A UK solicitor has tried desperately to rationalise Comodi's incredible comments about court bias, as reported by Nick Pisa. The solicitor has tried to reason that Comodi was very specifically only referring to a denial of the prosecution's request to review the DNA evidence with an "re-re-test", when she made the damning comment: "The judge and his assistant are clearly against us".
Now, the solicitor bases his bogus opinion on a few things. Firstly, he accuses Pisa of chopping and repasting Comodi's remarks. Strangely, one of the apparent "reasons" the solicitor uses to support this bogus claim is a grammatical one: he claims that two different parts of Comodi's statement have been incorrectly jammed together because of a "dropped paragraph". Now, I don't know where this solicitor went to primary school. but it's fairly basic knowledge of English grammar that if you are writing a direct quotation which includes paragraph spacing, you repeat the quotation mark at the beginning of the new para, but don't put a quotation mark at the end of the preceding para. So Pisa's quote of Comodi's statement is actually correct as written if she spoke (or wrote) the two adjoining paragraphs that he's quoting here:
Comodi said: "There is an ill wind blowing in this case.
"The judge and his assistant are clearly against us. I can see both Knox and Sollecito being freed which will be a shame as they are both involved."
There is no grammatical requirement for a quotation mark at the end of Comodi's first paragraph, but the quotation mark is correctly inserted at the start of the second para. And ironically, the only scenario in which it
would be correct to put a quotation mark at the end of the first para would be if the two paragraphs were not contiguous in the original statement. So we can in fact conclude that the first para and the second para were linked together in Comodi's original statement.
So, grammatical difficulties aside, the solicitor also uses another bogus and wholly invented "argument" to try to show that Comodi was only narrowly referring to the DNA retest when she talked about the judges being against the prosecutors. Some of it seems to be an argument from incredulity: the solicitor can't see how Comodi would be so stupid as to make a sweeping remark about court bias (I can though). And the solicitor's "argument" is essentially destroyed by two things: firstly, these comments were made before the prosecutors had even requested a re-test; and secondly, this is another part of Comodi as quoted by Pisa:
Comodi added: 'We are going to ask for a second review of the evidence. There are to many aspects that are incomplete and we believe the experts are wrong so we want another review.
'This could take another sixty days but I'm not confident that the judge will grant the prosecution request - it's very obvious this time that they are against us.'
Here, Comodi is clearly saying that she's "not confident" that the forthcoming prosecution request for a re-test will be granted by the court. She doesn't say that the request definitely won't be granted in her opinion. And it's also then clear that she is justifying her opinion of "low confidence" in the granting of the prosecution request by stating that "it's very obvious this time that they (the judges) are against us". It's perfectly clear to any objective observer that "this time" means "this appeal trial", and not "the issue of the DNA re-test". After all, if it meant the latter, then this half of her sentence would be totally incompatible with the first half of her sentence in which Comodi expresses "low confidence" in the outcome, rather than the outcome being "very obvious".
So unfortunately the solicitor has failed badly in a misguided and biased attempt to interpret Comodi's accusations of court bias in a far narrower and less-damaging (to Comodi and the prosecution) way. It's clear as day that Comodi's remarks were intended to suggest that Hellmann and the other judges were biased against the prosecution in the trial in general. And I for one look forward to her being seriously reprimanded for her ill-chosen remarks, together with a likely removal from the case. Shame, huh?
PMF is spinning this as a victory for their side, and of course I would love to see them have to accept the opposite.
