Circumstantial evidence, Galati (and Super8)
Suppose we had a witness who saw Rudy running along the road from the apartment to Lana's around 10 p.m. on the night of 01 Nov 2007 and another one who saw him outside Lana's place, leaning against a tree out of breath. If we add those two pieces of evidence to the discovery of Meredith's phones in the garden the next day we can infer a fact. The fact is that Rudy took and threw Meredith's phones into Lana's garden. So, three pieces of circumstantial evidence = one fact.
We can take that fact and use it in combination with other facts to make other inferences. Rudy's DNA was found on the handbag in which Meredith kept her phones, for instance. That may be enough, in combination with the first fact, to infer another one - that Rudy stole the phones. We could certainly heap more facts on the pile to buttress that inference: evidence that Meredith was not in the habit of giving her phones to other people, cell tower pings, telephone records etc.
Going back to Rudy running along the road, that is not only a circumstance which, with other circumstances, allows us to infer a fact, it is also itself direct evidence of a material fact - namely that Rudy was running away from the direction of the apartment at that particular time. We might, with other evidence, start to draw inferences from that fact too, putting it to a different use to help us infer other facts. Thus, evidence can be both direct
and circumstantial at one and the same time depending on what we do with it.
Wikipedia says this about circumstantial evidence:
Circumstantial evidence is evidence in which an inference is required to connect it to a conclusion of fact, like a fingerprint at the scene of a crime. By contrast, direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion directly—i.e., without need for any additional evidence or the intervening inference.
[highlight]On its own, it is the nature of circumstantial evidence for more than one explanation to still be possible.[/highlight] Inference from one piece of circumstantial evidence may not guarantee accuracy. [highlight]Circumstantial evidence usually accumulates into a collection, so that the pieces then become corroborating evidence.[/highlight] Together, they may more strongly support one particular inference over another. An explanation involving circumstantial evidence becomes more valid as proof of a fact when the alternative explanations have been ruled out.
I highlighted two sentences because they form the basis of a significant part of Galati's critique of Hellman-Zanetti. He accuses them of picking off individual bits of circumstantial evidence one by one without combining them into a coherent whole. Super8 [posting at IIP] rounded off his long post by parroting his understanding of Galati and accusing us of not grasping this not very deep concept but later passed over my request for further elucidation:
Clive Wismayer said:
Super8 said:
No single one of these proves AK committed the crime, and that is where the innocentitti (is that what you are called) fail in reasoning. Similar reasoning to Hellmann, [highlight]pick a point and say that doesn’t prove anything and totally fail to combine all into a single reasoned entity[/highlight]. Why do you start from an ‘AK is innocent’ viewpoint, do you not want to know who committed the crime.
I spy another Galati fan, like myself.
Super8, this is how you concluded your post and, if you have time, I would like to discuss just this part with you in order to understand better how we fail in our reasoning. Can you identify any points Hellman rejected which, if 'combined into a single reasoned entity' would bear greater weight as evidence for the prosecution?
I confess I have not waded through Galati fully but I have read the part where he attacks H-Z for their egregious mishandling of circumstantial evidence. If it were true that they had isolated individual pieces of circumstantial evidence from other pieces then Galati would certainly be on to something because that would indeed be a gross error. As the wiki quote says, circumstantial evidence is inherently ambiguous in isolation. Here's a little Galati on the point (take a deep breath before reading):
Galati appeal: Preface by komponisto* said:
But in addition to these learned definitions of the method of assessing circumstantial evidence, the Supreme Court has also suggested to the merit judge how to conduct the evaluation of multiple pieces of evidence of a circumstantial character. The Court has established [9] that “the rule articulated in the initial statement of C.P.P. Article 192, according to which ‘the existence of a fact cannot be inferred from circumstances’ — based, in rational terms, on the inherent ambiguity of circumstances themselves [ancorata, sul piano razionale, all'equivocità ontologicamente propria degli indizi], which enables them to be placed in (direct or inverse) causal relationships, with a multiplicity of causes or effects — serves to signify that [highlight][a single] circumstance is considered inadequate on its own to establish the facts[/highlight] [assicurare l'accertamento dei fatti].
Translation of the translation:
Circumstantial evidence, viewed in isolation, tends to be ambiguous. More
Gelatine Galati.
Galati appeal: Preface said:
[Such a circumstance] acquires probative value only when multiple pieces of evidence can all be traced to a single cause or a single effect. In applying this, therefore, the judge must first examine each item of evidence [indizio], identifying all its possible logical connections, then ascertaining their gravity, which is inversely proportional to the number of such connections, as well as the precision, which is correlated to the sharpness of [the item's] contours, the clarity of its representation, to the direct or indirect source of knowledge from which it derives, [and thus] to its reliability. [The judge] must, finally, proceed to the final synthesis, ascertaining whether the items under examination are consistent [concordanti], i.e. whether they can be linked to a single cause or a single effect, so that the existence or nonexistence of the fact to be proved can be inferred.
Translation of the translation:
As Wiki says
'circumstantial evidence usually accumulates into a collection'
This is Galati's punchline:
Galati appeal: Preface said:
This review of the Cassazione‘s jurisprudence on circumstantial cases grows out of the fact that [highlight]the Corte di Assise di Appello has not conducted a unified evaluation of the evidence and has not examined the various items of evidence in a unified and global manner. In the ruling under appeal, it has, on the contrary, made a hash out of [sminuzzato] the evidence; it has assessed each piece of evidence in an isolated way according to an erroneous logical procedure[/highlight], with the aim of critiquing its individual qualitative value; without noticing that, if it had followed the evaluative procedure dictated by the Cassazione, each item would have been integrated with the others, leading to an unambiguous clarification of what had been introduced [into evidence], so as to arrive at the logical proof of the fact: that is, the responsibility of the defendants for the murder.
Now, I am throwing out a challenge to Super8 (or anyone) to identify a piece of evidence that Hellman has treated in this way and to tell us how its assessment is affected by being combined with other evidence. And because I don't want to trick or trap him or her I should explain this further point about the Italian law governing circumstantial evidence, also taken from Galati:
Galati appeal: Preface said:
With the enactment of C.P.P. Article 192, our legislature has set forth the rules for assessing evidence in a criminal trial. Circumstantial evidence is dealt with in the second paragraph of the Article, which specifies that [highlight]“The existence of a fact cannot be inferred [desunta] from circumstantial evidence unless the latter is serious, precise, and consistent[/highlight]
What this does is introduce
a threshold test. That is to say, before we get to combining
this evidence with
that evidence and drawing inferences from the combination, the pieces of evidence themselves must first be
'serious, precise and consistent'. For example, you might want to use the DNA evidence on the knife to show that it was the murder weapon, perhaps in combination with the evidence of its discovery in Raffaele's kitchen in an 'extremely clean' state and Amanda's visit to Quintavelle to purchase cleaning products on the morning of 02 Nov. However, you can't, because the DNA evidence is not 'serious, precise and consistent'. So you don't even get to start the combining process.
Now, I suspect Super8 and the legal geniuses at TJMK may not understand this. They probably think you can overcome the weaknesses of the DNA evidence by combining it with other circumstantial evidence to restore it to something of value. Dead wrong. Read Galati and he will explain it.
*
komponisto deserves a Congressional medal of honour for wading through this verbiage imho
