(This article was first published on Ground Report – 21 August 2012.)

This is what happens when police get tunnel vision. They shoot the arrow, then they draw the target. They lose their objectivity and that’s why we have juries. – Raymond Kelly

Many religious fundamentalists, both Roman Catholic and Protestant still believe in the reality of evil and witchcraft. This means that a man like prosecutor Mignini has no difficulty in seeing the work of the Devil in a crime scene and can conjure up an unlikely scenario, untroubled by minor inconveniences like evidence and criminal profiling. It also means that, with God on his side, it may be easy for him to believe that the ends justify the means. After all, someone who rises to the top, perhaps because of a ‘superior’ ability to convict criminals, will not permit dissent when he pronounces. Thus have magistrates, judges and civic leaders behaved though the ages.

Witches are often outsiders

Witches are often outsiders, not well known to the local community and unable to easily call on character references. On the other hand, local petty criminals are often part of the townscape. Their parents and teachers will be known. Their descent into criminality will have been observed, but as locals, they may be allowed some slack.

Will Mignini have seen the protagonists this way? Rudy Guede was a local boy, known to the police, but had been helped by a businessman who had offered him opportunities. Knox and Sollecito were outsiders – Knox was not even Italian. This immediately aroused suspicion.

Little has been published about Mignini’s personality so who can we turn to for illumination? Journalists cultivated close relationships with police and prosecutors in order to be first with the news. This arrangement suited Mignini. He knew that anything he said would be published in Italy within hours, to say nothing of Britain and the United States. Among the closest journalists to Mignini were Barbie Nadeau and John Follain, both of whom went on to write books on the case, though in truth, Nadeau’s was little more than a pamphlet. In addition, Luciano Garafano, an Italian forensics expert collaborated on ‘Darkness Descending’ with Paul Russell and Graham Johnson. Garafano had an inside track to the prosecution and made the most of it.

In ‘Darkness Descending’ we learn that:

“Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini knew more about occult festivals than perhaps any other Magistrate in Italy. More than was probably healthy, he thought, smiling. On his desk, files from the Monster of Florence case lay next to his pipe. The unspeakable horrors within their pages – an unholy alliance of Freemasonry, black magic and sacrificial serial murder – hidden in their mundane manila bindings.”

(To date, no link between black magic and the Monster of Florence case has been proved.)

Rudy Guede was a local boy

Sunday Times journalist John Follain followed the case for four years and wrote the most comprehensive account from a guilt perspective. He was so close to Mignini that he could almost be considered unofficial scribe for the prosecution.

Follain wrote in the Sunday Times on 9 October 2008:

“At a committal hearing in the Umbrian town of Perugia, prosecutors Giuliano Mignini and Manuela Comodi gave their most detailed reconstruction of the sexual attack on and murder of Kercher, 21, on the night of November 1 last year. . .

The prosecutors ‘laid out a scenario like from some crime novel’, Sollecito’s lawyer Luca Maori said. He added that they ‘alleged it was some kind of satanic rite, with Amanda allegedly first touching Meredith with the point of a knife, then slitting her throat, while Sollecito held her by the shoulders, from behind, Guede held her by an arm” and tried to sexually assault her.'”

This confirms Mignini’s satanic obsession, but what was his opinion of local boy Rudy Guede? Was he also demonically possessed, or was he just a sad and unfortunate simpleton who was led astray by the real culprits?

Follain again:

“And yet Mignini felt sorry for Rudy, whom he saw as the most helpless of the three accused. Amanda and Raffaele had their families behind them. Rudy had no one. He’d been abandoned by his family and had a wretched life. The prosecutor hoped that Rudy would one day come clean and tell the whole truth, but so far he’d done nothing to help himself by continually changing his story.”

Although the case against Guede was a slam-dunk and his slippery evasions were unable to persuade anyone that his presence at the murder scene had been an innocent accident, Follain reports that Mignini viewed him almost as a prodigal son:

“But the prosecutor did have something positive to say about Rudy: ‘He at least showed a flicker of pity. He stayed on, he tried to stop the blood from Mez’s wounds and he didn’t slander anyone,’ Mignini said.”

Tunnel vision derails the investigation

It seems that Mignini’s certainty that Knox and Sollecito were agents of Satan blinded him to the true role of Rudy Guede right to the end. His obsession with witchcraft led to tunnel vision, a well known potential investigative trap.

A report from the Department of Justice, Canada states:

Tunnel vision has been defined as “the single minded and overly narrow focus on an investigation or prosecutorial theory so as to unreasonably colour the evaluation of information received and one’s conduct in response to the information.” It has been identified as a leading cause of wrongful convictions in Canada and elsewhere. In the words of University of Wisconsin Law School professor Keith A. Findley, “Tunnel vision is the product of a variety of cognitive distortions, such as confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and outcome bias, which can impede accuracy in what we perceive and in how we interpret what we perceive”.

The Canadian report should be translated into Italian and offered to the Perugian Authorities as they begin to clean up the law enforcement operation of their town.

Nigel Scott – August 2012

The Department of Justice, Canada, “Report of the Working Group on the Prevention of Miscarriages of Justice” can be found here:

http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/ccr-rc/pmj-pej/pmj-pej.pdf