Thanks for the figures. However, you still haven't broken them down into those who were annulled without referral that were not:
- case were rhe defendant/s were found 'Not Guilty' at the first or second instant court or both.
- the case was adjudged outside the statute of limitation.
- declared a 'mistrial' or 'in the public interest'.
- the defendant was deceased in the interim.
I take it you did not manage to find a single similar case as Knox' and Sollecito's, where the pair were found guilty of a serious crime by both the merits court and the appeal court.
This is what I was referring to when I pointed out Andreotti and Berlusconi.
Vixen, thanks for your almost reasonable if wrong-headed response.
I would have provided a more detailed analysis of the CSC verdicts for the many thousands of cases annulled without referral, but the CSC website doesn't seem to have those statistics available. The purpose of the CSC statistics appears to be documentation of the CSC case-flow, and not the actual final judgment (guilt, acquittal, or another type of dismissal, such as extinction due to exceeding the statute of limitations).
It should also be recognized that each case may involve several criminal charges, and the verdict for a case with more than one charge could be divided: guilt on one or more charges, acquittal on one or more charges, and dismissal on other charges. According to Italian law CPP Article 624, an annulment may be partial, and the parts of the lower court judgment not annulled by the CSC or not essentially related to those annulled parts shall be considered final.
The Chieffi CSC panel verdict, for example, while annulling the Hellmann appeal court verdict of acquittal on the murder/rape charges with referral, confirmed the Hellmann appeal court verdict finding Knox guilty of the charge of calunnia against Lumumba, but with referral on the charge of an aggravating factor.
Note that the Chieffi CSC panel in annulling the Hellmann cour t acquittal did not choose to impose a verdict of guilt, but referred the case for a retrial. This was in part because the Chieffi panel wished to have the knife-blade sample that the C-V team was unable to test subjected to DNA profiling.
However, it may also have been motivated by concerns about the legality under Italian and international law of a cassation court annulling a well-reasoned acquittal and substituting a conviction without hearing the accused. A cassation court does not hear testimony and does not hear the accused, witnesses, or experts, but only hears briefly lawyers and prosecutors, and reviews the case and trial records in the light of other legal and institutionally accepted documents. Therefore, substitution by a cassation court itself of a verdict of guilty for an appealed verdict of acquittal or dismissal annulled by the cassation court may be contrary to Article 111 of the Italian Constitution. It may also be a violation of international law under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
This last issue, concerning the case law of the ECHR regarding an appeal or cassation court overturning a verdict of acquittal and substituting a verdict of guilt without hearing the accused, is somewhat complex. The ECHR has published online a lengthy discussion of the applicable ECHR case law:
https://ks.echr.coe.int/documents/d...al-hearing-after-the-first-instance-acquittal
One of the cases cited in the above results in the following case law principle:
When an appeal (or cassation) court overturns a verdict of acquittal and substitutes a verdict of guilt without hearing the accused, and there are complex issues with law and fact entangled, the ECHR has found a violation of Convention Article 6.
See:
https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-96583
paragraphs 46 - 48
Otherwise, regarding your points in your quoted post, one can always theorize a conspiracy, and one can fill a lack of details on the verdicts in annulments without referral with imagined but extremely unlikely or unlawful outcomes of verdicts of guilt.
Under CPP Article 620, paragraph 1, for all the subparagraphs except possibly for H, I, and L it is very clear that the only verdict that the CSC could deliver would be a dismissal such as an acquittal. Under subparagraph H, where there is a contradiction in judgments or sentences for the same act, the CSC adopts the less stringent judgment or sentence (which may not have been an acquittal). Under subparagraph I, the appealed judgment as a court case should not have been conducted under Italian law, and the CSC apparently substitutes consideration of the previous judgment. Under subparagraph L, there may be a possibility of the CSC annulling an acquittal and substituting a guilty verdict, but this would only be (perhaps) lawful if the judgment of acquittal under appeal had a truly horrendous error; for example, suppose a man was accused of raping a woman, and all the credible evidence supported a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, but the appeal court delivered an acquittal solely on the basis that the man was a great athlete needed for Italy's success in a World Cup match. That case would, I suspect, possibly qualify for the CSC delivering an annulment without referral and with a judgment of guilt. It should also be noted that CPP Article 620 para. 1, subpara. L applies to reductions of a sentence after conviction, in a partial annulment without referral.
For the text of CPP Article 620, see:
https://www.brocardi.it/codice-di-procedura-penale/libro-nono/titolo-iii/capo-iii/art620.html
