My interpretation of Ronchi doesn’t depend on the defense appeal; it’s simply the common-sense default meaning of what he said, as reported in Massei-Cristiani...
I don’t agree with your common-sense default meaning in the English translation, then, although of course the original Italian may be more enlightening.
The term used (in Massei-Cristiani) is svuotamento gastrico, which is a pretty literal counterpart of “gastric emptying”. If someone says “X takes Y hours to empty”, I view it as the default assumption that they are talking about the time it takes to empty completely (not to start emptying or empty halfway). Do you have a different view?
...and confirmed by general information about average gastric emptying times.
That reasoning seems circular to me: the question of what the times are in this case, is exactly what I’m trying to determine here.
Ronchi is reported by Massei and Cristiani as having said that “gastric emptying” can sometimes take 6-7 hours; we want to know whether he meant total emptying, or just half-emptying (or something else). So I searched and found a reference stating that total emptying (with the meaning unambiguous, explicitly contrasted to other parameters) typically takes 4-5 hours, in contrast to half-emptying, which typically takes 2.5-3 hours. For me this increases the (already high) probability that total emptying, and not half-emptying, was what was meant.
I judge court findings to be much more reliable than claims of the defense attorneys
Here are some factors that you may not be adequately considering:
1. Argument screens off authority. Whatever the appropriate default assumptions about reliability may be, both the court and the defense have explained their arguments in detail (in lengthy documents that are publicly avaliable), while being in a position to know what each other’s arguments are. There is unlikely to be much important information not contained in these documents. In particular, if the prosecution case is correct and the defense case isn’t, we should expect to be able to determine this from the court’s opinion and the appeal documents (without requiring further “rebuttal” from the court), since the court will have heard the defense case already, and should be anticipating the strongest possible defense reply; we should in other words expect to perceive the defense appeals as substantively weak, while perhaps demonstrating legal cleverness. If instead we perceive them as strong, we should regard that as significant evidence in favor of the defense.
2. The argument about “neutrality” could equally well be applied to the prosecution side as much as the court, since the prosecutors (who in Italy supervise the police investigation) are ethically obligated to conduct the investigation in a neutral manner, and to charge only suspects whose culpability is rationally indicated by the evidence. Hence there shouldn’t be much difference in reliability between the prosecution and a court which has decided in favor of guilt; yet I presume you wouldn’t regard the prosecution as sufficiently reliable to not bother listening to defense arguments. (See also 4. below: in continental European “inquisitorial” systems, judges and prosecutors are traditionally regarded as belonging to the same job category.)
3. People change their minds less often than they think; and the judges are particularly unlikely to revise their opinion during the 90-day interval between the time the verdict is announced and the motivation document is submitted. (They presumably aren’t even legally allowed to change the verdict, since the rest of the jury is no longer participating.) Hence the latter is guaranteed to be the work of people trying to defend a decision they’ve already publicly committed to.
4. Cultural assumptions about how the legal process works (and what is considered acceptable behavior for attorneys and judges) do not necessarily transfer to a foreign country. For example, it’s not clear that the Italian system has the concept of a “mistrial” in the sense that you refer to. What it does have is second-level (“appeal”) courts which regularly modify or overturn first-level rulings, for various reasons (at a much higher rate than in the American system). My suspicion is that the closest analogue of “a mistrial being declared” is simply the appeal court reversing the first-level verdict—which is precisely what Knox and Sollecito are currently seeking to have done. So the inference you’re wanting to make about the first court’s level of even-handedness may not be valid, due to a possible difference in the error-correction mechanism. (Relatedly, a first-level finding of guilt in Italy does not have the same significance as “conviction” in the U.S., but is rather somewhere between indictment and conviction.)
5. Ignoring my own advice above, I could invoke the American assumption that defense attorneys are ethically (and/or legally) obligated not to mislead the court, particularly in official written filings.
Empirically, defense attorneys always side with the defense; I can’t think of a case where the defense attorney summed up to the jury with “You know what? I’m convinced, my client is guilty after all.”
I expect defense attorneys to make different kinds of arguments when they think their client is guilty than when they think their client is innocent. Don’t you?
Though I shouldn’t weigh it too highly, a subjective sense that even if the defendants are innocent, this particular defense team has lost credibility, for example with Pasquali’s testimony.
We may want to discuss that at some point, then, because I find Pasquali’s testimony very compelling (particularly the experiments he conducted).
Of course, I have an analogous sense with regard to Massei and Cristiani, who lose credibility in my view by assigning credence to people like Curatolo and Quintavalle (and indeed by not paying attention to Pasquali and his results).
The term used (in Massei-Cristiani) is svuotamento gastrico, which is a pretty literal counterpart of “gastric emptying”. If someone says “X takes Y hours to empty”, I view it as the default assumption that they are talking about the time it takes to empty completely (not to start emptying or empty halfway). Do you have a different view?
Ronchi is reported by Massei and Cristiani as having said that “gastric emptying” can sometimes take 6-7 hours; we want to know whether he meant total emptying, or just half-emptying (or something else). So I searched and found a reference stating that total emptying (with the meaning unambiguous, explicitly contrasted to other parameters) typically takes 4-5 hours, in contrast to half-emptying, which typically takes 2.5-3 hours. For me this increases the (already high) probability that total emptying, and not half-emptying, was what was meant.
Here are some factors that you may not be adequately considering:
1. Argument screens off authority. Whatever the appropriate default assumptions about reliability may be, both the court and the defense have explained their arguments in detail (in lengthy documents that are publicly avaliable), while being in a position to know what each other’s arguments are. There is unlikely to be much important information not contained in these documents. In particular, if the prosecution case is correct and the defense case isn’t, we should expect to be able to determine this from the court’s opinion and the appeal documents (without requiring further “rebuttal” from the court), since the court will have heard the defense case already, and should be anticipating the strongest possible defense reply; we should in other words expect to perceive the defense appeals as substantively weak, while perhaps demonstrating legal cleverness. If instead we perceive them as strong, we should regard that as significant evidence in favor of the defense.
2. The argument about “neutrality” could equally well be applied to the prosecution side as much as the court, since the prosecutors (who in Italy supervise the police investigation) are ethically obligated to conduct the investigation in a neutral manner, and to charge only suspects whose culpability is rationally indicated by the evidence. Hence there shouldn’t be much difference in reliability between the prosecution and a court which has decided in favor of guilt; yet I presume you wouldn’t regard the prosecution as sufficiently reliable to not bother listening to defense arguments. (See also 4. below: in continental European “inquisitorial” systems, judges and prosecutors are traditionally regarded as belonging to the same job category.)
3. People change their minds less often than they think; and the judges are particularly unlikely to revise their opinion during the 90-day interval between the time the verdict is announced and the motivation document is submitted. (They presumably aren’t even legally allowed to change the verdict, since the rest of the jury is no longer participating.) Hence the latter is guaranteed to be the work of people trying to defend a decision they’ve already publicly committed to.
4. Cultural assumptions about how the legal process works (and what is considered acceptable behavior for attorneys and judges) do not necessarily transfer to a foreign country. For example, it’s not clear that the Italian system has the concept of a “mistrial” in the sense that you refer to. What it does have is second-level (“appeal”) courts which regularly modify or overturn first-level rulings, for various reasons (at a much higher rate than in the American system). My suspicion is that the closest analogue of “a mistrial being declared” is simply the appeal court reversing the first-level verdict—which is precisely what Knox and Sollecito are currently seeking to have done. So the inference you’re wanting to make about the first court’s level of even-handedness may not be valid, due to a possible difference in the error-correction mechanism. (Relatedly, a first-level finding of guilt in Italy does not have the same significance as “conviction” in the U.S., but is rather somewhere between indictment and conviction.)
5. Ignoring my own advice above, I could invoke the American assumption that defense attorneys are ethically (and/or legally) obligated not to mislead the court, particularly in official written filings.
I expect defense attorneys to make different kinds of arguments when they think their client is guilty than when they think their client is innocent. Don’t you?
We may want to discuss that at some point, then, because I find Pasquali’s testimony very compelling (particularly the experiments he conducted).
Of course, I have an analogous sense with regard to Massei and Cristiani, who lose credibility in my view by assigning credence to people like Curatolo and Quintavalle (and indeed by not paying attention to Pasquali and his results).