Continuation - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[Chris_Halkides]

Yahoo News on the court appearance on the 8th

Lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova described Knox as "very sad and worried" but also ready to face the appeals trial.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101108/ap_on_re_eu/eu_italy_knox

 

[Machiavelli]

OK, thanks for the info. On the basis of what you say, it does seem as if the defence had grounds for complaint here, in that Sollecito was denied the right to speak with a lawyer without the prosecution filing the appropriate decree outlining the reasons for that denial. So on that issue, it seems that the defence have a valid point.

Your clarification of point 3 is interesting, and I'll have to go back and read Sollecito's appeal to understand what the defence is arguing with regard to that. They're saying the judge was wrong to deny their request to have the Gip interrogation nullified, but I'm not quite clear on the details (or the validity) of their argument. It seems that either they didn't realize the decree was missing, as you say, or that they pointed out it was missing but the Gip wrongly assumed it existed (which is what the defence seem to be suggesting). Anyway, I'll have to go back and wade through the legalese again to get a clearer understanding of this...

My understanding is that the missing decree is the decree of arrest, and the defence request is for the nullification of the arrest. The nullity of the GIP interrogation would have been put indirectly, as a consequence of the nullity of arrest, because the GIP is a judge that intervenes in early interrogatory only if the suspect is put under some kind of custody. So the legitimacy of the GIP intervention is a consequence of the decree of arrest.

The fact is, for whoever is accustomed a bit with the Italian system, the request of lawyer Bongiorno is obviously unrealistic. The question of nullity anbout the interrogation by a judge can't be put ex post on grounds of procedure on a previous act. It is totally nrealistic to expect anything from this argument.

 

[RoseMontague]

My understanding is that the missing decree is the decree of arrest, and the defence request is for the nullification of the arrest. The nullity of the GIP interrogation would have been put indirectly, as a consequence of the nullity of arrest, because the GIP is a judge that intervenes in early interrogatory only if the suspect is put under some kind of custody. So the legitimacy of the GIP intervention is a consequence of the decree of arrest.

The fact is, for whoever is accustomed a bit with the Italian system, the request of lawyer Bongiorno is obviously unrealistic. The question of nullity anbout the interrogation by a judge can't be put ex post on grounds of procedure on a previous act. It is totally nrealistic to expect anything from this argument.

I am more concerned if it was fair that Raffaele did not have a chance to consult with his lawyer prior to this hearing/interrogation. It would seem to me that it was not regardless if the defense now has a chance to have this particular request granted.

 

[Justinian2]

Perhaps the proper spin to put on this slander charge is that it was put off until next May.
The appeal should clear some of this stuff up, so it's logical to do the appeal first and then the slander trial. If the main trial is over-turned, then the slander charge becomes a non-sequitur. Furthermore, during the appeal the video of the interrogation may surface which proves or disproves one side or the other.

Anyway, the government has an excuse for keeping Amanda in prison. If she is acquitted, then the slander trial still stands and they will let her out for time served. It covers some fat Italian butts.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Woah.

If this is provable, then it blows the prosecution's case clean out of the water. But why on Earth could the defence not have produced this analysis in advance of the first trial? If it's true and provable, then obviously better late than never, but at the same time it HAS to raise questions about the defence's competencies in 2008 and 2009.

EDIT: Yes, the page showing screensaver activity between 6pm on the 1st and 5.30am on the 2nd is missing. Reading around the rest (in my very average Italian), I don't think the defence are suggesting continuous activity through the whole night, but instead they are suggesting near-continuous activity up until late in the night of the 1st. And, if so, this would destroy the prosecution case. I wonder why that key page is missing.......

It would be jumping to conclusions to say for certain that the same people who destroyed two of the three relevant hard drives, nearly destroyed the third and overwrote the metadata for the movie Amanda and Raffaele claimed to have watched on the night did so deliberately, and also deliberately erased that page of the screen saver log.

However it's not an easy oddity to explain by any means other than deliberate destruction of evidence by police who knew exactly what they were doing. I consider myself computer-literate and I've used Apple computers for years but I had no idea there was a screensaver log to edit, so it doesn't seem like the kind of thing a non-expert would know to seek out and tamper with in the first place.

If this turns out to stand up to scrutiny (and since it's easily checkable by the prosecution it would be a very silly thing to lie about) then I agree, the prosecution case just collapsed completely and there's nothing more to do but make popcorn and watch the show.

Deliberately destroying evidence that exonerates innocent victims of a misguided prosecution crosses a very serious line... I do hope the people responsible get their own day in court when all is said and done..

 

[RoseMontague]

Woah.

If this is provable, then it blows the prosecution's case clean out of the water. But why on Earth could the defence not have produced this analysis in advance of the first trial? If it's true and provable, then obviously better late than never, but at the same time it HAS to raise questions about the defence's competencies in 2008 and 2009.

EDIT: Yes, the page showing screensaver activity between 6pm on the 1st and 5.30am on the 2nd is missing. Reading around the rest (in my very average Italian), I don't think the defence are suggesting continuous activity through the whole night, but instead they are suggesting near-continuous activity up until late in the night of the 1st. And, if so, this would destroy the prosecution case. I wonder why that key page is missing.......

With your edit this makes more sense. That stinks. I hope the information can be recovered.

 

[Machiavelli]

I am more concerned if it was fair that Raffaele did not have a chance to consult with his lawyer prior to this hearing/interrogation. It would seem to me that it was not regardless if the defense now has a chance to have this particular request granted.

Raffaele as a citizen had a chance to consult with a lawyer all the time before being arrested. As a suspect, he had the right to refuse to talk to the judge.
I would be more concerned to find out if he was guilty or not, rather than dispute how fair it is for him to stay 2 days without speaking with his lawyer. If two people give incriminating statements on a crime thay could have committed in complicity or association, I don't see why I should allow them to receive information and pollute the evidence before their first interrogation takes place. The task of Justice is to allow a fair defense, not to help the defense.

 

[RoseMontague]

Raffaele as a citizen had a chance to consult with a lawyer all the time before being arrested. As a suspect, he had the right to refuse to talk to the judge.
I would be more concerned to find out if he was guilty or not, rather than dispute how fair it is for him to stay 2 days without speaking with his lawyer. If two people give incriminating statements on a crime thay could have committed in complicity or association, I don't see why I should allow them to receive information and pollute the evidence before their first interrogation takes place. The task of Justice is to allow a fair defense, not to help the defense.

Allowing a fair defense includes operating by the rules. They did not do so on this rule, as well as many others, in my opinion. If they thought talking to a lawyer would pollute the evidence then they would have needed a decree explaining why they were not allowing it.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

effective counsel?

Raffaele as a citizen had a chance to consult with a lawyer all the time before being arrested. As a suspect, he had the right to refuse to talk to the judge.
I would be more concerned to find out if he was guilty or not, rather than dispute how fair it is for him to stay 2 days without speaking with his lawyer. If two people give incriminating statements on a crime thay could have committed in complicity or association, I don't see why I should allow them to receive information and pollute the evidence before their first interrogation takes place. The task of Justice is to allow a fair defense, not to help the defense.

Machiavelli,

Raffaele did not see his lawyer before he appeared before a judge on 8 November, as I understand it. It occurs to me to wonder whether that hurt his lawyer's ability to prepare him for this appearance. Ditto for Amanda. The right to counsel means the right to effective counsel, if it means anything.

post script
I realize that Amanda did not speak to the court on this occasion. I am not sure that this changes anything.

 

[katy_did]

My understanding is that the missing decree is the decree of arrest, and the defence request is for the nullification of the arrest. The nullity of the GIP interrogation would have been put indirectly, as a consequence of the nullity of arrest, because the GIP is a judge that intervenes in early interrogatory only if the suspect is put under some kind of custody. So the legitimacy of the GIP intervention is a consequence of the decree of arrest.

The fact is, for whoever is accustomed a bit with the Italian system, the request of lawyer Bongiorno is obviously unrealistic. The question of nullity anbout the interrogation by a judge can't be put ex post on grounds of procedure on a previous act. It is totally nrealistic to expect anything from this argument.

I'm not sure, they talk about "il decreto di differimento", which I'd taken to mean a decree of postponement/deferral (presumably of the right to speak with a lawyer). This is different to the decree of arrest, right? My impression is they're arguing that despite the fact that no decree postponing the right to consult with a lawyer was issued in this case, Sollecito was still denied that right, as in the information Katody posted earlier:

The accused has the immediate right to see his attorney, before being arraigned by a judge. If the accused does not have an attorney, the Public Prosecutor's office will select a public defender (difensore di ufficio) from an available list of attorneys.

The right to an attorney immediately after arrest can be suspended by written order of a judge for up to seven days, but only in the most serious of cases. The Public Prosecutor must establish, to the approval of the preliminary investigation judge, that total isolation of the accused is necessary to prevent any hindrance to the investigation.

I tend to agree with Rose that regardless of the validity or otherwise of Bongiorno's argument (I need to do a lot more reading before I can make a judgment on that, LOL) the delay in Sollecito being allowed to speak to a lawyer is perhaps more worrying than any of the more hairsplitting legal arguments.

 

[Katody Matrass]

With your edit this makes more sense. That stinks. I hope the information can be recovered.

It's a misunderstanding
I wrote it's missing because it's not among the scans on the website. I'm sure the defense have them and filed them When you read the scans you realize there is a sentence cut in half on the page about screensavers, and right after that comes a page beginning with the last part of the log, so most of the logs are not there, probably because they're not interesting to an average reader.

It's time for my screensaver to kick in, good night

 

[RoseMontague]

It's a misunderstanding
I wrote it's missing because it's not among the scans on the website. I'm sure the defense have them and filed them When you read the scans you realize there is a sentence cut in half on the page about screensavers, and right after that comes a page beginning with the last part of the log, so most of the logs are not there, probably because they're not interesting to an average reader.

It's time for my screensaver to kick in, good night

Thanks for your help. It seems now that there are logs and they show continuous activity until late that night? Is that where this stands now? We need a translation to be certain.

 

[Machiavelli]

Allowing a fair defense includes operating by the rules. They did not do so on this rule, as well as many others, in my opinion. If they thought talking to a lawyer would pollute the evidence then they would have needed a decree explaining why they were not allowing it.

But along with your thesis, there is only one point of divergence with me. It is the word "they": if you thesis is correct, only one party, the prosecution, would have violated a rule by not issueing the decree ("if" : we should check the jurisprudence to see if 48 hours actually requires a differimento, I don't know).
Which shall be point out, is to be distinguished from "they", a bit generic, a pronoun that could be extended to all parties and authorities involved. And allowing a fair defense is not something that rests entirely on the prosecution. Once again, I see a failure to consider a mechanism by which respoonsability is distributed between each party in the system, rights and rules are warranted by the functioning of the whole, they do not depend entirely on the action of single parts. The defence could have complaint to the judge and they didn't. Actually, they didn't object for more than two years. This should be viewed as something revealing the actual minimal interest of the defence for this "rule issue". They didn't use their shared responsability in the enforcement of the rule when they were able to. This rule suddenly becomes "important" only when they meet a kind of court by which you could legally disallow the interrogation (and possibly could nullify the decree of arrest). So when the "violation" could be "used" as an attempt to obtain something else.

It is worth to know that a goal very close to what they want to obtain - the dismissal of Raffaele's statement to the GIP - could be obtained legally also in a different way: if Raffaele accepts to testify in the Appeal trial, the interrogation will not be acquired and read by the court. But - this is the problem - in this case, while it couild not be read, it could be used in court by Mignini to question Sollecito, together with all his other statements. The defence - this seems to me - obviously wants to avoid this questioning. This is why they try to disallow the interrogation via other means, and this is why they "like" very much to have this violation to use.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Thanks for your help. It seems now that there are logs and they show continuous activity until late that night? Is that where this stands now? We need a translation to be certain.

That does make more sense, and if so it's going to make it even more difficult to come up with any story whatsoever where Amanda and Raffaele were anywhere but Raffaele's house when Meredith was killed.

 

[Magister]

Woah.

If this is provable, then it blows the prosecution's case clean out of the water. But why on Earth could the defence not have produced this analysis in advance of the first trial? If it's true and provable, then obviously better late than never, but at the same time it HAS to raise questions about the defence's competencies in 2008 and 2009.

EDIT: Yes, the page showing screensaver activity between 6pm on the 1st and 5.30am on the 2nd is missing. Reading around the rest (in my very average Italian), I don't think the defence are suggesting continuous activity through the whole night, but instead they are suggesting near-continuous activity up until late in the night of the 1st. And, if so, this would destroy the prosecution case. I wonder why that key page is missing.......

And with the disco buses not running on Thursday 1 November 2007 proving Curatolo had confused that night with Halloween......

 

[Machiavelli]

Machiavelli,

Raffaele did not see his lawyer before he appeared before a judge on 8 November, as I understand it. It occurs to me to wonder whether that hurt his lawyer's ability to prepare him for this appearance. Ditto for Amanda. The right to counsel means the right to effective counsel, if it means anything.

post script
I realize that Amanda did not speak to the court on this occasion. I am not sure that this changes anything.

the post script:
you realize now that Amanda did not speak to the judge in this occasion?
This does change anything for Raffaele. For Amanda, we see she refused to to be questioned - albeit her hand written statement would have required some questions - but not only this: she also didn't make any spontaneous statement. She didn't say anything like "I was coerced", "my statement to the PM was false", "I had a confused memory, now I can tell you my testimony on Patrick Lumumba was false", "Patrick Lumumba is innocent", "I was forced by fear". She didn't say anything.

Claudia Matteini has Amanda's hand written note and her previous statement with incriminating revelations, now she sitting is before a suspect declaring "I avoke my right not to declare". This is something a GIP sees usually only by the most dangerous guilty folks. I think this situation contributed to a very negative impression of Amanda in Claudia Matteini.
Amanda wanted to obviosly take time before answering any question and before taking a position, possibly to confer and decide the strategy with lawyers and see how it evolves with evidence, Raffaele, Patrick and the yet unknown other man. She refuses any comment despite her incriminating and ambiguous pack of statements of the latest days.
All that sounds not good for a judge. In this sense, it maybe changed something for Amanda.

 

[Danceme]

Pahahahaha now our "professional defence attorney" seems to believe that his observation of the disco buses on Sat 30th Oct 2010 was relevant, because.......... the murder night was also a Saturday!

Breaking news: November 1st 2007 was a Thursday. Not a Saturday. Or even a Friday.

And while the clubs in town were indisputably open, it's the big out-of-town discos that were the issue here - since these were the ones to which the buses ran. And they were all closed on Thursday 1st November 2007, since it was All Saints' Day - a religious holiday in Italy, and the day after the big Halloween celebrations. And the buses therefore didn't run on that night. End of story.

Another triumph of accuracy for our legal expert

I hate to interfere with your gloating LJ but Frommer's Italy says Gradisca is only open on Thursdays and Saturdays.

http://tinyurl.com/Frommers-Italy-2008

Did you actually call the discos to find out for sure. I couldn't find their opening hours on their websites, perhaps you can pinpoint it please.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I hate to interfere with your gloating LJ but Frommer's Italy says Gradisca is only open on Thursdays and Saturdays.

http://tinyurl.com/Frommers-Italy-2008

Did you actually call the discos to find out for sure. I couldn't find their opening hours on their websites, perhaps you can pinpoint it please.

Does it say that it's open on All Saints' Day?

 

[Draca]

That does make more sense, and if so it's going to make it even more difficult to come up with any story whatsoever where Amanda and Raffaele were anywhere but Raffaele's house when Meredith was killed.

This is not a problem. The murder occurred after Raffaele's computer activity late at night. Toto had already come back to the park bench after the Disco buses parked for the night. Amanda needed the kitchen knife to cut the chocolate cake she made that was at the cottage. This murder did not happen because of reefer madness or a sex game gone wrong. It was becasue of pot munchies. They just had to have chocolate cake! They ran into rudy and he wanted some also. They met up with him when he was coming home from the Disco.

 

[Danceme]

Does it say that it's open on All Saints' Day?

The disco's website doesn't say anything about the opening days or hours, at least as far as I can see, hence the request to LJ to pinpoint this information.

You can read what Frommers says for yourself as I've handily provided the link.