Headsup: To those many lawyers amazed that Knox did not get on the witness stand to head off a certain re-conviction: the best guess among Italian lawyers is that Knox's own lawyers feared ANOTHER calunnia charge if she repeated the crackpot and highly disprovable claims that she was tortured. The tough calunnia law is primarily a pushback measure against mafia meddling which is widely suspected in this case.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

One Special Kind Of Journalism On the Grand Scale Italy Uniquely Inspires

Posted by Peter Quennell

MILANO from Davide on Vimeo.

If you keep a watchful eye on reporting on Italy, every few weeks you’ll see a report like this.

Jay Nordlinger went to Italy as a student - specifically to Milan - and just revisited it. He once again found a LOT to like.

There are many beautiful things in Milan, of course. Many beautiful works of art. But the city itself is a beautiful thing: a work of art. In my music criticism “” concerning both compositions and performances “” I often say, “Beauty isn’t everything. But it’s not nothing either.” The same is true of cities, I think. Beauty is not the be-all, end-all. But a little beauty “¦ can make a nice difference. I recall what Ed Koch said about cities: Paris, the most beautiful. London, the most interesting. New York “” his own “” the most exciting, or dynamic.

The Milanese have style. For heaven’s sake, they’re Italian: The Italians have style. There is often a casual formality about them. And, among the older people, a certain courtliness. Can they be drama queens? Well, they wouldn’t want to betray their nationality, would they? Many of the women look and act as though they consider themselves to be works of art “” and they are. Men in suits and ties, riding motor scooters, are a sight. I hear a dog not barking: I see just about no one wearing short sleeves, on a warm day.

Mirabile dictu, the window in my hotel room opens. How civilized. Unlike in America. Hang on, I will soon find out this is a mistake. The window is not supposed to open. Someone locks it. And I prevail on someone else to reopen it. Ah, civilization again. (I have promised not to jump out of this window.) (Much to the disappointment of my severest critics.)

Out my window, and all around the city, you hear the squeal of trams. It is a kind of music in Milan. Milanese risotto is a famous dish, yellow in color. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. But, when it’s good, it’ll bring tears to your eyes (not because it’s spicy). When I was a student, I practically lived on stracciatella “” not the soup, but the ice-cream flavor (which, in short, is their chocolate chip). It hasn’t gotten any worse “¦

Posted by Peter Quennell on 05/14/17 at 01:49 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (3)

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Multiple Attackers and the Compatibility of the Double DNA Knife (Exhibit 36)

Posted by James Raper

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Our YouTube whiz DelPergola’s video of November 2010

Ed note: This evidence area is enormously compelling - but also emotionally difficult. It is why initially we did not publish our translation of the Micheli Report. And why a quarter of the trial was behind closed doors with the media excluded. That well-meaning decision has bedeviled the case ever since, because only the jury and others in court then - including the white-faced and tongue-tied accused pair - were exposed to the full power of the prosecution testimony.

Material from some of my previous posts on TJMK (link at bottom here) was incorporated into my Justice on Trial book. From Chapter 15, this is the second of several posts setting out further material.

Before looking at the forensic evidence, which is the final theme I identified earlier, it will be helpful to take into account the wounds suffered by Meredith, and whether these suggest anything as to the dynamics of the murder, and whether any of them were compatible with the knife recovered from Sollecito’s kitchen, Exhibit 36, called the Double DNA knife because the DNA of Meredith was found on the blade and the DNA of Knox on the handle.

As mentioned earlier the autopsy was carried out by Dr Lalli.

It was observed that there were no significant injuries to the chest, abdomen or lower limbs.

The significant elements in the examination were described as follows :

A fine pattern of petechiae on the internal eyelid conjunctive.

The presence of tiny areas of contusion at the level of the nose, localised around the nostrils and at the limen nasi [threshold of the nose].

Inside the mucous membranes of the lips, there were injuries compatible with a traumatic action localised in the inner surface of the lower lip and the inner surface of the upper lip, reaching up to the gum ridge.

Also found on the lower side of the jaw were some bruising injuries, and in the posterior region of the cheek as well, in proximity to the ear.

Three bruising injuries were present on the level of the lower edge of the right jaw with a roughly round shape. In the region under the jaw an area with a deep abrasion was observed, localised in the lower region of the middle part at the left of the jaw.

Once the neck had been cleaned it was possible to observe wounds that Dr Lalli attributed to the action of the point of a cutting instrument.

The main wound was located in the left lateral region of the neck. A knife would be compatible provided it had one cutting edge only which was not serrated. The wound was 8 cms in length and 8 cms deep. The width could not be measured because the edges had separated due to the elasticity of the tissues both in relation to the region and to the position of the head, which could have modified the width. The wound had a small “tail” at the posterior end. The wound penetrated into the interior structure of the neck in a slightly oblique direction, upwards and also to the right.

Underneath this large wound, another wound was visible, rather small and superficial, with not particularly clear edges, “becoming increasingly superficial until they disappeared”, in a reddish area of abrasions. The knife had penetrated both Meredith’s larynx and the cartilage of the epiglottis, and had broken her hyoid bone. A consequence of that damage is that Meredith would be unable to vocalise, let alone scream.

There was also a wound in the right lateral region of the neck, also attributed to a pointed cutting instrument. This was 4 cms deep and 1.5 cms wide (or long). It had not caused significant structural damage.

The presence of two relatively slight areas of bruising, with scarce colouring and barely noticeable, were detected in the region of the elbows.

On Meredith’s hands were small wounds showing a very slight defensive response. A small, very slight patch of colour was noticed on the “anterior inner surface of the left thigh”. Another bruise was noticed on the anterior surface, in the middle third of the right leg.

The results of the toxicological analyses revealed the absence of psychotropic drugs and a blood alcohol level of 0.43 grams per litre.

Tests of histological preparations of fragments of the organs taken during the autopsy were also performed. They revealed the presence of “pools of blood” in the lungs.

The cause of death was attributed to asphixiation and loss of blood, the former being caused by the latter.

There was nothing in the pathology which confirmed that Meredith had been raped, though we should recall that Guede’s DNA was found on the vaginal swab, though not of a spermatic nature. For Massei this was confirmation that she had been subjected to a sexual assault.

—————————————

There was argument in court as to whether Exhibit 36 was compatible with the main wound. There was no dispute amongst the experts that it could not have been responsible for the wound on the right. The knife had an overall length of 31 cms and the length of the blade from the point to the handle was 17.5 cms. The width of the blade, 4cms from the point, exceeded the width of the right hand wound. The wound on the right was more akin to a pocket knife, or perhaps a flick-knife.

I shall look at the arguments advanced by the defence as to why the knife would not be compatible in a moment, but before that there is a simple logical point as to incompatibility based on measurements.

A knife would only be incompatible if the length of the wound was greater than the length of the blade of the knife, or if the width of the wound was less than the width of the blade. Exhibit 36 was therefore a priori compatible.

On this basis I would also have to concede that a pocket or flick-knife is not a priori incompatible with the main wound, unless (though we would not know) the length of it”˜s blade did not exceed 8 cms.

It should however be recalled that the width of the left side wound was also 8 cms. That is over 5 times the width of the wound on the other side of the neck. The width of the blade on Exhibit 36, 8 cms from it’s tip - and being approximately 3.5 cms wide- was over twice the width of the blade on the “pocket knife”. This fact, and the robustness of the larger weapon, particularly with regard to the observed butchering at the base of the left-sided cut, makes Exhibit 36 a far more likely candidate, in my submission, than a “pocket knife”, and that’s without taking into account Meredith’s DNA on the blade.

We can also enter into a numbers game as regards the experts (8 of them) who opined on compatibility. Massei tells us that Dr Liviero concluded “definite compatibility”, Dr Lalli and Professors Bacci and Norelli “compatibility” whilst “non- incompatibility” came from the 3 GIP experts nominated at a preliminary hearing. The latter were Professors Aprile, Cingolani and Ronchi.

As far as I am concerned “non-incompatability” is not hard to understand. It simply means compatible.

Professors Introna, Torre, and Dr Patumi, for the defence, opined that Exhibit 36 could be ruled out. Their argument was twofold. First, the length of the blade was incompatible with the depth of the wound had the knife truly been used with homicidal intent. Indeed, if it had been thrust in up to the hilt then the point would have exited on the other side of the neck. Secondly, they said that the smaller wound or the abrasions beneath the main wound, mentioned earlier, were in fact caused by the hilt of a knife striking the surface of the neck. Obviously if that were so then the main wound was not caused by Exhibit 36.

Their argument does not consider, because we do not know, what may have been the actual dynamics of the knife strike. We cannot know what was the cause of the underlying wound or the reddish area of abrasions. As to that wound it may have been the result of the knife edge being run across the surface of the skin and the abrasions may have had a different cause in the prior struggle for which there is ample evidence. Hence their argument seems very weak.

We cannot leave the topic without considering that there may have been more than two knives involved. This possibility arises from the evidence of Professor Vinci, for the defence. He considered blood stains that were on the bed sheet in Meredith’s room. These stains very much resembled the outline of a knife, or knives, laid to rest on the bed sheet.

It was Professor Vinci’s contention that the bloody outlines (a dual outline from the same knife he said) was left by a knife with a blade 11.3 cms long, or a knife with a blade 9.6 cms long with a congruent blooded section of handle 1.7 cms long (9.6 + 1.7 = 11.3), and having a blade width of 1.3 to 1.4 cms.

Taking these measurements as read they may seem incompatible with a pocket knife (such as Sollecito had a proclivity to carry) and they certainly are as regards Exhibit 36. It follows, he argued, that one has to infer the presence of a third knife in any hypothesis and if a pocket knife and Exhibit 36 are already accounted for by Knox and Sollecito then a reasonable inference is that the third knife would have to be Guede’s. Professor Vinci’s blade is not incompatible a priori with either of the two wounds.

The problem, and without going into detail on the matter, is that Professor Vinci’s contention and measurements are somewhat speculative depending on what one thinks one sees in the stains. It is rather like reading tea leaves. One could just as well superimpose Exhibit 36 over the stains and conclude that it was responsible for them.

Massei only briefly commented about the bloody outlines on the bed sheet. He opined that the blood stains were certainly “suggestive” but insufficient to establish any clear outlines from which reliable measurements could be established. Clearly then he did not accord any reliability to Professor Vinci’s measurements.

—————————————————-

We can now turn to the issue of whether Meredith’s injuries tell us anything about whether her attacker was a “lone wolf” or not.

Massei believed that Meredith’s injuries lay at the heart of the matter. It seemed inconceivable to him that she would first be stabbed twice and that she would then be strangled. The amount of blood, being very slippery, would make maintaining pressure on her throat difficult. So Meredith was forcibly restrained and throttled first. The hypothesis of a single attacker requires that he continually modify his actions, first by exercising a strong restraining pressure on her, producing significant bruising, and then for some reason switching to life threatening actions with a knife, thereby changing the very nature of the attack from that of subjugation to that of intimidation with a deadly weapon, and finally to extreme violence, striking with the knife to one side of the neck and then to the other side of the neck.

Massei described the first knife blow, landing on the right side of her neck, as being halted by the jawbone, preventing it from going any deeper than the 4 cms penetration. The court considered that this was an action to force Meredith to submit to actions against her will. The same hypothesis could also, of course, in view of the injuries to the jaw, apply as to the lack of penetration with Exhibit 36 on the other side

What surprised Massei about Meredith’s wounds was that in spite of all the changes in approach during the attack she somehow remained in the same vulnerable position, leaving her neck exposed to attack.

Massei paid particular attention to the paucity and lack of what can be regarded as defensive wounds on her hands by comparison with the number, distribution and diversity of the impressive wounds to her face and neck. He found this disproportion to be significant, particularly with regard to what was known about Meredith’s physicality and personality.

Meredith was slim and strong, possessing a physicality that would have allowed her to move around with agility. She liked sports, and practiced boxing and karate. In fact she had a medium belt in karate. She would, had she been able to, have fought with all her strength. How then would a single attacker have been able to change hands with a knife to strike to both sides of her neck, let alone switch from one knife to another? He would have had to release his grip on the victim to do that, unless she had wriggled free and changed position, in which case he would have to subdue her all over again, but this time, if not before, she would be ready.

Since the attack was also sexual in nature, at least initially, how could a single attacker have removed the clothes she was wearing (a sweater, jeans, knickers and shoes) and inflicted the sexual violence revealed by the vaginal swab, without, again releasing his grip? It might be suggested, as the defence did, that Meredith was already undressed when the attack began, but for this to be the case one of three possible alternative hypotheses has to be accepted.

The first is that Guede was already in the flat, uninvited, and un-noticed by Meredith, which can only mean that the break -in was genuine but un-noticed by her. The second is that Guede was there by invitation and that their relationship had proceeded by agreement to the contemplation of sexual intercourse when Meredith suddenly changed her mind, unleashing a violent reaction from Guede. The third is that, having been invited in Meredith then thought that he had left, although he had not.

Having looked at the staging we can surely rule out the first hypothesis. As to the second, it does not fit with what is known about Meredith’s personality and the relationship she had been developing with Giacomo. As to the third it is difficult to imagine that in a small flat Meredith would not have checked before securing the front door and preparing for bed.

Massei found it was highly unlikely that one person could have caused all the resulting bruises and wounds by doing the above, including cutting off and bending the hooks on the bra clasp. The actions on the bra clasp alone would necessitate someone standing behind her and using a knife to cut the straps, requiring the attention of both hands from her attacker, during which time Meredith would have had the opportunity to apply some self-defence. It has to be conceded though that this could have happened when she was concussed, though there is no persuasive physical evidence of a concussive blow, or during or after she had been mortally wounded.

Massei concluded that there was little evidence of defensive manoeuvers on Meredith’s part, which to him meant that several attackers were present, each with a distribution of tasks and roles: either holding her and preventing her from making any significant defensive reaction, or actually performing the violent actions. He concluded that the rest of the body of evidence, both circumstantial and forensic, came in full support of such a scenario. He concluded that two separate knives had been used and that one was from Sollecito”˜s bedsit.

Although, at the trial, the defence had attempted to explain a scenario whereby a single attacker might have been responsible for the injuries, that there had been multiple attackers was not a scenario with which any court, other than the first appeal court presided over by Hellmann, demurred.

Posted by James Raper on 04/27/17 at 06:58 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Evidence & Witnesses, Real crimescene, Faked breakin, The pack attack, The two knives, DNA and luminol, Trials 2008 & 2009, Massei prosecution, Hoaxes against Italy, 4 No firm DNA hoax, 5 No pack attack hoax, Hoaxes re Guede, 33 Sole attacker hoax • Comments here (17)

Friday, April 21, 2017

The Suspicious Behaviour And Evidence Contradicting the Mutual Alibis Of RS And AK

Posted by James Raper

Material from some of my previous posts on TJMK was incorporated into my Justice on Trial. From Chapter 11, this is the first of several posts setting out further material.

Suspicious behaviour is not proof of guilt but it is an addition to the mix and, if there is enough of it, it can be weighty. I have already mentioned in Chapter 6 reservations as to the motive for Knox’x E-mail in view of certain things that did not make much sense.

Now we can consider what else arises from the testimony of witnesses, from what Knox and Sollecito had to say for themselves in their own words, and from the evidence concerning the phone records and computer analyses.

I have included the Court Exhibit log of calls made and received on the mobile phones for Knox and Sollecito, for the days the 1st and 2nd November 2007, in Appendix C. I did consider whether I should have done this given the telephone numbers referred to. However it is now eight years since the murder and I think it very unlikely that these numbers have not since been changed. In addition, Knox herself has had for some time, and may still have, a similar log for her mobile, covering the period from the beginning of October until a few days after Meredith’s death, on her website.

The relevant behaviour to be covered is from the day before the discovery of the murder up to the time of their arrest and we will discuss how this reflects upon their mutual alibi. As to that alibi we have in evidence Knox’s Memorial but not Sollecito’s statement to the police.

We also have the testimony of Antonio Curatolo and Marco Quintavalle.

Curatolo was a tramp who says that he saw Knox and Sollecito in the square at Piazza Grimana after 9.30 pm on the 1st November, having, as it appeared to him, an argument. They were at the end of the square from which the gates leading to the cottage could be seen.

Quintaville was the owner of a store who said that he saw Knox there at 7.45 am on the morning of the 2nd November.

Both were amongst witnesses unearthed by an enterprising local reporter, Antioco Fois, who stole a march on the police’s own investigation.

I will look more closely at their evidence in the next Chapter.

Knox and Sollecito would certainly have an alibi up until 8.40 pm on the 1st November, and later as it happens. That is because a witness, Jovana Popovic, knocked on Sollecito’s door at that time and spoke to Knox.

We need, however, to backtrack a bit. Popovic had knocked at Sollecito’s door between 5.30 and 5.45 pm. She wanted to ask Sollecito for a favour. Would he be kind enough to drive her to the train station in his Audi to collect some luggage that would arrive for her there later that night? Knox answered the door and invited her in and she spoke to Sollecito. He agreed he would do that.

Sollecito then started to play a film, Amelie, on his computer at 6.27 pm, which he says he and Knox watched. It would appear (See Chapter 30) that Knox then went out (whether with or without Sollecito is not clear) and that before returning to Sollecito’s flat, she (at 8.18 pm) received the text from Lumumba saying that she did not have to go to work that evening. She replied by text at 8.35 - “Sure. See you later. Have a good evening”.

Sollecito”˜s varying versions, be it in his statements to the police, was (in the first version) that after leaving the cottage, he and Knox returned to his flat between 8.30 and 9 pm to eat, watch the movie and smoke some pot. That version then changed, of course, during his interview with the police on the 5th November, when he told them that before he got home Knox had left him to go to go and see friends at Le Chic and did not return until 1 am.

Popovic returned to Sollecito’s flat at 8.40 because she had been told that the luggage was not in fact being sent that evening. Knox, whom she described as being in a very good mood, told her that she would pass the message to Raffaele.

From this point on, of course, both Knox and Sollecito had an evening free to themselves.

At 8.42 pm Sollecito received a call from his father on his mobile. That this call was within 7 minutes of Knox’s text to Lumumba, and that there was no further activity on their mobiles until the following morning, is what had sparked the interest of the police and had resulted in Sollecito being called to the Questura on the 5th.

As mentioned Curatolo claimed to have first seen Knox and Sollecito in Piazza Grimana shortly after 9.30 pm. However that was contradicted by Knox’s trial testimony as to when she and Sollecito had eaten a meal at his flat.

From Knox’s trial testimony on the 12th June 2009 -

GCM: Can you say what time this was?

AK: umm, around, umm, we ate around 9.30 or 10, and then after we had eaten, and he was washing the dishes, well, as I said, I don’t look at the clock much, but it was around 10. And”¦he”¦umm”¦well, he was washing the dishes and, umm, the water was coming out and he was very bummed, displeased, he told me he had just had that thing repaired. He was annoyed that it had broken again. So”¦umm

LG: Yes, so you talked a bit. Then what did you do?

AK: Then we smoked a joint together”¦”¦we made love”¦..then we fell asleep.

The next day, on the 13th , on cross-examination by Mignini, Knox testified -

GM: So, I wanted to know something else. At what time did the water leak?

AK: After dinner, I don’t know what time it was.

GM: Towards 21, 21.30?

AK: 21, that’s 9? No, it was much later than that.

GM: A bit later? How much?

AK: We had dinner around”¦”¦10.30, so that must have happened a bit later than that. Maybe around 11 [slow voice as if thinking it out]

The alibi also now covers the prosecution’s first indication of the likely time of death at around 11 pm, but which was then moved to around 11.30 pm during the prosecution summing up at the trial.

Unfortunately Sollecito’s father himself torpedoed this dodge by telling the court that when he phoned his son at 8.42 pm Sollecito had told him that there had been a water leak while he was washing the dishes. Taking into account Knox’s testimony that they had eaten before the dish washing, this places the meal and dish washing before that call.

Sollecito told the police that at about 11 pm he had received a call from his father on his land line. Not only is that not confirmed by his father but there is no log of such a call. There were no landline calls at all for the relevant period of an alibi.

There is no log of a call to his mobile at that time either though his father had sent a text message then but which Sollecito did not receive until 6. 03 am the following morning. We know that he had received it at that time because that is the time at which it is logged in the phone records. Sollecito had just turned his phone on and clearly the phone had been off when the text message was sent.

There is no record of any phone activity for either of them from after the 8.42 pm call until, in Sollecito’s case, receipt of that text message at 6.03 am, and in Knox’s case her call to Meredith’s English phone at 12.07 pm the next day.

A word about this here because, as mentioned, Knox released her phone records on her web site. In her case it has to be said that this is not so unusual. Up until the 30th October there is no regular pattern of late or early morning phone activity.

Sollecito is different as his father was in the habit of calling at all hours just to find out what his son was doing. This is backed up by his phone records.

In the case of Knox she said that her phone had been switched off so as not to be disturbed and to save the battery.

——————————————————

We can now consider Sollecito’s computer, a “MacBook - PRO” - model Apple Laptop. This had been seized by the police on the 6th November and was then handed over to the Postal Police on the 13th November. They cloned the hard disk which is standard practice.

Massei -

“Of the 124 files (or “reports”) with “last accessed” in the referenced time period (from 18:00 on 1/11/07 to 08:00 on 2/11/07) only two were “human interaction”; the remaining 122 reports were actions carried out automatically by the Mac OS X operating system installed on the Apple MacBook PRO.

In particular the evidenced human interaction occurred at :

21:10:32 [ 9.10 pm] on the 1/11/07
and at
05:32:09 [ 5.32 am ] on the 2/11/07

Furthermore at 18:27:15 [6.27 pm] on the 1/11/07, there was human interaction via the “VLC” application, software used to play a multimedia file for a film “Il Favolso Mondo Di Amelie.avi”, already downloaded onto Sollecito’s computer laptop via P2P (peer to peer) some days earlier.”

There is thus no record of any human interaction with Sollecito’s computer from 9.10 pm on the 1st November until 5.32 am the next morning, when music was played on the computer for half an hour.

There was computer evidence for the defence at the trial and further attempts were made to try and force an alibi from his computer later on appeal. I think it would be appropriate, and convenient, to include a discussion of all this here.

At first Sollecito had maintained that he had been sending e-mails and surfing the web but that account was quickly demolished. However, a defence expert called Antonio D’Ambrosio did give very clear testimony at the trial. He was generous enough to acknowledge that the investigations carried out by the postal police were accurate, and well interpreted, but he said he had been able to uncover a bit more information about the computer because he was not limited by forensic protocols (and could therefore reveal information not visible to the Encase software used by the police) when he examined a copy of the cloned disk. This information was an interaction with the Apple website at 00.58 on the 2/11/07 which he did believe was a human interaction.

Unfortunately, whether there was or was not a human interaction with the computer at that time, does not provide Sollecito with an alibi.

D’Ambrosio also said that he noticed an interaction at 9.26 pm on the 1/11/07 but was unable to be certain whether a human interaction had occurred or whether a pre-requested download of a film, Naruto, had commenced.

The first defence expert report was in fact one prepared by Angelucci, in March 2008, at the request of Knox’s lawyer, Dalla Vedova. It does not appear to have been submitted in evidence but the salient point from this was that the data from both Sollecito’s Asus computer (he said he had another which was broken) and Meredith’s computer, was recovered.

Then there was the D’Ambrosio report followed at the first appeal by another report from Professor Alfredo Milani. In his book Sollecito mentions Milani as one of his professors at the college at which he was studying computer science. Milani credits D’Ambrosio with a lot of the content but his report was gratuitously offensive as regards the work of the postal police and he said that they had made “grave methodological errors” which had resulted in the concealment of information and which led him to conclude that it could not be excluded that there had been an overwriting of the time data was stored.

Firstly he spends much time outlining the Mac OS, in every release, and tells us that because the postal police used an “analogous but not identical” MacBook a tiny difference in the release number in the operating system renders their analysis unreliable. This is impossible to accept for two reasons - firstly, that the OS employed resided on the cloned disk from Sollecito’s own MacBook, but more importantly the precise OS release would not affect in any way the reading of the log files.

Secondly, he unwisely reminds us of inodes (log files). These files are regularly archived, in compressed form, and the archive is not over written. The archive is not very easy for an ordinary user to search but it is certainly not beyond the capabilities of “an expert computer consultant”.

He also unwisely provides a play list of the music which Sollecito had been playing when he opened his ITunes app: at 5.32 am in the morning.

The Report was in evidence but it is unlikely that the Court had before it an analysis of the music. The music app featured, amongst others, songs by the Seattle based punk rock band Nirvana, but more interestingly the app opens with the head banging introductory music (entitled “Stealing Fat”) to “The Fight Club” cult movie: with it’s own rendition of the iconic stabbing sound from the Hitchcock movie “Psycho” and introducing a background wailing sound. An interesting choice of music at 5.32 am in the morning and within hours of Meredith”˜s brutal murder. There is clear evidence of manual interaction as some tracks are paused and then clicked through to the next.

One track on the app was not given any play time. This was “Polly” by Nirvanna based on the true story of the abduction, torture and rape of a 14 year old girl. The culprit is still serving time in jail.

Knox and Sollecito claimed that neither woke until Knox rose at 10.30 am. Not only are the two of them trapped by a blatant lie but if one’s choice of music is a reflection of mood, or to facilitate a change of mood, then their choice of music (and some of the lyrics, such as “I killed you, I’m not gonna crack”) is disturbing.

In the event the defence reports seem to have done little to impress the appeal judges. Perhaps Sollecito knew that they never would. In his prison diary on the 11th November 2007 he wrote -

“I have been very anxious and nervous in the last few days, but to see my father who tells me “do not worry, we will get you out”, makes me feel better. My real concerns are now two: the first one derives from the fact that if that night Amanda remained with me all night long, we could have (and this is a very remote possibility) made love all evening and night only stopping to eat”¦. It would be a real problem because there would be no connections from my computer to servers in those hours.”

———————————————-

Knox falsely claims in her book that having had her shower at the cottage she called her mother on her way back to Sollecito’s apartment (a 5 minute journey) as she was beginning to have concerns as to what she had seen at the cottage. She writes that her mother tells her to raise her concerns with Raffaele and the other flatmates and Knox says that she then immediately called Filomena Romanelli. Romanelli tells her to get hold of Meredith by phone which she tries to do by calling Meredith’s English phone first, then her Italian one.

(a) How does this correlate to the contents of her e-mail of the 4th Nov?

(b) How does this correlate to Knox’s phone records?

(a) There is no mention of a call to her mother at all in the e-mail. This from her e-mail -

“”¦.and I returned to Raffaele’s place. After we had used the mop to clean up the kitchen I told Raffaele about what I had seen in the house over breakfast. The strange blood in the bathroom, the door wide open, the shit in the toilet. He suggested I call one of my roommates, so I called Filomena”¦”¦”¦..
Filomena seemed really worried so I told her I’d call Meredith and then call her back. I called both of Meredith’s phones the English one first and last and the Italian one in between. The first time I called the English phone it rang and then sounded as if there was disturbance, but no one answered. I then called the Italian phone and it just kept ringing, no answer. I called the English phone again and this time an English voice told me the phone was out of service.”

(b) the phone records are as follows -

02/11/2007

Ist call @ 12.07.12 (to Meredith’s English phone) - 16 seconds

2nd call @ 12.08.44 (to Romanelli) - 68 seconds

3rd call @ 12.11.02 (to Meredith’s Italian phone) - 3 seconds

4th call @ 12.11.54 (to Meredith’s English phone) - 4 seconds

(The 5th, 6th and 7th calls are by Romanelli)

8th call @ 12..47.23 (first call to her mother) - 88 seconds

Â© the discrepancies are as follows -

1. The accounts in the book and the e-mail differ materially but at least the phone records enable us to establish facts. The first call to her mother was not just after leaving the cottage but 40 minutes after the call to Romanelli, and the call to Romanelli had been placed (on the basis of the e-mail) after she had returned to Raffaele’s place and after they had used the mop and had breakfast. If we add on 20 minutes for that activity then we can say that she called her mother at least an hour after she had left the cottage.

2. The first call to Meredith’s English phone (and it rang for an appreciable time - 16 seconds) was placed before the call to Romanelli, and not after as Knox would have it in her e-mail and in her book. A minute before, but Knox did not mention this to Romanelli, as confirmed by the e-mail and Romanelli’s testimony.

3. The call to the Italian phone did not just keep ringing (See 5 below). The connection was for 3 seconds and this was followed by a connection to the English phone for 4 seconds.

4. The English phone was not switched off, nor (as Knox has claimed -see email) out of service. Mrs Lana’s daughter had found it. She said that she would not have done so but for it ringing (the 12.07 call for 16 seconds?). She picked it up and took it into the house where it rang again (the 12.11 call - 4 seconds?). A name appeared on the screen as it rang : “Amanda”.

5. The 3 and 4 second calls are highly suspicious. The Italian phone was already in the possession of the postal police. Because of it’s discovery before the English phone the postal police had been dispatched to the cottage at about midday. According to Massei it’s answering service was activated, accounting for the log. Clearly Knox did not even bother to leave a message for Meredith as it would take longer than 3 seconds just to listen to the answering service. This is not the behaviour of someone genuinely concerned about another. By contrast Romanelli had called Knox three times, spending no less than half a minute on each call, and on the last one being informed by Knox that her room had been burgled and ransacked.

Observations -

In her e-mail, and repeated in her trial testimony, Knox says that she woke up around 10.30 am, grabbed a few things and walked the 5 minutes back to the cottage. If the first call to her mother (at 12.47) was about an hour after she left the cottage (see before) then she left the cottage at about 11.47 am, which means that she spent over an hour there. Either that or she spent much more than 20 minutes at Raffaele’s place before calling Romanelli. One might think that the latter would be more likely as it is difficult to conceive that she spent over an hour at the cottage just showering and blow drying her hair, is it not? She did not (Knox’s testimony) have the heating on when she was there. If that were the case then one has to wonder why she dallied, without any concern for her flatmates, in an empty and cold cottage, the front door to which she had found open.

Either way there is a period of up to about an hour and a half between when she might have tried to contact Meredith (if she believed she was there, by knocking on or trying her bedroom door or by calling her phone) and her calling Romanelli, effectively to raise the alarm.

That we are right to be incredulous about this is borne out by the false claim in Knox”˜s book. That false claim is significant and can only be because Knox is acutely aware that the phone records show that her original story does not stack up.

That it is incredible is even belatedly acknowledged by Sollecito’s feeble but revealing attempt to distance himself from Knox in a CNN interview on the 28 Feb 2014. “Certainly I asked her questions” he said. “Why did you take a shower? Why did you spend so much time there?”

That she makes that false claim and has constantly stonewalled and/or misplaced the 16 second call to Meredith’s English phone is indicative of a guilty knowledge. Her guilty knowledge with respect to the 16 second call was that it was made to ascertain whether or not the phones had been located before she called Romanelli, and hence for her it was not (incredulous though this is without such explanation) a pertinent fact for her to bring up with Romanelli. More than that though she also sidestepped the specific question put to her by Romanelli -

Massei -

“Amanda called Romanelli, to whom she started to detail what she had noticed in the house without, however, telling her a single word about the unanswered call made to Meredith despite the question expressly put to her by Romanelli.”

As to the 12.47 call to her mother (4.47 am Seattle time and prior to the discovery of Meredith”˜s body) Knox not only did not mention that in her e-mail but in taped conversation with her mother and in her trial testimony she steadfastly declined to recall that it had occurred. Ostensibly the call would have been, of course, to report the break in. So what would be the problem with that? However she clearly did not want, or could not be trusted, to discuss her motive for the call and what had transpired in conversation with her mother (and stepfather) before the discovery of Meredith’s body.

Not only was the timing of the 12.47 call inconvenient to her mother but I found it interesting to note from Knox’s phone records (covering 2nd Oct - 3rd November) that mother and daughter do not appear to have called or texted each other once by phone up until that 12.47 call. It would appear then that in so far as they remained in direct communication with each other for that period it must have been by e-mail or Skype. Indeed Knox has referred to such communication being via internet café. One can therefore imagine that her mother was very surprised to receive that call. It is also very difficult to accept that Knox could not recall a phone call she was not in the habit of making.

Until Knox published her book the only information that was available about the 12.47 call (apart from the phone log which showed that it lasted 88 seconds) came from her mother (who reported that her daughter was concerned about the break in) and her stepfather Chris Mellas. Mellas says that he interrupted the conversation between mother and daughter to tell Amanda to get out of the cottage. In her book Knox tells us (her memory now having returned) that he yelled at her but that she was “spooked” enough without that. But what had really happened to spook her? Readers will already know where I am coming from, and may think I am pushing at bit hard here, but I believe that the call to her mother was both a comfort and a rehearsal call, not simply because there had been a burglary, but because she knew a set of events was about to unfold on Romanelli’s arrival at the cottage. Would her explanation about having been there earlier for a shower be credible? Would Romanelli and subsequently the police, detect anything suspicious? The fact that her mother and stepfather already had the jitters was not a good omen.

The testimony of Edda Mellas was as follows ““

“Yes, in the first call she said that she knew that it was really early in the morning but she had called because she felt that someone had been in the house. She had spent the night at Raffaele’s and she had returned to take a shower at her house, and the main door was open. That had seemed strange to her, but the door had a strange lock and sometimes the door didn’t close properly, and when she entered the house everything seemed to be in place. Then she went to take the shower, and when she came out of the shower she noticed that there was a bit of blood but she thought that perhaps someone was having their period and had not cleaned up properly after themselves. She then went to her room and dressed and then went into the other bathroom to blow dry her hair and realized that someone had not flushed the toilet., and she thought it was strange because usually the girls flushed. Then she had to go to meet Raffaele, and she told him of these strange things in the house. Thern she tried to call one of the others who lived with them to find out something,, and had the number of another Italian roommate that was in the town, the others were there no longer and she tried to call Meredith several times but there was no response, They returned to the house, and she showed Raffaele what she had found and they realized that there was a broken window, Then at this point they began to knock on Meredith’s door trying to wake her up and when there was no answer they tried to enter her room.”

This is a lot of information to cram in to an 88 second phone call when surely Knox’s mother must have been feeling confused, concerned, and with questions of her own. At what point did Chris interrupt and yell at her to get out of the house? Edda’s testimony is very much a reprise of Knox’s e-mail. How could Knox not have remembered such a detail packed conversation, a prelude to her e-mail, and triggered by, on the face of it, a burglary?

Knox’s phone records also correct a previous misapprehension of mine. I had regarded it as rather unlikely that Knox would have tried to contact Meredith first on her English phone rather than the Italian phone which she knew Meredith had and used for local calls. However the records show that it was not at all unusual for Knox to call Meredith’s English phone. In fact she did this most of the time. But also, if the purpose of the first call to Meredith (after midday on the 2nd) was to check as to whether or not the phones had been located by anyone, then calling Meredith’s English, rather than her Italian, phone would make sense, because of course Knox would know that was the phone by which Meredith and her parents remained in frequent contact with each other, and that the parents would surely have raised the alarm had the phone been discovered and a call by Meredith’s parents been answered by some diligent but confused citizen in Italian. This, of course, could have happened and the alarm could have been raised by Meredith’s parents well prior to Meredith’s phone being called by Knox the first time, but such an eventuality would not have been a matter of concern to Knox in the event that she had not been to the cottage earlier.

At the cottage, and prior to the above call, Sollecito received a call from his father at 12.40 am. Do we know what they discussed? It would in any event have been after the discovery of Romanelli’s broken window and (allegedly) Sollecito’s (rather feeble) attempt to break down Meredith’s door. Did the responsible adult advise his son to do the obvious and call the police? One would think so, but then why was there a 10 minute delay before he called his sister in the Carabinieri at 12.50 am? Indeed, why call his sister at all? Why substitute the formality of calling the police to report a break in with a personal call? They are not the same thing - clearly, as immediately afterwards he did call the 112 emergency services to report the break in. Romanelli had also urged Knox to call the police when she called at 12.35.The 16 minute delay from that call might be accounted for by the unexpected arrival of the postal police and if this was the case then it was before Sollecito called the 112 emergency services.

The issue of whether Sollecito was lying when he told the postal police that he had already called 112 is an interesting one. It would take up too much time and space to discuss in detail here. See Chapter 13. Suffice to say that the prosecution set out to demonstrate that the postal police had arrived before the call and the defence set out to demonstrate the contrary.

Neither Knox nor Sollecito saw into Meredith’s room when the door was broken down and her body discovered on the floor under a quilt. Yet in the immediate aftermath it is as if they have wanted others to believe that it was they who discovered her body and in the bragging about this there have been disclosures, not only as to what they should not have been aware but also suggestive of disturbed personalities. This behaviour was remarkable for all the wrong reasons.

(a) The police were suspicious about the fact that Knox had alluded to Meredith having had her throat cut at the Questura, but we now know from Luca Altieri”˜s testimony that Knox and Sollecito had heard about this directly from him during the car ride to the police station.. However her bizarre and grotesque allusion in the early moments of the investigation to the body being found stuffed into the closet (wardrobe) is not just factually incorrect (it was lying to the side of the closet) but bears a striking correlation to later forensic findings based on blood splatter in front of and on the closet door, that Meredith had been thrust up against the closet after having been stabbed in the throat.

(b) The behaviour of Knox and Sollecito at the police station is documented in the testimony of Meredith’s English girlfriends and of the police. Whilst it is true that people react to grief in different ways it is difficult to ascribe grief or a reaction to shock to some of Knox’s behaviour. Emotionally she was cold towards Meredith’s friends and occasionally went out of her way to upset them with barbed and callous remarks. The fact that Knox was not observed to cry and wanted to talk about what had happened is not of itself indicative of anything but remarks like “What the fuck do you think, she bled to death” (Knox acknowledged a similar comment to this in her tv interview with Diane Sawyer - See Chapter 27) and her kissing and canoodling with Raffaele (including them making smacking noises with their lips when they blew kisses to each other) in front of the others was not normal. Rather chilling in retrospect was a scene between the pair of them when Knox found the word “minaccia” (in english - threat) amusing and made a play of it with Sollecito in front of witnesses.

Â© Grief is in any event reserved for friends and relations, or people one much admires. The evidence is that the initial short friendship between the two had cooled to the extent that Meredith was studiously, if politely, avoiding being around Knox. For the narcissistic and attention seeking american girl this would have been difficult to ignore and may well have offended her.

(d) The next day Sollecito was willingly collared by a reporter from the Sunday Mirror and told her about the horror of finding the body.

“Yes I knew her. I found her body.”

“It is something I never hope to see again,” he said. “There was blood everywhere and I couldn’t take it all in.”

“My girlfriend was her flatmate and she was crying and screaming, ‘How could anyone do this?’”

Sollecito went on the tell the reporter (with reference to the night of the murder) that -

“It was a normal night. Meredith had gone out with one of her English friends and Amanda and I went to a party with one of my friends. The next day, around lunchtime, Amanda went back to their apartment to have a shower.”

This was not in evidence which is as well because about the only thing that is true here is that he knew Meredith.

Posted by James Raper on 04/21/17 at 06:09 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (9)

Thursday, April 06, 2017

Eight Evidence Items Beyond Reasonable Doubt: How Honestly Did Marasca & Bruno Address Them?

Posted by Cardiol MD

1. Post Overview

You might recall that the Fifth Chambers Sentencing Report was (illegally under Italian law) published two months late in 2015.

Machiavelli posted the panel’s spoken verdict late in March 2015 and I posted a series of tests of the final report’s honesty in April 2015.

Thereafter the Perugia and Florence prosecutors posted a critique in May 2015. The Sentencing Report was finally published in August 2015, and our translation was posted in September 2015.

Finaly Catnip’s extensive critique was posted in September and James Raper’s even more extensive series in November 2015.

2. The Obvious Shortfalls And Dishonesties

I might mention first my credentials for this series. My screen-name indicates a Doctorate of Medicine, but I have also a Doctorate of Law and have professionally appeared often in American courtrooms. My purpose here is to revisit my tests of honesty of April 2015 and to complete our record here on how Marasca and Bruno shaped up on them.

A “shortfall” results when the actual benefits of a venture are lower than the projected, or estimated, benefits of that venture. I conclude that the cherry-picking ruling of the cherry-picked SCC panel, the Marasca/Bruno panel, one of 79 possible pickable SCC panels, was a huge shortfall, even more brazen than the U.S. jury-ruling in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

The first publicised sign of the pending shortfall came in March, before the Marasca/Bruno proceeding had even begun on AK/RS’s involvement in the murder of Meredith Kercher, when Judge Bruno was quoted as having said that the trials had “not many certainties beyond the girl’s death and one definitely convicted.”

It was this premature and unethically prejudicial statement that immediately triggered my April posts. I offered over 50 tests for assessing how honest the pending sentencing report (which pended for over 5 months) could prove. Eight tests were of items that for any objective panel of lawyers or judges should have been Beyond Reasonable Doubt and 43 tests were of Certainties or Certainly-Nots.

Machiavelli, Catnip and James Raper later did excellent post-publication reviews leaving the corruption of the court exposed. In all probability this corruption was really only aimed at getting RS “off-the-hook”. AK was included only because it would have been too complicated not to do so; AK is a lucky secondary beneficiary.

AK&RS are as guilty as hell, as we all know. To me it is obvious that M&B know that also. So how badly DID they fail my tests?

3. The Reasonable Doubts

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 1

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Accepting Massei’s conclusion, Knox and Sollecito were standing-up and facing Meredith in Meredith’s room. Knox, Sollecito and/or Guede, were participating in the restraining of Meredith.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 2

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Sollecito (or Guede) was holding the smaller Knife, probably in his right hand. This smaller knife made Stab B.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 3

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Stab B preceded Stab A, and caused Meredith’s scream.

When Meredith screamed Knox plunged Knife36 into Meredith’s neck in the above long-axis direction, from left to right, transecting Meredith’s Hyoid bone, first opening Meredith’s airway to the atmosphere, then transecting Meredith’s Right Superior Thyroid Artery.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 4

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

Knox was holding Knife36, probably in Knox’s right hand, holding Knife36 against the left side of Meredith’s neck with Knife36’s point directed slightly upwards to the right side of Meredith’s neck, the blade-label facing towards Knox, the palm of Knox’s right hand also facing towards Knox and the long-axis of Knife36 angled a few degrees above horizontal.

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 5

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

A thin stream of bright-red oxygenated blood spurted from this artery to its exterior environment, probably through the cuts made in her skin to the outside by both knives.

(Consistent with bleeding from both cuts, Follain, in his book “A Death In Italy” wrote that Guede stated that he saw blood coming out of the left side of Meredith’s neck. Follain also wrote that Francesco Camana of the Rome forensic police, in Camana’s written report, that spurts of blood in the middle of Meredith’s chest made her sweatshirt more bloody on the right side than on the left side)

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 6

FINAL FATAL SEQUENCE

The large knife was Knife-36, which had been brought to the murder room from Sollecito’s kitchen

Marasca/Bruno constructively-dismissed all the above references to Knife-36, ruling that Sollecito’s Kitchen Knife cannot be The Murder Knife because “it was illogical to state that the kitchen knife, used for the homicide” was “re-placed in its place, with previous cleaning” to Sollecito’s Kitchen Drawer!?

And further,that it is “objectionable” to state such a thing!?

Also, Marasca/Bruno state that Sollecito would never have given his “concurrence” to Amanda’s “unjustified carrying of knife”!?

Marasca/Bruno’s specious “reasoning” is equivalent to ruling that O.J. Simpson could not be guilty because it would not be logical for him to have committed the crime.(or “Psychopaths act logically-only; therefore they cannot be guilty of committing a crime that we think is illogical.”)

The Massei Motivazione devoted Pages 77-86 (9&1/2 pp) to a meticulous analysis, integrating all the facts, not considering them only in isolation, taking into account not only the (sworn?) testimony of these 2 witnesses, but also that of other witnesses, including Knox, and the relevant circumstances. Their rulings justify the Conclusion that:

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 7

WITNESS CURATOLO

IT IS BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT THAT CURATOLO SAW AMANDA KNOX AND RAFFAELE SOLLECITO IN PIAZZA GRIMANA ON THE EVENING OF NOV.1st, 2007 ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS. A FEW YARDS FROM THE COTTAGE AT NO. 7, VIA DELLA PERGOLA, WHERE, IN THE SAME SPAN OF TIME, THE MURDER TOOK PLACE.

Marasca/Bruno, after an unmeticulous analysis dismissed the testimony of Curatolo & Quintavalle with these (Translated) words:

“Nevertheless, the presence of intrinsic contradiction and poor reliability of witnesses [ ed: ie the above named] do not allow unreserved credit to be attributed to (their) respective versions, to the extent of proving with reasonable certainty the failure, and therefore the falsity, of the accused’s alibi, who insisted she stayed in her boyfriend’s home from late afternoon on the 1st November until the following morning.” As if Knox’s “insistance” proves she was not lying?

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 8

WITNESS QUINTAVALLE

IT IS BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT THAT MARCO QUINTAVALLE SAW AMANDA KNOX IN HIS CONAD SHOP AT AROUND 7:45 am ON 2 NOVEMBER 2007.

Amanda Marie Knox was lying when she claimed to have slept at Mr. Sollecito’s house in his company until 10am in the morning on 2 November 2007, and no court seems to have ruled otherwise.

(Marasca/Bruno’s above reference to Knox’s insistance, while probably not a ruling, betrays their underlying dishonesty.)

4. Footnote

Nine BARDs were originally listed in the relevant 2015 post but #3 was mistakenly duplicated in #6 during the settingup of the post.

Posted by Cardiol MD on 04/06/17 at 11:59 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Cassation critiques, Cardiol critique, Hoaxes against Italy, 3 No evidence hoax • Comments here (0)

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Running On A Mudslide, The Seemingly Freaked Sollecito Team Tries Again Not To Be Overwhelmed

Posted by Peter Quennell

Sollecito just lost big in a way we are asked not to post about just yet. Italian media has made no mention of it.

This request, rare from the open Italian system, has been made a few times before in this case, to try to block corruption and dishonest PR before they can get up to speed.

Meanwhile, it is safe to assume that a great unraveling of the huge body of lies must be freaking the Sollecito and Knox team’s minds. A new development that the Italian media IS reporting suggests this is so.

By way of context, Guede is now out on parole but has some time still to serve, including three years awarded by the Florence court for possession of stolen property, a notebook computer taken by two persons still unknown from a law-firm in Perugia, late in 2007.

(There is zero hard evidence that Guede ever did any break-and-entering, ever, and he has never been charged or convicted of that.)

His Rome team has filed a Supreme Court appeal against the Florence court’s decision not to grant him a retrial for grounds based on the 2015 Supreme Court outcome of the Sollecito and Knox appeal which said in part (1) Guede did not act alone and (2) Knox and Sollecito were both there.

And his interview broadcast nationally by RAI could be followed up by a book damning to RS and AK.

Okay. Now the Italian news service ANSA reports this.

“Once he has finished his full term in prison, Rudy Guede must be expelled from Italy” the lawyer Luca Maori, one of the defenders of Raffaele Sollecito, has asked.

The Ivorian these days is in Perugia, at the home of his former elementary school teacher where he is taking advantage of a possible reversal of the condemned’s sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment, which he is serving for the murder of Meredith Kercher.

Sollecito was finally acquitted for the same crime. “I will ask the police headquarters in Perugia - said Maori - to take steps to undertake the removal procedures of Guede, who is not an Italian citizen, who is now finishing serving his sentence (in prison in Viterbo - Ed.)

Many foreigners are expelled from our country for far less serious offenses to murder for which the Ivorian was sentenced” he said.

Any such expulsion order, considered unlikely, would be put on hold while Guede appeals - and presumably does maximum harm.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/18/17 at 06:01 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (17)

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Florence Court Report Now In English: Why Sollecito Gets Zero Compensation For “False Imprisonment”

Posted by Peter Quennell

Highrise Florence courts are just visible at left background

Please download here the English translation by unpaid volunteers on PMF dot Org of the adamant Florence judgement against Sollecito for State compensation.

Important context posts by KrissyG here and by James Raper here with more to follow.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/07/17 at 09:10 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (0)

Friday, March 03, 2017

How Too Often Nobody Tunes In On A Faulty System Before It Spectacularly Goes Wrong

Posted by Peter Quennell

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How Ignored Systems Become Mean

Well-intentioned Italy is for sure the ONE country in the world where our case could still be playing out after nearly 10 years.

Why? Well, it is the ONE country that mandates two automatic levels of appeal (why?) with the first appeal before a new jury (why?) and the original trial prosecution absent at both levels of appeal (why?).

Outside of the courtrooms, judges and prosecutors are forbidden from even mildly explaining themselves (why?).

And judges are all required to write these enormous reports, the original purpose of which was to ensure justice is SEEN to be done - but which can set 10 million Sherlocks on the loose, intent on making law enforcement look fools.

Not such wonderful aspects of a system with intentions for the best. These negative aspects (among others) eat up time and resources, and they create living hells for the families of victims - the Kerchers have tens of thousands of Italian families of victims for sad company.

Do you know of this dramatic book and film?

It did not look like racial scaremongering at the time though looking back it does now.

What had happened is that a huge leap forward by the Japanese economy in the 80s in large part by adopting industrial systems created in the US made Americans realise Japanese enterprises were eating their lunch while their own legacy systems decayed.

The positive outcome of that big scare was widespread adoption of this mass system upgrade in the US.

Partly because of that the American economy in the 90s really roared - and the huge Silicon Valley systems generator came alive.

And The Best-Picture Envelope Please

If you watched the Best Picture mix-up at the last few minutes of the Oscars the other night you will know HOW LONG it took for corrective action to cut in.

Two and a half thank-you speeches by the wrong team had already come and gone.

You may already have heard that the Academy will never use those two accountants again.

Scapegoats? Maybe not. The main reason was not that one of them (the man) messed up - it was that when the wrong announcement was made both of them froze. They had to be forced out onto the stage!

THATS an odd system mishap for sure.

And why was the presenter (Warren Beatty) puzzled at what he saw on the card? The card itself was a mess. This terrific article on typography gone wrong explains how.

The accountants’ system for creating and handing out the right cards had obviously not been gamed for flaws.

But the Academy also was at fault, for not checking all of their systems out. They know now that their systems need a little love, too.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 03/03/17 at 10:15 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (9)

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Sollecito Thinks He Can Win Again At The Supreme Court? Think Twice, Eyes Much Sharper Now

Posted by James Raper

1. Sollecito’s Tough Road Ahead

He who comes to court for compensation must come with clean hands.

Dr Maresca’s comment quoted below is relevant and fully justified. It is not to be overlooked that in addition to the lies and suspicious behaviour we have a “definitive” (joke) judgement that also says that Knox and probably Sollecito were present in the cottage at the time of the murder.

Even if Sollecito was not then he had good cause to believe that Knox was, yet before and after his police statement he did everything he could to obfuscate the fact and mislead investigators and prosecutors, all the while trying to dig himself out of a hole.

That adds up to a number of additional criminal offences he has committed but for which he has escaped sanction. In addition who can doubt that at the very least he had a part in, or knowledge of, the burglary staging (not criticized by the 5th Chambers), and the subsequent removal of blood traces (the evidence for which which the 5th Chamber basically ignored).

‘Doubts Remain about Sollecito’s Acquittal by Maresca’

(ANSA) - PERUGIA, Feb. 12 - The lawyer Francesco Maresca, who represents the family of Meredith Kercher, commented on the decision of the Tuscan capital judges to reject the claim for unjust detention by the young man from Puglia.

“The Court of Appeal of Florence confirms the uncertainty related to the acquittal of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox will remain in the history of Italian justice for all the unresolved doubts that it leaves”.

According to the lawyer “It confirms the statements and behavior of the young pair as a justification for custody and reminds us of the fact that the Supreme Court has placed them still in the house of the crime, so it really does seem that this absolution was to be refused at all costs.”

2. Knox & Sollecito Actions In The Week Prior To Arrest:

This is a repeat of my post of almost exactly three years ago which reveals an incriminating behavior pattern for sure.

A very strong case for guilt has been made at trial and endorsed at the first-level appeal…

The focus of this post… is upon the described behaviours of Knox and Sollecito, from the very beginning for a full week.

How The Behavior Speaks To Guilt

The early pointer of the staged break-in aside this behaviour gave investigators an insight into the pair’s possible involvement back on Day One: Behavioral pointers have continued on a par with corroborated developments in the case.

It has even continued, incredibly, since their release from prison. For me it is the thread that runs through this case having as much to do with the overall picture of culpability as the other elements .

This behaviour - to include what they have to say for themselves - is a catalogue of the inappropriate, of the implausible, of inconsistencies and contradictions, of evasions and obfuscations, to be gleaned from the accounts of Knox and Sollecito themselves and highlighted in the accounts of other witnesses. It is also to be gleaned from phone and computer records.

Taken together it is a formidable body of evidence which goes to character and culpability. It cannot be attributed to a railroading job, the machinations of a corrupt and evil prosecutor or character assassination by the media. It is also implausible if not impossible to explain it as being due to naivety, confusion or some quirkiness of character.

It amounts to the pair of them concocting stories, telling lies and misleading investigators and the general public.

Physical Evidence Array Is Already Substantial

There are numerous items of evidence which are building blocks in the prosecution case and with which we are all familiar.

locked door.

Behaviors In The First Week Of November 2007

I don’t want to make this an unduly long post. Accordingly I am going to concentrate on the period up to that famous police interrogation analysed just below. As to that critical period I will be selective but it should be enough.

The Lady With The Mop?

The story (in Knox’s e-mail) that she had visited the cottage to collect a mop, have a shower and get a change of clothing, earlier on the morning of the 2nd November, but did not notice that Filomena’s window had been broken and her room trashed is just that - a made up story. It is entirely implausible and the account unreliable for a number of reasons including-

The Two Stayed At Home?

The story that Knox and Sollecito had spent the previous night (the night of Meredith’s murder) indoors, critically from 9 pm onwards, that both had slept and that Knox had been the first to rise at about 10.30 am the next morning is implausible and uncorroborated, not only because this alibi is directly contradicted by the testimony of Curatolo and Quintavalle, and Sollecito’s statement to the police that Knox had gone out and not returned until about 1 am, but also in view of the following facts.

GCM: Can you say what time this was?

AK: umm, around, umm, we ate around 9.30 or 10, and then after we had eaten, and he was washing the dishes, well, as I said, I don’t look at the clock much, but it was around 10. And”¦he”¦umm”¦well, he was washing the dishes and, umm, the water was coming out and he was very bummed, displeased, he told me he had just had that thing repaired. He was annoyed that it had broken again. So”¦umm

LG: Yes, so you talked a bit. Then what did you do?

AK: Then we smoked a joint together”¦”¦we made love”¦..then we fell asleep.

The Fake Call To Knox’s Mum in Seattle?

Knox falsely claims in her book that having had her shower she called her mother on her way back to Sollecito’s apartment as she was beginning to have concerns as to what she had seen at the cottage. Her mother tells her to raise her concerns with Raffaele and the other flatmates and Knox says that she then immediately called Filomena. Filomena tells her to get hold of Meredith by phone which she tries to do by calling Meredith’s English phone first, then her Italian one.

“”¦.and I returned to Raffaele’s place. After we had used the mop to clean up the kitchen I told Raffaele about what I had seen in the house over breakfast. The strange blood in the bathroom, the door wide open, the shit in the toilet. He suggested I call one of my roommates, so I called Filomena”¦”¦”¦..
Filomena seemed really worried so I told her I’d call Meredith and then call her back. I called both of Meredith’s phones the English one first and last and the Italian one in between. The first time I called the English phone it rang and then sounded as if there was disturbance, but no one answered. I then called the Italian phone and it just kept ringing, no answer. I called the English phone again and this time an English voice told me the phone was out of service.”

Ist call of the day @ 12.07.12 (to Meredith’s English phone) - 16 seconds

2nd call @ 12.08.44 (to Filomena) - 68 seconds

3rd call @ 12.11.02 (to Meredith’s Italian phone) - 3 seconds

4th call @ 12.11.54 (to Meredith’s English phone) - 4 seconds

8th call @ 12..47.23 (first call to her mother) - 88 seconds

My Observations:

1. In her e-mail, and repeated in her trial testimony, Knox says that she woke up around 10.30 am, grabbed a few things and walked the 5 minutes back to the cottage. If the first call to her mother was about an hour after she left the cottage (see before), then she left the cottage at about 11.47 am, which means that she spent over an hour there. Either that or she spent more (a lot more) than 20 minutes at Raffaele’s place before calling Filomena. The latter would be more likely as it is difficult to conceive that she spent over an hour at the cottage. She didn’t have the heating on when she was there. Either way there is a period of about an hour and a half between when she might have tried to contact Meredith or raise the alarm and actually doing so.

2. That we are right to be incredulous about this is borne out by the false claim in Knox”˜s book. That false claim is significant and can only be because Knox is aware of the problem and feels she needs to add some support to her implausible story of the mop/shower visit and to conceal the real reasons for the inactivity and delay connected with it.

3. That it is incredible is even belatedly acknowledged by Sollecito’s feeble but revealing attempt to distance himself from Knox in a CNN interview on the 28 Feb this year. “Certainly I asked her questions” he said. “Why did you take a shower? Why did you spend so much time there?”

4. That she makes that false claim and has constantly stonewalled and/or misplaced the 16 second call to Meredith’s English phone is indicative of her guilty knowledge. Her guilty knowledge with respect to the 16 second call was that it was made to ascertain whether or not the phones had been located before she called Filomena, and hence for her it was not (incredulous though this is without such explanation) a pertinent fact for her to bring up with Filomena.

The Real Call To Knox’s Mum In Seattle?

As to the 12.47 call to her mother itself (4.47 am Seattle time and prior to the discovery of Meredith”˜s body) Knox not only did not mention that in her e-mail but in her trial testimony she steadfastly declined to recall that it had occurred.

She clearly did not want, or could not be trusted, to discuss why the call had occurred and what had transpired in conversation with her mother before the discovery of Meredith’s body.

Not only was the timing of the 12.47 call inconvenient to her mother but I found it interesting to note from Knox’s phone records (covering 2nd Oct - 3rd November) that mother and daughter do not appear to have called or texted each other once up until that 12.47 call.

It would appear then that in so far as they remained in direct communication with each other for that period it must have been by e-mail. One can therefore imagine that her mother was very surprised to receive that call.

It is also very difficult to accept that Knox could not recall a phone call she was not in the habit of making. (On the other hand the same records show that it was not at all unusual for Knox and Meredith to communicate with other on Meredith’s English phone.)

Sollecito’s Call From His Dad?

At the cottage, and prior to the above call, Sollecito received a call from his father at 12.40 am. Do we know what they discussed? It would in any event have been after the discovery of Filomena’s broken window and (allegedly) Sollecito’s (rather feeble) attempt to beak down Meredith’s door.

Did the responsible adult advise his son to do the obvious and call the police? One would think so, but then why was there a 10 minute delay before he called his sister in the Carabinieri at 12.50 am? Indeed, why call his sister at all? Filomena had also urged Knox to call the police when she called at 12.35.The delay might be explained by the unexpected arrival of the postal police and if this was the case then it was before Sollecito called the 112 emergency services.

The Claims Of Finding Meredith’s Body?

Neither Knox nor Sollecito saw into Meredith’s room when the door was broken down and her body discovered on the floor under a quilt. Yet in the immediate aftermath it is as if they have wanted others to believe that it was they who discovered her body and in the bragging about this there have been disclosures, not only as to what they should not have been aware but also suggestive of disturbed personalities. This behaviour was remarkable for all the wrong reasons.

“Yes I knew her. I found her body.”

“It is something I never hope to see again,” he said. “There was blood everywhere and I couldn’t take it all in.”

“My girlfriend was her flatmate and she was crying and screaming, ‘How could anyone do this?’”

About the only thing that is true here is that he knew Meredith.

Posted by James Raper on 02/14/17 at 05:08 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in Defendants in court, Raff Sollecito, The legal followups, Sollecito followup, Hoaxers from 2007, Raff Sollecito PR, Raff Sollecito #2 • Comments here (17)

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Sollecito Compensation Decision Overdue Since Last Friday; Fifth Chambers Ruling May Be His Problem

Posted by KrissyG

Key Background

Sollecito, represented by his attorneys throughout the process, Avvocato Giulia Bongiorno and Luca Maori, is currently claiming compensation for “˜wrongful imprisonment’.

This claim now before a Florence court is in respect of the four years he served of a sentence of 25 years handed down for the Aggravated Murder of Meredith Kercher, 1 Nov 2007.

The conviction was controversially overturned by the final Italian Supreme Court in March 2015, and its Motivational Report published ““ some three months late ““ in September 2015.

It was only then Sollecito was able to commence compensation proceedings, as the Italian Penal Code provides for this, given its long-winded legal process whereby defendants accused of serious crimes (i.e., one with a sentence of over three years custody) can be held on remand whilst awaiting trial. In theory, this should only be for up to one year.

The Florence panel of three women judges indicated over a week ago that their decision could be expected by last Friday. Why the further delay? Well, a major reason could be that, far from finding Sollecito “innocent”, the Marasca-Bruno Supreme Court ruling in fact did him few favors and the judges may be having a hard time grappling with that.

They will also know of Dr Mignini’s explosive contention that two articles of the judicial code were flouted and the case should have been referred back down to the appeal court (the same Florence court!) if there were evidence problems.

Issues with Marasca/Bruno ruling

The Marasca/Bruno verdict is considered controversial because Sollecito and his co-defendant, Amanda Knox had been found guilty at the first instance trial court (merits), which was upheld on appeal.

It is unusual for the Supreme Court to have not remitted the case back to the Appeal (second instance) court as the Penal Code ““ as is standard in the UK and the USA ““ does not allow the Supreme Court to assess facts found at trial.

The correct procedure is to send the disputed evidence back to the court which in the opinion of the Supreme court erred. Marasca did not rule a Section 530,1 “˜Not Guilty’ acquittal, but a Section 530, 2 “˜Not Guilty’ “˜insufficient evidence’, which some say is similar to Scottish Law, “˜Not Proven’. However, the wording used, proscioglimento indicates a pre-trial “˜charges dropped’, rather than “˜acquittal’ (assoluzione).

Sollecito and Knox made several applications against being held in custody whilst awaiting trial and were turned down at every stage, including appeals and an application for “˜house arrest’ in lieu.

The prosecution opposed the application on the grounds of the seriousness of the crime, and in Knox’ case, the standard ground that she might flee the country, as a foreigner to Italy. In addition, the prosecution had used special preventative powers to isolate the defendants (Knox, Sollecito and Guede) to prevent tampering with witnesses, a power which had been added to the Penal Code to assist in the fight against mafia gangs who did intimidate witnesses, often through their lawyers.

Therefore the law allowed the prosecutors to deny the defendants an attorney until just before their remand hearings.

Sollecito’s challenges

However, the award of compensation for having (a) been held in remand, and (b) serving a sentence until such time the conviction was overturned, is not automatic. The applicant has to show that they are factually “˜not guilty’, i.e., cannot possibly have committed the crime, perhaps because the “˜real perpetrator’ has come to light, or “˜new evidence’ presented.

Neither of these scenarios apply in Sollecito’s case. Whilst a defendant is allowed to “˜lie’ and indeed, does not need to swear an oath in testifying, this only holds true if they are guilty. Marasca did not find Sollecito or Knox, “˜Not Gulty’ as per Article 530,1, the common or garden “˜Not Guilty’ verdict.

Further, Sollecito refused to testify at his own trial, and made various misrepresentations and lies to the police. He argues in current tv and radio show rounds ““ for example, in the recent Victoria Derbyshire BBC morning show ““ that as he was a “˜collector of knives’ and had always carried a knife around since age thirteen, “˜To carve on tables and trees’, he explains, and thus argues, the police should not have viewed this with suspicion when he attended the questura carrying one in the days after the murder.

Sollecito’s other difficulty is that Marasca, whilst criticising the investigation as “˜flawed’, and this being the main reason for acquittal, it nonetheless cuts Sollecito little slack.

How Marasca-Bruno Cut Sollecito Little Slack

From the Marasca Supreme Court Motivational Report, Sept 2015 (boldface added):

It remains anyway strong the suspicion that he [Sollecito] was actually in the Via della Pergola house the night of the murder, in a moment that, however, it was impossible to determine. On the other hand, since the presence of Ms. Knox inside the house is sure, it is hardly credible that he was not with her.

And even following one of the versions released by the woman, that is the one in accord to which, returning home in the morning of November 2. after a night spent at her boyfriend’s place, she reports of having immediately noticed that something strange had happened (open door, blood traces everywhere); or even the other one, that she reports in her memorial, in accord to which she was present in the house at the time of the murder, but in a different room, not the one in which the violent aggression on Ms. Kercher was being committed, it is very strange that she did not call her boyfriend, since there is no record about a phone call from her, based on the phone records within the file.

Even more if we consider that having being in Italy for a short time, she would be presumably uninformed about what to do in such emergency cases, therefore the first and maybe only person whom she could ask for help would have been her boyfriend himself, who lived only a few hundred meters away from her house.

Not doing this signifies Sollecito was with her, unaffected, obviously, the procedural relevance of his mere presence in that house, in the absence of certain proof of his causal contribution to the murderous action.

The defensive argument extending the computer interaction up to the visualization of a cartoon, downloaded from the internet, in a time that they claim compatible with the time of death of Ms. Kercher, is certainly not sufficient to dispel such strong suspicions. In fact, even following the reconstruction claimed by the defence and even if we assume as certain that the interaction was by Mr. Sollecito himself and that he watched the whole clip, still the time of ending of his computer activity wouldn’t be incompatible with his subsequent presence in Ms. Kercher’s house, given the short distance between the two houses, walkable in about ten [sic] minutes.

An element of strong suspicion, also, derives from his confirmation, during spontaneous declarations, the alibi presented by Ms. Knox about the presence of both inside the house of the current appellant the night of the murder, a theory that is denied by the statements of Curatolo, who declared of having witnessed the two together from 21:30 until 24:00 in piazza Grimana; and by Quintavalle on the presence of a young woman, later identified as Ms. Knox, when he opened his store in the morning of November 2.

An umpteenth element of suspicion is the basic failure of the alibi linked to other, claimed human interactions in the computer of his belongings, albeit if we can’t talk about false alibi, since it’s more appropriate to speak about unsuccessful alibi.

Sollecito in his police interview of the 5 Nov 2007, shortly after which he was arrested, withdrew his alibi from Amanda Knox. During the Nencini appeal phase, he and his advocate, Bongiorno, called a press conference to underline that Sollecito “˜could not vouch for Knox’ whereabouts between 8:45 pm and 1:00 am on the night of the murder. Sollecito has never once retracted this withdrawal of an alibi for Amanda.

Further, Judges Marasca and Bruno state:

The defensive argument extending the computer interaction up to the visualization of a cartoon, downloaded from the internet, in a time that they claim compatible with the time of death of Ms. Kercher, is certainly not sufficient to dispel such strong suspicions.

In fact, even following the reconstruction claimed by the defence and even if we assume as certain that the interaction was by Mr. Sollecito himself and that he watched the whole clip, still the time of ending of his computer activity wouldn’t be incompatible with his subsequent presence in Ms. Kercher’s house, given the short distance between the two houses, walkable in about ten [sic] minutes.

Sollecito had claimed he was surfing the internet until 3:00 am in one statement and claimed to have watched Naruto cartoon until 9:45 pm on the murder night. It winds up:

The technical tests requested by the defence cannot grant any contribution of clarity, not only because a long time has passed, but also because they regard aspects of problematic examination (such as the possibility of selective cleaning) or of manifest irrelevance (technical analysis on Sollecito’s computer) given that is was possible, as said, for him to go to Kercher’s house whatever the length of his interaction with the computer (even if one concedes that such interaction exists), or they are manifestly unnecessary, given that some unexceptionable technical analysis carried out are exhaustive (such are for example the cadaver inspection and the following medico-legal examinations).

Leading to the verdict:

Following the considerations above, it is obvious that a remand [rinvio] would be useless, hence the declaration of annulment without remand, based on art. 620 L) of the procedure code, thus we apply an acquittal [proscioglimento *] formula [see note just below] which a further judge on remand would be anyway compelled to apply, to abide to the principles of law established in this current sentence.

*[Translator’s note: The Italian word for “acquittal” is actually “assoluzione”; while the term “proscioglimento” instead, in the Italian Procedure Code, actually refers only to non-definitive preliminary judgments during investigation phase, and it could be translated as “dropping of charges”. Note: as for investigation phase “proscioglimento” is normally meant as a non-binding decision, not subjected to double jeopardy, since it is not considered a judgment nor a court’s decision.] http://themurderofmeredithkercher.com/The_Marasca-Bruno_Report_(English)

The Issues Facing the Florence Appeal Court

Sollecito has clearly passed the first hurdle of being eligible to have a hearing for compensation. His legal team have asked for the maximum â‚¬516,000. A claimant who can successfully plead “˜wrongful imprisonment’ can claim â‚¬500, per diem imprisonment, up to a cap of â‚¬516,000.

Sollecito’s legal team have referred to Marasca’s criticism of the investigation as grounds for the full compensation, claiming Sollecito’s “innocence and loss of youthful endeavours” because of the “˜flaws’. Problem is, the issue of investigative flaws was never pleaded at trial, or at least, not upheld, by either the trial or appeal court judge. Marasca never really explains in which way this was a proven fact.

The Prosecutor’s Office based at Florence is opposing the application. I would expect they will be relying on Matteini’s remand hearing and Gemmelli’s written reasons rejecting Sollecito’s appeal against being kept in custody until the hearing.

The three judges who on 27 January 2017 in a hearing listed for five days announced they would issue their verdict “˜within five days’, as of 7 Feb 2017, some seven working days later, have yet to make a decision. Alternatively, the decision has been made, but the public and press have not yet accessed it. It could be Sollecito’s legal team have yet to call a press conference, whilst they study the findings.

The Florence panel of judges will have to decide:

Watch this space for the decision! Also Sollecito has made noises that he plans further legal action against the prosecutor, based on Marasca’s criticisms in the Motivational Report. Watch for that too.

Sources: The Murder of Meredith Kercher com True Justice for Meredith Kercher

Posted by KrissyG on 02/08/17 at 04:35 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (25)

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

Florence Court Decision On Whether Sollecito Gets Any Compensation - If Yes, Why Its Ill Deserved

Posted by Peter Quennell

Here is the BBC’s interview with Sollecito on his compensation claim.

The ill-prepared Victoria Derbyshire was snowed.

Sollecito was convicted ONCE and not ever found “innocent”. The verdict was that he was probably at the scene of the crime, and Knox definitely so. And that fail was despite a mighty effort to corrupt two Italian courts.

Who knows what new tricks behind the scenes are being played now? But if the Florence judge really studies the record of the early days, there is no way in which Sollecito gets paid.

He ADMITTED on 5-6 November 2007 that he had lied to the cops, because Knox made him do so. That same night he signed a confession to that effect. Lying to the cops is itself a crime.

And Sollecito was treated extremely fairly throughout. He and Knox had half a dozen judicial hearings even before the 2009 trial began.

He and Knox failed to win release at every one - all the judges ending with Judge Micheli who wrote up the case against them at length turned his pleas down, moving him from prison to mere house arrest being one.

One of Sollecito’s and Knox’s failed attempts at being sprung before trial was an appeal directly to the Supreme Court (amazing - try that in the UK or US!).

Our translation by Catnip of the Gemelli judgment is highly worth a read (there is a similar judgement for Knox) as the Florence court has to decide: did the Gemmeli court act unfairly in light of the list of evidence here?

Gemelli Court Decision on Raffaele Sollecito’s 2008 Appeal (English)

Summary

Held: the decision to continue pre-trial prison detention for the suspect was reasonable.

THE REPUBLIC OF ITALY
IN THE NAME OF THE ITALIAN PEOPLE
THE SUPREME COURT OF CASSATION
SECTION 1 CRIMINAL DIVISION

Comprised of the most Honourable Justices:

Dr Torquato GEMELLI - President -
Dr Emilio Giovanni GIRONI - Member -
Dr Maria Cristina SIOTTO - Member -
Dr Umberto ZAMPETTI - Member -
Dr Margherita CASSANO - Member -

have pronounced the following JUDGMENT on the appeal lodged by:

(1) RS, born on X, against Order of 30/11/2007 Liberty Court of Perugia;

having heard the relation made by Member Emilio Giovanni Gironi;
having heard the conclusions of the Prosecutor-General Dr Consolo for its rejection;
having heard the defence advocates G and T (substituting for advocate M).

REASONS FOR THE DECISION

The order referred to in opening confirmed, at the Re-examination stage, the one by which the GIP [the Preliminary Investigation Magistrate] had applied pre-trial prison detention of RS for participation in the murder of MSCK, the which occurring in Perugia on the evening of the 1st of November 2007 by means of a cutting weapon, in an alleged context of sexual assault by a group, in which there would have taken part, in addition to S, his girlfriend AK and a RHG, who had left behind a palm print on the bloodied pillow on which the victim’s body was resting and whose DNA was found on the vaginal swab taken from the body of the same and on faecal traces found in a bathroom of the house that the victim was sharing with Ms AK and two Italian students.

The picture of circumstantial evidence specifically concerning S consists of the identification of a print left in haematic material present at the scene of the crime of a sports shoe held to be compatible, because its dimensions and configuration of the sole, with the type of footwear, “N” brand size 42.5, used by the suspect; of the recovery ““ in the kitchen of his house ““ of a kitchen knife bearing traces of Ms AK’s DNA on the handle and on the blade traces of Ms MK’s DNA; and of the collapse of the alibi put up by the young man (having been disproven by technical investigations carried out), in which, as asserted by him, he had interacted with his computer during the hours in which, according to the forensic pathologist’s reconstruction, the criminal fact would have occurred, that is between 22:00 and 23:00 of the 1st November 2007; from the investigations carried out up until now it would appear, in fact, that the last interaction with the machine on 1 November occurred at 21:10 and that the subsequent one took place at 5:32 the day after, when S also reactivated his mobile phone, acts witnessing thereby an agitated and sleepless night. Equally disproven was that the young man had received a phone call from his father at 23:00 on the night of the murder, it resulting, instead, that said call had happened at 20:40.

Against S, caught at the time of arrest with a switchblade initially considered compatible with the wounds found on the neck of the victim, would line up, in addition, the mutability of the stories given to the investigators by the same and by his girlfriend, having initially maintained they had remained the whole evening and night in the young man’s house, later to state, instead, that at a certain point Ms AK would have left to meet the Ivorian [sic] citizen PDL, manager of a pub in which Ms AK was undertaking casual employment, she making a returning to her boyfriend’s house only around one in the morning.

It must, finally, be added that the same Ms AK had, amongst other things, initially referred (not confirming, in any case, the thesis in confused and contradictory subsequent versions) to having taken herself to her own house with L, where this latter (he also was struck with a custody order, later revoked after the previously mentioned identification of G’s DNA) had had sexual relations with Ms MK, and to having, while she herself was in the kitchen, heard her friend scream, without, further, remembering anything else of the subsequent events, up until the occurrences of the day after, marked by the discovery of traces of blood in the small bathroom next to Ms MK’s room and culminating in the discovery of the body, after the intervention of the forces of law and order (the police appear, in particular, to have intervened prior to the call to 112 effected by S); in particular, the young woman was specifically pointing out not being able to remember whether S were also present in the victim’s house on the occasion of the events just described.

The Re-examination Court concluded recognizing, for the purposes of maintaining pre-trial detention, the persistence of all the types of pre-trial exigencies mentioned by Article 274 Criminal Procedure Code.

The S defence has indicated an appeal, on the grounds of, with new reasons as well:

- reference to Ms AK alone of the circumstantial evidence constituted by the presence of biological traces from her and from the victim on the knife found at S’s house;

- absence, at the scene of the crime, of biological traces attributable to the suspect [ndr: note, this was before the bra-clasp tests had been done];

- arbitrary transference onto S of the weighty circumstantial evidence against Ms AK, on the unfounded assumption that the pair could not have been anything but together at the moment of the homicidal fact;

- inexistent evidential value of the phases relative to the discovery of the body;

- absence of blood traces from the soles of the “N” shoes worn by the suspect even at the moment of his arrest;

- absence of any evidential value of merit, alleged failure of the alibi, constituting the use of his computer, of which the falsity has not in any case been ascertained, of the lack of interaction by the subject with the machine after the last operation at 21:10 not permitting the inference that the computer was not, however, engaged in downloading files (being, to be specific, films);

- irrelevancy of the mistake revealed between the indicated time of the phone call to the father furnished by S and the actual time of the call, given the uncertainty of the time of death of the victim, depending on the time, otherwise uncertain, of the consumption of the dinner (according to various witness statements coinciding with 18:00), it being well able, therefore, for the time indicated by the forensic pathologist (23:00) to be revised backwards to 21:00, a little before which time the witness P had referred to having made a visit to S, finding him at home and not on the verge of going out;

- interpretability of the so-called unlikelihood of the versions supplied by the suspect as attempts to cover for (aid and abet) another subject;

- attribution of the victim’s biological traces found on the knife seized at S’s house to chance contamination not related to the homicidal fact;

- insufficiency of the pre-trial exigencies, having diminished in a probative sense after the return to Italy of G; those relating to risk of flight lacking in specificity and concreteness; and with reference to the conventional content of blogs posted on the internet by the suspect, those relating to danger to society illogically reasoned;

- missing appearance of the young man’s walk, via security cameras installed along the route that the aforesaid would have had to traverse to go from his house to that of the victim’s.

THE APPEAL IS UNFOUNDED

As regards what this Court is permitted to appreciate, not being able here to proceed with a re-reading of the investigative results nor with an alternative interpretation of the factual data referred to in the custody order, the appellant defence substantially contests the recognition, as against S, of the necessary requisite of grave indicia of culpability. The question thus posed and submitted for scrutiny by this bench of the well-known limits of the competence of the court of merit, it must be held that the finding expressed by the Re-examination judges concerning the gravity of the frame of circumstantial evidence is not susceptible to censure.

Not upheld, in the first place, is the defence submission according to which the knife bearing the genetic prints of Ms AK and of Ms MK found in S’s house would constitute a piece of evidence relevant solely as against the young woman, even if privy of traces attributable to the suspect, the utensil has as always been found in the young man’s house, and the testimony acquired up until now has led to the exclusion that it formed part of the inventory of the house inhabited by the victim, and which, at the time, and until proved to the contrary, must be held to be the same available for use by the suspect and which had been used in MK’s house, there being contested no access by her to S’s house.

Given the multitude of group contributive possibilities, the fact is not significative, then, in itself being a neutral element, that on the scene of the crime there are no biological traces attributable to S, to which, in any case, is attributable the “N” brand shoe print considered compatible, by dimensions and sole configuration, with the footwear worn by the suspect at the time of arrest. Although having the same impugned order excluded, at the time, the certainty of the identification constitutes as, in any case, a certain datum that the print in question had been made in haematic material found in Ms MK’s room by a shoe of the kind and of the dimensions of those possessed by the appellant, while it remains to be excluded that this could have originated from G’s shoe, who wore a size 45 and, therefore, dimensions notably larger. The revealed coincidence, notwithstanding the residual uncertainty on the identification, assumes particular valency in relation to the restricted circle of subjects gravitating to the scene of the homicide, with not even Ms AK, who made admissions about her presence on site at the same time as the execution of the offence, excluding the presence of her boyfriend in the victim’s house in the same circumstance; nor can it be held that the print could have been left by S the following morning, he never having claimed to have entered into the room wherein the body was lying.

It does not answer, therefore, to verity that, as against the young man, there had been recognized, by a phenomenon of transference, items of circumstantial evidence in reality pointing solely to Ms AK.

The last finding held unfavourable to S is constituted by the failed proof of the alibi constituted by the argument of the suspect as having remained at home on the computer until late at night; it being a matter of, properly speaking, an alibi failing up till now and not of a false alibi and the defence, correctly, does not refute the technico-judicial valency of the circumstantial evidence, but it remains, in any case, acquired into the case file that the accused had not been able to prove his absence from the locus of the crime at the same time. An item up until now assumed as certain is, instead, the fact that S had interacted with his computer at 5:32 the morning following the murder, at around the same time reactivating his own mobile phone, a contradiction of the assumption of a waking up only at 10:00 and a symptomatic tell-tale of a more or less sleepless night; likewise as symptomatic was held to be the nearly simultaneous cessation of telephonic traffic as much by Ms AK, in his company the evening of 1 November 2007.

The proof of a permanent stay in his house by the suspect can, all told, be considered as acquired up until 20:40 ““ coincident with P’s visit ““ who confirmed his presence, or up until 21:10, the last interaction time on the computer, but this does not cover the time of the homicide, located between 22:00 and 23:00.

As for the proposed argument that S’s conduct were interpreted as aiding and abetting, this does not result, in the event, as being supported by anything emerging from the investigations and its plausibility cannot be verified by the judges of merit.

In conclusion, the Re-examination Court’s evaluation as to the gravity of the circumstantial evidence picture are removed from the audit of this court.

There remains, finally, the finding that for what concerns the pre-trial exigencies, those of a probative nature are not able to be considered as ceasing from the sole fact of G’s re-entry into Italy (amongst other things significantly never invoked in the statements by the suspect and by his girlfriend, who instead co-involved L in the proceedings), given the existence of an investigative picture in continual evolution, in which the positions of the various protagonists so far remain unclear, the changing versions of which are marked by reticence and mendaciousness (the same suspect had, in truth, admitted to having, at least initially, told “˜a load of balls’); but the permanence of pre-trial exigencies had been held reasonablely even under the aspect of flight risk, in relation to the gravity of the charges and of the potential sanctions, not to mention danger to society, given the revealed fragility of character and the specific personal traits of the subject, ““ which would narrowly evaluate as innocuous youthful stereotypes ““, in a context the more connoted by the noted habitual use of drugs.

FOR THESE REASONS

Rejects the appeal and sentences the appellant to payment of costs of the proceedings. Article 94 para 1 ter, and activating provisions, Criminal Procedure Code, applies.

Rome, 1.4.2008.

DEPOSITED IN THE REGISTRY ON 21 APRIL 2008

Posted by Peter Quennell on 02/01/17 at 09:12 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (18)

Page 15 of 118 pages ‹ First < 13 14 15 16 17 > Last ›

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BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 1

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 2

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 3

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 4

BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 5

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BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT 8

4. Footnote

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Physical Evidence Array Is Already Substantial

Behaviors In The First Week Of November 2007

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

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Issues with Marasca/Bruno ruling

Sollecito’s challenges

How Marasca-Bruno Cut Sollecito Little Slack

The Issues Facing the Florence Appeal Court

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Florence Court Decision On Whether Sollecito Gets Any Compensation - If Yes, Why Its Ill Deserved

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