Friday, September 18, 2009

Trial: Defense Expert Tries To Claim Sollecito-Sized Footprint Is Guede’s

Posted by Peter Quennell

Click above for the Daily Express’s full report. The relevant section:

A bloody footprint found at the house where a British student was killed in Italy was wrongly attributed to one of the defendants in the case, a forensic expert has testified at the murder trial.

The footprint was found on a bathroom rug in the house in Perugia where Meredith Kercher was killed in November 2007.

Prosecutors have attributed it to Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian who is on trial on murder charges with Amanda Knox, his girlfriend at the time. Both defendants deny wrongdoing.

In his testimony, expert Francesco Vinci compared detailed pictures of the footprint on the rug with images of Sollecito’s feet, arguing that the sizes and shapes “absolutely don’t match”.

“Differences, one by one, can be seen,” said Vinci, who is a witness for Sollecito’s defence.

According to Vinci, the footprint is “compatible” with the foot of a third man, Rudy Hermann Guede, who was convicted in a separate trial last year and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In effect then, the claim is that Guede was participating with bare feet in the cleanup of the crime scene some time after the death of Meredith - although precisely what he cleaned up is unclear, as strong evidence of his presence remains.

Like many of the defense’s attempts at rebuttals, this sounds to us like a tragedy that is now playing out as farce.

In one of his clinically precise powerpoints Kermit already refuted this claim

 

Posted by Peter Quennell on 09/18/09 at 06:06 PM in The officially involved,  Evidence & Witnesses,  Other witnesses,  DNA and luminol,  Raff Sollecito,  Raff Sollecito PR

Comments

It has always seemed very unlikely in the “lone wolf” scenario that the supposed attacker would have bare feet. An intruder would keep their shoes and socks on.

Posted by bobc on 09/19/09 at 12:36 AM | #

I guess that if Vinci would have come to the same conclusion, that the print was actually Sollecito’s, the defence wouldn’t have invited him to testify. It is clear that the defence will only present “experts-for-hire” in court who will contradict the existing evidence. That is what they are getting paid for.

Not only belongs the footprint to Raffaele, but the theory that Rudy would have taken off his shoe and then (let it be understood that he had clean feet when he took off his shoe as his shoe would have been soaked with blood, not the sole of his foot!) left a bloody footprint on the bathmat is outlandish.

Posted by Nell on 09/20/09 at 05:57 AM | #
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