Oh, and I want to second the posters who’ve pointed out how annoying Adnan’s lawyer sounds. That’s just bonkers. They’ve played about 30 seconds of her talking in court and it makes me want to chuck my iPod into a lake. I can’t imagine being on the jury and having to sit through, what, six weeks of that?
Maybe. It’s mostly subjective, but I just can’t picture where you’d put a pay phone there. Maybe by the entrance, but then people would probably remember that. Combine that gut feeling with the facts that we know there was no phone there 2 years later, no one can find evidence it actually existed, and Jay’s story seems to be wrong about several other details, and I think it’s probably imaginary.
Or maybe it’s not, but I think if the phone was fake that’s the kind of thing cops/lawyers might discover, instead of would discover. Overall, I feel like saying there’s 1 chance in 3 that the phone was actually there.
Why your trunk and not the glovebox? Also, why would Adnan’s prints be on the map, and why would the page for Leakin Park, an area he likely knows, be missing.
Please cite your qualifications to make such a claim?
Glove compartments are small and are needed for many other items. Trunks are large. I don’t need every map all the time. Before I set off, if I need a nap, I get it from the trunk.
A degree in law. Admission to the bar in two states. Nearly 20 years of an occupation that requires reading court documents.
Why wouldn’t Adnan’s palm print be on the map book? He had been her boyfriend, his prints should be all over her car. How the fuck that this single piece of physical evidence tying him to the crime could be enough is mind-boggling.
If anyone is experiencing Serial withdrawal this week, you might want to check out an episode of This American Life called Confessions. It’s so relevant to Serial that it might as well be part of the show. If features Jim Tranum, the detective from episode 8 of Serial, and the story of how, early in his career, he unwittingly orchestrated a false confession from a suspect.
They said in an early episode that the page that had Leakin Park also included other parts of the area where the kids would have been going in their normal lives. I remember doing that, ripping out the page in the city atlas that I used the most so that it was handy. As an adult, I would keep it in the glovebox, but when I was in high school, it would get thrown in the back seat and then I would have to cram six girls into my Skylark after some school activity so all the crap in the backseat would get scooped up and thrown in the truck. That’s one of the things that strikes me about a lot of this circumstantial evidence … it’s all random because that’s how teenagers go through life.
Can I back up for a second to talk about something more general?
We’ve been brought up by television to believe that “means, motive, and opportunity” (MMO) is the be-all and end-all of criminal jurisprudence – it’s probably not a coincidence that brickbacon chose to put it at the end of his list. However, it’s actually a pretty useless concept to everyone except prosecutors hoping to snow a jury.
Suppose you want to prove that I bought an apple last week. Did I have the means to buy it? Yes, they’re like 2.49/lb, I can afford that. Motive? Sure, I like apples, I suppose there’s motive there. Opportunity? Uh-huh, they sell them at the corner store a block away from my apartment. I guess I had the means, motive, and opportunity to buy an apple.
And, hey, suppose further that I can’t account for my whereabouts at the time we think the apple was purchased, that someone remembers that I wasn’t hungry when I met them that night (suggesting I’d already eaten), that someone else remembers me saying I wanted to get a vegetable peeler one time, that I looked up “grocery” on Google Maps two days before the purchase, that after the purchase someone recalls me saying I liked oranges and not apples (so now my story is shifting like I’m trying to hide something), that I’m not suffering from a Vitamin C deficiency, etc., etc.
Jeez, it’s looking pretty bad for me, with all these coincidences piling up. Very damning. The only problem is: I didn’t buy any freakin’ apples, and none of that stuff does anything to show otherwise. Real evidence would be: security-cam footage of the purchase, a personal check for the correct amount made out on the day in question, a receipt from the store with my fingerprint on it, apple seeds in my garbage, or, yes, an eyewitness. If, instead of stuff like that, we’ve got means, motive, and opportunity (and the junk from the preceding paragraph), we’ve actually got nothing. We should try to keep perspective about what certain facts truly demonstrate.
Note: Ok, I don’t want to overstate it, MMO can be useful to police at the start of an investigation when they’re trying to find suspects to focus on.
Note #2: Most of the above is paraphrased from ideas in Bill James’s (very fun) Popular Crime book. (Yes, that Bill James.)
True, but how often do you consult a map for an area you live near? I am not alleging there isn’t an innocuous explanation, but rather that it is one more thing in a long list of things that in somewhat suspicious.
I don’t believe the missing page was recovered though.
I disagree. As guizot stated, it is a pretty good means of eliminating people as suspects. Yes, it is not the end all be all, but it is very useful. The issue with your apple example is that SOMEONE actually did buy the apple, so if I know it was only either person A or B, and person B is completely broke (lacks means), hates apples (lacks motive), or is working any time the one places that sells apples in his area is open (lacks opportunity), I can be pretty sure it was it was person A who bought the apple. Yes, it’s not going to be completely determinative in a case with multiple suspects who all have those things, but in case where that isn’t the case, it’s a great shorthand.
Remembering back to when I was a new teenage driver, fairly often, especially if it was not my immediate neighborhood, but maybe, for example, the next school district over and we were cruising around trying to find a party. And this predates the time when you could put an address into your phone.
I guess overall, I don’t find most of the things in the list suspicious at all. Obviously, some of them, like the fact that Jay knew where the car was, are extremely important. But many of them, they read to me like “and another suspicious thing, the SKY WAS BLUE.”
Actually, yes, it does. It’s absolutely routine. What kind of evidence do you expect? Researchers don’t publish studies showing that people put their shoes on after their socks.
And you have not only my word for it, you also have Sarah Koenig’s word for it. She said something pretty close to what I did.
Why do you think the Baltimore police are no longer allowed to stop recording in situations like this?
There appears to be a hearing scheduled for January for post-conviction relief. Apparently, Syed’s new attorney is claiming his trial attorney provided ineffective defense when she failed to question an alibi witness, Asia, and that she failed to approached the prosecution with a plea deal and didn’t present a plea deal as an option to Syed (if so on the later, WTF?!).
Honestly, this story seems much more compelling than the one offered by either the prosecution or by Jay. It fits a timeline that makes sense and pretty much the only piece of cell phone evidence that doesn’t fit into the narrative is the early call to Nisha, which also doesn’t fit into any other narrative.
Also, I hadn’t realized until I read this, but the 2:36 call, the one that the prosecution claims is the “I’m at Best Buy, come pick me up” call, is only 5 seconds long. That’s very short even for a call with just that info.
I’m leaning toward “Jay did it, Jenn helped him cover it up” much more after reading the above. It has a lot going for it:
Jay and Jenn’s timeline/alibi doesn’t really work at all because he calls her house several times during the period they both claim they were together at her house.
Jay is the one who disposes of the shovels after wiping them clean of prints.
Holy crap! The Prosecutor basically hired the defense attorney for Jay?! WTF?!
And I’m very glad that SK starts off the episode by discussing the potential casual racism that may have existed (under the guise of “culture” rather than “religion”). Maybe it means more to me being a second generation immigrant who is ethnically Pakistani myself. The woman who spoke about it being because he’s Muslim sounds like something like my dad would exactly say. And some of the jurors comments just chilled me to the bone. It’s an interesting idea to explore this week, after the grand jury decisions of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
There was interesting discussion about Adnan’s lawyer as well. It was interesting to note that she was seemingly starting get really, really sick around the time of the second trial. It was very interesting to know that the lawyer was fantastic in the first trial, and seemingly much more so than the second one when it appeared she was going downhill. Asking for high levels of money in cash is really strange. I also think it was interesting that SK addressed the ineffective assistance of counsel news that came out this week - it really makes it obvious that she is putting this together week to week.
Having to listen to Gutierrez’s voice again makes me even more exasperated that Adnan was never put on the stand and allowed to speak on his own behalf.
Imagine a version of this podcast where you never hear Adnan’s voice, and instead of Sarah Koenig, you get Christina Gutierrez as narrator. What do you think your impression of Adnan would be?
Thanks for this summary. I have to admit I cant really work my unknown person into this anymore. It was strained already. So then I guess they were both involved.
At this point, I no longer think it’s a possibility that Jay wasn’t involved. However, I think I’m back to entertaining the idea that Jay did it on his own, no Adnan required.
I also think Jen is covering some things up. Something I’ve seen mentioned a couple of places is that both Jen and Jay and insist that Jay left her place at around 3:40 on the day of the murder, despite the call records showing that calls were placed to her house from the cell phone before that. It looks like Jay might have asked her at some point, “Hey, how about you give me an alibi for the time up until 3:40”, not knowing that the phone records would contradict it. And once she had testified to that, they were sort of stuck with that story.
That blog is pretty interesting. This post argues pretty convincingly that the detectives may have been helping to direct and shape Jay’s story, even if that weren’t doing it intentionally.
Actually, scratch the “may have been”. We know that Jay is lying and changing his story a lot of the time, and it only makes sense that he’s taking his cues from the detectives for what to lie about and when, to give them answers they like. Then the question becomes to what extent the detectives are aware of this, and whether they’re even helping him along on purpose.
But that would imply that he had the idea to try and frame Adnan before the cops even talked to him, right? It doesnt seem likely to me that he had this idea, and amazingly managed to pull it off too. Plus Adnan could just as easily have had a solid alibi at that point, or at least have a clear memory of what happened that day.