I’m trying to recall, how long was the gap between the time he was arrested, and the time she wrote the letter to him? It’s not clear to me that she didn’t build up the weather part of the story long after the fact.
Yeah, that’s probably true. I guess I’m just part fascinated and part banging my head against my keyboard over how no one can get their goddamned stories straight.
Well…to me the most compelling part of the story, which others have mentioned, is that clearly somebody here is lying, which seems to rule out some third party that we haven’t considered. I’m leaning still toward Adnan as the guilty party, but if I ever end up charged with a serious crime, please remind me to testify regardless since the jury will apparently be unable to follow the judge’s instructions to ignore my non-appearance.
Yeah, to me, it’s become a case of a man convicted on very thin evidence. If he did it or not is almost irrelevant to me now.
Wasn’t that the point of the first part of Ep1. Its not easy to remember everything from a day that happened in the past. Of course their stories have holes in them.
I remember listening to part of a trial once (OJ, maybe?) where the attorney was questioning a witness as to the timing of some event. They were taking things in order of occurrence and assigning estimated times to everything. “OK, so you left your house and got in your car. That took, what, one minute? And then you drove to the store. How long did that take?” And it frustrated the hell out of me.
Our memories of specific events are fuzzy enough as it is. How well do we estimate and remember time? How often do we look at our watches or clocks and remember the time on them? There is so much slop in the numbers involved that hanging a conclusion on a reconstructed timeline like this seems like wishful thinking at best.
Now, I can see a place for reconstructing some specific set of events to determine plausibility, like Koenig and her assistant did with the timeline here. It doesn’t prove anything, but it could potentially disprove something, or at least lend a little weight to a particular story. But drawing conclusions from estimated times to do poorly-remembered things seems like an exercise in futility.
Oh, and if I had been on that jury, I might have shot myself in the head after listening to Adnan’s attorney for more than five minutes. Did her voice remind anyone else of Nancy Grace?
I thought choice of attorney alone may have doomed his case.
Well, now episode 9 gave us Adnan saying explicitly that he had nothing to do with the murder. So, yeah, so much for my pattern in clouds. Throwing that out, then.
Also, probably no pay phone at all at Best Buy? And Hae seen at school after the time when was supposed to be dead?
Seems like the deeper you dig, the less you know. Is there anything at all left of Jay’s narrative that makes sense now, except maybe the part about the burial in Leakin Park that evening?
The nuttiest theory I’ve seen on Reddit today: The location where Hae’s car was found, off Edmonson avenue, is right next to Leakin Park. If the cops had really been looking all over for the car, they couldn’t have been looking very hard. So maybe they already knew where it was when Jay was brought in, and they fed that information to Jay. Crazy? Maybe. Serious police corruption? Yes. But detective Ritz, at least, was apparently involved with some serious misconduct in a different case, so maybe we shouldn’t put that past the Baltimore police.
At this point my gut feeling is not to believe a single word of Jay’s story. None of it. At all.
Another thing: Why, oh why, was Adnan not allowed to take the stand? He’s charismatic, charming, believable and ready to insist on his innocence. If nothing else, he would have blown the picture of the “Muslim with a dark side” right out the window, since he was so obviously just a regular weed-smoking high school kid.
Furthermore: No signs of violent or sociopathic behavior in prison for the fifteen years that he’s been there. So that leaves the hypothetical murder as the only such episode in his entire life, with no tendencies like that before or after.
It just doesn’t make sense.
This is not a case where a victim is identifying an assailant. This is a case where a co conspirator has a constantly changing story, so I very much get worried that his testimony is really the only proof used to send someone to jail. Additionally, there are literally hundreds (probably more I don’t feel like looking it up) of cases where people are convicted on the basis of a victim ID and those people later turn out innocent as a result of DNA testing. So overall, the case against Adnan is very weak and full of reasonable doubt.
Adnan not taking the stand has never bothered me, personally. Maybe I’ve watched too many legal dramas, or read too many legal blogs, but I have assumed all along that Adnan’s attorney:
[ol]
[li]Thought that the prosecution’s case was flimsy enough that she could pick it apart and create sufficient doubt for an acquittal, and,[/li][li]Determined that there was significant risk in allowing the prosecution the opportunity to cross-examine him.[/li][/ol]
By the second point I don’t mean to imply that she knew he did it, or that he even was complicit in the murder. Just that she may have decided that his stories were sufficiently vague and conflicting (like everyone else’s) that the prosecution might be able to make more from his testimony than they could from his silence.
I suspect we’ll get an episode or two in the future focused on Adnan’s lawyer; maybe they’ll clarify some of this. I seem to remember some hints in earlier episodes that suggest she might not have been the best choice to defend his case.
Thank you.
As I said, I don’t believe Adnan did it, but I can’t create an alternative scenario. Which is mostly because of that damn car location identification.
As in one thread on reddit where someone posted an elaborate theory about someone else doing it, and the top post was just: “Jay. Car.”
However, if it’s at all possible that this information was fed to him, then all of a sudden Mr. S could have done it again, and he seems like a vastly more likely culprit than Adnan.
It doesn’t even have to be police corruption. Let’s say that all the police knew where it was. At some point someone says it and Jay overhears, and perhaps he knows exactly where that is. And the police don’t want to make a big deal out of this because they believe his story (and want to believe his story because it can get a conviction.) They push him into accusing Adnan by saying that else they would go after him both about weed and about the murder (plus maybe they had even more).
The Nisha call I don’t think is such a big problem. Perhaps Jay calls Nisha, it rings for a while, she picks up and they talk for a bit. Or perhaps Jay lends the phone to someone else and that person calls Nisha. In a scenario where both Jay and Adnan are innocent of this crime, it’s not really so difficult to explain.
Indeed. The cops timeline is now all shot to Hell, IMO.
I know there have been a million articles about Serial, but I thought this one was very interesting and relevant: What Serial Gets Wrong
This reinforces what I’ve thought before, that Adnan very well might be guilty of killing Hae Min, but I don’t know if he should have been convincted based on the evidence they had. It might be interesting to dig into more of the institutional stuff, but it’s maybe not as dramatic.
Very engrossing episode today.
One thing I noticed about my experience while listening. In the first few episodes, I believed that Adnan was probably not guilty, and I would mentally dismiss evidence that conflicted with that view.
Around episode 6 or so, it became too much to dismiss and I flipped to believing that Adnan was likely guilty. Listening to the latest episode, I found myself dismissing evidence that conflicted with that view.
I like to think of myself as an open-minded person, but it’s interesting seeing how I latch onto a narrative and how much it takes to shake me off of it once I do.
Sounds like next episode will focus on Adnan’s first attorney. Should be interesting.
I hope at some point we get a recap of the evidence presented at trial; essentially a digest of each side’s case. Because, based on what I’ve heard so far, I can’t imagine voting to convict if I had been on that jury. Sounds like lots of reasonable doubt.
Also, I was really disturbed by the judge’s comments at sentencing. Granted, we were not at the trial, and haven’t heard much of the actual trial, but the judge’s characterization of Adnan as manipulative sounded like it came out of left field. I wonder what that was all about?
They don’t have to be. If the cops influenced Jay’s story, why did they report all inconsistencies. To do so makes no sense. Those notes and tapes could have easily “disappeared”, but they didn’t.
It’s nowhere near perfect precision. Yes, there are corrupt cops, but there are very few corrupt, stupid cops who also take detailed, seemingly unaltered notes which document their corruption.
There are THEIR notes. Chain of evidence has nothing to do with it.
You are basing this on nothing. More importantly, you wouldn’t document the process if that is what you were doing.
So they convinced Jay, a kid who doesn’t trust cops, to implicate himself and make himself an accessory rather than have him just say Adnan told him where the car was?
Do you think both Jenn and Chris are lying too?
He’d be a terrible witness because he has no alibi, was caught lying, and the parts of his story he does remember sound like complete bullshit.
Well, he is in jail with men. The environment is not as conducive for a guy who has murdered a woman.
It’s not the only proof.
Remember, the jury didn’t hear everything we heard in the way we heard it.
That’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? SK has not uncovered any new evidence in her investigation. All she’s done is shine a new light on evidence that’s been sitting around for the past 15 years. Given what’s been presented thus far, I’m inclined to think that there is sufficient reason to have this case be brought back in front of a judge on appeal. Not because I’m convinced the wrong guy is doing life in prison but because there was insufficient evidence to convict him in the first place.
Actually it is. they have nothing physical, only Jay and the timeline he concocted with the police doesn’t work anymore now that there are multiple people who saw Hae at school when the police say she was murdered.
This is one point where I agree with you and makes me believe the only reason Adnan is in jail is because his lawyer did nothing for him. My god, there wasn’t even a phone booth at the Best Buy - without the phone booth Jay’s story is even more completely messed up and riddled with lies - especially when Jay notes specifically the Adnan was wearing red gloves while waiting for him at the pay phone. The phone that didn’t exist. All Adnan’s lawyer has to do is introduce in court that the phone booth wasn’t there and Adnan never gets convicted.
On Reddit I saw discussion about another murder around the same time of another student at Woodlawn. Also killed by strangulation and body found in a park.
Someone was convicted and is actually serving time in the same prison as Adnan. I wonder if this guy was ever looked at as a suspect for Hae’s murder.
Here’s the Reddit thread w/ links to the info. Here’s the article on the other murder.
There are holes that don’t match up w/ the timeline, but as we know - the timeline is pretty bunk at this point.
In a sense she has because we hear from Adnan.
On what grounds?
Insufficient evidence is up to a jury (or a judge in limited circumstances), and they clearly disagreed in record time. You can’t just get a new trial because you think you lawyer should have been better. Ineffective counsel is very hard to prove and has a pretty high bar.
Most murder cases don’t have physical evidence. This study says only 13.5% of murder cases they reviewed did.
Plus, there is more evidence than that. Here is a fairly comprehensive list without Jay’s testimony just off the top of my head. I am sure I left things out:
- Jen’s testimony
- Hae’s letter to Adnan about being controlling on which he wrote, “I’m going to kill”.
- Hae’s diary
- Adnan’s prints on the map cover found in Hae’s trunk which had the Leakin Park page torn out
- The cell tower evidence showing his phone was in Leakin Park when she was likely buried
- The Nisha call and the voice mail call
- Adcock’s testimony that Adnan lied about asking for a ride
- Adnan’s brother calling him a “masterful liar”
- Cathy’s testimony that Adnan received a call and was acting strange
- The numerous holes in Adnan’s account of where he was and why he did the things he did (eg. lending his car to Jay, calling Hae 3 times the night before she disappears, thinking Hae went to CA).
- Adnan never trying to contact Hae again after the 13th.
- He loans his car and cell phone to, and hangs out most of the day with Jay, a person who admits being an accessory to murder.
- Hae being strangled, a very personal and inefficient way to kill someone
- Hae likely going missing from the last place Adnan was, and a place Jay wouldn’t be. Also that she wouldn’t have stopped for just anyone before picking up her cousin.
- Anonymous tipster with Asian accent fingers Adnan.
- Yasser, Adnan’s good friend states Adnan said if he ever killed his GF, he would dump her car in a lake or the woods.
- Witnesses state Adnan asked Hae for a ride the day she disappeared.
- Adnan essentially led a double life and has lots of experience lying convincingly.
- Adnan has no credible alibi, plausible alternative theory of what happened, or desire to look for any exculpatory evidence.
- Adnan, and AFAIK, only Adnan has motive, means, and opportunity to kill Hae.
I suppose no single numbered item above means he did it, but the totality of it all is very damning even absent Jay’s testimony.
Or, maybe the phone was there. Honestly, do you think his lawyer was THAT bad? Don’t you also think someone would have caught that at the time if it were true?