@gungasnake,
Well, it's not unreasonable. But they touch on a lot of things with a single brief sentence that glosses over quite a few details. Probably that was necessary in order to keep the article within a certain size for publishing. But there is a lot of important stuff that doesn't get mentioned in the article.
For instance, regarding Guede's supposed "remorse" after cutting Kercher's throat:
The blood spatter on Kercher's clothes indicates that she was fully clothed when her throat was cut.
The blood spatter on her bare chest indicates that she was still alive and spraying blood when she was undressed by the person who raped her.
Guede's skin DNA inside her vagina indicates that Guede is the person who raped her as the blood was spraying from her throat.
We don't technically know that the semen stain under her corpse belongs to Guede, as it hasn't yet dawned on the Italians that they should test semen stains found under the corpses of people who have been raped and murdered.
The article is much too brief on the issue of the Postal Police showing up with Kercher's phones.
Very shortly after Kercher died, her phones were thrown down a ravine to land in the yard of someone who lived at the bottom. And very shortly after that, at a time when only someone who was involved with the murder would have any idea that anything was amiss, someone who had the resources to rapidly identify which house was at the bottom of that ravine and what their phone number was, phoned a bomb threat to that house telling them that their bathroom was wired to explode.
The homeowners reported this to the Postal Police, who came and searched the yard where the phones landed, but didn't find anything because it was dark.
The next morning, the woman who lived at that house found Kercher's phones in her yard and brought them to the Postal Police "because she had seen on TV shows that bombs can be hidden in phones".
The Postal Police waited until just after Amanda and Raffaele called the Carabinieri before showing up at the apartment. Then the Postal Police lied and claimed that the call to the Carabinieri took place after they were already there.
When Mignini claims to regret not having the temperature of the corpse taken so as to establish an accurate time of death, he is lying. He did that deliberately because he already knew that he was going to blame the crime on innocent people. If there is a concrete time of death, most innocent people can come up with a good alibi for that exact time.
It is laughable that he says it was done out of a desire not to contaminate the crime scene. Not measuring the time of death in order to preserve the crime scene is idiotic in the extreme. And the Italians actually made a habit of contaminating the crime scene on a daily basis. The notion that they were worried about such contamination is ludicrous.
The article does characterize the alleged "silly behavior" as something that the Italians
accuse Amanda of, rather than something she
actually did. However, it would have been much better if the article had pointed out that the accusations of unusual behavior are
entirely false.
As for Raffaele's DNA on the bra clasp, it is a bit wrong to say it tested positive for Raffaele's DNA. There was DNA from a whole bunch of people on it, and in such a case you can only know you've identified one profile if you've identified all the profiles. Otherwise you could be mixing and matching pieces of different profiles to create a match for someone whose DNA is not present.
Since the Italians have never tracked down all the profiles on the clasp, it can't really be said that they have truly identified a match to Raffaele.
But with all those extra profiles, contamination seems pretty definite. One might ask the Italian police why, if DNA on the clasp is so incriminating, do they not go track down all the other people whose profile is on the clasp.
However, there is more. This bra clasp was "found" just after the existing "evidence" against Raffaele had been found to be fictitious. In order to keep holding him, they needed to find some other evidence against him. So they went back to the place and videotaped themselves searching the apartment. When they came across the bra clasp, they did not react the way they acted for everything else they found, but instead acted like they had just made a magnificent discovery.
It is rather odd how, right at the exact moment when they really needed some evidence against Raffaele, they knew that this clasp was going to be important
before they had even brought it in for testing.
It was also impossible for the appeals court to do any further testing on the clasp because the police had stored it in a vial of corrosive liquid between the two trials, and there was nothing left to test.
The claim that Kercher's DNA was on the knife blade is also questionable. No such DNA test has ever been produced.
The Italians have produced a graph matching Kercher's DNA, that they
say came from a test of the knife. But they have steadfastly refused to produce any of the data from this supposed test. At this point, it seems pretty clear that there never was such a test, and the Italians just drew Kercher's profile on a sheet of paper. That graph did not come from any DNA test.
There is also no reason to worry about subsequent tests finding any of Kercher's DNA on that knife. The shape and size of the murder weapon is known, not only from Kercher's wounds, but also from where the killer set the blood-soaked knife down and left a bloody outline of the blade. The knife from Raffaele's kitchen does not even come close to matching the murder weapon. Raffaele's knife is much too large.
The expectation that "Amanda and Raffaele might receive a sentence reduction on appeal" failed to take into account the reasons for Guede's three sentence reductions.
Guede opted to be tried by an abbreviated hearing in front of a judge instead of demanding his right to a full trial. In doing so, he earned an automatic sentence reduction.
The automatic sentence reduction is as follows:
a) a sentence of LIFE with Daytime Solitary Confinement is reduced to ordinary LIFE
b) a sentence of LIFE is reduced to 30 years
c) any other sentence is reduced by a third
Guede's crimes were severe enough to give him the maximum sentence (line A). However, due to the accusations against Amanda and Raffaele, it was not clear that Guede had broken in through the window, and not clear that he had stolen Meredith's money. Not convicting him of those two crimes led to him only being sentenced to 30 years (line B).
His sentence was further reduced from 30 years to 16 years when Amanda and Raffaele were convicted. They were given an unusually light sentence of 24 years, and the courts reduced Guede's sentence to match theirs, with Guede then getting a 1/3 sentence reduction (line C).
This is why I mock the Kerchers for helping Guede get such a light sentence. He'd still be facing the opening stretch of a LIFE sentence right now if not for the Kerchers' efforts to lynch Amanda and Raffaele. Instead, he is just about to qualify for "daytime release" (although he will still have to return to prison every night for a couple of years).
The notion that Guede had never committed a violent crime ignores the event where he broke into a bedroom where a guy was sleeping, and pulled a knife when the guy woke up and confronted him. There was no stabbing, but Guede used the threat of his knife to cover his retreat.
And there is also an event where Guede stole some jewelry and then set fire to a house in order to cover up the missing jewelry. That fire killed someone's cat.
