Here’s why if Serial floated your boat, you should be listening to Undisclosed, bias or not.
Let’s play amateur sleuth.
On February 28, Jay leads them to Hae’s car. It’s the first time police will see it. Even though Hae’s body was found on February 9th, her car–which is where she was killed, according to the state’s case, and thus a crime scene–wouldn’t be found until that day on the 28th. Jay takes them there.
The officers snapped photos, and then for some reason simply loaded the car onto a flatbed and took it in for evidence processing.
Here’s one of the pictures the detectives took of her car, as they found it:
The car was dumped the night Hae was killed. Within hours, an ice storm and snow storm hit the area. Weather was spotty for the next month, with other storms coming through. Look at that car. It’s supposedly been sitting there in that grassy parking area for 6 weeks. That’s a really clean car.
Look at the space next to Hae’s car. Presumably, a car has been parked there. The grass is pretty brown and dead. Look under Hae’s car. That grass is awfully green.
Check out the wheel wells of her car. That’s grass that was kicked up there when the car was parked. It’s been detached, torn grass for 6 weeks. It’s still fairly green.
It really, really looks like a car was parked overlapping the space where Hae’s car was found. Like that car was there a lot, but got moved and Hae’s car was parked there recently.
Multiple mini-bombshells in this one. Jay and a friend visited Stephanie during her interview with the PI, specifically because they knew she was giving the interview at that time, and had to be turned away at the door. Jay’s original interview said Jeff gave him a ride to the high school to see Stephanie around 3:00.
And then out of left field, the ATM where Hay deposited her paychecks is across the street from Roy Davis, a serial killer who killed a girl near her age 8 months earlier and left the body in the same park. And Hae had not deposited her last paycheck yet and her credit cards were maxed out. Holy bananas WTF.
There’s more in there too. Really recommend the latest addendum episode.
This podcast is in the category of, “People talking about a subject” rather than a nicely produced narrative driven show like the original series. But as far as shows go in that category it’s quite good.
The Roy Davis stuff isn’t new, though. Can’t remember if it was brought up in one of the later episodes of Serial, but it’s certainly been much discussed
I’m catching up with Undisclosed and it’s certainly full of seemingly big problems for the state’s case, but the thing that really caught me off guard (in episode 3) was the presentation of a fairly convincing theory for why Jay would lie: namely, he was being fed the story he was telling by the police. A story which had some underpinning facts wrong and which he had trouble remembering. Of course, one still wonders how they got him into that position, but it’s unfortunately much more credible than taking his varied renditions of affairs at face value.
I think this case shows how hopelessly improbable finding true justice is simply due to the case load and time required to sort things out. How many dozens of people over years have poured over this case, and new things keep coming out? How’s some public police detective going do this and the fifty other cases they have to solve?
The one thing that makes this case stand out so much is just how odd and different it is compared to other murder cases. When you read about “solved” cases that result in a conviction, you almost always read about some piece–or many pieces–of physical evidence that led to the result. Accounts of witnesses and participants gain credibility when they can be fit into a whole where such accounts make sense with the other evidence provided.
Here, it’s seeming more and more clear that very basic police procedures were not followed, procedures that were not particularly time intensive. In fact, Adnan’s defense team has assembled a pretty credible case that the prosecution’s star witness was fed a story to tell and timeline to use by police detectives. A prosecutor elected to bring a first-degree murder charge based solely on evidence provided by a single, incredibly unreliable witness account. That feels incredibly singular to me, and it is the way that this case stands out from so many other cases with both guilty and not guilty verdicts that makes it such a perfect subject for the treatment its been given.
Oh, and the Undisclosed folks (who are Rabia Chaudry, the lawyer who is the friend of Adnan’s family and brought the case to Sarah Koenig in the first place; Colin Miller, an associate dean and criminal law professor at the University Of South Carolina; and Susan Simpson, an associate with a fairly prestigious DC firm) aren’t downplaying today’s episode (6pm EDT). They’re now saying that there will be news in Adnan’s case today presented over regular media channels. Entertainment Weekly is also putting up a companion piece to today’s episode after it airs.
Susan Simpson @TheViewFromLL2 14m14 minutes ago
You guys have no idea how big the temptation is right now to upload Never Gonna Give You Up and label it as Episode 10 of @Undisclosedpod.
EDIT: that was pretty fascinating. Definitely seems as if they now have a clear-cut Brady violation on which to ask for a new trial (in addition to the other reasons already specified), and may have lots, lots more than that.
One of the things that the Undisclosed folks have been regularly demonstrating is that Adnan’s case actually isn’t that unusual in a lot of respects, when you go looking. It’s just that in his case, Serial brought a lot of public scrutiny. (Though it may yet be fairly unique in the degree and combination of improper police/prosecutorial action and surprisingly inadequate defense action.)
Again, I must be listening to a different set of podcasts here.
Over and over again they’ve demonstrated that his case is full of grave exceptions to widely accepted standards:
The cell phone records being admitted at all.
His attorney somehow missing the the warning, in triplicate, on the faxes of the cell tower records
The state’s attorney finding Jay a pro bono lawyer
The failure to secure an exculpatory witness to bring to the stand.
The inability to get something as simple as a police officer to testify
The numerous Brady violations that may have occurred
The bringing of a case to trial without physical evidence
The failure by Adnan’s original attorneys to check basic facts (the wrestling match date, the date in which his coach says he talked to Adnan at practice, etc.)
What I hear over and over is them saying “You see this in cases that don’t go to trial.” What’s extraordinary here is that this case did go to trial. And granted, given Baltimore’s checkered record, it may not be that unusual for that jurisdiction, but it certainly is unusual for even our warts and all criminal justice system.
And then they list a whole bunch of cases where similarly outrageous things happened because the cops were intent on pushing the suspect that they had decided to focus on instead of casting a wide net for the actual truth, and other cases where Adnan’s attorney specifically didn’t do her cases justice in the way you’d think she should, etc. The message I’m getting isn’t that Adnan’s case is highly unusual in the exceptions to what -should- have happened (although, as I say, it may be unusual in the sheer number and scope of those exceptions - it’s hard for me to say), but that those exceptions each constitute miscarriages of justice that collectively present a compelling case that his case should be retried and that there likely would not be sufficient grounds to sustain his conviction were that to happen.
One of the strongest impressions I got from Serial was that Adnan’s lawyer was a crazy nonsense cartoon person.
That may be entirely unfair, maybe what makes a good lawyer has nothing to do with what it looks like on TV; I’m certainly in no position to judge from experience. But listening to the few clips they had of her, she just sounded nuts, like the kind of person I would have a hard time taking seriously if I was on a jury.
But I can’t remember, was she also already sick at the time, or fighting illness?
Anyway, I guess I should really get around to listening to Undisclosed.
She was fighting illness, yeah. But I don’t know how much that would have affected her courtroom style. Undisclosed this week had a couple of voice clips of her talking directly to the judge outside of the courtroom that were much more “regular person”, for lack of a better way to describe it.
So outside of the potential bombshell in today’s episode, is Undisclosed worth listening to? I’d never even heard of it before reading this thread just now.
As far as podcasts covering a topic, it’s quite good. Just don’t expect anything like Serial – a narrative-driven professionally-produced super long This American Life episode. It’s just a podcast where people talk about different aspects of the case and their discoveries.
You do hear a lot more of the raw interview tapes on it so there’s some good stuff.
It has a bias, and they’re up front about it and don’t beat around the bush. They’re going to present a podcast with evidence and arguments for why Adnan Syed is wrongly imprisoned. So, know that going in, and know that they’re not hiding that slant.
Like Quaro mentions, this isn’t Serial. It can be rambly, it isn’t as produced, it can be dry at times.
There are plenty more “Wait, what?” moments throughout the entire podcast series, however.
