If there is no research on the matter, then you can’t makes can’t make those claims with any confidence. Your anecdotal evidence holds little sway.
Why would her anecdotal testimony be more meaningful?
Cops in general must record the entire interrogation from beginning to end without stop. The issue was not stopping recordings to smooth testimony, but rather doing it beforehand intentionally or unintentionally.
Maybe, but Asia is a terrible and unreliable witness. Perhaps she didn’t think it was worth pursuing.
A few people who know his disagree.
Yes, but I think the main issue is that we hear from Adnan but not his detractors, and that we are judging a present day Adnan against the tapes of kids 15 years ago. It’s not really a fair comparison.
That’s a fundamentally stupid position to take. Of course I can make those claims with confidence, based on what I’ve seen with my own eyes and what I know from colleagues in my profession.
You might choose to disbelieve me, but that is irrelevant to whether I can have confidence in my own knowledge.
Do you never give any degree of credence to any claim of fact by anyone that is not supported by clinical research?
I still can’t believe that Adnan doesn’t know more than he is saying.
It just seems impossible to me. I can believe he didn’t physically do the ‘thing’ (as Koenig is fond of say ), but that he is completely clueless about everything? That he doesn’t know why Jay would set him up?
We know Jay has details that tie him to the murder 100% (he was involved in some way) and we know he spent a significant amount of time with Adnan on the night she disappeared.
So for Adnan’s story to be true, then stoner Jay must be some pretty cold criminal to have set up Adnan in advance like this (and forget even thinking about a reason for that)…
One thing that annoys me a bit about Koenig is that she starts off reminding us how these kids can’t be expected to remember what they were doing on these crucial dates, so don’t take that as meaning anything. So whenever Adnan can’t remember something or misremembers something, it is innocent and because of that. But when anyone else gets any details wrong or misremembers something, it must be because they are trying to mislead.
I agree that It feels like Adnan knows more than he’s saying, but I think the reason he wouldn’t say what that is, is because it would implicate him.
As for Sarah Koenig, she’s definitely reached the point where she’s a little smitten with the whole story, and has lost the sense of journalistic impartiality, if she ever had it. Then again, This American Life has always walked a line of claiming to be journalism, but a form of journalism that invokes fictional narrative techniques…which to me isn’t necessarily journalism to begin with.
Finally, I agree that some of her arguments are a little biased toward Adnan. One example is the false dichotomy that for him to be lying to Sarah, he must be a sociopath. The reality is he might just be a kid who did something really dumb, but who is also a polished liar, especially after that many years in prison. That doesn’t require sociopathy, that requires believing your own bullshit.
I don’t really get the whole “it’s vanishingly unlikely that he’s a sociopath” argument, either. Sociopathy/Antisocial Personality Disorder isn’t really all that rare, is it? That one woman she interviewed said she just couldn’t be that lucky, and presumably she knows more about it than I do, but Wiki saysthe incidence in prison populations is 47%, so it doesn’t seem too unlikely to me.
What does seem clear is that his lawyer really dropped the ball. None the less, I still think he did it.
I agree, though I don’t necessarily fault her for it. As you say, this is more “story telling” than journalism.
One thing I really hope to see in one way or another after the final episode is Koenig stepping out of the narrator POV mode and reflecting on the whole concept of Serial and her role in the story. Preferably we’d see her interviewed by someone not involved in the production of the show. I know she’s done some interviews, but I’ve been avoiding most online discussion of the show (SDMB excepted) for fear of encountering spoilers.
Well in Jay’s case, he’s on record at telling contradictory stories so I’m fine with her pointing that out. I don’t recall her saying that Jen is trying to mislead anybody - though just in listening to her it clearly sounded to me like somebody who was trying to keep made-up story straight.
Though to be honest, I wonder if the entire exercise (partially) may be a meta-narrative on journalism. If there anything really apart from story telling in trying to ‘report’ something.
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I don’t really get the whole “it’s vanishingly unlikely that he’s a sociopath” argument, either. Sociopathy/Antisocial Personality Disorder isn’t really all that rare, is it? That one woman she interviewed said she just couldn’t be that lucky, and presumably she knows more about it than I do, but Wiki says the incidence in prison populations is 47%, so it doesn’t seem too unlikely to me.
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What is vanishingly rare is the type of sociopath who has absolutely no early markers of trouble, then suddenly commits one extremely violent crime, and then goes straight to being a model prisoner with not a single trace of trouble in fifteen years.
The cool, extremely intelligent chessmaster sociopath is more myth than reality. Most 17-year old sociopaths are violent criminals or petty thieves and con-artists, not good students in magnet programs. Friends and relatives of sociopaths are generally not surprised by a murder conviction, contrary to popular belief.
More to the point, Gutierrez couldn’t have thought Asia was a a terrible and unreliable witness, since she never bothered to contact her.
I put very little stock in the whole “you can hear it in his voice/reaction/etc., he’s lying” game – that’s just prone to a ridiculous amount of confirmation bias, and people have been shown in studies to be very poor at spotting lies by reading the person. However, since we’re all playing that game already, I’ll mention that, on listening a second time, Jen’s taped statement in her police interview sounds very rehearsed and not genuine to my ears. That doesn’t necessarily mean she’s lying, of course; she could have carefully rehearsed the phrasing of her true story, or I could be seeing something that simply isn’t there. But, just on a gut level, it raises an eyebrow and makes me somewhat less inclined to think she’s being entirely truthful. :shrug:
Sarah Koenig was on The Colbert Report last night discussing Serial. No new information for podcast listeners, but it’s nice to see it getting this kind of attention.
The end of episode 10 really hammered home the dilemma of the falsely accused. Maintain your innocence, and your shot at parole is drastically decreased. Or you can lie and ‘admit’ you did it and hope for the best. Whether Adnan did it or not, there have to be thousands of prisoners in that situation. Plus throw in the plea dilemma (truthfully defend yourself and risk life in prison or take the plea and serve a reduced sentence), and you can really see how the deck is stacked against the innocent. Especially those that have to worry about potential racist/bigoted judges and/or juries.
So apparently next week is the last episode. Probably that’s the right move. While I thoroughly enjoy each episode, if they’re at the point at which they’re reporting on anonymous rumors about what Adnan’s personality was like 15 years ago, the well is probably pretty dry.
I guess it’s not realistic to hope that Koenig will provide something like a definitive resolution – probably that was too much to hope for even at the beginning. Still, I’m confident that the conclusion will be satisfying.
Yeah. That was the only episode so far that I didn’t even want to listen to more than once. Just nothing in it. It sounds like Sarah feels the same way as Adnan about this story now, she just wants it to end. I guess this is going out with a whimper rather than a bang.
With an episode titled “Rumors”, I was expecting to hear something about the threats that Adnan was supposed to have made against Stephanie, or some evidence that he might really have a dark side or a violent streak. But, no, instead we learn that he stole a little bit of money from the mosque in the 8th grade, and apart from he was always a really great guy. Heck, I did things like that in the 8th grade. Doesn’t make me a murderer, and it really isn’t even relevant to the case.
I’m still hoping for something from the final episode, though. There are a couple of sound bytes from the intro that we still haven’t heard on the show. One where someone says “basically threatened me, what happened to Hae is what will happen to you, that’s how I felt that day”, and another one where Dana (I think) says “I’m thinking, could he have gone crazy?” to Sarah. I still want to know what that is all about.
I enjoyed parts of the episode a lot - it’s really interesting to me how self-aware Adnan is, and how clear his language is about how he imagines Sarah and the rest of the world view him.
), but that he is completely clueless about everything? That he doesn’t know why Jay would set him up?