Today's first ruling in Amanda Knox's fourth trial for murder doesn't bode well for a fair trial.

[pnwmom]

83. It isn't the obligation of the defense to prove how and when contamination occurred,

as you would know if you were an actual defense attorney.

It is the obligation of the prosecutor to prove that they followed correct methods to avoid contamination.

http://www.injusticeinperugia.org/TheKnife.html


What was left of the sample from the blade was tested for DNA.. The results were negative.There was no DNA on the blade. This is when all guidelines for testing DNA were thrown out the window. Stefanoni used a very new, unproven technique called low copy number DNA profiling.

Patrizia Stefanoni had neither the proper equipment nor the proper laboratory to perform low copy number DNA profiling, but she did it anyway. There are only a few such laboratories in the world. Her own lab was not even certified to perform ordinary DNA profiling at the time these tests were performed. Stefanoni performed tests that do not conform to any standard, anywhere.

Even with the low copy number method, Stefanoni was still not getting the desired result. The tests kept coming back "too low." She took even more drastic measures. The machine parameters were over-ridden. The machine parameters were pushed far past the level of reliability finally producing the result she needed. Keep in mind, the test was done in a lab using large amounts of Meredith's DNA. No negative controls were used. The alleged match to Meredith’s DNA is completely unreliable because the result was so infinitesimally small (less than 100 picograms, with a picogram being a trillionth of a gram, or 0.000000000001 gram). The procedures used to get the result Stefanoni needed were deeply flawed. The DNA found on the knife came from the lab. The knife had no DNA from Meredith Kercher on the blade when it arrived for testing. The DNA sample was so small that only one test could be performed. No additional testing will ever be available.

Keep in mind,

No blood was on the blade.

No DNA was on the blade.

The knife doesn't match most of the wounds on Meredith.

The knife doesn't match the bloody imprint left on the bed.

SNIP

Mark C. Waterbury, Ph.D, summed up the lack of control testing perfectly:

"Perhaps even more important for the knife DNA, no control experiments were run to follow the handling of the item from the field through to the laboratory. That is, to see if other, random objects retrieved from the same drawer and handled in the same, unprofessional way, might also appear to have DNA on them. It would be interesting to hear the prosecution spinning a sinister implication out of DNA found on a can opener. Perhaps one can use canned peas for satanic rituals. Would Meredith's DNA be found on a spoon from the same drawer? How about Filomena's? Would the spoon then be cast as the murder weapon, whether it matches any wounds or not?
All this is preposterous of course. But think about it. We have no way of knowing what the supposed knife DNA means, or where it came from, because no comparison tests of any kind were performed."

Read more of Mark's analysis here: www.sciencespheres.com.