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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yup.

[quote]The claim that there is no evidence is baffling. Among the 10,000 pages of evidence presented is, of course, the DNA evidence.”  Knox’s DNA was found on the handle of the murder weapon – a knife belonging to Sollecito – and Kercher’s was found on the blade. Whether it’s really Kercher’s DNA is hotly contested by Knox supporters, but contamination was ruled out at the latest appeal. The probability that the DNA on the blade did not come from Kercher was found to be one in 300 million billion.[/quote][/quote]

Nope.

Raffaele's kitchen knife was the prosecution's "smoking gun."  The prosecution claimed that Amanda's DNA was on the handle and Meredith's DNA was on the blade. But the truth is the prosecution never found the murder weapon that was used to kill Meredith Kercher.

The knife was a common kitchen knife retrieved from the kitchen of Raffaele Sollecito. The knife was chosen from the drawer because it looked clean. No other knives were taken to be tested. Was this an extraordinary case of good luck by the detectives or was this knife not the murder weapon after all?

Italian forensic police expert Patrizia Stefanoni performed the DNA testing on the knife. When the knife was tested, Amanda's DNA was found on the handle. This was expected because Amanda often prepared meals at Raffaele's apartment. She used the knife for cooking.

A sample was taken from the knife blade and was tested for blood. The result was negative. There was no blood on the knife.

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.

The knife doesn't match the wounds on Meredith.

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

No control tests were done to eliminate the possibility of contamination in Stefanoni's lab. A lab that had tested large amounts of Meredith's DNA. A spoon from Raffaele's kitchen would have most likely provided the same result in that environment using the standards that Stefanoni applied.

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? 
[/quote]

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