“The second story can be told as follows. Cardace and Gaglione are connected by friendship and by illegal activities. 265In the hours preceding the murder, the two men quarrel over the phone. The second call, which is very tense, ends with an agreement to meet, partly to avoid talking about certain subjects on the phone. Soon afterwards, Cardace goes to Gaglione’s home and the two of them clear things up, to the extent that Gaglione, almost as a gesture of reconciliation, gives Cardace some specimens of a new kind of pills of a narcotic nature. Cardace leaves, meets Arcidiacono, stops to have coffee with him and gives him one of the new pills he himself received a short time earlier. Then Cardace returns home, where he sees his mother, and stays there for a while. Meanwhile, someone else gets into the victim’s apartment and kills him, maybe having had the intention of merely kneecapping him. Then Cardace goes out, wearing the same jacket he had on in the afternoon, the same jacket he had been wearing a few days earlier when he had gone shooting with a friend of his in a quarry. Soon afterwards the police pick him up and take him to Headquarters. On the car ride there, chatting to an officer he knows, the accused admits quite openly that he has been at Gaglione’s home. At Headquarters, he is subjected to a gunshot residue test, with all that ensues.

“Is this merely a conjectural story? No. It’s a story that’s possible and even quite likely to an extent. So now we have at least two possible reconstructions in which all the evidence presented during this hearing can be encompassed.

“I exhort you in this respect not to make a mistake, that of thinking that in order to select the best story it’s necessary to refer to levels of probability: we have two stories, one’s likelier than the other, I’ll choose that one. It doesn’t work that way. The burden of proof being on the prosecution means that it’s not enough for the prosecution to propose a story that’s 266likelier than the others to obtain a conviction. The prosecution has to propose the only acceptable explanation in order to overcome the hurdle of reasonable doubt.

“Conversely, for the defence to invoke reasonable doubt and ask for an acquittal of the accused, it’s enough to put forward a possible explanation, an explanation that’s not far-fetched and not merely conjectural.

“A court hearing aims to reconstruct the facts of the past and has to do so to a very high level of probability, as defined by the evidential paradigm of article 533 of the code of practice: ‘The judge pronounces a verdict of conviction if the accused is found guilty of the crime beyond reasonable doubt.’

“We are beyond reasonable doubt when it’s not possible to imagine any alternative explanation to that of the prosecution.