They did: he was an ex-boyfriend. That’s automatically grounds for suspicion in a case like this, and in the absence of a watertight alibi or a more promising suspect, Jay coming along and giving them a witness they could (sorta) make a case against Adnan with probably seemed like a real gift.
Really fascinating panel discussion of the podcast here.
One of the panelists is one of the partners of Popehat Ken, and is a former DA. His take is very interesting, and really dovetails with my own take on things.
I agree that on technical merits, the case against Adnan was a mess. However the mountain of circumstantial evidence is beyond convincing for me. I can’t conjure a scenario where Adnan wasn’t involved. He’s so flippin’ obviously guilty, that I’m pretty much of the opinion that justice is being served, whether or not the judicial process was sound.
I’d be open if there was something, anything, that changed my perspective. Like almost everyone else, I came into this with the hope that he was innocent and he’d be exonerated, but I just can’t imagine that possibility any longer. As they summarized on the series finale, Adnan would have to be just about the unluckiest guy in the world to be innocent. I’ve yet to read a convincing alternate scenario.
There are a bunch of plausible alternate scenarios, here’s one: http://viewfromll2.com/2014/12/08/serial-an-examination-of-the-prosecutions-evidence-against-adnan-syed/
I don’t like the unlucky argument because it ignores selection bias. The producers chose to do this story. They didn’t randomly sample a murder case and then do a story on it. For example, if they had done a story on a lottery winner, you wouldn’t have an expert say, “I just can’t buy that this person actually won the lottery, the odds make it essentially impossible.”
I didn’t like how Dana like characterized some of the elements of chance. If you started from the assumption that Jay is the suspect, and Jay often borrowed Adnan’s car, it’s not bad luck, borrowing his car is just a normal thing that Jay does. It also wasn’t weird for Adnan to lend out this stuff. A classmate on Adnan’s, verified on reddit, posted that they borrowed Adnan’s cell phone and car to go to Burger King once and didn’t know him well.
With Jay’s recent retelling it makes even less sense with the call records. Jay says he wasn’t in the park at 7 pm, rather at midnight. So why is the phone in the park paging Jenn, someone Adnan didn’t know? So now you have to stretch and posit, well, maybe Jay had Jenn’s pager, and that’s why Adnan was in the park paging it?
I think part of the problem is that using cell phone towers for tracking is junk science. Didn’t they go over that at some length in the podcast? Cell phones often/regularly ping off towers other than the closest to them. It’s a lot like cheap wifi in that sense – you’ll often stay connected to one AP even after there’s another that’s closer to you and has better signal. Similarly, cell towers used to get overloaded all the time, so you’d be pushed to a different tower as a form of load balancing.
(That’s what I remember from a class I took on wireless tech about 10 years ago – so it’s likely outdated, today, but possibly accurate for the timeframe of the case)
I didn’t read the whole epic post, but that link appears to, rather poorly, attempt to undermine evidence as opposed to offer reasonable alternate scenarios. The case against Jay killing Hae, and Adnan being a hapless chump, seems vastly less credible than the Occam’s razor alternative.
Edit: heh, I just started listening to the podcast trigger linked. I seem to be be pretty much in a priori agreement with Alan the former DA. He did it, but maybe not legally guilty.
So why would Jay initially tell Jenn that he needed her to give him a ride from Adnan’s mosque at 7:00 p.m., but then call her back at 7:00 p.m. to tell her to ignore the initial plan and that he would contact her later to let her know where to pick him up? One obvious explanation is that Jay had believed Adnan was going to drop him off at 7:00 when he went to mosque, which would have left Jay stranded and without a car. But then something changed, and he no longer needed Jenn to pick him up — indicating that he had figured out some other way of getting a ride. And why might that be? If anyone else has any alternative explanations for this series of events, please share them, but here is one obvious explanation that fits well with the known facts: the reason Jay let Jenn know he was no longer going to need a ride from Adnan’s mosque is because Jay was able to borrow Adnan’s car (with the cell phone in the glove compartment, like Jay has previously described).5 I am unable to think up any other reason that could explain both Jay’s requested locale for a pick-up and the sudden change in plans, and it seems unquestionably significant that the original rendezvous point for Jenn and Jay was immediately next to the place Adnan says he was that night.
Jay also testified that Adnan left his phone in the glove compartment when he was at school, that was the way he got it the first time he borrowed it. Those phone pings, and the Nisha call, are the two pieces of evidence that aren’t pure Jay testimony.
I posted this on the earlier page, but I have hard time buying that this kind of conversation took place:
Adan: “Hey Jay, so we just buried a body in the woods, and moved Hae’s car so nobody else will find it, but we still have these shovels and other physical evidence like clothes. I know you don’t have a car but can you call a friend or something and take of that for me?”
Jay: “No problem, I’ll just call my friend Jenn and have her give me rides so we can take care of it. We’ll go around and burn the clothes and wipe down all the shovels for you.”
Adan: “Cool. Just tell her not to say anything okay?”
Want to hear Jay’s side? Here you go:
Weird, I thought we’d discussed that, but I guess not here.
What’s interesting to me about that interview is that Jay admits that he lied in his testimony and lied to everyone else in authority…and then his new and revised version of events STILL doesn’t fit with the known things that happened with the timeline in the case.
Nor does it resolve any of the other issues I had with his testimony, really. Like the idea that he would be more worried about having the police told about his small time pot dealing than being a frigging accessory to murder. I mean, it’s not like they don’t disproportionately punish dealing pot, especially if you’re black, but still. Plus, I don’t remember at this point how Jay came into the police’s case, but he volunteered himself as a witness, didn’t he?
Yeah, I have come to think that Adnan is very unlikely to be blameless in this murder, but Jay’s testimony seems like awfully thin stuff to be sending a guy to jail for life over.
I’m only on the sixth episode, but I believe that in the fourth or fifth it was revealed that Jay was brought to the attention of police by… I want to say his ex-girlfriend. They brought him in for questioning.
Simplified version: the police were looking into Adnan and they pull his cell records and noticed that the day Hay went missing there were an overwhelming number of calls to Jenn, including the critical period right after school. Police talk to and she Jenn says those calls were from Jay.
Despite the State of Maryland vigorously fighting it, yesterday the state court granted an appeal for Adnan Syed, to be heard in June.
I think, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the guy deserves at least another appeal. From the evidence on the show, it seems like Adnan had terrible legal counsel, and there were some weird evidence for the defense that went missing from the trial. Probably enough to change the verdict from murder 1 to something less.
So yeah, I guess we should bring up the Undisclosed podcast.
This podcast makes no bones about its slant. It’s run by the lawyer/friend-of-the-family who first got the case to Sarah Koenig’s attention, and is part of the first couple of episodes. It’s sponsored by the Adnan Syed Trust. They’re very up front about all of this. They’re not pretending a lack of bias.
And so there’s stuff in here that clearly comes from that point of view, and it’s easy to spot and either accept or dismiss depending on your own view of things.
But there are also some things where they’ve found facts that clearly don’t match up and are a mess and may poke holes in the State’s case.
I’ll do spoiler tags.
episode 1
[spoiler]To me, the biggest bombshell here is that Adnan has another eyewitness to back up his alibi. If you remember, Jay says that Adnan called him from Best Buy, and that after picking him up there, they drove around and got Adnan to track practice on that January the 13th at 5pm, way late. Adnan’s always denied that, saying that he was at track practice, on time. Undisclosed has a police statement from another witness–Adnan’s track coach. The coach couldn’t give the exact date, but says he distinctly remembers an unseasonably warm January day where the indoor track team could practice outside and did so. On that day, he and Adnan chatted together at the start of practice about Ramadan, which was underway. Adnan was fasting. He told his coach about the fasting, doing prayers at the mosque, whatever.
What the Undisclosed lawyers did was to take a look at meteorology records. We know that the day after Hae went missing on the 13th, it was a snow day. But on the 12th and 13th of January, it was indeed unseasonably warm, in the 50s. On the 12th, the team had a meet, which they won. They didn’t practice. On the 13th, they did practice, and it was the only day on the calendar in January where it could have happened outdoors.[/spoiler]
But this one is even bigger. It destroys so much of what was presented on Serial as the timeline, and also the State’s timeline. This might be why Adnan is set free.
episode 2
[spoiler]OK. We’ve always had two conflicts for Hae’s schedule after school on the 13th. She was either supposed to work a 6-10 shift at LensCrafters with Don, her new boyfriend, or score a wrestling match as the manager. There’s also that TV interview that was chillingly done the day she died about her being athlete of the month or something. It all seems collaborated by a note found in Hae’s car after the fact. It’s a letter to Don where she apologizes for not being able to see him because she has to go to a meet at Randallstown that night. She says in the PS that the interview today went well, and something about getting him copies so he can watch as much as he likes.
From that, police have always thought that Hae did the interview during the school day (a clock in the background shows 10:30 am) on the 13th. Her fellow team manager, Summer, told the Serial podcast that she saw Hae later that day, and was the last person to see her alive. She was pissed, because Hae had agreed to score the match that afternoon with Randallstown with her. Summer was new at scoring and needed help. Hae never showed up. Cops had thought that after picking up the 6-10 shift at LensCrafters (she wasn’t scheduled, Don had convinced her to pick up) she then realized at school she had the wrestling match, and was upset about that conflict, and that’s what the note was that she wrote.
Problems. First up, Two of her good friends (and prosecution witnesses) were with her at the class before she would have left to do the taping/interview thing. They don’t remember anything about it. They also clearly remember her at lunch at 10:40, not in her lacrosse uniform at all, not talking about the interview, but instead talking about stuff that everyone remembers as happening on the 13th–Jay’s girlfriend Stephanie’s toy reindeer that Adnan gave her, Hae realizing she couldn’t give Adnan a ride after school, that sort of stuff. The interview (which presumably would be pretty exciting) never came up.
Bigger problems. No one can really remember when the wrestling match started. The Undisclosed folks researched through old, old newspaper clips and discovered that Woodlawn (Hae and Adnan’s school) had a wrestling meet the day before, on the 12th. Nothing on the 13th. To make things worse, the clippings show that Woodlawn DID have a match against Randallstown–the only one all year with them–and it was on the 5th of January. Credit card slips show that Hae was at Owings Mills Mall on the evening of the 5th. Most likely conclusion: Hae wrote the note, planning to join Summer to help her score the meet with Randallstown on the 5th, not the 13th. Then she saw Don, hung out at the mall, and stood Summer up. The note she wrote to Don just got left in her car. The presence of NO wrestling meet on the afternoon/evening Hae died pretty much blows up the State’s timeline.[/spoiler]
Is Undisclosed worth checking out on its own, or just fascinating for what it’s doing for the case?
It’s not as polished or as well-told as Serial, but if you were fascinated by the case, then yes, absolutely.