened. At the end of his report, he concludes that everyone comported themselves with great professionalism and the loss of Amanda's hard drive remains an unsolved mystery.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

I wouldn't defend myself against an attacker before first grabing a weapon - like a bedside light. I don't see that any conclusion can be reached from the lack of defensive wounds.

In this case, it can be explained by the swiftness of the attack and the fact that she was down on all fours with her assailant on top of her, attacking from behind. He stabbed her in the right side of her neck twice, and then he reached around and cut her throat with a stroke in which he pulled up and to the right. She probably strugged desperately, but she would have lost consciousness within a very few minutes.

 

[RoseMontague]

I'm wondering if this is a clever tactic by the defence. What they say is that if you're using testing kits that match 16 loci, then all 16 have to match for the profile to be compatible, and that if even one of them doesn't, the individual has to be excluded; since, as they argue, 6 of the loci don't match Raffaele's profile, the DNA can't be his. Whereas the sentencing report implies that if more loci match than don't, that's good enough. It also distorts what the defence expert Tagliabracci said about being able to match profiles using only 6 loci: Massei interprets this to mean that if 11/16 loci match (as in this case), that's even better than 6/6 matching in the other case. But it isn't, because the same principle applies in both cases: all loci have to match, and the only difference is the strength of the certainty that the profile matches the suspect (in the sense that a greater percentage of the population will share 6 loci than 16).

So the defence say that the profile can't be Raffaele's because of the 6 non-matching loci (as Tagliabracci argued). Reading between the lines, perhaps the explanation for these non-matching loci is that other people's DNA is on the clasp. Therefore, by arguing that the DNA can't be Raffaele's because not all the loci match, the defence are forcing the prosecution to argue that the clasp was contaminated (by other people's DNA) in order to claim that the DNA is Raffaele's...

I love this reading between the lines stuff. Hit me with some more when you get a chance.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

RS's appeal is based on the video taken in Meredith's room. If there is other video shot in other parts of the apartment on the same day the bra clasp was taken why isn't it mentioned in RS's appeal?

Say what? I have no idea what you are arguing here.

Yes, you're right, his DNA was found on a cigarette butt. Was that butt taken into custody the same day as the bra clasp?

I actually thought it was, but it turns out I was wrong about that.

RS's appeal doesn't agree with you. They say that the contamination occured at the apartment during the collection of evidence, no metion of the lab.

As to "hiding the files", why doesn't either the appeal of RS or AK mention these hidden files or ask for them to be surrendered to the defense?

How many times have I whacked this one mole with you personally? How many times am I going to need to whack it?

I do not accept the court's verdict, nor Massei personally, nor the defence team, nor the appeal team, nor any other person or group of people as a magical final authority about this case. The facts are the facts whatever any of those people do or say about them, or fail to do or say about them.

An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy, and it does not become less fallacious with repetition.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

London John,

I don't see where in your ToD/digestion research you mention that the contents themselves play a large part in digestion times. I have been poking around and I have found where exactly what you eat dictates the amount of time it takes for the stomach to disintegrate its contents. For example, in one study by F. Kong and R.P. Singh dated May 2008, they found the length of time is much longer for fats, proteins, and sugars. They further state that if you subsequently consume additional sugars it slows the process even more. I think when all is said and done, we really can't be all that certain about the ToD, at least not from a stomach/duodenum content point-of-view. It certainly seems to be so variable and disputable to be unusable as a defense. Certainly the best evidence for an earlier ToD is the cell phone evidence.

 

[Chris C]

I'm wondering if this is a clever tactic by the defence. What they say is that if you're using testing kits that match 16 loci, then all 16 have to match for the profile to be compatible, and that if even one of them doesn't, the individual has to be excluded; since, as they argue, 6 of the loci don't match Raffaele's profile, the DNA can't be his. Whereas the sentencing report implies that if more loci match than don't, that's good enough. It also distorts what the defence expert Tagliabracci said about being able to match profiles using only 6 loci: Massei interprets this to mean that if 11/16 loci match (as in this case), that's even better than 6/6 matching in the other case. But it isn't, because the same principle applies in both cases: all loci have to match, and the only difference is the strength of the certainty that the profile matches the suspect (in the sense that a greater percentage of the population will share 6 loci than 16).

So the defence say that the profile can't be Raffaele's because of the 6 non-matching loci (as Tagliabracci argued). Reading between the lines, perhaps the explanation for these non-matching loci is that other people's DNA is on the clasp. Therefore, by arguing that the DNA can't be Raffaele's because not all the loci match, the defence are forcing the prosecution to argue that the clasp was contaminated (by other people's DNA) in order to claim that the DNA is Raffaele's...

Yup thats somewhat how i see it. I think they are trying to force the courts hand here. Either they test it using LCN or admit its contaminated. If its tested using LCN and it comes back Sollecito's dna the defense have lost nothing. They can still argue contamination. There is however the chance it comes back not his DNA. Which then completely destroys the prosecutions case.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

London John,

I don't see where in your ToD/digestion research you mention that the contents themselves play a large part in digestion times. I have been poking around and I have found where exactly what you eat dictates the amount of time it takes for the stomach to disintegrate its contents. For example, in one study by F. Kong and R.P. Singh dated May 2008, they found the length of time is much longer for fats, proteins, and sugars. They further state that if you subsequently consume additional sugars it slows the process even more. I think when all is said and done, we really can't be all that certain about the ToD, at least not from a stomach/duodenum content point-of-view. It certainly seems to be so variable and disputable to be unusable as a defense. Certainly the best evidence for an earlier ToD is the cell phone evidence.

It would have been polite to include the URL for this study, however it was easy enough to google. Here's a link.

Now please point out where anything in this paper affects the t(lag) calculations that form the basis for concluding that Meredith almost certainly died before 21:30. Because I sure as heck can't see it.

Now maybe I'm wrong and if so I'll gratefully accept correction, but it looks to me like you've completely failed to understand the study, and you think that effects that slow the rate at which digested matter is allowed into the bowel also dictate the time at which digested matter starts entering the bowel. Nothing in this paper suggests that this is the case, as far as I can see.

Unless I'm wrong then the paper you refer to is irrelevant, and absolutely does not justify your conclusions. I suggest to you that further "poking around" on your part will be more productive if you take the time to read and thoroughly understand the research you are poking.

 

[Chris C]

London John,

I don't see where in your ToD/digestion research you mention that the contents themselves play a large part in digestion times. I have been poking around and I have found where exactly what you eat dictates the amount of time it takes for the stomach to disintegrate its contents. For example, in one study by F. Kong and R.P. Singh dated May 2008, they found the length of time is much longer for fats, proteins, and sugars. They further state that if you subsequently consume additional sugars it slows the process even more. I think when all is said and done, we really can't be all that certain about the ToD, at least not from a stomach/duodenum content point-of-view. It certainly seems to be so variable and disputable to be unusable as a defense. Certainly the best evidence for an earlier ToD is the cell phone evidence.

Maybe this will help you understand better. The stomach doesn't work like a bathtub. In a bathtub when your done taking a bath you pull the plug and in a few minutes its empty. The stomach works differently when it empties. Regardless of what order you eat food when its broke down the stomach moves the broke down food to the duodenum.
The problem with the prosecutions TOD is that its physically impossible for the stomach to still have all her meal in her stomach at 2330. With a meal eaten at 6pm to 6:30pm there should have been food in her duodenum by 2200hrs. At some point it would have started to send the broken down food into the duodenum. Even if it was only a small portion there should have been some food in there. Thats what the defense is argueing. The 2330 hrs is to far outside the window of food digestion.
So if Meredith was killed at 2330 hrs to 2400hrs then the friends she ate with lied. This train of thought brings up a whole lot of issues that the prosecution doesn't want to deal with. So either you call Meredith's friends liars, or you have to move the ToD closer to 2200hrs. Thats what the defense is trying to argue. If the prosecution is forced to change the ToD even by 30 minutes it brings up reasonable doubt.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Amanda's diary and preventive detention

Here is a portion from Amanda’s diary (Murder in Italy, p. 215):

“The police had come to search through my bags to see how guilty my schoolbooks were and one police officer asked me if I had seen the news, about the knife. Wanted to know if I had anything to say. I repeated my story, that I wasn’t anywhere near Meredith when she was murdered. Then he laughed and said, “Another story? Another lie? He stared right at me as if I was no better than gum he wiped off the bottom of his shoe. It was the first time that anybody has looked at me like that before. So when I went back to my cell, I cried at the ugliness of it all, my being in prison, my friend dead, the police following a cold and irrational trail because they have nothing better.”

I decided to post it for three reasons. First, it is an instance of Amanda crying, an issue which has appeared here. Second, anonymous individuals have questioned Amanda’s ability to write well, and the comparison with gum on the sole of a shoe is pretty good, IMHO. Third, the preventive detention law under which Amanda and Raffaele were held without charge forbids interrogation of the individuals detained. This is one more thing that ILE failed to do properly.

 

[Dan O.]

I suppose if you hooked up the cable backwards, so the power was going in pins 1-4 instead of 41-44, you might get a puff of smoke. In my charmed life of bumbling with connectors, I would expect to run into a blocking diode. But who knows...

At low voltages, a blocking diode would waist a significant fraction of the drives total power usage. It's more common to use a fuse with a diode to shunt the reverse voltage. Since USB provides a current limited power source, nothing should permanently smoke.

I am told the image of Meredith's drive showed activity on Nov. 5, 2007, meaning that someone booted up the machine and examined it before removing the drive.

Meredith's computer (like Raffaele's) was a Mac. Most Mac users don't bother shutting their computers down but just let them sleep. They would have had to wake it up to properly shut it down. Without a proper shutdown, recent events recorded by the system log daemon could be lost.

It would have been useful if the investigators had recorded the state of the power manager before shutting the system down. This information would provide the approximate time that the power plug had been removed from the wall and give one more data point in the sequence of recent activities within the cottage.

 

[christianahannah]

I suppose if you hooked up the cable backwards, so the power was going in pins 1-4 instead of 41-44, you might get a puff of smoke. In my charmed life of bumbling with connectors, I would expect to run into a blocking diode. But who knows...

I am told the image of Meredith's drive showed activity on Nov. 5, 2007, meaning that someone booted up the machine and examined it before removing the drive.

This consultant was engaged by the court, but he didn't talk to the first group of people to handle the computers and drives, so of course he didn't get to the bottom of what happened. At the end of his report, he concludes that everyone comported themselves with great professionalism and the loss of Amanda's hard drive remains an unsolved mystery.

Charlie,

Is there documentation for my bolded part above concerning Meredith's drive? Her computer was not removed from the flat until 7 November, 2007. Surely, the police would not have started any investigation on her drive while it was at the flat do you think (with the exception of fingerprints).

I have wondered what state all the computers were in (Amanda, Raffaele, Meredith) when taken into custody - were they on or off, how were they connected to the internet (wireless, broadband, etc.) and was the connection to the internet on or off, etc. and how would any of this affect later activity on the computer?

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

At low voltages, a blocking diode would waist a significant fraction of the drives total power usage. It's more common to use a fuse with a diode to shunt the reverse voltage. Since USB provides a current limited power source, nothing should permanently smoke.

I don't know how it is with Macs, but PC drives (even laptop drives) need 12v. I have this gadget called "Easy IDE" that uses a wall cube.

I don't have a junk laptop drive sitting around or I would hook it up backwards to see what happens. At my other house I've got a couple that would be good fodder for such an experiment.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Tagliabracci's interpretation

I'm wondering if this is a clever tactic by the defence. What they say is that if you're using testing kits that match 16 loci, then all 16 have to match for the profile to be compatible, and that if even one of them doesn't, the individual has to be excluded; since, as they argue, 6 of the loci don't match Raffaele's profile, the DNA can't be his. Whereas the sentencing report implies that if more loci match than don't, that's good enough. It also distorts what the defence expert Tagliabracci said about being able to match profiles using only 6 loci: Massei interprets this to mean that if 11/16 loci match (as in this case), that's even better than 6/6 matching in the other case. But it isn't, because the same principle applies in both cases: all loci have to match, and the only difference is the strength of the certainty that the profile matches the suspect (in the sense that a greater percentage of the population will share 6 loci than 16).

So the defence say that the profile can't be Raffaele's because of the 6 non-matching loci (as Tagliabracci argued). Reading between the lines, perhaps the explanation for these non-matching loci is that other people's DNA is on the clasp.

This is quite remarkable. My only reservation is that if there were no alleles showing up at all in approximately 6 loci, then it would constitute a partial profile. However, that does not seem to be what Dr. Tagliabracci said. If the alleles in 6 loci do not match, the DNA is not Raffaele’s, and the strongest piece of evidence against the pair evaporates. Massei’s reasoning on page 297 of the translation is dubious.