“Visus” Reconstruction of a person accused of murder  

For the first time in Italy in an Assizes courtroom, the “visus”, in other words the eyesight of a person accused of murder was reconstructed.
It happened in Novara, where the Public Prosecutor’s Office, in order to reconstruct a murder scene, made use of the expertise of one of the most famous opticians in the world, professor Fabio Dossi, and a multi-media professional, Dr. Giuseppe Galliano, who for the first time brought a three-dimensional reconstruction into an Italian courtroom (in Parma, on the 10th of December 1994).
It was produced with the participation of two people and shown at the Assizes Court in the hearing on the 10th February of this year: the location where the crime was committed was virtually reconstructed, including the automobile that were there and the conditions in terms of the amount of light that day and at the time the crime was committed.
A model was therefore created which corresponded exactly to the real scene. Subsequently the scene was filmed from the visual positioning of the accused, on the basis of evidence gathered from three experiments conducted by both the military and scientific police.
The reconstruction of what the accused could see was made possible thanks to the scientific rigour of the work carried out by Professor Fabio Dossi, who subjected the accused to a repeated series of comprehensive clinical tests.
Through using the three-dimensional model of the murder scene it was possible to accurately reproduce the visus of a person with good eyesight, in the same environmental conditions of the crime scene.

This visibility reading was therefore developed jointly by Dr. Giuseppe Galliano and Prof. Fabio Dossi; by a series of comparisons the reconstruction of what the person in question could see was achieved, considering his visual deficiency and the low level of light present in that precise location (the area in front of Borgomanero Cemetery) on the day and at the time in which the crime was committed (29th December 1997 at 17:03 hours).
The computer showed what the accused could actually see, giving the Judges and the Public Prosecution an additional element in comparison to the witness statement and examinations.
The sentence, which was passed on the 23rd of February 199 found the accused guilty of voluntary homicide, committing him to a punishment of twenty years in confinement, three years of supervised freedom at the end of the twenty year period, the sum of eighty million lire each for the husband, son and daughter of the victim, and the sum of twenty million lire for the victim’s brother and sister.
A production in which medicine, law and information system technology were integrated to achieve a result; it is possible to imagine new frontiers not only for the Justice system, which will be able to use these kinds of tools in the future, but also for the medical field, which will be able to follow new paths with increasingly revolutionary technology.