Another excellent post and what we have come to expect from you.
Do you think with Curatolo gone, can the defense also argue against how ludicrious the ToD advanced by the prosecution was in the first trial? And tie in the computer evidence that AK and RS were at home for the most likely actual ToD. Plus hold up to ridicule the moving target ToD was for Mignini during the various phases of the first trial. Can the defense introduce/mention the ToD finding of 10 PM or earlier in the Guede trial?
Why thank you
The answer to the first question is that they can indirectly attack it by implication by showing how extraordinarily improbable a ToD later than 10.30pm would be, and of course if the prosecutors still try and go for an 11.30+ ToD in the appeal trial, the defence can attack it directly and head-on.
I imagine that the defence lawyers will try to couple together all the factors pointing to a ToD shortly after 9pm. In addition to the medical evidence, there's also:
1) the failure of Meredith to retry the phone call to her mother after the 8.56pm aborted call - a hugely important factor in my opinion, given that her mother was in hospital with a serious condition, and Meredith made a point of calling every single day;
2) the fact that Meredith seemingly still had her jacket on when attacked;
3) the refutation of the "Meredith playing with her phone" nonsense - and the far more likely explanation of the 9.58pm and 10.00pm aborted calls (that they were made accidentally by the killer, as he was trying to turn off Meredith's handset);
4) the likely position of Meredith's handset at 10.13pm - some distance from the cottage and en route to the dumping site, according to cell connections - when the GPRS MMS message was received, and the likely reason that the incoming message was aborted (the killer aborted the message to silence the "incoming message" alert);
5) the fact that Meredith still had a load of damp washing in the machine, which one might expect her to have removed had she come home at 9pm and had not been confronted until after 11pm;
6) the fact that Meredith had seemingly neither taken out the textbook that she had borrowed from an English friend (and which she was going to return the following day), nor had she been online or made any phone calls - all of which would be unusual if she had got home at 9pm and not been confronted until after 11pm.
With regard to Mignini moving the ToD in his closing argument, I think that there's potential for the Supreme Court to look at this if it ever got that far. Although I understand that there's more latitude for this sort of thing to occur in the Italian system, it still seems that Massei should never have allowed Mignini to pull off this sleight-of-hand trick at the last moment. However, since my view is that the upshot of this appeal will be acquittal, I think this is a moot point.
And lastly, the defence can't directly reference the ToD finding of fact from Guede's trials (only the evidence/testimony from those trials is admissible in Hellmann's court - not the findings of fact or verdict), but they can reference the evidence upon which this finding of fact was made.
