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rolf_nelson comments on Experiment: Knox case debate with Rolf Nelson - Less Wrong
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Surely you meant the defense appeal document here? (I haven't referenced the prosecution appeal, and there wouldn't be much reason to, since it's just a 20-page rant arguing that Amanda and Raffaele are really nasty people and deserve a harsher sentence than the Massei court gave them.)
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, and confirmed by general information about average gastric emptying times.
But even if it did, the appeal documents constitute the defense's reply to the Massei-Cristiani report, and so I don't see why they are any less useful than the latter. They rely on the same records that Massei and Cristiani do.
Interestingly, p. 390 says the opposite: that Meredith had not consumed alcohol, according to Lalli. (And indeed it has been suggested by others elsewhere that the alleged small gastric alcohol level could have been due to a fermentation reaction). However, this is unlikely to be an important issue, as you point out.
Of course, this is not the only internal contradiction in the document:
Indeed, it seems the only way to know for sure which of these passages (if either) is accurate would be to have a transcript of Introna's testimony, which we unfortunately don't have. However, it's pretty clear in any case that Introna would exclude the Massei timeline of post-23:00.
I would sooner hypothesize that Meredith's last meal actually took place closer to 19:00 than 18:00, given the vagueness of the testimony on the matter. This puts her within 2 standard deviations, perhaps even 1.5.
But, granting a non-normal distribution, it's really difficult for me to see how it could significantly work against Raffaele, given where the 25th and 75th percentiles are. Probability mass would have to be transferred to the extreme right tail from somewhere else; how do you propose to do this in a way that isn't specifically tailored to yield the desired bottom line?
My questions, in that case, are:
(1a) What does your gastric lag-time model look like, such that you don't get significantly more surprised by going out to 22:00 than 21:00?
(1b) Why do you believe that model rather than one more similar to mine?
(2) What is your probability of guilt, conditioned on death having occurred (a) before 21:30? (b) before 22:00?
Slippage is a priori unlikely, especially with the ligatures applied (professional opinion), and hence given a level of gastric contents consistent with the meal in question, there's no reason to believe any significant slippage occurred.
Only with regard to fried food being the cause; as you'll recall I've already allowed for a total emptying time of 6-7 hours "in some circumstances". Note that this timeline is characterized as "markedly delayed" by the authors. And, once again, the relevant variable for us is lag time, not total emptying time. (If we try to extrapolate, using the fact that 1/2 seems to be an upper bound on the ratio of lag time to total emptying time, with 1/3 being in practice a better estimate, this would yield no more than 158.5 minutes, and probably something more like 105 minutes, in this "markedly delayed" scenario.)
The lag time given in the alcohol study you linked to is 48.1 ± 6.5 minutes (!). (And note this: "The lag phases after 4 and 10% (v/v) ethanol, beer, and red wine were not significantly different from that of water... the inhibitory effect of ethanol and alcoholic beverages is mainly induced by a prolongation of the gastric emptying phase (without affecting the lag phase)...")
Here is another source characterizing any lag time over 150 minutes as "extremely delayed". By comparison, "normal" is 50-100 min and "delayed" is 100-150. For half-emptying time, over 200 minutes is "extremely delayed".
Just how large do you think the standard deviation is? If you believe in the Massei theory, you have to come up with a lag time of four hours at minimum. I can't find any evidence that that is anywhere close to being within normal human parameters. Can you?
In my view, essentially all of the uncertainty arising from the factors you mention is used up simply by postulating a lag time of two hours or more, in contrast to the more typical 50-100 minutes. This view is supported by the sizes of the standard deviations relative to the means in all of the various studies.
On the other hand, if you want to believe the time of death was earlier, you run into other problems (in addition to the improbably extreme lag time for anything after 22:00). From 22:30 onward there was a broken-down car outside the cottage, with a tow truck arriving at around 23:20-23:30. No one associated with this incident (occupants of the car, tow-truck operator, a street witness) reported seeing anyone enter or exit the cottage, or hearing anything coming from inside. (This is of course also a problem for the Massei timeline.) There was activity on Meredith's cell phone at 21:58, 22:00, and 22:13, making it unlikely that death occurred between these times. (Incidentally, it's worth noting the interrupted call home at 20:56, not attempted again afterward, which is extremely consistent with the defense theory of when the attack occurred.) And then, of course, there is the computer activity at 21:10 and (according to the defense) 21:26.
So what is your probability distribution for time of death?
Yes, typo.
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.
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.
I judge court findings to be much more reliable than claims of the defense attorneys because:
The defense attorneys are chosen and paid for by the defense
Defense attorneys are ethically obligated to assist the defense, while the court is ethically obligated to neutrally examine the case
Court bias can result in a mistrial being declared; defense attorney bias (toward the defense), in contrast, is considered acceptable or even mandatory
If the defense is found to wield misinformation to successfully free a guilty client, they'll gain prestige and be more likely to be hired for more money in the future. If a court wields misinformation, on the other hand, it will be more likely to have negative rather than positive consequences for the court
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."
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.
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).