This was posted a few days ago on TJMK. The over-the-top self-praise reminds me of Trump! They are so desperate for attention that they're recycling past junk.
Too bad the Supreme Court didn't see these 'brilliant' powerpoints before excoriating the police and prosecution and then acquitting Knox and Sollecito.
It's worse than Trump - it's positively Soviet-era Pravda-esque!!
The really funny/tragic thing is that Quennell simply cannot/does not see the deeply-embedded ironic contradiction in his position. On the one hand, he is continually desperate to convince others (and himself...?) that
"the sense that the Italians got things right can get to be unshakable". But he can only apply this "logic" to the two convicting lower courts (Massei and Nencini) and one of the SC-level courts (Chieffi). However, he is forced to avoid claiming "the Italians got things right" to the Hellmann court, and, critically, the Marasca SC panel.
So in other words, in Quennell's bizarro-world, the convicting courts show Italian criminal justice to be wonderful and infallible etc etc..... but the acquitting courts - including the SC panel which ultimately and definitively acquitted Knox and Sollecito on all murder-related charges - DO NOT show Italian criminal justice to be wonderful and infallible etc etc. And logically, this must by definition destroy Quennell's fanciful claims about the excellence of Italian criminal justice!! If he was making this claim in the aftermath of the Massei convictions and before the Hellmann appeal trial (as indeed he was), then at least logically he'd have a defensible position. But ever since the Hellmann acquittals, he simply cannot have it both ways.
The truth of the matter is this: lower level Italian courts - especially courts of first instance - appear to be of very poor quality and serve only a very limited role in the application of justice. In fact, they appear in so many ways to be similar in scope and remit to arraignment-level courts (or Grand Juries) in places such as the UK or US. The heavier lifting in Italy appears to get done in the appeal-level courts.
I'd add to this my opinion that the multi-level system in Italy for all significant "felony-level" criminal trials is a ridiculous waste of money, a poor way to apply justice, and hugely unnecessarily long and complex. All that is needed is a properly-constituted court to try the case once and once only. And if that court turns out to have acted improperly or unlawfully, or if evidence placed before that court turns out to have been presented improperly or unlawfully, or if new evidence comes to light, then there should be a fair opportunity for appeal. Italy's multi-level approach - where prosecutors get as many repeat bites at the cherry as the defence - appears, yet again, to be a hangover from the Mussolini era (for reasons which may be obvious....).
So: Italy's criminal justice system is hugely unfit for purpose. The fiasco of the Knox/Sollecito trial process only serves to illustrate this (while driving a coach and horses through Quennell's ridiculous claims about how great Italy's system is). Every disinterested observer can see this full well. There's an enormous amount of literature (both academic and journalistic) on the subject. Whether the Knox/Sollecito trial process will further serve to illuminate the massive problems inherent in the Italian system is, unfortunately for justice in Italy, questionable. We've seen how it effectively took a demand from the EU and the European Council to force Italy to abandon its dreadful inquisitorial system - and yet we've also seen how Italy managed to fudge even that with a clumsy, half-hearted legislative change which allowed way too much reactionary wiggle-room.
Italy is a broken state, unfortunately. It is riddled with corruption, political patronage, shocking public services, organised crime, and a more-or-less institutionalised grey/black economy. I tried brokering a significant business collaboration between a (very large) UK and Italian company in the early 2000s. But we had to abandon the whole thing when we dug deep enough to realise just how much embedded corruption, tax evasion, crazy courts system and two-faced dealings were going on. And I know for certain that this was very, very far from unique. The Knox/Sollecito trial fiasco is just another example of how broken Italy is. The only good thing that can be said about it is that in the Marasca SC panel Knox and Sollecito finally found a judicial entity that could see the case for what it actually was.
