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On the Side of Sweetness
Carlo Dalla Vedova was simply impressive, trying first of all to clean up the trial from all useless arguments brought by the prosecutors, as we are hearing them these days and we have always heard before (“They brought even a cartoon!” he reminded); or urging the court “to stay on what is technical and essential, to stop this ‘War of the Roses,’ where the private prosecutors are only trying to discredit the defendants or even two scientists like Conti and Vecchiotti, who dared to think some tests were wrong … We instead have nothing to say on Stefanoni. She’s a very capable biologist. But that knife is not the murder weapon, not because Meredith’s DNA is not on it, but because it’s impossible, it’s illogical.”
“Of 450 DNA tests done by Stefanoni only one remains, and it says ‘no Meredith’s DNA’…. Every other argument brought by the prosecution is illogical. How can you say that Amanda and Raffaele attacked Meredith because she turned mad at them, and that she turned mad at them predicting that Laura would have been mad at her since Rudy didn’t flush the toilet?” (All this with Laura not being in town, having the ones in the house a couple of days for flushing the toilet, and having Laura to be eventually angry with Amanda for having brought Rudy, not with Meredith).
“This trial has just to admit failure, and has to stop this mistake that looks never-ending. You can’t try someone ad infinitum”
“No prosecution theory stands. The murder weapon theory will never work because the Marietti is not the murder weapon. The real knife was thrown in the ravine between the cottage and Rudy’s house.”
“Useless that they keep trying to build a motive. They can’t find the motive because there is no motive, because Meredith was killed by Rudy. …. By continuing to try, the prosecution is like a ship that has bumped into a rock and is sinking.”
OUR LADY OF THE OSMOSIS
“And this Cassation sentence, that tells the court how to convict! … To make an osmosis… What is this osmosis that Mrs Caprioglio wants? Taking from one indication of guilt what’s missing from the other indication of guilt so that it becomes valid?!!…. The Supreme Court even managed to say that you should consider that letter sent by Rudy to a TV program! It was not even written by him. He had never accused Amanda and Raffaele before; in the Skype conversation he even told his friend ‘Amanda doesn’t have anything to do with it!’”
“And the prosecutor today says that it’s not possible they got it wrong. Of course they got it wrong! It has been a huge miscarriage of justice!…..Amanda didn’t escape, she stayed, and on the Monday returned to school, even if Dorothy was insisting on having her in Germany. And why did she go to the police station that evening? Not because she wanted to report Patrick, but because her stepfather Chris had opened her eyes: ‘Be careful, the murderer is still around. Maybe he meant to get you.’” She certainly didn’t want to be left alone in the street at night.
“They were deceived by the SMS, and 36 cops, they were all over this girl. Even the interpreter was not an interpreter but acting as a psychic. They lost their minds because of the media pressure; they were afraid of the critics. It was the group who created and consolidated the error, as Professor Caltagirone explained.” (Positivist scientist Cesare Lombroso had indeed discovered that a group doesn’t copy the qualities of each member, as it was believed at the time out of Spencer’s lesson, rather it distorts them, eventually multiplying the negative outcome).
“What happened during that whole night, summed up in a couple of lines?……We have to listen to the Cassation? Fine, the Cassation in 2008 demolished the whole night of November 6. So, the statements were illegal…….They kept wiretapping her in jail for months. They told her she had AIDS. Then they said that they repeated the test and they told her it was positive again. What did they want to obtain?: ‘Ah you got infected, why don’t you tell us who you’ve been with?’”…
Here Nencini asked proof of this accusation Dalla Vedova was suggesting, but he of course doesn’t have those certificates. He and Ghirga know of the wrong HIV tests because Amanda and the jail personnel told them at the time. And she wrote about it in her diary (which someone gave to the press…). Ghirga recalled that in the end, after 10 days, they brought her to a lab outside the jail, owned by a friend of his who called him (“Luciano, Amanda is here”!), and there the test came out negative, relieving Amanda from that nightmare in the nightmare.
THOSE STRANGE “WITNESSES”
Dalla Vedova then recalled the impressive episode of the four hard disks fried, along with the many other strange things about this case. Like the witnesses. Like Kokomani, the witness known by the cops, who tried to fill in the lack of clues that Amanda and Raffaele could be together with Rudy, which coincidentally was just what the prosecution needed… “ This Kokomani was a criminal; how did he come out? Who brought him in?”
And Curatolo, “who came in court in a confused state. He didn’t even know if he was in jail, or what he had been convicted for. He’s not unreliable because he was a bum, he’s unreliable because he said impossible things. And Amanda should go to jail for 30 years because of a guy like this?!”
Dalla Vedova felt like Nencini was intimidating him when he asked proof of the wrong HIV tests, because if it was an accusation, Nencini then explained, he had to start a criminal proceeding. So, Carlo had to retract that “accusation,” leaving it only as one of the many strange mysteries about the case. But then he reminded the judge: “Amanda said she was slapped. That’s something for starting an investigation.” No answer.
Episodes like this make the defense still pessimistic on the outcome of the trial. But the private accusers look pessimistic too, and they lost the boldness of the pre-DNA review, when they were confident Meredith’s profile would have been confirmed. It’s as if they heard a rumor that, without confirmation on Meredith’s DNA, Nencini wouldn’t convict.
As a matter of fact, how can he convict with this evidence? What should he write in the motivations, that they are guilty because of an unconfirmed DNA test? For some DNA that resisted in an unexisting scratch after an unproven washing? Or because Amanda and Raffaele didn’t receive phone calls that night? Or because of the turd in the toilet? Or because “Toto” Curatolo said so? Or because Raffaele went to Santo Domingo? Or because Conti and Vecchiotti are no good and the journalists are corrupted?
It would be the final death blow to Italian law. Would you like to be remembered for that?
THE PILLARS OF THE PROSECUTION
Knox’s lawyers were perfect. They should have maybe taken one day each, to at least tie with the amount of time the crowd of accusers took. And to explain things more in detail. These judges weren’t on the case since day one. If you tell them, for instance, if you yell, as Ghirga did, “The Scientifica arrived in the evening!” — I doubt they understand the importance of this sentence and what it means (it means: “You can’t validate Curatolo –as the Cassation told you to do– because he said he saw the scientific police the next morning, yet the scientific police arrived in the evening, and anyway they weren’t in the piazza, but in the cottage).”
Or: Maresca recalled that Stefanoni wasn’t consultant for the prosecution (meaning that her work was reliable). Maybe it was the case to remember that true, she wasn’t. But her direct supervisor Biondo was.
If you are reliable only when you are independent, as Maresca suggests, it means that Conti and Vecchiotti are super reliable, since they were court appointed.
And the scientific pillar of the accusers, prof. Novelli, is not, since he is consultant for the prosecution…
Little details, just to be precise. Little things to be maybe fixed in the replays.
Frank Sfarzo