“This individual, identified by the defence investigations, was Arcidiacono, and his testimony demolishes this assumption on which the whole of the ruling rests. The two men went for a coffee after Cardace had been to Gaglione’s apartment. And at that moment Gaglione was surely still alive. The witness Sassanelli, testifying at the original trial, said she could not indicate the exact time at which the two men were in the cafe, but she could say with some certainty that it took place not long before ‘all that kerfuffle’, by which she meant the arrival of the ambulances and the police following the 118 258call by the dying Gaglione. That the encounter in the cafe, a perfectly relaxed one, took place after Cardace had been to Gaglione’s apartment is demonstrated, quite apart from anything else, by the fact that Cardace gave Arcidiacono one of the pills that Gaglione himself had supplied him with a little earlier.

“From this point of view, Arcidiacono’s testimony, highly commendable for its spontaneity and sincerity, almost constitutes an alibi. And sticking with the concept of an alibi, I’d now like to dwell on a possible alternative interpretation of the evidence considered in its entirety.

“I base this delicate part of my closing statement above all on the testimony of the technician from the forensics team, with which we have already dealt, and therefore I refer to the observations I have already made; the testimony of the head of the Homicide section; the testimony of Signor Rafaschieri, Gaglione’s former partner in running a gym; and the testimony of the accused, given right here in front of you at this hearing.

“The point of calling Assistant Commissioner Montesano as a witness was basically to demonstrate a shortcoming in the investigation. Thanks to his testimony we were able to see how the almost immediate identification of an excellent working hypothesis orientated the investigation in a single direction, making the team neglect any other lines of inquiry.

“You see, when we adopt a single hypothesis with respect to a reality to be interpreted, a hypothesis which from the start does not admit different possibilities, this produces a phenomenon that psychologists call ‘cognitive tunnelling’. This means that the hypothesis becomes the yardstick not only for the interpretation of the data, but for the actual perception of reality. It means that we perceive only what corresponds to 259the hypothesis, and we quite literally don’t see what contradicts it. More generally, we don’t see the things that don’t fit the interpretative grid fixed by the hypothesis or else by the task we have set ourselves or that someone else has assigned to us.

“We don’t work to scrutinize the hypothesis. We work to confirm the hypothesis.