Headsup: Unsurprisingly, Knox chickens out of presenting her "proof" on 10 April of being forced to frame Patrick for Meredith's murder when actually under no stress. She's not a good liar. She could face Patrick's tiger of a lawyer and many officers she has slimed. Trial is closed to the press, like the most damning parts of the 2009 trial; a pity that. And see links here for Knox's false framing #2: Rudy Guede as sole killer.

Monday, July 03, 2017

Here’s Something Important That Factors Into Our Interest In Cool-Headed Rational Communities.

Posted by Peter Quennell

Simple walking is rather startlingly proving to have health benefits beyond the obvious, and also major community benefits.

The main new finding for important health benefits is that the balancing required in walking adds neuron capacity to the hippocampus - a hybrid brain gland which also handles key components of memory, diminishment of which is behind memory loss and dementia.

Now there is also a new finding for the positive effects on community building and by extension better environmental and economic-growth prospects, as for both teamwork is vital.

The anti-twitter… !!

Cruising the US one can see in large areas decaying towns and failing communities. In places stark poverty. Often little mingling, and other than the local Walmart, no very enticing walking, either for locals or to entice any visitors.

Get walks going, guys? 

Already there’s begun a big push in the US to open up many more trails for walking. New York city, one of the world’s most walkable, is still adding or enhancing walks like the elevated Highline Park and the paths around the edge of Manhattan.

Trails hundreds even thousands of miles long are being created - by way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal one can already walk or bicycle from NYC to Toronto or vice versa (think about it Ergon!).

The economic effect all along the way of these trails is becoming obvious.

Italy probably remains a very smart and creative country not least because places like Rome and Florence and Perugia become more walkable even as they become less drivable.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 07/03/17 at 03:38 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (2)

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Sollecito Loses Supreme Court Appeal Against Florence Court Ruling Refusing $0.55M Damages Claim

Posted by Peter Quennell


No Big Bloodmoney Payday

Our previous posts on this can be seen here and here and here.

UK reporter Krissy Allen of Blasting News kindly summarises the Italian reporting.

Here are some excerpts. Emphasis is added to key sentences confirming a rebuttal of Knox claiming “vindication” in the post just below and in those earlier posts.

Raffaele Sollecito has today been denied any compensation for the four years he spent in prison, one year on remand, and three years until the final Supreme Court Appeal decision in March 2015.

The problem is, although acquitted, it was on the grounds of ‘insufficient evidence’ and not a straightforward exoneration.

After having to wait six months for the written reasons, in Sept 2015, Sollecito then had the way clear to put in a claim for compensation, which Italian law allows for wrongful imprisonment

However the statute that allows compensation for wrongful imprisonment specifically excludes defendants who lie to the police, described as ‘gross misconduct’.

In other words, the Florence Appeal Court in January this year dismissed Sollecito’s claim for this reason.

It deemed that Sollecito had committed ‘willful misconduct’ or ‘at the very least, gravely negligent or imprudent.’

It found it ‘implausible’ that he could not account for the movements of his then-girlfriend, Amanda Knox. It states that both he and Amanda Knox lied many times and that it was an ‘indisputable fact of absolute certainty’ that Knox was at the murder scene ‘when the young Meredith Kercher was murdered’.

Sollecito through his lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, citing the fact of Rudy Guede’s shoeprint being mistaken for his. However, this was never the point of law for which Sollecito was refused his demand for the maximum 517,000 Euro compensation….

It means the written reasons of the Florence Court of 10 Feb 2017, stands. It is damning and scathing of the pair’s behaviour throughout the investigation.

In effect, it blocks any compensation claim Amanda Knox might have had her eye on from Italy….

Sollecito’s lawyer, Bongiorno has made a statement that he now plans to take it to the European Court of Human Rights. This would not be an appeal as the ECHR has no jurisdiction to overturn the verdict. Rather, it can make an award should it decide there was unfairness in the procedure.

The average award of the ECHR is circa 3,500 Euros - a far cry from the 517K Euros Sollecito was demanding.

Also in La Republica the increasingly hapless Sollecito claims that he is near broke and he is unable to find a job because of the cloud hanging over him.

Maybe we’ll see yet another burst of anger against Knox for dropping him in this. It may actually gain him some sympathy, though it is hard to see that paying any bills.

In his ongoing Florence book trial he is going to have to admit publicly that he lied and defamed - defamed both numerous people and Italy and its justice system - the felony crimes of diffamazione and vilipendio.

Either that or end up with a huge award against him, maybe leaving him deeply in debt.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 06/29/17 at 03:38 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (12)

Friday, June 23, 2017

Despite Her Claims, Knox Was NOT Exonerated By Italy’s Supreme Court

Posted by Our Main Posters



Kentucky State Capital and Supreme Court

1. Kentucky Lawyers Get Duped

The Kentucky Bar Association is the latest to get swindled by Knox. They have paid a ton of money to be lectured to by a fake exoneree.

The online notice of today’s talk by Knox at their annual conference says it all: it PROVES a complete lack of due diligence. It wrongly reads as follows:

On Friday 23 June the programming will be packed with fun and interesting sessions.. Topping off Friday’s schedule will be the featured presentation; AMANDA KNOX will share her story. She is the American exchange student who spent almost four years in an Italian prison, following her conviction for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student who shared her apartment. In 2015, Knox was definitively acquitted [aka exonerated].


2. But Knox Was NOT Exonerated

Knox’s sentence was merely vacated (she could be tried again) because under mafia influence the Fifth Chambers of the Supreme Court ignored most of the evidence - and then claimed there was not enough.

Read here. The Fifth Chambers was assigned the case through quite open defense manipulation. It does not normally handle murder cases, and neither the lead judge nor the writer of the sentencing report had previously handled murder cases. Their reasoning was torturous, evidence was cherry-picked, and it seems certain any experienced and trained murder-case judges would have found for guilt here.

Read here  Knox was in fact found to have been at the scene of the crime, and with blood on her hands. The Supreme Court’s Fifth Chambers in fact handed down the weakest possible “not guilty” sentence, not guilty due to “insufficient evidence” (though see below; most of it they ignored, and the trial prosecution was not even at the Supreme Court) which allows an appeal if the prosecution or victim’s family wish to take up that option.

Read here. Knox was definitively found guilty of calunnia (criminal defamation) against her boss, Patrick Lumumba. The Supreme Court in her final appeal confirmed that she falsely accused Patrick Lumumba, a black man, of murder. She served three years in prison, and is a convicted felon for life. (To date she has refused to pay compensation of about $100,000, placing her in contempt of the Supreme Court. So much for Knox “helping” the wrongfully imprisoned.)

Read here. That book by Knox - in an expanded but unrevised 2nd edition - is one of the most dishonest ever written. It contains an estimated 400-plus provable lies and up to 100 possible defamations. See this example. For those Knox still faces multiple possibilities of prosecution.

Read here. Also read here. The evidence against Knox and her co-defendant Sollecito was in fact massive, and when correctly seen as a whole (as only the 2009 trial jury saw, not the several appeal juries) absolutely damning. Read also here. Thereafter the gaming of the system began, starting with the defense procuring ANOTHER judge not qualified for murder trials (Judge Hellmann, now edged into early retirement) for their first (2011) appeal. 

Read here. If true to form Knox will again try to claim to your audience that police interrogators forced a false confession out of her. Again untrue. She was not interrogated on that night or any other night. In fact she was only ever interrogated twice, BOTH TIMES at her own request by Dr Mignini, in December 2007 and July 2009. She was given SIX court opportunities to get herself off before the 2009 trial - and she failed all of them.

Read here. The supremely fair Italian justice system comes out pretty well against other systems including the American system. Italy’s rate of incarceration is 1/6 that of the United States, and among Italians the system polls very positively.

There’s much more if your members are inclined to set up a task force. For the protection from fraud of bar associations everywhere, we would welcome that.

Posted by Our Main Posters on 06/23/17 at 06:00 AM • Permalink for this post • Archived in • Comments here (14)

Monday, May 22, 2017

See Taormina In Sicily, Host Town For The G7 Summit This Next Weekend

Posted by Peter Quennell

This was of course the G8 group prior to Mr Putin being disinvited. Sorry about that Vlad. Mr Trump is being welcomed, sort of, though security is intense and satires in the media ever moreso. Sorry about that Don. Mr Obama is also in Italy, cycling around somewhere further north, with what seems like zero security detail.

Posted by Peter Quennell on 05/22/17 at 10:54 PM • Permalink for this post • Archived in The wider contextsItalian contextComments here (5)

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

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.

 


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


© 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.

© 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.


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)

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