So the current explanation is that the contaminated bra clasp planted by the police does not have Raffaele's DNA?
I remember going through this dumbstruck, the only thing I could think was 'why didn't they just
frame them?' It's nearly unbelievable to me that they actually offered those items as 'evidence' in any court in the world. Less developed countries might not employ DNA evidence, thus Italy probably
does have the worst DNA evidence standards in the world, though honest prosecutors in Italy no doubt don't stoop to Mignini's level.
As for your question, it does appear the
Conti-Vecchiotti Report (translated by Komponisto and Katy-Did!) Y-Haplotype of Raffaele was on the clasp, unfortunately the
database is hardly complete and Raffaele's is not listed giving us no indication of the rarity in Puglia. His father was from that area too, wasn't he?
C&V Capillary Electrophoresis said:
The genetic profile thus derives from a mixture of unidentified biological substances (it will be recalled that no test was performed with a view toward revealing the presence of flaking cells, and so the claim is without scientific basis), whose larger component is represented by the DNA of the victim and whose smaller component is represented by DNA from several individuals (cf. autosomic STRs) of male sex (cf. Y chromosome), of which one of the Y haplotypes corresponds to the Y haplotype of Raffaele Sollecito
So the y-haplotype is probably his, but there's so much mess it doesn't come out in the
autosomic and of course Meredith's dwarfs his:
C&V Capillary Electrophoresis Autosomic STRs said:
Thus, the interpretation of the electropherogram is rather more complex and involved [articolata] than what is reported in the RTIGF. Indeed, even if one were to arbitrarily limit the application of Recommendation 6 to peaks in stutter position above the threshold of 50 RFU, this still reveals a profile deriving from the mixture of several individuals consisting of a major contributor and several minor contributors, as summarized in the table
below:
So it's probably Raffaele's, but as the Judge said it might not be. It's not like the 1 in millions type odds you get with a real DNA profile, and of course, no one knows what it is. Think about that for a second, that's the true danger with this LCN DNA, DNA doesn't work as a GPS or a timestamp, all it does is
identify biological material found. So....what did they find? You find blood, or semen, or saliva and as long as it's inherent to the room, it's pretty much identified for you, much better than the days of saying the blood type was compatible with O+ or something. Plus the
items aren't even inherent to the room! 'Hypothesizing' about flaked skin cells is all fun and games until you realize that means either could easily have happened by secondary or tertiary transfer as well, playing with DNA this small means all the old rules are broken, and as for the knife--that never left the drawer.
My guess is the same as both defense lawyers: it's a 'prop.' They never intended to actually use it in court, it was mainly to get Amanda to confess, they hit her hard with mindgames all at this same time: the *cough* 'clear-cut'
CCTV, the bogus knife, the HIV false
positive which gave them the goods for the Foxy Knoxy smear to go along with all the lies that Curious has been posting, including the ones about the washing machine and the laundromat. Maybe they figured they could get away with it when Stefanoni confirmed it, who knows. It's garbage and even if it was legit it wouldn't be very good evidence of murder anyway due to the absolute lack of corroborating evidence in the room.
At any rate, with no biological material the most obvious answer is not skin cells, it's the fact that during the PCR amplification stage they multiply
67 million DNA, which won't come with a biological substance in a lab not equipped for it which makes pretensions it never had any contamination
ever. That's like a major league pitcher saying he never gave up a run--it's
impossible. So if they say that it means two things: They're lying and they're highly susceptible to contamination.
It's one of those ones where you wonder if they're trying to pretend they're so incompetent they can't be corrupt, or if they're corrupt because no one can be that incompetent. There's a lot of that going around this case...
, but I get the feeling Amanda Knox would feel differently (especially if, as I recall was mentioned at one point or another, she was hoping to become a translator).
Will add them also to my remarks on Websleuths. Thanks again!