Nogbad,
The Kercher family believes that there were multiple attackers. I was persuaded by a number of things, not the least of which was Ron Hendry's analysis, that there was just one. Their confusion is coming through to me more palpably than it did before. I believe that the family of any murder victim is likely to have an especially hard time being objective about the facts of their case. Judging by the comments here, I am not the only one who is thinking along these lines.
It also appears that the Kercher family have either been misled by their own lawyer about the ramifications of the Supreme Court's Guede ruling, or that they don't understand the issue.
I will try, yet again, to outline this issue as simply as possible. The first trial and appeal trial in Guede's case both concluded that Guede was guilty of the murder, but they both then added that in those courts' opinions there was evidence to suggest that Guede was only one of a group of people responsible for the murder. The Supreme Court affirmed the verdicts of the lower courts. It did not reach its own findings of fact, whether those findings were related to the guilt of Guede or the presence of other killers.
But a fundamental cornerstone of modern jurisprudence is that findings of fact in one person's trial can have no read-across bearing on another person's trial. And in addition to this fundamental doctrine, there's actually another extremely strong reason why this particular finding of fact in Guede's trial is of little or no real substance. I shall endeavour to explain:
Firstly, it's arguable that the courts in Guede's trial had no business in law in finding that the murder was a group act: the role of the courts was purely to evaluate Guede's guilt. But regardless of that, here's the important thing:
nobody from any side in Guede's trial had any desire to refute the suggestion that the murder was a group act. Prosecutors already believed that this was what happened, and they were preparing to prosecute Knox and Sollecito accordingly. Guede's defence team certainly didn't want to argue that there were not others present: indeed, the core of Guede's defence was that two other people committed the murder while he was sitting on the toilet.
So the evidence pertaining to the presence of others was never even properly tested in Guede's trials, since it was actually in the interests of every party in those trials to establish evidence of the presence of others! The prosecutors wanted this fact to be established, the defence wanted this to be established, and the court obliged. In fact, the "evidence" pointing to multiple assailants is almost all the product of misinterpretation or outright mendacity.
The truth is that all the evidence is perfectly consistent with one man - Rudy Guede - acting alone. I suspect that this is what Hellmann's motivation document will say, since he has already stated that Knox and Sollecito did not commit the murder, and that the "staging" never even happened.
?
Ahem,