Continuation Part Six: Discussion of the Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito case

[Dan O.]

***EXTREME IDIOT/BIAS ALERT***

A pro-guilt commentator has posted a commentary piece whose central assertion is as follows:

...
2) But the police didn't discover any alleged blood evidence in the hallway until December 2007, and it remained essentially invisible until then - therefore

And those markers placed in the hall, the big #2, the big #3, were the police just setting up an indoor miniature golf course?

 

[Machiavelli]

The answer is simple.

Stefanoni declared - but did nothing to demonstrate - that she had the controls. She claimed intent to deposit them, but no-one has provided any documentation indicating that they were actually deposited. No docket number, no reciept, no deposition reference, nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nil.

Vechiotti asked her for the files related to the testing, which would include the controls. Vechiotti did not recieve the controls.

You are a bit twisting and omitting things.
The transcript actually also records the deposit of some negative controls on Oct. 4, but besides that, the transcript records the statement that Stefanoni made about the negative controls, the declaration that they exist, and the declaration that they will be deposited.
When you say “no-one has provided any documentation, number, etc.” this is a sillyness, because no-one will ever provide you such kind of documentation. You need to access such documentation. This is what a court-appointed expert is supposed to do (not “be provided”). You are not provided court documentation: there is a reason why we say “deposited”.

Then, we come to what you omit: you omit to say that Vecchiotti was caught ignoring what is in the transcript of the preliminary hearing (the transcripts which she quotes, on a key topic she uses in her report).
You ‘forget’ to consider that Vecchiotti states that she doesn’t even know what is written in the transcript, she says she hears this information now for the first time. And that through all her answers, it is basically obvious that she doesn’t even know the content of the Oct. 2008 transcript.
It’s not that she just didn’t find the negative controls in the file, or that she ‘was not provided’ documentation (itself that would be already an unacceptable excuse); actually, she doesn’t even know this issue was in the content of the Oct. 2008 hearings (“I learn this only now for the first time”).

You also omit other Vecchiotti’s “omissions”: the fact that she omits to mention the reference to negative controls made on Oct. 8. in her report; the fact that she omits to check anywhere, besides expecting to be provided material from Stefanoni; the fact that – in contradiction with this – she asserts that she does research the case file to read the transcripts, which she uses and quotes (but doesn’t know what is written into them); the fact that she fails to point out lack in documentation in her e-mail exchange with Stefanoni; the fact that she fails to specifically request files that allegedly are missing, and admits that; the fact that she declares Stefanoni was cooperative; the fact that she fails to verify if such alleged missing files are at the chancellery; the fact that she tries to ‘blame’ others with some inconsistent statements (“they”, confusion between Stefanoni and courts, etc.); the fact that she does not report any denial from Stefanoni, nor any alleged contradiction between her court declarations and the existing documentation.

On my part, I can conclude Vecchiotti simply did not search for the controls, did not mention the lack of them at any stage of her research. But the point is: in other words, what YOU fail to do, is to scrutinize Vecchiotti.
You want to draw ‘inference’ only about Stefanoni (I’ll add: based on your bias) while don’t draw any inference about Vechiotti. Did she condct her work properly?
Btw, did she complain about the raw data?

The only logical inference at this point is that the controls did not exist and that Stefanoni did not do them, otherwise, why were they not in the evidence files, or the files submitted for review?

Submitted by whom?
By Vecchiotti herself?
The answer should be “yes”. The prosecution is not submitting anything to Vecchiotti for review. It is an expert executing a judge’s order. The experts needs to research and collect material, not others, not the parties, nobody else.

It's a matter of severe professional misconduct in any profession outside of Italy to fail to submit the enitirety of a piece of work for review when you know that work is under review.

Maybe it need to be clarified that Vecchiotti is not somebody “above” Stafanoni or above any of the parties in a trial. She does not have a natural chrismal authority to review others’ work; she does not have any superior authority, she cannot judge anyone. Her only authority derives from the judge’s orders, and the only way to accomplish such orders is to act in first person to fulfil her task, collect her material. Her task is to verify if there is DNA on the knife, not to judge Stefanoni. Nobody has a duty to serve Vecchiotti in her work beyond what is due by the law.

In other countries, case reviews can include everything written about the case, even handwritten scribbles - if it's related to the case , it's in.

It can include whatever Vecchiotti requests. Not what she doesn’t request.

Stefanoni's trust of Vecchiotti is irrelevant. Stefanoni's responsibility is to show her work, not try to trick another person into thinking she'd done work she presented zero evidence of doing. Saying "they're in the files" is worthless when you can easily re-produce them or signpost on to their exact location.

Stefanoni had no professional reason not to prepare to hand over the entirety of her case files to C+V before they even requested them.

No reason at all.

The reason is that there is a court appointed expert reviewing her work. Stefanonis interest is irrelevant at this point. You're essentially arguing that anyone hiding poor work should be allowed to hide it on the basis that it is in their interest to hide their poor work.

Your arguement is not only illogical, but immoral.

Actually, the thing that really doesn’t matter, is your opinion about what is moral or immoral. Expecially since your opinion is built on the assumption that Vecchiotti, a court appointed experts, should be held by definition as trusted by the parties or as more reliable (by parties or by judges) than other experts. Which is not. Apparently you have a Vecchiotti-centered concept of morality, which is not a case to subscribe to.

If Stefanoni’s actions are justified by her interest, which is not a criminal interest but a legal one, and if they are complying with the law, then her actions are lawful, correct, and right.
With due respect, you are nobody for deciding that Stefanoni has a responsibility to “show” which goes beyond the rules. And you are also not in the position to assert that there is no evidence that Stefanoni did something: the person who has the burden to make verifications – the court-appointed expert in this case – needs to do a research and see if there is evidence or not. For what we know, Stefanoni declared to have deposited the negative controls, she did that on the Oct. 2008 hearings, and that exhausts all her duties related to the point. The prosecutor declared that the docmentation exists. Vecchiotti does’t verify, doesn’t even know what’s written in the 2008 transcripts, and you think she can blame somebody else? "not provide evidence"...?
While you fail to make any kind of inference or scrutiny about Vecchiotti's work?

 

[Dan O.]

I don't believe they were concerned that the phone call warning of a bomb in the toilet was taken seriously. I doubt they went at top speed with siren blaring.

At a minimum since it was well after dark they had their headlights on.

Okay. When did he step on the bath mat? Not a challenge as the rest is kinda what I think.

When he steps out of the shower after rinsing blood off the outside of his pant seam. Try it yourself. stand on the left foot, raise the right knee and hold the right foot out to the side. Your toes are naturally pointing down and when you rinse the pant seam some of the water will flow down to the foot across the ankle, over the bottom of your foot and off the big toe. This wets the foot exactly as we see in the stain on the mat missing the little toes. Then take a step just outside the shower to say, reach for a towel putting the ball of the foot down but not the heal. The outside pant leg is still soaking wet so will drip onto the outside edge of the mat saturating it just like we see on the mat. Do this at home and see for your self (water will show up fine on most dark towels so you don't need to cut anybody). Take pictures and show us what you get. Then compare your pictures with the crime scene photos of the bath mat.

He walked out and left shoe prints and then returned. He didn't just leave as the PGP say.

He didn't just leave. The physical print evidence is clear for anyone that actually looks at it.

 

[Grinder]

Let's assume for a moment your scenario is valid. You are stating the files were deposited into the file twice and Vecchiotti either missed them or didn't look for them.

So here is Comodi's perfect chance to completely discredit Vecchiotti by whipping out either the chancellery record showing they were, in fact, deposited in October 2008 or the transcript showing it, and she doesn't do it?

This would mean Comodi is a complete idiot.

And the entire defense team especially the DNA experts.

 

[Machiavelli]

Let's assume for a moment your scenario is valid. You are stating the files were deposited into the file twice and Vecchiotti either missed them or didn't look for them.

So here is Comodi's perfect chance to completely discredit Vecchiotti by whipping out either the chancellery record showing they were, in fact, deposited in October 2008 or the transcript showing it, and she doesn't do it?

This would mean Comodi is a complete idiot.

Actually she does do that, in my opinion. She does that over the hearings between August and September 2011. But the problem is, you are not putting a corrupt judge into the equation.

Indeed Comodi brought the negative controls, and the chanhellery records; but the judge (Pratillo Helmann) simply declined to accept them, on the ground that "the contamination could have occurred outside the laboratory" (I'm not joking, that was the reason given by Hellmann-Zanetti's court).

On the other hand, Vcchiotti basically refused to read them, saying she couldn't understand them, she would need time to read them, the photocopies were bad, she needed glasses, didn't understand reference pages and so on.

Comodi belied Vecchiotti but the problem is Vecchiotti is only a court's ploy. It's not Vecchiotti cheating alone, it looks like a team game lining up Vecchiotti and the judge.

 

[LondonJohn]

No, I can see that as possible. Totally!!! I mean why not?? She's probably a freak.but it's actually even crazier than that. The two of you would get Giselle Bundchen to join you.


This damn story drives me CRAZY. Especially when the answer is so simple and staring everyone down.

I want to smack the guilters and the Italians upside the head and say "MACFLY, MACFLY THINK, THINK!!!!"

Giselle would only get to join in once she'd set up all the video recording equipment properly


Incidentally, talking of stupid and/or highly improbable things: a UK solder was last week found guilty of the murder of a defenceless Afghan man (who was already lying wounded) - he shot the man in the chest and head.

But here's the thing: the soldier KNEW that one of his colleagues (who was actually acquitted of murder) was wearing a helmet camera which recorded audio and video. They assumed collectively (there were three of them in all) that they could keep the video out of official hands, but were seemingly keen to show it off to their mates back home in UK ("Look at me slotting a towelhead insurgent hahahaha").

But of course the video/audio eventually found its way into the wider domain. And on it, EVERYTHING is shown and heard including the shots being fired into the defenceless (and still very much alive) man - including, incredibly, the soldier who did the shooting telling the other two "I've just broken the Geneva Convention lads. Obviously this goes nowhere else".

Assuming for a moment that none of these three soldiers went out with the premeditated intent to commit a war crime, the question therefore remains obvious: once they all knew what had happened, why didn't they destroy the incontrovertible evidence (in the form of the digital recording)?!!!!! They had the means and the mechanism to destroy it - heck, in extremis, they could have even ripped off the entire helmetcam mechanism, shot it to pieces in the field, and claimed that an insurgent had ripped it off in hand-to-hand combat, and that it had been shot up in the ensuing firefight.

But no, they chose to keep it as some sort of "trophy", even though they'd apparently managed to conceal its existence from the army. Why would they have kept something that they knew would almost inevitably see at least one of them condemned to a life imprisonment if it was ever discovered?

People do strange, incomprehensible and self-harming things all the time. That's part of the vagaries of human nature.

 

[Grinder]

If my memory serves correctly, isn't what happened something along the following lines:

In Hellmann's court, Vechiotti said she had never received the negative controls. Comodi butted in to say that this was all ridiculous because the negative controls were in fact deposited with the courts during one of the very early preliminary hearings.

Hellmann said something like "OK, fine, we'll get someone to pull the relevant document out from the file dating from that time period". Someone looked, but couldn't in fact find any such negative controls in the court file from that time period or any other time.

Comodi said something like "Well, we DID lodge them with the court, but here's a copy anyhow if you can't manage to find them", and handed over a smudgy photocopy that - under closer examination - did not appear to be a genuine negative control run from the right overall experimental run.

Is this anything near an accurate recollection?

That's how I remember it. I thought that was when they tried to sneak something in by putting it in a folder but Hellmann caught them or something like that.

Btw, I believe it is more likely that a murderer would take a knife from his home and return it than you would have sex with what's her name and kill a homeless person. That is not a comment about you. And if Amanda and Raf did murder, they would have had to be totally whacked out so all bets on their respective personalities would be off.

I appreciate your helping convey that isolating the one aspect of taking a knife from everything else was the point.

 

[acbytesla]

Giselle would only get to join in once she'd set up all the video recording equipment properly

Well only if you skipped the "thrill kill and went straight to the sex.

Incidentally, talking of stupid and/or highly improbable things: a UK solder was last week found guilty of the murder of a defenceless Afghan man (who was already lying wounded) - he shot the man in the chest and head.

But here's the thing: the soldier KNEW that one of his colleagues (who was actually acquitted of murder) was wearing a helmet camera which recorded audio and video. They assumed collectively (there were three of them in all) that they could keep the video out of official hands, but were seemingly keen to show it off to their mates back home in UK ("Look at me slotting a towelhead insurgent hahahaha").

But of course the video/audio eventually found its way into the wider domain. And on it, EVERYTHING is shown and heard - including,incredibly, the soldier who did the shooting telling the other two "I've just broken the Geneva Convention lads. Obviously this goes nowhere else".

Assuming for a moment that none of these three soldiers went out with the premeditated intent to commit a war crime, the question therefore remains obvious: once they all knew what had happened, why didn't they destroy the incontrovertible evidence (in the form of the digital recording)?!!!!! They had the means and the mechanism to destroy it - heck, in extremis, they could have even ripped off the entire helmetcam mechanism, shot it to pieces in the field, and claimed that an insurgent had ripped it off in hand-to-hand combat, and that it had been shot up in the ensuing firefight.

But no, they chose to keep it as some sort of "trophy", even though they'd apparently managed to conceal its existence from the army. Why would they have kept something that they knew could see at least one of them condemned to a life imprisonment?

People do strange, incomprehensible and self-harming things all the time. That's part of the vagaries of human nature.

Well, what happens in battle zones changes things dramatically. I've read a lot of military and war history...mostly about WWII and unfortunately, that kind of thing really is more common than we care to think about. There is a bond between soldiers that civilians never experience. They become a little too desensitized to the violence and the killing. So I can see how they might trust each other, obviously a little too much. Obviously they weren't the brightest bulbs. No, that's not it. They were MONUMENTALLY STUPID.

I always worry about vets that have seen a lot of action returning to society. It's amazing how many of them end up killing someone and/or themselves when they get back home.

 

[Ampulla of Vater]

<snipped>

As for, the question if it's a game, well a legal disupte in a way is a game, in the sense that it is a dispute based on rules and strategies.
And within this perspective, it was correct - and appropriate, in my opinion - on the part of Stefanoni to not "help" Vecchiotti beyond any explicit request.
The fact that Vecchiotti happens to be "exposed" this way is a proof that Stefanoni's behavior was intelligent. It was a good idea to let Vecchiotti take her "misstep" alone. Had Stefanoni been more "helpful", she would have deleted records/tracks of Vecchiotti's dishonesty.

I have always viewed trials as a sort of game. You have to present your case within the rules in an attempt to 'win'. So on this, we have agreement.

With regard to what you wrote about Stefanoni's strategy, my question is why? What good does it do Stefanoni to purposely not point out the negative controls to Vecchiotti? Why wouldn't she be motivated to personally hand-deliver them to her? Wouldn't it have been better for Vecchiotti to have been forced to write a glowing report of Stefanoni's work on the case? Was it more important to Stefanoni to create a misstep for Vechiotti than to have the "experts" publically state Stefanoni's work was perfect in every way?

It makes no sense.

 

[Grinder]

Giselle would only get to join in once she'd set up all the video recording equipment properly


Incidentally, talking of stupid and/or highly improbable things: a UK solder was last week found guilty of the murder of a defenceless Afghan man (who was already lying wounded) - he shot the man in the chest and head.

But here's the thing: the soldier KNEW that one of his colleagues (who was actually acquitted of murder) was wearing a helmet camera which recorded audio and video. They assumed collectively (there were three of them in all) that they could keep the video out of official hands, but were seemingly keen to show it off to their mates back home in UK ("Look at me slotting a towelhead insurgent hahahaha").

But of course the video/audio eventually found its way into the wider domain. And on it, EVERYTHING is shown and heard including the shots being fired into the defenceless (and still very much alive) man - including, incredibly, the soldier who did the shooting telling the other two "I've just broken the Geneva Convention lads. Obviously this goes nowhere else".

Assuming for a moment that none of these three soldiers went out with the premeditated intent to commit a war crime, the question therefore remains obvious: once they all knew what had happened, why didn't they destroy the incontrovertible evidence (in the form of the digital recording)?!!!!! They had the means and the mechanism to destroy it - heck, in extremis, they could have even ripped off the entire helmetcam mechanism, shot it to pieces in the field, and claimed that an insurgent had ripped it off in hand-to-hand combat, and that it had been shot up in the ensuing firefight.

But no, they chose to keep it as some sort of "trophy", even though they'd apparently managed to conceal its existence from the army. Why would they have kept something that they knew would almost inevitably see at least one of them condemned to a life imprisonment if it was ever discovered?

People do strange, incomprehensible and self-harming things all the time. That's part of the vagaries of human nature.

This is totally impossible. There was no psychopathy in their histroies or they wouldn't have been allowed in Her Majesties whatever and they were good students from good homes. They certainly would have turned off the video.

This is just totally crazy and you must have made it all up.

Besides the good guys never kill defenseless people, I've seen it in the movies!

 

[LondonJohn]

That's how I remember it. I thought that was when they tried to sneak something in by putting it in a folder but Hellmann caught them or something like that.

Btw, I believe it is more likely that a murderer would take a knife from his home and return it than you would have sex with what's her name and kill a homeless person. That is not a comment about you. And if Amanda and Raf did murder, they would have had to be totally whacked out so all bets on their respective personalities would be off.

I appreciate your helping convey that isolating the one aspect of taking a knife from everything else was the point.

How dare you! I'll have you know that the first part of this scenario almost worked with former Playboy centrefold Carrie Westcott once

(But because it didn't quite work, I never got as far as suggesting part two of the scenario )

 

[Skind]

The transcript actually also records the deposit of some negative controls on Oct. 4, but besides that, the transcript records the statement that Stefanoni made about the negative controls, the declaration that they exist, and the declaration that they will be deposited.

If they were deposited, then it would have been trivial for Comodi to pony up the docket/chancellery/receipt/submission number.

Declaring that they will be deposited is not proof that they were desposited. If they exsited and were deposited, there is no reason for them not to exist in the files Stefanoni sent to C+V.

When you say “no-one has provided any documentation, number, etc.” this is a sillyness, because no-one will ever provide you such kind of documentation. You need to access such documentation. This is what a court-appointed expert is supposed to do (not “be provided”). You are not provided court documentation: there is a reason why we say “deposited”.

This objection is silly. If the documents were desposited, then the desposition reference can be given. This was in court, so my rights of access are irrelevant. No evidence of actual desposition was given in court when such evidence would be available, relevant, known, and legal to give.

The first stop of a court appointment expert on accessing the information would be to ask the person that generated it.

You ‘forget’ to consider that Vecchiotti states that she doesn’t even know what is written in the transcript, she says she hears this information now for the first time.

No, she states that she was not aware that the controls had been deposited. She makes no mention of not knowing that there was an intent to deposit.

The content of the Oct 8 hearings was that Stefanoni claimed intent to deposit, not that she actually had.

Submitted by whom?
By Vecchiotti herself?
The answer should be “yes”. The prosecution is not submitting anything to Vecchiotti for review. It is an expert executing a judge’s order. The experts needs to research and collect material, not others, not the parties, nobody else.

And the only way C+V could have got hold of documentation that was both submitted and not-submitted would be by asking the person who generated the information.

Stefanoni should ALREADY have ALL of the information needed - or have a record of when she deposited it - because she should have already collected it as part of her work on the case.

If Stefanoni’s actions are justified by her interest, which is not a criminal interest but a legal one, and if they are complying with the law, then her actions are lawful, correct, and right.

Nope. Stefanoni's actions *might* be legal (if so, you need to take to the streets en masse to have the law changed immedietely if you have any respect for the concept of justice), but that doesn't make her actions morally right, proper conduct or correct.

She has no moral right to deny justice simply because she may or may not like someone.

The prosecutor declared that the docmentation exists.

Great! So, it should have been no trouble at all to prove that. They should have had the exact reference number for the exact docket that they were deposited in.

They should have had that ready to whip out in court.

They didn't.

The only option left is to assume the controls do not exist until proven otherwise.

It would have been a trivial professional courtesy to have appended the control files to the files Stefanoni submitted to C+V - a work of a few minutes. It's ludicruous to state or imply that she would have been unaware of how important they were at that stage. She would have been fully aware of how intrinsic they were to the testing. She would have been aware that her work was under review. She would have been aware that the experts would have come around asking for the files.

Pure common decency should have compelled her to add the control files.

 

[acbytesla]

This is totally impossible. There was no psychopathy in their histroies or they wouldn't have been allowed in Her Majesties whatever and they were good students from good homes. They certainly would have turned off the video.

This is just totally crazy and you must have made it all up.

Besides the good guys never kill defenseless people, I've seen it in the movies!

No, this is WAR..this is battle weary soldiers. Not sex weary students.

MACFLY!!! MACFLY!!!!

 

[LondonJohn]

Well only if you skipped the "thrill kill and went straight to the sex.

The sex happened first

And anyway, how do you know that in my warped psychopathy I wouldn't have cherished a video of me, Candace and Giselle strangling a homeless man?

Well, what happens in battle zones changes things dramatically. I've read a lot of military and war history...mostly about WWII and unfortunately, that kind of thing really is more common than we care to think about. There is a bond between soldiers that civilians never experience. They become a little too desensitized to the violence and the killing. So I can see how they might trust each other, obviously a little too much. Obviously they weren't the brightest bulbs. No, that's not it. They were MONUMENTALLY STUPID.

I always worry about vets that have seen a lot of action returning to society. It's amazing how many of them end up killing someone and/or themselves when they get back home.

I totally agree. It's now very well-known that aspects of combat can have remarkable effects on the actions and psyches of those involved - both during the combat phase itself and afterwards (even for decades afterwards).

In regard to this case, I'm not really even discussing what the solders actually did in the field. I'm well aware that if you've seen your best friend vaporised to a red mist by Afghan insurgents the week before, you might potentially overstep the marks laid down by recognised war conventions if placed in the position of coming across an insurgent lying injured in a crop field.

That's a very different discussion and debate - and an important one to have. But my point in this instance was that the soldiers in question knew that they had in their possession incontrovertible evidence of what they'd done. And regardless of how they acted in the heat of the moment, they had a very long period of time to have come to the rational realisation that it was overwhelmingly in their collective best interests to make sure that this recording was never capable of finding its way into the non-private domain. And clearly the best - and probably only - way of ensuring that was to destroy the recording.

Even if they hadn't realised this in the immediate aftermath of the act (which would have afforded them the opportunity of destroying the cam and recording at the scene), they had months and months in which they could have done so. It appears that the army were totally unaware that this recording even existed until it somehow leaked out via the soldiers showing it to people on their computers.

 

[LondonJohn]

Can I just point out in passing that it's strange indeed to observe the spectacle of someone who claims to have a communist upbringing and tendencies going to extraordinary lengths to try to defend some of the more nakedly-fascist laws that inexplicably remain on the Italian statute book?

Then again, Mussolini himself was an active communist in his youth, before switching horses from the left-hand side of the racecourse to the right-hand side (so to speak). I guess that sometimes extremists at both ends of the political spectrum are sometimes far closer in nature than one would expect - almost as if the spectrum actually curves and meets up somewhere at the edges.....

 

[Machiavelli]

I have always viewed trials as a sort of game. You have to present your case within the rules in an attempt to 'win'. So on this, we have agreement.

With regard to what you wrote about Stefanoni's strategy, my question is why? What good does it do Stefanoni to purposely not point out the negative controls to Vecchiotti? Why wouldn't she be motivated to personally hand-deliver them to her? Wouldn't it have been better for Vecchiotti to have been forced to write a glowing report of Stefanoni's work on the case? Was it more important to Stefanoni to create a misstep for Vechiotti than to have the "experts" publically state Stefanoni's work was perfect in every way?

It makes no sense.

But, it seems you don't understand. It's a cautionary attitude. It's not that Stefanoni creates directly a misstep. But if Vecchiotti is honest, she will have to take steps consistent with that. In the event Vecchiotti was honest, a possible Stefanoni's cautious attitude would have been ok anyway. What apparently you don't perceive, is that something like Vecchiotti's decision to assume the negative controls don'exist, is something that would have been not possible on the part of a honest expert. It's just grotesque to assume the laboratory doesn't perform negative and positive controls, when the laboratory belongs to the ENFSI, when all testimonies transcripts report about negative controls, and when ever the parties' experts were there present attending the tests. It's not something like an assumption which a court-appointed, competent, honest expert could ever take; and based on his omitting a check at the court's office; and based on omitting the reading of the documentation, and then, not asking for the negative controls in her e-mail contacts.

On the other hand, if Vecchiotti is dishonest, she would not second Stefanoni's findings, at any cost. She would always make up something to discredit the DNA results. The negative controls are a peculiar ploy in the sense that it was an argument already dropped by the defenses; they were already 'used' as an argument by the defence in the preliminary hearing, but the argument was debunked insofar as the negative controls were deposited. In fact, the defence had dropped the negative controls argument.
But still, there were other defensive arguments that a partial 'experts' may attempt to throw against Stefanoni.
Vecchiotti's report does not contain anything original: these arguments were already put forward by the defence, and they lost, they were dismissed by the first instance court.
The defence only wanted a 'court-appointed expert' (to picture as an 'independant' expert) to 'validate' them so they could bring them back into court.
Stefanoni and the prosecution perfectly knew this and it would make no sense to expect that a dishonest expert could be 'forced' to write something different: any corrupt expert would just bring the defensive arguments back into play. Which is exactly what Vecchiotti did.
However, she also brought in some arguments that the defence had abandoned in the previous trial, because they were not arguable before an impartial court. But before the Hellmann court, even the junk could find its place and could be used for the show. This is what I think happened.

On these grounds, making all these considerations, I think Stefanoni's caution makes sense and I don't see what other behaviour could be more rational.

A last side note: everybody here seems to ignore it, but at the Hellmann trial, the C&V report was not the only expert report submitted. The experts reports from public parties were three: there was also a second Stefanoni report, and a Novelli report.

 

[Bill Williams]

You are a bit twisting and omitting things.
The transcript actually also records the deposit of some negative controls on Oct. 4, but besides that, the transcript records the statement that Stefanoni made about the negative controls, the declaration that they exist, and the declaration that they will be deposited.
When you say “no-one has provided any documentation, number, etc.” this is a sillyness, because no-one will ever provide you such kind of documentation. You need to access such documentation. This is what a court-appointed expert is supposed to do (not “be provided”). You are not provided court documentation: there is a reason why we say “deposited”.

< ............ sinister deletia ...............>

While you fail to make any kind of inference or scrutiny about Vecchiotti's work?

Machiavelli. Your argument is now with Andrea Vogt. Andrea Vogt now blogs that the RIS Carabinieri submission to the Nencini court in essence debunks Stefanoni's work, and that the C&V report is now before the Nencini court as it was in front of the Hellmann court.

Why are you wasting all this time arguing what did or did not happen between Stefanoni and Vecchiotti at the Hellmann trial? That was more than two years aog.

My wonder is why you are not arguing how sloppy and invalid, and perhaps criminal, the RIS Carabinieri work is.

Vogt accepts it. Are you calling her an "approximate reporter"?

 

[acbytesla]

The sex happened first

And anyway, how do you know that in my warped psychopathy I wouldn't have cherished a video of me, Candace and Giselle strangling a homeless man?

I hoped.

But my point in this instance was that the soldiers in question knew that they had in their possession incontrovertible evidence of what they'd done. And regardless of how they acted in the heat of the moment, they had a very long period of time to have come to the rational realisation that it was overwhelmingly in their collective best interests to make sure that this recording was never capable of finding its way into the non-private domain. And clearly the best - and probably only - way of ensuring that was to destroy the recording.

Even if they hadn't realised this in the immediate aftermath of the act (which would have afforded them the opportunity of destroying the cam and recording at the scene), they had months and months in which they could have done so. It appears that the army were totally unaware that this recording even existed until it somehow leaked out via the soldiers showing it to people on their computers.

No, I understood your point. I know that pictures of similar things made their way home from Vietnam....but this takes that to a whole new level. It is really unbelievable that they could be so stupid not to erase the damn files. It really is incomprehensible.

I know that Grinder will say..."see, anything is possible". And while that might be true, I do think some things AREN'T.

 

[Machiavelli]

Can I just point out in passing that it's strange indeed to observe the spectacle of someone who claims to have a communist upbringing and tendencies going to extraordinary lengths to try to defend some of the more nakedly-fascist laws that inexplicably remain on the Italian statute book?

Then again, Mussolini himself was an active communist in his youth, before switching horses from the left-hand side of the racecourse to the right-hand side (so to speak). I guess that sometimes extremists at both ends of the political spectrum are sometimes far closer in nature than one would expect - almost as if the spectrum actually curves and meets up somewhere at the edges.....

It doesn't seem to me that I "defend laws", meaning no law in particular; I'm not into a political discussion here.

 

[Strozzi]

What do you question? She made a Mojito for Patrick out of his special Polish vodka IIRC and he suggested that they have a Mojito night at Le Chic and Meredith agreed to do it.

It seems to me that if I were in the situation Meredith was put in I would demur the offer.

Thank you for the info. I don't see anything in it to suggest that Meredith was not respectful of Amanda's position with her employer. In fact, just the opposite. It shows Meredith is a fun party girl (she has her own special highball recipe) which seems to fit with what Amanda was and the two girls would have had fun together at the bar with Meredith serving up her special Mojito. They would have invited their friends and Italian guys to come. Tips would be good. Lumumba's cash register would have rung loud that night (unless he had it set to "silent" tax evading mode. ).